Curie-Alder Et Al 2014 PDF

international
development
INTERNATIONAL
DEVELOPMENT
Ideas, Experience, and Prospects
Edited by
BRUCE CURRIE-ALDER, RAVI KANBUR,
DAVID M. MALONE,
and
ROHINTON MEDHORA
International Development Research Centre

Centre de recherches pour le développement international
1
1
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Contents
Foreword x
Preface xii
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Figures xv
List of Tables xvii
List of Contributors xviii
The State of Development Thought 1

Bruce Currie-Alder, Ravi Kanbur, David M. Malone,
and Rohinton Medhora
PA RT 1 C R I T IC A L I S SU E S
A historical overview of thinking on development, including how development has been

studied, main theoretical perspectives, how concepts spread, and significant debates; plus
a survey of a few core issues and challenges for current development theory and practice.
1. The Study of Development 21

David Williams
2. Development Theories 35
John Harriss
3. Fifty Years of Growth Economics 50

Shahid Yusuf
4. Development Strategy: Balancing Market and Government Failure 65

Shantayanan Devarajan and Ravi Kanbur
5. Poverty in Development Thought: Symptom or Cause 81

David Hulme
6. Inequality and Development: An Overview 98

Frances Stewart and Emma Samman
7. Women’s Economic Roles and the Development Paradigm 116

Irene Tinker and Elaine Zuckerman
vi contents
8. Composite Indices of Development 133

Maria Emma Santos and Georgina Santos
9. Development Evaluation 151

Patricia J. Rogers and Dugan I. Fraser
PA RT 2 C ON C E P T S A N D T H E OR I E S
The intellectual origin of concepts influencing current thinking on development; how

these concepts have changed over time, including key debates and critical perspectives;
and how they might evolve, particularly in relation to emerging patterns of
development.
State and Society 169

1 0. Growth, Inclusion, and Human Satisfaction 173
Albert Berry
11. Social Protection 188

Armando Barrientos
12. Law, Regulation, and Development 204

Kevin E. Davis and Mariana Mota Prado
13. Rooting Change: Indigeneity and Development 221

Maivân Clech Lâm
14. Corruption 239

Huguette Labelle
Economics256
15. Public Finance in Developing Countries 259
Richard M. Bird and Arindam Das-Gupta
1 6. The Evolving Paradigms of Structural Change 277

Justin Yifu Lin and Célestin Monga
17. Trade and Finance in Development Thinking 295
José Antonio Ocampo
18. Entrepreneurship and Economic Development 311

Wim Naudé
19. Two Prophets of Regional Integration: Prebisch and Adedeji 323

Adekeye Adebajo
contents
vii
Peace and Security 339

2 0. The Political Economy of Intrastate Conflicts 345
Gilbert M. Khadiagala and Dimpho Motsamai
21. Peacebuilding and Development 362

Mats Berdal
2 2. Violence, Insecurity, and Crime in Development Thought 379

Keith Krause
2 3. The Resource Curse and Transparency 395

Charles Cater
2 4. Transitional Justice and Development 412

Pablo de Greiff
Environment and Health 428

2 5. Agriculture and Food Security 432
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, Rajul Pandya-Lorch,
and Sivan Yosef
2 6. Water Resources: An Evolving Landscape 448

Cecilia Tortajada
27. The Rural Transformation 463

Julio A. Berdegué, Tomás Rosada, and Anthony J. Bebbington
2 8. Land Reform 479

Ben White, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., and Ruth Hall
2 9. Climate Adaptation 495

Fatima Denton
3 0. Global Health 511

Tim Evans
31. Targeting Diseases 530

Nandini Oomman and Farley Cleghorn
Innovation and Technology 546

32. Industrial Policy 550
Michele Di Maio
33. Innovation Systems and Development 566

José Eduardo Cassiolato, Marcelo G. Pessoa de Matos,
and Helena M. M. Lastres
viii contents
34. Universities and Higher Education in Development 582

Rodrigo Arocena, Bo Göransson, and Judith Sutz
35. Innovation for Development 599

David Brook, Caitlyn MacMaster, and Peter A. Singer
36. Information and Communication Technologies for Development 614

Ronaldo Lemos and Joana Varon Ferraz
PA RT 3 E X P E R I E N C E S
How particular countries and organizations have shaped thinking on development at critical
junctures, whether by challenging existing concepts or inspiring new ones, and how they
have both influenced and reflected the evolution of thinking on development.
Geographic Diversity 631

37. The Asian Model of Development: From Crises to Transformation 635
Simon S. C. Tay
38. China 651

Lan Xue and Ling Chen
39. Brazil 667

Renato G. Flôres Jr.
4 0. Chile 683
Ernesto Ottone and Carlos Vergara
41. South Africa’s Quest for Inclusive Development 697

Mthuli Ncube, Abebe Shimeles, and Audrey Verdier-Chouchane
4 2. India’s Economic Development 714

Devesh Kapur
43. Economic Development: The Experience of Sub-Saharan Africa 732

Olu Ajakaiye and Afeikhena Jerome
4 4. Economic Development in the Arab Region: A Tale of Oil and Politics 750
Ahmed Galal and Hoda Selim
Development Actors 768

45. The State as a Developmental Actor: State Forms for Social Transformation 771
Celia Lessa Kerstenetzky and Jaques Kerstenetzky
46. Civil Society 788

Kumi Naidoo and Sylvia Borren
contents ix
47. Foundations and Private Actors 799

Carol Adelman and Yulya Spantchak
4 8. The World Trade Organization and Development 815

Diana Tussie and Cintia Quiliconi
49. The Role and Influence of International Financial Institutions 831

Danny Leipziger
50. Development Assistance 847

Homi Kharas
51. Consultative Forums: State Power and Multilateral Institutions 866

Gregory Chin and Jorge Heine
52. Underestimated Influence: UN Contributions to Development Ideas,

Leadership, Influence, and Impact 881
Richard Jolly
Epilogue 899
Bruce Currie-Alder, Ravi Kanbur, David M. Malone,
and Rohinton Medhora
Index 903
Foreword
amartya sen
When Thomas Hobbes grumbled about the state of mankind in his seventeenth-century
world, he pointed not only to the fact that human lives were “nasty, brutish and short,”
but also to the deprivation coming from the “solitary” lives of people. Hobbes’s attempt to
change the world took the form of his championing co-operative action through an imag-
ined social contract, the provisions of which would be put into practice through the work
of a sovereign state. That route, while a major advance in social thought, may be full of
problems of various kinds (not the least of which being its dependence on national
states, respectively working within their isolated sovereignties). However, Hobbes was
remarkably insightful in understanding the far-reaching adversity of the solitariness of
human lives.
The subject that we now call “development economics,” or more broadly “development
studies,” is particularly concerned with reversing the solitariness of human efforts to improve
their individual lives, through attempts to overcome the nastiness, the brutishness, and the
shortness of human lives through human interactions, within the boundaries of a state, but
also across the boundaries. Various relationships, practices, and institutions—from economic
markets and legal interventions to political alliances and social agitations—can contribute to
societal changes that can help to reduce, or eradicate, the penalties of privation. People relate
to and interact with each other through communicating ideas, through exchanging commod-
ities, through collaborating in political movements, through joining in making economic and
social demands, through instituting and improving legal arrangements, and through many
other routes.
The enterprise of development is, thus, a gigantic field, and includes immense diversities
of engagement. In this wonderfully ambitious book, the editors have judiciously identified
a range of topics in terms of which attempts at development can be viewed, scrutinized, and
assessed, and have then proceeded to arrange for significant contributions in each of the
identified areas. The result is a very distinguished collection of studies, with an overarching
understanding of the complexity of the process of development, offering richly informed
and enlightening insights, theories, and applications. The reader can find illumination
in an astonishingly large range of issues that make up the thoroughly diverse field of
development.
It is greatly to the credit of the editors that they have not tried to arrive at anything like
a “consensus” on what needs to be done for development. Analyses of many issues can
live with—indeed flourish with—different approaches, related not only to unresolved
priorities, but also to varying contexts and diverse circumstances. While some airing of
foreword xi
preconceptions or prejudices, whether or not hallowed by alleged authority (past or

present), can be subjected to withering scrutiny, the heterogeneity that remains can
include different—and differently relevant—understandings and conclusions. This is a
reflection of the nature of the subject, rather than evidence of “unfinished business.”
There are many insights, understandings, and proposals in this distinguished collection
of essays that will greatly aid practitioners, and yet there are also enough disagreements
and disparate evaluations, and what the editors call—rather charmingly—“dialogue
between authors,” to serve extremely well the purpose of developmental education and
pedagogy. I feel very privileged to be given the opportunity to welcome a book on devel-
opment that is, in more than one way, a triumph. It is not often that one is fortunate
enough to be given a task that is as delicious as this.
Preface
The aim of this book is to trace the history of thought on various aspects of development that
are presently in a state of flux, map the current range of approaches for each sector, and set out
options and possibilities for the future, some of which may open new avenues for research.
Development has come to be understood as more than economic growth and poverty allevia-
tion, and policy choice is more than the result of ideological positions or designed social
experiments. As more global powers emerge, the ideas shaping concepts of development and
how it happens, and the policy recommendations that flow from them, are less likely to be
hegemonically driven. The only unity in future development thought and practice might be at
the broadest possible level—that there is no such unity and that its application must be intelli-
gently and doubtless diversely pursued by local actors (how local would depend on the issue
at hand).
This book provides both a reference point for and a counterpoint to conventional wisdom
always subject to challenge. We hope to demonstrate in the pages that follow that as with any
study of thought and practice, a logical progression of reason yields to fads, deviations, and
inconsistencies. But equally, the development arena has been a massive laboratory for the sci-
entific method. Ideas born of context and necessity are floated, developed, applied, modified
or discarded only to be succeeded by others. Despite the seeming messiness of this process
the field is in fact advancing. The lack of a resultant unified theory of development is entirely
to be expected, but still distresses some.
Pedagogic Element
The editors also want this work to be of practical and not solely intellectual use. It occurred to
our publisher and to us that a variety of combinations of these essays could lend themselves to
undergraduate and graduate university education with some supplementary guidance for
instructors and students, as well as advice on appropriate further reading. This supplementary
material is provided free of charge at the following website: <www.developmentideas.info>.
So is the pre-published text of all of the chapters.
Readers may wish to look out for a number of themes and related assertions that arise in
the volume, sometimes mutually reinforcing, sometimes in conflict or at best running in
parallel to each other. Because development does not lend itself to conventional wisdom for
long—consensus in this field nearly always turns out to be wrong, at least in part—this is
neither surprising nor alarming. Rather, the dialogue between authors, now reflected on
the page, aims to stimulate the minds of those seeking to tackle our rich subject through
this book.
Acknowledgments
This volume originated with a concern that many books, and university courses, on inter-
national development fail to grapple with the complexity of the field, the relevance of
regional and country specificities, and the need to breach the disciplinary silos in academe.
The editors are deeply grateful for the guidance provided by eminent colleagues who helped
shape our work, including Mats Berdal, Julio Berdegué, Kevin E. Davis, Gerry Helleiner,
Alan Hirsch, Devesh Kapur, Xue Lan, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Simon Tay, and Ngaire Woods.
They forced us to refine our thinking, identified potential contributors, and provided much
needed guidance and encouragement throughout.
The editors warmly acknowledge the hard work of the contributors assembled here. They
form an exceptional community drawn from around the world, reaching across disciplinary
boundaries and spanning generations. Although each is credited with their own chapters,
we are indebted to you all for your timely response to our feedback and deadlines and patient
work in bringing this volume into existence.
The process of preparing this volume involved three separate workshops held in Ottawa,
Bellagio, and New York. These occasions afforded an opportunity to offer critique, identify
synergies, build on common themes, and shape our overall arguments. The editors are
extremely appreciative of the generous support extended by Canada’s International Devel-
opment Research Centre, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Greentree Foundation. In
particular, the editors recognize Emmanuelle Dany, Nadia Gilardoni, and Ahmad Dawwas
for their skill and professionalism which proved critical in making these events happen.
Our final meeting was attended by several distinguished individuals whose views we
greatly value. They included Paul Bluestein, Alison Evans, Rebeca Grynspan, Bruce Jones,
Rima Khalaf, Ricardo Lagos, Mustapha Nabli, Martin Ravallion, Emma Rothschild, Amartya
Sen, Doug Saunders, Janice Stein, Philips Stephens, Jan Švejnar, and Dwight Venner. To
them, our warm thanks for sacrificing a lovely fall weekend, albeit in beautiful surroundings.
We hope this volume will seem to them worthy of their contributions to it.
The editors are also deeply grateful to Oxford University Press, particularly Adam Swallow,
who provided excellent advice throughout, on substance as on form. His patience and wise
counsel helped us always to consider the reader over the interests of the writer. We could not
have hoped for a more supportive publishing team, notably one committed to making this
work available in the developing world and through new forms of dissemination.
The research presented in this publication is the result of a project supported by Canada’s
International Development Research Centre. IDRC supports research in developing coun-
tries to promote growth and reduce poverty. IDRC rarely carries out research of its own, yet
welcomed this collegial effort to shed light on the complexities of the wider topic and of the
subject matter discussed in each of the ensuing chapters. We are very grateful to the Board of
Governors, particularly former Chairperson, Barbara McDougall. IDRC is an exceptional
institution that we look to with great admiration and affection.
xiv acknowledgments
Numerous individuals within IDRC were tremendously helpful to us. Elizabeth Mohan
was invaluable behind the scenes on financial management and logistics, and everyone
associated with this project is indebted to her tireless efforts. Daniel Norfolk and Niranand
Kumar helped orient us within the intellectual history of development. Charles Cater acted
as a contributing editor, offering constructive feedback, contributing to workshops, and
providing countless hours of editing. Emily Jansons and Nuala Nazarko coordinated all the
drafts and revisions, organized the second and third workshops, and supported us in myr-
iad ways. Diana Tyndale and Maggie Gorman-Vélez provided a fresh perspective on the
final text.
Finally, we are deeply grateful to those who taught us that engagement can bring enlight-
enment, and that collaboration is more fun (and often produces better results) than solitary
endeavor, and to those who continue to encourage us to understand more and better. It is
never too late for any of these dispositions that we have learned from others and that have
made our professional lives much more fulfilling that they otherwise would have been.
List of Figures
5.1 Incidence of reference to “poverty” in Google Books, 1700–2000 83

22.1 Global distribution of lethal violence (death rates per 100,000),
2004–9 annual average 385
22.2 The most violent states (death rates per 100,000), 2004–9 annual average 386
30.1 Scatter-diagram of relations between life expectancy at birth and
national income per head for nations in the 1900s, 1930s, and 1960s 513
30.2 The Rainbow Model of Health Determinants 516
35.1 Aligning funding mechanisms to encourage “Innovation for Development” 612
39.1 Brazil annual GDP growth, 1930–2011 668
41.1 Trends in actual and potential per capita GDP in South Africa, 1960–2010 698
41.2 Evolution of growth and redistributive strategies in South Africa 700
41.3 Poverty (headcount) in South Africa, with a poverty line of US$3 in 2005 706
41.4 Growth decomposition of GDP from 1960 to 2010 708
43.1 Annual GDP growth rates: Africa and other developing regions,
1960–85734
43.2a Contributions of agriculture to GDP: Africa and other developing
regions, 1960–85 735
43.2b Contributions of manufacturing to GDP: Africa and other developing
regions, 1960–85 735
43.3 Annual GDP growth rates: Africa and other developing
regions, 1986–95 737
regions, 1986–95 738
regions, 1986–95 738
43.5 Annual GDP growth rates: SSA and other developing regions, 1996–2010 739
regions, 1996–2010 740
regions, 1996–2010 740
44.1 Convergence of GDP per capita in developing regions relative to OECD
average, 1974–2010 (constant US$2,000) 752
44.2 Oil rent and GDP per capita in oil-rich Arab countries, 1974–2009 755
xvi list of figures
44.3 Governance indicators in oil-rich Arab countries, in 2000 and 2010 759
44.4 Governance indicators in oil-poor Arab countries, in 2000 and 2010 762
47.1 Total official and total private flows—philanthropy, remittances,
investment—from OECD donor countries to developing countries, 1991–2010 801
47.2 Official, private investment, philanthropic, and remittance flows from
OECD donor countries to developing countries, 1991–2010 802
50.1 The evolution of development assistance: key events 850
List of Tables
9.1 Different types of evaluation 163

15.1 Tax levels: Revenues as a percentage of GDP 260
15.2 Tax structures: Tax categories as a percentage of total taxes 261
22.1 Classifying conflict, crime, and violence 387
34.1 A scarcity-induced innovation framework 594
39.1 Growth in urbanization, 1960–80 672
39.2 Annual rate of inflation in Brazil for selected years 676
41.1 Selected social indicators in Southern Africa 705
42.1 The Indian economy, 1900–2010 729
44.1 Human and social development indicators, 2009 753
44.2 Government revenues and expenditures in selected Arab countries,
averages 2003–2010, percentage 758
List of Contributors
Adekeye Adebajoâ•‡ is Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, Cape Town,
South Africa. He was formerly an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University, and he
holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
Carol Adelmanâ•‡ is Director, Center for Global Prosperity at the Hudson Institute, where she
publishes the annual Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances. Formerly Assistant
Administrator at USAID, she ran aid programs in Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
She writes on global philanthropy, economic development, and international health, and
holds a Master’s and Doctorate in Public Health from Johns Hopkins and Master’s in Foreign
Service from Georgetown University.
David Olusanya Ajakaiyeâ•‡Research Professor of Economics of Nigerian Institute of Social
and Economic Research (NISER) is currently Executive Chairman, African Centre for
Shared Development Capacity Building (ACSDCB), Ibadan, Nigeria. Previously, he was
Director-General, NISER, Ibadan, Nigeria, and Director of Research at the African Eco-
nomic Research Consortium (AERC), Nairobi, Kenya. He holds a PhD from Boston
University.
Rodrigo Arocenaâ•‡ is Professor of Science and Development at the University of the Republic
in Montevideo, Uruguay. He is the current Rector of the University. He holds a PhDÂ€in Math-
ematics and a PhD in Development Studies from the Central University of Venezuela.
Armando Barrientosâ•‡ is Professor and Research Director at the Brooks World Poverty Insti-
tute at the University of Manchester. He holds a PhD from the University of Kent at Canter-
bury. His research focuses on the linkages existing between welfare programs and labor
markets in developing countries, and on policies addressing poverty, vulnerability, andÂ€pop-
ulation ageing. His most recent book is Social Assistance in Developing Countries (Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
Anthony J. Bebbingtonâ•‡ is Higgins Professor of Environment and Society and Director of
the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University, a Research Associate of the Centro
Peruano de Estudios Sociales, Peru and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of
Manchester. Recent books include Social Conflict, Economic Development and Extractive
Industry (Routledge, 2012) and Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil and
Gas in Latin America (with J.Bury, University of Texas Press, 2013).
Mats Berdalâ•‡ is Professor of Security and Development at King’s College London and former
Director of Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He holds a
DPhil from the University of Oxford and is the author of Building Peace after War (Routledge,
2009).
ï»¿list of contributorsâ•‡â•‡â•‡ xix
Julio Berdeguéâ•‡ is Principal Researcher at RIMISP-Latin American Center for Rural Devel-
opment, based in Chile. His recent work focuses on territorial dynamics of growth and social
inclusion in non-metropolitan areas of Latin America. He holds a PhD in Social Â�Science
from Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Netherlands.
Albert Berryâ•‡ is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Toronto. He has pub-
lished widely on agriculture, labor markets, income distribution, and small enterprises in
developing countries, with a regional focus on Latin America and a special interest in
Colombia. Apart from academic activities, he has worked at the Ford Foundation and the
World Bank and has consulted with various international and Canadian institutions.
Richard M. Birdâ•‡ is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Toronto. His
research interests include tax policy, tax administration, local finance, and intergovernmen-
tal fiscal relations in developing countries.
Saturnino M. Borras, Jr.â•‡ is Associate Professor of Rural Development Studies at the Inter-
national Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, and Adjunct Professor at the College
of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD), China Agricultural University in Beijing.
Previously, he was Canada Research Chair in International Development Studies at Saint
Mary’s University, Halifax.
Sylvia Borrenâ•‡ is the Executive Director of Greenpeace Netherlands, as well as co-chair of
the Global Call for Action against Poverty (GCAP). Previously, she was co-chair of World-
connectors and the Director of Oxfam Novib, as well as a member of the Advisory Council
on International Affairs (AIV) for the Dutch government.
David Brookâ•‡ is Director of Strategic Projects at Grand Challenges Canada. Previously,
Mr Brook was the founder and President of DBk Consulting Inc., a firm Â�specializing in
innovation, health, and environmental policy, commercialization, and citizen engage-
ment. Mr Brook has also worked with a number of small- and medium-sized green
energy companies, and as a senior research associate with the Public Policy Forum in
Ottawa.
José Eduardo Cassiolatoâ•‡ is Professor of Economics and Coordinator of the Research Net-
work on Local Production and Innovative Systems, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He
holds a DPhil from Sussex University, was Planning Secretary of the Brazilian Ministry of
S&T, and Visiting Fellow at MIT, Sussex University, and Université de Rennes 1, France. His
publications include BRICS and Development Alternatives (Anthem Press, 2009) and Sys-
tems of Innovation and Development (Edward Elgar, 2003).
Charles Caterâ•‡ is a research analyst at Security Council Report in New York. Previously, he
worked at the International Development Research Centre. His research interests include
policy responses to conflict and corruption associated with the natural resource extraction
industries. He holds a Master’s of International Affairs from Columbia University and a
DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford.
Ling Chenâ•‡ is Associate Professor and Associate Director of Industrial Development and
Environmental Governance (CIDEG) at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsin-
ghua University, China. Her research is in public policy process and innovation policies.
InÂ€ recent years, she has conducted research and published on low-carbon innovation in
xxâ•‡â•‡â•‡ list of contributors
Â�China’s automobile industry and China’s semiconductor industrial policy. She holds a PhD
in Public Management from Tsinghua University.
Gregory Chinâ•‡ is Associate Professor of Political Science at York University (Canada), China
Research Chair at The Centre for International Governance Innovation, and Fellow of the
Center for International Political Economy at Peking University. He was First Secretary
(Development) at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, and was responsible for Canadian aid to
China and North Korea. Previously, he served in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs
and International Trade, and the Canadian International Development Agency.
Farley Cleghornâ•‡ is Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer of Futures Group. He
received his MD (with honors) at the University of the West Indies Faculty of Medical
Â�Sciences and an MPH (Alpha Delta Omega) in epidemiology and biostatistics of infectious
diseases from Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.
Bruce Currie-Alderâ•‡ is Regional Director, based in Cairo, with Canada’s International Devel-
opment Research Centre (IDRC). His work examines the governance of public research fund-
ing and scientific cooperation with developing countries. His previous experience includes
facilitating corporate strategy, contributing to Canada’s foreign policy, and work in the Mexi-
can oil industry. Currie-Alder holds a Master’s in Natural Resource Management from Simon
Fraser University and a PhD in Public Policy from Carleton University.
Arindam Das-Guptaâ•‡ is Senior Professor and head of the Centre For Economic Research at
the Goa Institute of Management, India. An applied microeconomist, his consulting experi-
ence and research interests are in tax policy, tax administration, public expenditure manage-
ment, and governance in developing countries. He holds a PhD in Economics from Cornell
University.
Kevin E. Davisâ•‡ is Vice Dean and Beller Family Professor of Business Law at New York Uni-
versity School of Law. He holds an LLM from Columbia University and LLB from the Uni-
versity of Toronto. His current research focuses on the impact of transnational
anti-corruption law, quantitative measures of the performance or impact of legal institu-
tions, and innovation in contracting.
Pablo de Greiffâ•‡ is Director of Research at the International Center for Transitional Justice.
His latest publication is “Theorizing Transitional Justice” (Nomos LI, 2012). He is the editor
of ten books in political theory and on transitional justice, including The Handbook of Repa-
rations (Oxford, 2006) and Transitional Justice and Development (SSRC, 2009). He is also
UN Special Rapporteur for the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparations, and Guarantees of
Non-recurrence.
Fatima Dentonâ•‡ is the Director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s
African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC). Previously, she led one of the largest adaptation
research programs as part of a joint initiative of Canada’s International Development
Research Centre (IDRC) and Britain’s DFID, and has worked for the United Nations Envi-
ronment Program. She is a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
and holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham.
Shantayanan Devarajanâ•‡ is the Chief Economist of the Africa Region at the World Bank,
following roles as Chief Economist of the South Asia Region, and as Chief Economist for the
ï»¿list of contributorsâ•‡â•‡â•‡ xxi
Human Development Network. Before the World Bank he was on the faculty of Harvard
University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the author and co-author of over
100 publications.
Michele Di Maioâ•‡ is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Naples “Parthe-
nope” (Italy) and Senior Affiliate of the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN). His areas
of expertise are trade, structural change, and industrial policy in developing countries. He
holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Siena, Italy.
Timothy G. Evansâ•‡ is Dean at the James P. Grant School of Public Health at BRAC University
and former Assistant Director General of the World Health Organization. Previously, he was
Director, Health Equity, at the Rockefeller Foundation and co-founding Board member of the
Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunization. He has a DPhil in Agricultural Economics
from University of Oxford and medical training from McMaster University.
Renato G. Flôres, Jr.â•‡ is Professor at the Graduate School of Economics of Fundação Getulio
Vargas (FGV), Brazil. His interests include development economics, sustainable growth and
trade (theory and policy), European and Regional Integration, and the links between inter-
national law, politics, and economics within the context of globalization. Before engaging in
academics, he held important positions in the Brazilian government.
Dugan I. Fraserâ•‡ is Senior Technical Adviser in Monitoring and Evaluation at South Africa’s
Public Service Commission. He also works as an independent public and development man-
agement consultant. His areas of expertise include M&E strategy development, institutional
and capacity development, and process facilitation.
Ahmed Galalâ•‡ is Managing Director of the Economic Research Forum, which covers the
Arab countries, Iran and Turkey. A former staff member of the World Bank, he holds a PhD
in Economics from Boston University. He is the author of more than a dozen books, the most
recent of which is The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North
Africa (World Bank, 2008).
Bo Göranssonâ•‡ is Senior Research Fellow at the Research Policy Institute at Lund Uni-
versity. His research focuses on the role of technology in development and economic
growth, particularly issues related to technology transfer, capacity building, and the
impact of new technologies on developing countries. He is Coordinator of the UniDev
Network on the Evolving Role of Academic Institutions in Innovation Systems and
Development.
Ruth Hallâ•‡ is Associate Professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies
(PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She holds a DPhil in Politics
from the University of Oxford, and works on land rights, land deals, and agrarian politics in
South and Southern Africa.
John Harrissâ•‡ is Professor and former Director of the School for International Studies at
Simon Fraser University, having formerly served as Professor of Development Studies at
the London School of Economics. A specialist on the politics and political economy of
India, and with interests in institutional theories, Dr Harriss is the author, most recently,
with Stuart Corbridge and Craig Jeffrey, of India Today: Economy, Politics and Society (Polity
Press, 2012).
xxiiâ•‡â•‡â•‡ list of contributors
Jorge Heineâ•‡ is CIGI Professor of Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International
Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, and Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International
Governance Innovation (CIGI), in Waterloo, Ontario. A past vice-president of the Interna-
tional Political Science Association (IPSA), he has served as ambassador of Chile to India
and to South Africa, and as a Cabinet minister in the Chilean government.
David Hulmeâ•‡ is Professor and Head of the Institute for Development Policy and Management
at the University of Manchester, Executive Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute, and
CEO of the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre. His research interests
include rural development, poverty analysis, and poverty reduction strategies, finance for the
poor, and sociology of development.
Afeikhena Jeromeâ•‡ is National Coordinator of the State Peer Review Mechanism in the
Nigeria Governors’ Forum. He previously worked with the United Nations as Coordinator for
Economic Governance and Management at the African Peer Review Mechanism, Midrand,
South Africa and Member of Faculty, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He holds a PhD in Eco-
nomics from the University of Ibadan.
Richard Jollyâ•‡ is Honorary Professor at the Institute of Development Studies of the Univer-
sity of Sussex and was co-director of the UN Intellectual History Project. As an UN Assist-
ant Secretary-General, he served as Deputy Executive-Director of UNICEF and as Principal
Coordinator of UNDP’s Human Development Report. His many publications include co-
authoring UN Ideas That Changed the World (Indiana University Press, 2009).
Ravi Kanburâ•‡ is T. H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Eco-
nomics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He has taught
at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Essex, Warwick, Princeton, and Columbia, and
has served on the senior staff of the World Bank, including as Chief Economist for Africa
and Director of the World Development Report.
Devesh Kapurâ•‡ is Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India and holds the
Madan Lal Sobti Chair on Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania and is a
Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. His research
has focused on the World Bank, international migration and India’s political economy. He
has a PhD in Public Policy from Princeton and degrees in chemical engineering.
Celia Lessa Kerstenetzkyâ•‡ is Professor of Economics and Political Science and Director of
the Center for Studies of Inequality and Development at Universidade Federal Fluminense
in Rio de Janeiro. She was a visiting scholar with the Political Science Department at MIT
and the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in
Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute.
Jaques Kerstenetzkyâ•‡ is Professor of Economics at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
(UFRJ) in Brazil and Fellow of the Celso Furtado International Center. He has been a visiting
scholar at MIT and New York University, and an adjunct professor with the Stern School of
Business at NYU.
Gilbert M. Khadiagalaâ•‡ is the Jan Smuts Professor of International Relations and Head of
Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Dr
Khadiagala’s research focuses on conflict resolution, mediation, leadership, and develop-
ï»¿list of contributorsâ•‡â•‡â•‡ xxiii
ment in Africa. He obtained his PhD in International Studies from Johns Hopkins
University.
Homi Kharasâ•‡ is Senior Fellow and Deputy Director in the Global Economy and Develop-
ment program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He is the co-author of Cata-
lyzing Development: A New Vision for Aid prepared as background for the High Level Forum
on Aid Effectiveness. His most recent book, Getting to Scale, argues that new approaches are
needed to scale up the impact of development cooperation. He holds a PhD in Economics
from Harvard University.
Keith Krauseâ•‡ is Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Stud-
ies in Geneva, Director of its Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding, and the
Program Director of the Small Arms Survey, an internationally recognized research center
NGO he founded in 2000.
Huguette Labelleâ•‡ is Chair of Transparency International and is a Board member of a
number of national and international organizations including the Africa Capacity Building
Foundation and the UN Global Compact. A former Chancellor of the University of Ottawa,
she served for nearly twenty years as Deputy Minister in the Canadian Government includ-
ing the Canadian International Development Agency.
Maivân Clech Lâmâ•‡ is Professor Emerita of international law at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York and the former Associate Director of its Ralph Bunche Institute
for International Studies. She served as academic counsel to the American Indian Law Alli-
ance which, alongside other indigenous parties, played a key role in the drafting of the UN
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Helena Maria Martins Lastresâ•‡ is the Head of the Office for Local Production and Innova-
tions Systems and Regional Development at the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). Her
main areas of interest and publication include development and S,T&I policies, economics
of knowledge and innovation, financing of national, regional and local production, and
innovation systems.
Danny Leipzigerâ•‡ is the Managing Director of the Growth Dialogue, and formerly headed
the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) Vice Presidency.
He holds an appointment as Professor of International Business and International Affairs at
George Washington University, and has previously acted as Vice Chair of the Commission
on Growth and Development.
Ronaldo Lemosâ•‡ is the director of the Rio Institute for Technology and Society and profes-
sor at the Rio de Janeiro State University’s Law School (UERJ). He is a visiting scholar at the
MIT Media Lab, and holds a Master’s from Harvard Law School and a Doctorate from the
University of Sao Paulo. Dr Lemos’ research on the use of technology by the poor has been
influential in Brazil and internationally.
Justin Yifu Linâ•‡ is Professor and Honorary Dean of the National School of Development at
Peking University. He was the former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the
World Bank and Founding Director of the China Centre for Economic Research at Peking
University. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago.
xxivâ•‡â•‡â•‡ list of contributors
Caitlyn MacMasterâ•‡ holds an MSc in Global Health (Globalization and Development

stream) from McMaster University, as well as undergraduate degrees in Environmental Sci-
ence and in Economics. She has worked as a summer student and subsequently as a program
assistant at Grand Challenges Canada, and also as a consultant and project manager in the
renewable energy industry.
David M. Maloneâ•‡ is Under-Secretary-General of the UN and Rector of the UN University
(UNU) headquartered in Tokyo. Previously, he was President of the International Develop-
ment Research Centre (IDRC), and prior to that the Canadian High Commissioner to India
and non-resident Ambassador to Bhutan and Nepal. He has also been the President of the
International Peace Academy (New York) and a Canadian ambassador to the United Nations.
Marcelo G. Pessoa de Matosâ•‡ is Lecturer at the Institute of Economics, Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a researcher at RedeSist, an inter-disciplinary research network
on local productive and innovative systems. His research interests lie in the economics of
knowledge and innovation, innovation systems, local productive and innovative systems,
and industrial and ST&I policy.
Rohinton Medhoraâ•‡ is the President of the Centre for International Governance Innovation
(CIGI), and was formerly Vice President of Programs at the International Development
Research Centre. Prior to IDRC, Dr Medhora was with the faculty of economics at Univer-
sity of Toronto, where he also earned his PhD.
Célestin Mongaâ•‡ is Senior Advisor and Director of the Program on Structural Transforma-
tion at the World Bank. He has taught economics at Boston University and the University of
Bordeaux and served as Associate Editor of the five-volume New Encyclopedia of Africa. Pre-
viously, he was Department Head and Manager in the Banque Nationale de Paris group. Dr
Monga holds degrees from MIT, Harvard, and the universities of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne,
Bordeaux, and Pau.
Dimpho Motsamaiâ•‡ is a policy analyst with the Africa Conflict Prevention & Risk Analysis
program of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), in Pretoria, South Africa. Her work
includes conflict vulnerability assessments of countries in the Southern African Develop-
ment Community (SADC) region and analysis on how the SADC institution interfaces state
security, human security, and human development. She is currently pursuing her doctoral
studies with the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Kumi Naidooâ•‡ is Executive Director of Greenpeace International and President of the civil
society alliance “Global Campaign for Climate Action” (GCCA). He is the former Secretary
General of the CIVICUS, the Founding Executive Director of the South African National
NGO Coalition (SANGOCO), and the founding Chair of the Global Call to Action against
Poverty (GCAP). A veteran of the anti-apartheid movement, he holds a doctorate in Political
Sociology from the University of Oxford.
Wim Naudéâ•‡ is Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT and the University of Maastricht, and
Dean-Director of the Maastricht School of Management, the Netherlands. He is also Affili-
ated Professor at Centrum Católica, Peru. Previously, he was Senior Research Fellow at the
United Nations University in Finland, Council Member of Statistics South Africa, and Lec-
turer and Research Officer at the University of Oxford.
list of contributors˘â•‡â•‡â•‡ï»¿â•‡â•‡â•‡
xxv
Mthuli Ncubeâ•‡ is Chief Economist and Vice President of the African Development Bank
Group. He holds a PhD in Mathematical Finance from Cambridge University, and is former
Dean of Commerce, Law and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he
holds a Chair and is on leave.
José Antonio Ocampoâ•‡ is Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs and
Member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. He is former Under-
Secretary General of the United Nations for Economic and Social Affairs, Executive Secre-
tary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and Minister of
Finance of Colombia. He has a PhD in Economics from Yale University.
Nandini Oommanâ•‡ is an independent global health and development consultant, Vietnam,
and the former Director of the HIV/AIDS Monitor (2006–2011) at the Center for Global
Development in Washington, DC. She has a PhD from the School of Hygiene and Public
Health at Johns Hopkins University. She was an associate faculty member in the Department
of Family Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, from
2000 to 2007.
Ernesto Ottoneâ•‡ is Professor of the Institute for Global Studies/MSH of Paris, the Director of
the Chair “Globalization and Democracy” at the University Diego Portales of Chile and at
the University San Martin of Buenos Aires, and Academic Adviser of the Club of Madrid. He
was formerly Deputy Executive Secretary of UN ECLAC, and has served as Director of Stra-
tegic Analysis to the Chilean president Ricardo Lagos.
Rajul Pandya-Lorchâ•‡ is Chief of Staff in the Director General’s Office at the International
Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC. She concurrently serves as Head
of IFPRI’s 2020 Vision Initiative. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Wellesley
College and a Master’s degree in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University.
Mariana Mota Pradoâ•‡ is Associate Professor of law at the University of Toronto. She has
worked at the World Bank and been affiliated with the Brazilian Center of Analysis and
Planning (CEBRAP). She holds an LLB from the University of Sao Paulo, an LLM and a JSD
from Yale Law School.
Cintia Quiliconiâ•‡ is a faculty member at FLACSO-Argentina; she has also worked in the
Secretariat of Industry at the Ministry of Economy of Argentina. Her research interests have
focused on regional integration, bilateral trade agreements, and multilateralism in Latin
America. A second area of interest is currently on development and inclusive green growth.
Patricia J. Rogersâ•‡ is Professor of Public Sector Evaluation at Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology and Project Director of BetterEvaluation. Dr Rogers has provided advice on
methods for development evaluation to bilateral aid agencies, UN agencies and development
banks, as well as working directly with national governments.
Tomás Rosada is the Regional Economist for the Latin America and the Caribbean Division
at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Before joining IFAD he
served as Alternate Executive Director for Central America and Belize at the Inter-Â�American
Development Bank. His areas of interest include poverty and inequality, social policy, and
rural development. He holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of
Guelph in Canada.
xxviâ•‡â•‡â•‡ list of contributors
Emma Sammanâ•‡ is Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). Prior to
joining ODI, she worked for the Human Development Report Office (UNDP), Institute of
Development Studies (IDS, University of Sussex), Oxford Poverty and Human Development
Initiative (OPHI), and International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). She holds a
DPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford.
Georgina Santosâ•‡ is Lecturer at the School of Planning and Geography, Cardiff Univer-
sity, and Visiting Research Associate at the School of Geography and the Environment,
Oxford University. Her areas of expertise include transport economics, environmental
economics and, more recently, development economics. Within development econom-
ics, she is interested in gender differences at the work place, with a focus on women in
academia.
María Emma Santosâ•‡ is Assistant Professor at Departamento de Economía, Universidad
Nacional del Sur (UNS), and Research Fellow at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones
Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Bahía Blanca, Argentina. She is also Research Associate at
the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), in the Department of Inter-
national Development, University of Oxford.
Hoda Selimâ•‡ is an economist at the Economic Research Forum (ERF) in Cairo since 2011.
Previously, she worked for five years at the World Bank’s Cairo Office in the Poverty Reduc-
tion and Economic Monitoring department. She also held a research-related position at the
Global Development Network. She has participated in research on Â�macroeconomic and
development issues in Egypt and the Arab region. She holds a PhD from Sciences Po in
Paris.
Abebe Shimelesâ•‡ is Division Manager in the Research Department at the African Develop-
ment Bank. He has previously worked for the World Bank as Senior Poverty Economist
based in Rwanda, as Assistant Professor of Economics at Addis Ababa University, Commer-
cial College, and as Program Advisor at Action Aid. He holds a PhD in Economics from
University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has particular research interest in applied micro-
econometrics.
Peter A. Singerâ•‡ is Chief Executive Officer of Grand Challenges Canada and Director of the
Sandra Rotman Centre at the University Health Network, University of Toronto. He is also
Professor of Medicine at University of Toronto, and the Foreign Secretary of the Canadian
Academy of Health Sciences.
Yulya Spantchakâ•‡ is Deputy Director and Research Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center
for Global Prosperity. She has an extensive academic and professional background in inter-
national development, philanthropy, remittances, and global health research and holds an
MA in Sustainable International Development, Brandeis University.
Frances Stewartâ•‡ is Professor Emeritus of Development Economics at the University of
Oxford. She is former Director of the Centre for Research on Inequality Human Security and
Ethnicity (CRISE) and of the Oxford Department of International Development. She has an
honorary doctorate from the University of Sussex.
Judith Sutzâ•‡ is Academic Coordinator of the University Research Council and Professor of
Science Technology and Society at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of the
ï»¿list of contributorsâ•‡â•‡â•‡ xxvii
Republic, Uruguay. She holds a Master’s degree in Development Planning from Central
University of Venezuela, and a PhD in the Socio-Economics of Development from Paris-
Sorbonne.
Mankombu Sambasivan (M.S.) Swaminathanâ•‡ is Emeritus Chairman of M. S. Swaminathan
Research Foundation. Fellow of many leading scientific academies, including the Royal Society
of London and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, he has received 66 honorary doctorate
degrees from universities around the world. A plant geneticist by training, he is known as the
“Father of the Green Revolution in India” and is globally recognized as an authority on sustain-
able food and nutrition security.
Simon S. C. Tayâ•‡ is the Chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, the
country’s oldest think tank and part of the Asean Isis network. He teaches international law
and public policy at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. He holds an LLM
from Harvard University and LLB Honors from the National University of Singapore.
Irene Tinkerâ•‡ is Professor Emerita in the Department of Regional Planning and Women
Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She is co-founder of the Wellesley Center for
Research on Women and founding president of the International Center for Research on
Women (Washington, DC). In a career that encompassed both activism and the academy,
she has published widely describing the adverse impact economic development had on
women and how they responded.
Cecilia Tortajadaâ•‡ is the President of the Third World Centre for Water Management, Mex-
ico. Her work focuses on public policy aspects of natural resources management, especially
water. She is author and editor of more than 30 books by major international publishers,
which have been translated into seven languages.
Diana Tussieâ•‡ heads the Department of International Relations at FLACSO/Argentina, is
the founding Director of the Latin American Trade Network (LATN), and has served as jun-
ior secretary for trade negotiations. She has been a member of the Warwick Commission on
“The Multilateral Trade Regime: Which Way Forward?” and the Committee for Develop-
ment Policy of the United Nations, and serves on the editorial boards of several international
journals.
Joana Varon Ferrazâ•‡ is Researcher and Project Coordinator at the Center for Technology
and Society (CTS / FGV), where her work centers upon Internet Governance and Develop-
ment Studies. A lawyer, she holds a post-graduate degree in Law and New Technologies and
Development Studies, and a Master’s in Law and Development from EDESP/FGV. Recently
she has been involved in film activism, coordinating and producing short films for “freenet?,”
an online collaborative documentary film project.
Audrey Verdier-Chouchaneâ•‡ is Chief Research Economist in the Development Research
Department of the African Development Bank. She has worked extensively on measurement
of poverty and inequality in Africa. Previously, she was Assistant Professor at the University
of Nice, France from where she holds a PhD in Economics.
Carlos Vergaraâ•‡ has been a consultant of different international organizations such as
ECLAC, UNDP, and UNICEF. He has given conferences in universities in United States,
Canada, Europe, South Africa, and Latin America. He has acted as a senior adviser on
xxviiiâ•‡â•‡â•‡ list of contributors
Â�
strategic analysis to President Lagos in Chile; Regional Adviser at the office of the Executive
Secretary of ECLAC; and, at present, as a consultant on social and political studies.
Ben Whiteâ•‡ is Professor Emeritus of Rural Sociology at the International Institute of Social
Studies, The Hague. His teaching and research has focused on agrarian and rural develop-
ment issues, with a second area of interest in the anthropology and history of childhood and
youth, particularly in Indonesia.
David Williamsâ•‡ is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at
Queen Mary University of London. Dr Williams’s research interests are in the area of the
international political theory and international relations of development. He is the author of
The World Bank and Domestic Transformation in International Politics and International
Development and Global Politics, both published by Routledge.
Lan Xueâ•‡ is the Dean of the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University
in Beijing. He is Executive Vice President of the Development Research Academy for the 21st
Century and Director of the China Institute for Science and Technology Policy atÂ€Tsinghua
University. He holds a PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon
University.
Sivan Yosefâ•‡ is Program Manager in the Director General’s Office at the International Food
Policy Research Institute (Washington, DC). She has worked on initiatives and publications
highlighting successes in agricultural development, as well as the linkages among agricul-
ture, nutrition, and health.
Shahid Yusufâ•‡ is the Chief Economist of the Growth Dialogue at George Washington Uni-
versity. He has worked for more than 35 years at the World Bank, and has written extensively
on development issues, with a special focus on East Asia. He holds a PhD in Economics from
Harvard University.
Elaine Zuckermanâ•‡ is President and Founder of Gender Action, an organization dedicated
to promoting gender justice and women’s rights in all International Financial Institution
investments. She has worked in the World Bank as an economist on China projects, the social
impacts of structural adjustment, and in the gender unit; and in the Inter-American Devel-
opment Bank as Coordinator of the Social Agenda Policy Group.
th e state of
dev el opm en t thought
bruce currie-alder, ravi kanbur,
david m. malone, and rohinton medhora
Why This Volume?
What is development? How does it happen? What can policy do to make it happen? Our
project is designed to trace the evolution of responses to these questions over the past s eventy
years. The focus is on the interplay between ideas and experience in development broadly
construed. How have ideas on development changed since the Second World War? How has
thought driven practice, and how has practice in turn shaped thought? Our central proposi-
tion is that the certainties of the immediate post-war period are not with us anymore. Devel-
opment is no longer seen purely in terms of economics and economic growth. It is also no
longer seen as being dependent either solely on state direction or solely on the free play of
markets. And development “wisdom” no longer emanates from the developed countries
of the north. As a result of the current mutability in the field, the moment appears ripe for
a stocktaking of where we are, an analysis of how we got here, and some speculation on
what all this portends for the future.
Thought on development involves both theoretical and empirical dimensions. The former
mostly revolves around theories grounded in the concepts of a particular academic disci-
pline, which are often obscured by more accessible insights and rhetoric about what devel-
opment constitutes and how it supposedly occurs. Theorizing about development can depart
from normative or empirical bases, from moral principles and values relating to a desirable
society, or from evidence about how societies have changed over time. Thus theoretical and
empirical lines of thought are intertwined, and many of the contributions to this volume
speak to the interplay between the two. If there is a trend to recent decades of thinking on
development, it represents a gradual shift away from grand theories, such as modernization
or dependency, toward a more modest aspiration grounded in realist and positivist philoso-
phy. Whereas thinking on development once aspired to explain the unintentional evolution
of people and places through history, more recent thinking tends to focus on the gap between
the goals of public policy and what was achieved in practice, thus evolving in response to
2 bruce currie-alder, ravi kanbur et al.
perceived success, failure, and surprise. It reflects a desire to do things differently in order to
improve upon past performance and realize a better future. Hence the emphasis we place on
experience and practice, which might have been seen as less relevant to foundational think-
ing in this field three or four decades ago.
More than ever, those concerned with development want to understand and assess the
policy and experience of others in order to develop ideas relevant to their own countries. On
the one hand, thinking on development is pulling together, breaking out of disciplinary silos
and drawing on ideas, concepts, and theories across the natural and social sciences. This vol-
ume recognizes an increasing accord among scholars and practitioners around the constitu-
ents of development (if not the weight that might be attached to each); and the existence of a
plurality of views on what “works” and what does not, across time and place. The variety of
contributors and their perspectives highlight how diverse approaches complement and
enrich one another. On the other hand, thinking on development may be tearing apart, shift-
ing as lines between international politics, development, and security blur and hitherto
developing countries become major powers. As the developing world becomes more influ-
ential for global prosperity and the movement of people and ideas, it challenges the founda-
tions of relations between the developing and developed world. It is thus an opportune time
to re-examine the critical debates that have shaped thinking on development until now, and
how such thinking may evolve in the coming decades.
In trying to understand the evolution of economic and human development up until today
and where it might be headed, a historical approach on the thinking underpinning it is essen-
tial. As every chapter in this volume demonstrates, successive phases of thinking are informed
by the platform on which they were formed. Beyond this, in a recent book on the history of
economic thought Agnar Sandmo (2010) suggests three reasons why understanding the evo-
lution of thought is important. First, the history of thought can be fun. Clearly, such treatises
are an acquired taste, and the editors stake no claim on the entertainment value of this book,
though we do hope the reader finds many of the chapters enjoyable. But we do place a pre-
mium on readability, as part of the challenge in surmounting ideology and disciplinary silos
lies in banishing unnecessary jargon within an informed narrative. Second, the history of
thought should be part of a liberal education. This comes nearest to our view that as power
points shift globally and become more diffused, it is ideas and not gravity that drive change.
A liberal education is about broad thinking, and the inculcation of the “scientific method”
that advances good ideas and discards bad ones. Third, the study of the history of thought
shows that a field is not static but is evolving. Evolution need not mean all new ideas all the
time. In development, it is the resurrection of traditional ideas—for example industrial policy,
or land as an essentially non-economic entity—re-shaped, combined with others differently
than previously, that is as much a feature of current thought as are new ideas (such as the use
of randomized controlled trials to guide policy interventions) which may prove ephemeral.
As with any process of evolution, understanding the path is as important as defining the
end point. In the case of development, the end point remains unknown and the paths are
many. All the more reason to study them. Taking a broad view of development as the starting
point, the papers in the volume cover the evolution of thought and characterize the current
state of development thinking. They range from explorations of specific issues such as pov-
erty and inequality, through perspectives on development in particular countries and
regions, to broader questions such as the nature of development itself. This overview presents
a brief account of the evolution of development thought, focusing on the post-Second World
the state of development thought 3
War period, as a means to set out the foundation upon which this volume is built. This is fol-
lowed by a road map to the volume, including a brief introduction to the individual chapters
in the collection. The final section presents some insights, reflecting on the motivation for
this volume and what the editors have learned along the way.
The Evolution of Development Thought
Concern over development has been with us for as long as people have existed, for it is fun-
damentally about the improvement of the human condition. But its study as a formal line of
enquiry is more recent, and best seen in two waves. The first dates back to what W. Arthur
Lewis (1988: 28) terms the “superstars of the eighteenth century,” the contributions of David
Hume, Adam Smith,1 James Steuart, and later, John Stuart Mill.2 The classicists’ ambit was
what we would today term questions of economic growth, the distribution of wealth and the
principles underlying personal behavior and public action. Thinking largely concentrated
within the British Isles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was complemented by
that of the French philosophes, which focused less on economic factors (and perhaps efficien-
cies) and more on the promotion of greater equality and freedom and a just society. The
philosophes, driving a form of French enlightenment, that culminated in, and rapidly reached
a dead end in the excesses of the French Revolution, were discussed and sometimes hosted
by elites and courts in Prussia and Russia. While encapsulated in a shallow layer of society,
the conversation extended new ideas throughout much of Europe’s political and intellectual
elite. Meanwhile, in the newly independent United States of America, its former constituent
colonies were seeking to practice what the great minds of Europe had merely preached
several decades earlier. Finally, and worthy of note, were the efforts of Napoleon Bonaparte
in France to codify both law and national education available to all citizens. (In the UK, the
development of the “common law” came about as a process of aggregation over time of
custom and innovation through the complex interactions of parliament, increasingly inde-
pendent courts, and monarchs of varying but decreasing autonomous power.3)
The second wave of discourse on development stems from the end of the Second World
War and the accompanying preoccupations with European (and of a different scale and
nature, Japanese) reconstruction, maintaining the peace while fighting the Cold War,
decolonization, and the emergence of newly independent but poor countries. There are
antecedents here—the outputs of (mainly) colonial administrators and culturalists who
took a fancy (sometimes a dubious one) to the more exotic parts of their country’s empire,
and with a quite different orientation the seminal work during the 1930s and 1940s on eco-
nomic planning for a post-independent India by the National Planning Committee of the
Indian National Congress. But (for example) Edwin Seligman’s pre-war Encyclopaedia of
the Social Sciences contains precious few entries pertinent to the growth industry that
development would constitute just two decades later. It was not until the Marshall Plan of
the late 1940s and 1950s that a comprehensive and sustained interest in the design and
practice of development emerged as the confluence of fighting poverty, (re)building infra-
structure, keeping enemies at bay, and strengthening the institutions of good and demo-
cratic government.
But the Marshall Plan, focused on Europe, and parallel massive aid to parts of Asia,
notably Japan and Korea, were very much concentrated on reconstruction (as were such
institutions as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the
slightly later Organization for European Economic Cooperation), a notion which explicitly
recognized that advanced economic and often political achievements had been attained in
those territories in the decades preceding the Second World War. The success of these
post-war reconstruction ventures produced what seems in retrospect a facile belief that
with means, good will, and hard work, development could be encouraged everywhere with
similar methods and results. This would not prove the case.
Thus while a post-war timeline for the present examination of development thinking and
practice is apposite, it is also perhaps prone to generating confusion. Indeed, it was only in
the 1950s that thinking and planning for development as we conceive of it today seriously
took root (beyond the Soviet Union). Thinking about development tended to be “overarch-
ing” in nature: the Big Push, Marxian interpretations, Dependencia theory, and Basic Needs.
Beyond these signposts, development came to be seen through two distinct lenses which
endure to this day: early developers from the West who sought to replicate their own evi-
dently successful experience at modernizing; and later developers—foreign aid donors—who
prescribe actions especially designed for poorer countries. These lenses in turn shaped
notions of development in economic and normative terms. But these lenses were not always
complementary or internally consistent in their logic. For what was deemed to have “worked”
for the early developers was not necessarily what was prescribed to the later developers. Geo-
politics and the ideology of the time clearly trumped pragmatism or the historic record. This
is most evident in notions of the role of the state, which cemented into dogma in the two
principal blocs (three counting the smaller though still influential one centered on China)
into which the developing world found itself divided during the Cold War period.
Throughout time there have been important voices of dissent from the mainstream
approach to development. A principal strand, which went beyond dissent to actually hold
sway in many countries, was the view of the leaders of newly independent countries them-
selves, starting with Latin America in the nineteenth century and continuing with Asia
and Africa in the twentieth century. Shaped by their experience with colonialism, they
were unsurprisingly wary of close economic and political ties with their former colonizers
and other rich Western powers. Likewise, they were deeply suspicious of advice to adopt
those economic and political systems that had enslaved their peoples, sometimes for cen-
turies. Yet many were passionate admirers of the Western model of democracy and its
institutions; they were only disillusioned that these were not applied in their own lands by
the colonizer. Driven also by the imperatives of nation-building (and their own not incor-
rect reading of the path that Western countries had taken) these leaders saw a central role
for the state and public institutions in charting (rather than merely managing at the mar-
gins) the process of development. Indeed, those countries that set their own path early
seemed to fare better later on.
Faith in a unique way forward came with perils. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Iran entered
into a forced march toward modernization along Western lines, which at the time was
hailed by many as exemplary. The strains experienced within the country’s social fabric,
recognized by anthropologists and sociologists, went unheeded in Tehran and foreign
capitals. The 1978 revolution was in many ways a backlash against development as it was
then pursued by a self-serving elite. Although entirely different in context and outcomes,
the broad point about such blind faith might also be made about the collapse of the Soviet
states and the current crisis in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Yet as long as money and ideas were flowing in tandem to the developing world, a hall-
mark of the post-war multilateral and bilateral aid architecture, the unified understanding of
development was one defined in the West and not by the developing world. This was epito-
mized by the so-called Washington Consensus of policy prescriptions which crystallized in
the late 1980s, coherent on their own terms, yet seemingly ignoring political and social con-
text. Of course a lot can be said on this and was, including about the extent to which the
original proposals were (or were not) traduced and otherwise distorted. Some argued that it
was not sound even on its own terms (i.e. the policies advocated would not lead to economic
growth even if implemented). Then there were further critiques—the proposals would not
be implemented, or would be only half implemented, because of social and political con-
straints. Or, further, that the objective of economic growth itself was problematic, even if
supplemented by equity, because of longer run environmental constraints. Missed in the din
was an important message: that sound policy—not least state financial policy—matters, and
that many varying articulations of sound policy are not only possible but desirable.
Inevitably, numerous challenges emerged that critiqued and undermined the tidy (and, in
hindsight, over-reaching) nostrums of that “consensus.” These came from within the devel-
oping world, from civil society organizations, and from credible institutions such as UNICEF.
The ensuing debate conspired to place the field in great flux. Market and political forces
at home and abroad demonstrated the limits of grand schemes, albeit in different forms in
different places. Compounded by profoundly altered global economic and geo-strategic
circumstances, a unified understanding has succumbed to numerous challenges, leaving
behind varied new views on how to achieve development. Among the more salient of these
are: expanding definitions of success, the importance of context to whether development
“works,” and a renewed appreciation for the questions economics cannot answer.
First, what is cast as constituting success has changed over time, embracing a bewildering
number of goals of different sorts at varying scales of ambition and cost: from national
income to individual freedoms, from global health to safer communities. Choosing the
objectives, ends, or goals of development is a value judgment in the realm of the normative.
The early reliance on growth in incomes as the sole measure of success in development practice,
or as a proxy for a broader array of the components of development, has withered under
the combined assault of experience and reason. For one, measures of economic growth are
poorly correlated with other features of development. Also, welfarist approaches have dem-
onstrated the importance of so-called value-heterogeneity (Pildes and Anderson 1990; Sen
1988). More recent understandings of development have layered new aspirations on top of
older ones. For example, many conceptions of the “wealth of nations” expanded to include
expectations of a just society that affords its citizens the opportunity to satisfy their basic
needs and realize freedoms (on the desirable range and ordering—if any—of which consen-
sus internationally remains elusive, beyond the realm of human right treaties). Progress is
now widely assumed to mean positive movement in some combination of income, educa-
tion, health, nutrition, housing, the environment, personal security, personal liberty, and the
quality of public institutions—including their distribution across population groups and
regions. There is little consensus on exactly what progress constitutes in its components, nor
any need for one, as there is little prospect nor the theoretical foundation for creating an
“optimal” political system that would yield an “optimal” development outcome.
Second, experience and observation have shown that the extent to which development
“works” depends in part on particular local, historical, or institutional contexts. Thus gen-
eral policy prescriptions will fail when the necessary conditions that make them work are
either absent, ignored, or poorly understood. In short, context matters, suggesting a need to
study how people understand their own development experience. As Dani Rodrik (2010: 34)
puts it, “there has not been a greater instance of poverty reduction in history than that of
China in the quarter century since the 1970s. Yet can anyone name the (Western) economists
or the piece of research that played an instrumental role in China’s reforms? What about
South Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam?” Equally, the implosion of the countries of the former
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe demonstrated that it was not market economics alone that
was on trial, but perhaps dogmatism more broadly. If the countries of the world are varied in
every way from their initial conditions to the degree of their openness to outside money and
influence, and success is not centered in any one group of countries, it stands to reason that
there cannot be a single recipe for development.
Third, the discipline of economics has well-known, if often overlooked, limitations in its
application to real-world problems. A partial list includes the inability of conventional
approaches to appropriately value the contributions to human welfare by the environment,
housework and leisure; the role of history (“path dependency”), and cultural norms in peoples’
behavior and actions; and the importance of good government and sound public institutions
to well-functioning markets. Any single discipline contains its own strengths, weaknesses, and
blind spots. The way forward lies in understanding how various disciplines can be brought
together to enrich our understanding of development and its practice.4 Such an approach
might yield, for example, a nuanced role for government to create and strengthen markets, and
sometimes circumvent them in the public interest, but not consistently to replace them.
The financial crisis initiated in 2007–2008 laid bare the continuing fragility of the eco-
nomic systems and the unpredictable and sometimes shaky capacity of governments in
Western countries to manage them. At the same time, the crisis seems to show a new resil-
ience among the emerging powers. The previous near-consensus on the wisdom of deregu-
lating markets eroded quickly, yet it is not obvious what should take its place. In the aftermath
of dealing with their recessions, many developed countries chose or were forced to introduce
austerity budgets cutting expenditure, but in so doing risked further decreasing incomes and
undermining social protection more needed then than in times of smooth sailing.
Heated debate continues among economists on which policies would serve affected econ-
omies best, with agreement elusive (although many of the economic dynamics at play are
widely accepted within the discipline). This, of course, further calls into question near-
certainties of old on how development happens. Citizens and experts alike dusted off previ-
ously discarded theories and began to search for new ideas. Such is the nature of inquiring
minds. Meanwhile the Occupy Movement rebuked growing inequality in developed coun-
tries, while the economic engine of global power appeared to shift to regions hitherto labeled
developing, not in absolute terms but in forward momentum.
The ascension of the G20 as the premier forum for economic cooperation (however disap-
pointing at times in practice) has offered larger developing countries a new voice and influ-
ence in global affairs, and the historically delicious opportunity to contribute to the IMF
resources required to bail out Europe. The financial crisis and related wider economic crisis
since 2008 thus generated a crisis of confidence in established ideas, in turn prompting a
reflection among a wide range of scholars and practitioners, of which this volume is a result.
The terminology and language used to describe development is increasingly inadequate

to describe reality in its many hues. The older dichotomies of developed and developing, or
North and South, are poorly-suited to a reality where some of the largest economies are also
home to some of the globe’s largest numbers of very poor people. The nation-state itself is not
always the most meaningful unit of analysis. The phenomenon of globalization and the
emergence of meaningful new powers tie together the fates of many, while the diversity of
experiences within borders is often greater than that between countries. For example, the
levels of poverty and inequality in some municipalities within central Chile approach the
national averages in Western Europe, while others more closely match African countries
(Bentancor et al. 2008). Similarly, some states of India have development indices approach-
ing Latin American averages, while others are at Sahelian levels.
Recent experience also suggests a shift in the fundamental question that drives thinking
on development. For much of human history, the question was about how to overcome scar-
city, or how to generate income. Theories of development proposed different answers to this
question, creating points of tension around key concepts, such as the role of states and mar-
kets, and their respective failures. At present, with many countries growing at rates many
experts would have considered improbable, the fundamental question is increasingly how to
live responsibly (for example, in terms of the environment) and well amid plenty, or how to
manage the fruits of economic growth. The contributors to this volume mostly see growth as a
means to achieve development by investing in health and education, providing safety nets
and social protection, and enriching democracy and other dimensions of governance (which
likely will continue to vary considerably from society to society). Beyond this, there is cur-
rently little consensus. If anything, this volume suggests the importance of paying attention
to what is under-emphasized in thinking on development, or what Bauer (1972) termed the
“dissent on development.” Many of the topics the editors considered vital to include in this
volume, such as indigenous people, the role of civil society, and adaptation to climate change,
were absent in the most forward-leaning thought on development of seventy years ago. That
our conception of development has expanded, such that ignoring these issues is now
unthinkable, speaks to what Sen (2005) terms the constructive roles of democracy and epis-
temology, which he defines as “government by discussion” and “learning from discussion.”
Structure of the Volume
This book is organized in three parts, moving from the broad ideas that shape the critical
issues and that have featured in development theory (Part 1) to its elemental concepts
which, for the sake of exposition, reflect the tone and language of the underlying sector or
academic discipline (Part 2) to experiences of countries and regions and the roles of other
key actors (Part 3).
Part 1 addresses the key question—what is development?—and in doing so touches on
several points of tension in the post-Second World War discourse of the field such as: con-
cern with economic growth and inequality within society; wider understanding of poverty
beyond a narrow focus on income (see David Hulme); recognizing the role of women in
development while striving toward gender equity (see Irene Tinker and Elaine Zuckerman);
broadening notions of how to evaluate development (see Patricia Rogers and Dugan Fraser);
and how changing political, societal, and economic relations have influenced trends in devel-
opment theory and vice versa (see John Harriss).
It is striking how the great thinkers have always seen development as a broad-spectrum
term, encompassing individual well-being through to the condition of large groups of
people, even the entire world’s population, and within these all manner of well-being not
just material. Also, how broad philosophical concepts such as the capabilities approach
have, of necessity, led to advances in the type of statistics that are gathered and used and
how seemingly abstract views of development are amenable to measurement. We share the
essentially—indeed surprisingly—optimistic view in David Williams’ chapter, that the
study of development has over time surmounted tensions rather than exacerbated them,
and that of Maria Emma Santos and Georgina Santos that rather than see statistics as
essentially limiting “there have been significant advances in terms of enriching the
dashboard of development indicators and composite indices.”
There is also a sense of synthesis in two discussions that had become sterile for a while,
growth versus inequality, and States versus Markets, both false dichotomies. The chapters on
inequality, by Frances Stewart and Emma Samman, and on growth, by Shahid Yusuf, show
the inherent importance of each concept on its own terms, but also outline the interplay
between them, sometimes virtuously and sometimes not. The empirical evidence on the
links between inequality and growth is mixed, and deals with too aggregate a frame to yield
very many meaningful results. But the deconstruction into different types of inequality does
carry more meaning. It is perfectly reasonable for a society to be more intolerant of inequal-
ity among health outcomes for infants, for example, than of inequality among male adult
professionals. Likewise, Yusuf ’s conclusion that growth economics is about more than
obscure debates between technical specialists is salutary.
Finally, Shanta yanan Devarajan and Ravi Kanbur provide a way forward in the States
and Markets debate, by recognizing that both sets of players are prone to success and fail-
ure, and exploring how their interaction will play out in the following areas: the nation-
state in an era of globalization, the increasing importance of international public goods,
and the socially and politically vexing question of entrenched pockets of poverty within
countries rich and poor.
Part 2 of this volume, on the concepts that form the building blocks of the modern devel-
opment discourse, picks up on the echoes of the questions raised in Part 1. It is organized into
five sections: concepts that relate to the state and society; primarily economic topics; peace
and security; sustainability and health; and technology and innovation.
The first section, on State and Society might as well have been named Institutions for it
deals with the legal, social and political structures, norms and processes that underpin all
countries, developing and otherwise. Here is where nuance and the need to examine
issues in their proper context are most apparent. Kevin Davis and Mariana Prado argue
that legal systems cannot be one-size-fits-all: for example, societies vary in their view on
what constitutes private property, as well as in the formality of the process used to create
and enforce law. This is especially apparent in Maivân Clech Lâm’s account of the treat-
ment of indigeneity in most modern development processes. Indigenous voices, she says,
are stronger than ever, and many among them do not articulate “development” as the
mainstream does. Armando Barrientos notes that social protection programs have made
an important contribution to reducing poverty and vulnerability, yet their rationale,
design, and effectiveness remain contested. Albert Berry considers how income growth,
socio-economic equality, and healthy inclusion interact to determine levels of satisfac-
tion and happiness in a society.
A chapter that begs to differ with cultural relativism is Huguette Labelle’s treatment of
corruption, which she sees as being unambiguously socially and economically damaging,
in contrast to more ambivalent views that make the distinction between “enabling” and
“disabling” corruption, or suggest that corruption is indeed understood differently around
the world. So this would appear to be one case of a universal truth; yet Charles Cater’s anal-
ysis of transparency-based policies targeting conflict and corruption suggests there is still
room for more than a single narrative.
The second section, on economic concepts, displays the range of options open to coun-
tries seeking to raise incomes, and pursue micro-economic and macro-economic policies.
Justin Lin and Célestin Monga describe three waves of economic policy, the first concerned
with market failures, the second with government failures and an emerging third wave that
recognizes a role for government but explicitly in stimulating the private sector rather than
replacing it. Variations around this theme—the pragmatic and efficient State—appear in the
chapters on trade and finance (by José Antonio Ocampo); entrepreneurship (by Wim
Naudé); and public finance (by Richard Bird and Arindam Das-Gupta). Lastly, Adekeye
Adebajo addresses these issues from a regional and historical perspective with his focus on
the influence of Raùl Prebisch and Adebayo Adedeji, two early “prophets” of regional inte-
gration. It is possible that after fifteen years of discussion following the coining of the phrase,
we are no further ahead than saying states (and markets) should function within their capa-
bilities (and aware of their limitations) and complement each other. But this too is an advance
over pre-conceived notions of the primacy of one over the other.
The third section deals with the relatively new, even by development standards, field of the
two-way relationships between war and peace on the one hand and development on the
other. It is no coincidence that the parts of the world where poverty indicators have wors-
ened even during periods of global buoyancy, where strains of disease thought to be eradi-
cated stubbornly prevail, and where local and international crime festers are those in conflict.
As Gilbert Khadiagala and Dimpho Motsamai note, the political economy of intrastate
conflict is rarely entirely “local” in that there has typically been some connection to colonial
history or the interplay of outside powers. Development theory and practice is rapidly (if
very belatedly, as pointed out by Keith Krause) catching up to the connections between con-
flict and post-conflict reconciliation and development. Throughout all chapters in this
section lie two precepts—large-scale violent conflict is everywhere and unambiguously
inimical to development (even if sub-groups might benefit from it); and societies can only
make progress from conflict to true development through a process of local reconciliation
(however much mid-wifed by external actors). The range of options here might be wide as
Pablo de Greiff and Mats Berdal show in their chapters on transitional justice and on peace-
building respectively, but these two precepts might be the nearest we get to in this volume to
suggesting a “universal truth”—perhaps a prelude to it being challenged by future scholars
and policy actors, as each field has attracted a wide range of critics.
The fourth section on Sustainability and Health addresses what were once termed “sec-
tors” and operationally are still treated as such in many organizations—agriculture, health,
the environment. Measures of the quality of health or the environment do indeed contribute
to an understanding of development, both at the individual level through their contribution
to well-being (or human development) and at a more aggregate level, in indicating the
priorities of a country or society. M. S. Swaminathan et al., Cecilia Tortajada, and Julio
Berdegué et al. show that the place of agriculture, water, and rural places in development
thought have evolved considerably, becoming integral to other development imperatives
such as health, nutrition, and sound environmental management. As Ben White et al. note in
their chapter on land reform, if badly managed (and with no help from the agriculture and
trade policies of developed countries) the sector may continue to be a source of poverty and
conflict. A similar story emerges in the chapters by Tim Evans which traces the evolution
from tropical medicine to global health, and by Nandini Oomman and Farley Cleghorn
which addresses the tension between targeting disease and strengthening health systems.
The chapter on climate change by Fatima Denton belongs in this section but might also be
read as a complement to the chapters in Part 3 on country and regional experiences. Climate
change embodies all that is complicated, risky, and exciting about development. It is con-
nected with everything else (imagine how lonely and ineffective an isolated Ministry of
Climate Change would be); its science, while compelling, remains in its infancy and connects
with policy interventions in complex ways. It is the quintessentially long-term, externality-
driven problem. How the world as a whole deals with this threat, and how heretofore
successful emerging powers deal with the threat at home and as global citizens, may well
define our notions of development in coming decades.
The final section of Part 2 treats competitiveness, innovation, education, and new tech-
nologies as part of a continuum. It covers topics such as industrial policy (see Michele Di
Maio), innovation systems (see José E. Cassiolato et al.), incentives for research (see David
Brook et al.), and ICTs for development (see Ronaldo Lemos and Joana Ferraz). In doing so,
the focus consciously moves away from the traditional emphasis on primary and secondary
levels of education as a “basic need” in order to consider how it connects with both personal
development and informed citizenship on the one hand, and economic prosperity on the
other. Universities might well be the fulcrum that balances the social and economic dimen-
sions of education. Rodrigo Arocena et al. make this point explicitly in their chapter on uni-
versities and higher education, and it is hard to read the other chapters in this section without
having an image of the national university system, effective or dysfunctional, at the back of
one’s mind. A greater understanding of, and attention to, universities in developing coun-
tries might be the single biggest gap in the current discourse on development. And current
excitement over the important role that think tanks can play in the developing world (nota-
bly in encouraging policy development) should not suggest that such institutions can substi-
tute for the vital functions of universities, which are struggling or failing in many parts of the
globe, while their business model in much of the West is also in question.
Part 3 of this volume brings home the sometimes abstract discussion inherent in a book
on development thought. But development is essentially a real-life process, and a funda-
mental aim of our endeavor is to understand how thought and practice shape each other. It
is axiomatic that one learns as much from successes as from failures. This section shows
that neither success nor failure is unambiguous. The chapters on China (Xue Lan and Ling
Chen), East Asia (Simon Tay), Chile (Ernesto Ottone and Carlos Vergara), India (Devesh
Kapur), Brazil (Renato Galvão Flôres), South Africa (Mthuli Ncube et al.), sub-Saharan
Africa (David Olusanya Ajakaiye and Afeikhena Jerome) and the Arab countries (Ahmed
Galal and Hoda Selim) analyze what has worked, but also point to important gaps in devel-
opment performance. In all cases, it is heartening to see a discourse on development that is
increasingly informed by evidence-based decision making and driven by local rather than
external contributions and players. International finance and foreign aid still matter, but
development tends to be locally defined, and in an increasing number of countries, it is
overwhelmingly financed through domestic revenues. At root, it is invariably internally
powered, as first the Asian Tigers and later China and India demonstrate. This is increas-
ingly true of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa but appears to be less established in
many parts of Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa that have not yet achieved
notable success. We do not offer a chapter on experience in “industrialized” countries of
North America or Western Europe, but we conjecture that such a chapter would confirm
that development is a path and not an end point, with new, often politically salient, chal-
lenges constantly arising in every society.
The second section in Part 3 deals with the Actors in development, including the State;
civil society, and NGOs; international organizations with operational roles and more con-
sultative fora; development assistance; and private philanthropy (as Carol Adelman and
Yulya Spantchak demonstrate in their chapter, foundations and other private actors are an
increasingly important complement to the official development assistance sector as private
remittances and foreign investment flows far outstrip the latter in size).
In their chapter on The State, Celia and Jacques Kerstenetzky decry the “capture of devel-
opment by the idea of economic transformation” and concomitant with it a new, almost
“mechanical” role for the State which was, however, not apolitical. But states are about more
than counterpoints to markets, and this chapter articulates the broad spectrum view of the
state both in theory and through its application in a number of cases. Likewise, as Kumi
Naidoo and Sylvia Borren argue in their chapter on civil society, many development chal-
lenges cannot be adequately addressed solely within a state-centric framework. This may
suggest the need for enhanced civil society participation in future development decision
making at all levels—including sub-national, national, and international.
Just as national governments are supposed to provide public goods to their citizens, inter-
national organizations were created to provide global public goods (although that term itself
is of more recent vintage and might have drawn blank stares in San Francisco and at Bretton
Woods.) The actual record is a distinctly mixed one, and there is no more contested space in
development than around the nature, role, and performance of the UN organizations and
other international financial institutions. Moreover, the so-called international architecture
has been characterized by overlapping mandates (as in health and agriculture), gaps in glo-
bal governance (as in climate change and post-conflict development) and pure additionality,
with few recorded instances in the post-Second World War era of even minor institutions
“going out of business.” Still, for example, as is implicit in Diana Tussie and Cintia Quiliconi’s
(WTO) and Danny Leipziger’s (IFIs) chapters, the counter-factual of how the international
trade and finance systems would have functioned without their much-maligned main multi-
lateral institutional platforms existing, leaves pause for thought. But averting disaster is
hardly the standard by which international architecture should be judged. A more positive
agenda ahead lies in drawing on:
• the role that Richard Jolly describes as having been played by the UN in changing the
ways in which issues were perceived globally; framing agendas for action; altering the
balance of power between groups over time; and creating operational structures to
take new ideas forward;
• the gap between the UN and the IFIs being closed or at least narrowed;
• as Homi Kharas mentions in his chapter, new technologies enabling the rapid transfor-
mation of official development assistance toward more decentralized and competitive
programs;
• and developing countries, especially the larger ones, playing a more active role in the
governance of the established institutions or actively replacing them with their own
creations (see Gregory Chin and Jorge Heine on Consultative Forums).
Several other chapters were considered for this volume, yet given the limitations on length,
the editors needed to be selective. For example, there is a strong case for considering how
thinking on demography has evolved over time, yet ultimately the editors decided to pass
up on this tantalizing possibility, given myriad mistaken past demographic predictions and
that demographic factors appear frequently in the chapters. Of course demography matters
in development, particularly how demographic transition is addressed by policy. In India,
it was until recently fashionable to intone that a fast-growing population would prove a
decisive boon in the future while China’s slowing population growth would limit that coun-
try’s productive potential. Of course, whether hundreds of millions of young people in due
course produce an economic boom, or constitute a social and economic bomb, greatly
depends on how well countries can educate and meet the aspirations of the expanding
number of young citizens.
Likewise, a case can be made for addressing how nationalism affects development out-
comes. Conversations among the contributors and others noted that nationalism threatens
to overwhelm today’s optimism about continued growth through ever greater economic
integration. After short-term exhilaration, the experience of political populism often leads
to disastrous economic outcomes. At worst, nationalism and “sub-nationalism” lead to con-
flict between assertive nation-states and group identities endemic in regions that lie within
countries and sometimes transcend them. But these dynamics are well documented
elsewhere.
Initially, the editors hoped the contribution of women to development, and the constraints
they face, would be sufficiently prominent throughout the volume. Yet after some debate, it
was decided that a chapter specifically relating to gender was needed. Often the question of
women and development is framed as a choice between mainstreaming and exceptionaliz-
ing: between accepting women are equal citizens and participants, or acknowledging that
women experience development differently than men. In what proves to be an indispensable
chapter, Tinker and Zuckerman show this is a false dichotomy. Gender needs to be present
throughout development thinking and practice, yet there is continued need to advocate for
women’s rights and agency, and to analyze this process on its own merit.
In the interplay of ideas and practice, the interplay of power is seldom far behind. This
volume does not explicitly address power, but it is present in everything to do with develop-
ment, from dynamics within the household, to the tensions between different groups in soci-
ety, and the geopolitics among countries. A chapter on the relationship of power to
development would have been intriguing, but the editors ducked this option. Ultimately, no
volume of this nature can ever do justice to every perspective, and every key issue. In our
failure to meet all expectations in this regard, our consolation is that we tried very hard, not
least through our dialogue with authors on what their chapters might touch on.
Past, Present, and Future
Development can be defined as simply how societies change over time. It is tied to the age-old
questions of “how did we get here and where are we going?” This volume embodies a collec-
tive attempt to search for a historical understanding of past change in a quest to shape the
future. A couple of observations emerge that help to distinguish among the ways of under-
standing development that stem from this common point of departure.
There is a tension between development as a subject of study and as a field of action. The
process of change within society is a subject of scholarship across a multitude of disciplines.
Yet understandings of development are not passive. They inform and inspire the actions of
individuals, organizations, and states in their continuous effort to invent a better world. They
include the mindsets and motivations that shape the real-life decisions of central bankers,
political leaders, family doctors, parents, and beggars. Studying and acknowledging such
practice is arguably as important to grasping the contours and content of development as is a
command of the formal scholarship.
Analysis of development can seek to explain changes in a country’s social, economic, and
political situation, or the lack thereof. Extended visions of development might add impor-
tant factors such as the bio-physical environment and spirituality or other philosophical and
ethical dimensions to the formulation. There has been a continuous quest to learn from past
experience and then to apply that knowledge to present action in order to realize future
potential. In contrast, the absence of development is also a concern, as demonstrated through
attention to the topics of deprivation, dependency, underdevelopment, fragile states, and
corruption. The focus is on the barriers that prevent desired change rather than to arrive at a
universally accepted set of development objectives or strategy to achieve them.
This is not to imply that there are no universally accepted components of success in devel-
opment. As argued in the papers in this volume, there are several, ranging from those repre-
senting basic material needs to personal security and political freedom. But the weight given
to each, the order in which they are prioritized and pursued and the manner in which the
national development project is framed and implemented can (and must) vary by country
and time period.
Development thought has been described as knowledge and understanding of the world in
which we live (Sen 2005). Informed by practice and facts on the ground, it can be defined
simply as the ideas, concepts, and theories that constitute our knowledge of how societies
change. The progression from ideas to concepts and theories forms an intellectual hierarchy
with each level relying on the building blocks of the level below. The abstract ideas of state,
security, and well-being are tied to more refined concepts of social protection, transitional
justice, and global health. In turn these concepts give rise to theories, which can be under-
stood simply as systems of ideas that provide explanation. Thus the concept of economic
growth informs theories on poverty, inequality, and inclusion, while the concept of sustain-
ability informs theories of climate adaptation, food security, and water governance.
If development is about how societies change over time, change itself occurs as a response
to ways of thinking. As noted by Beland and Cox (2011) “what things change and how they
change are all the result of what people choose to do . . . these choices are shaped by the ideas
people hold and debate.” Ideas in turn are the product of “pure” academic enquiry but also
are a product of their times, driven by experience, the dominant prevailing ideology and
other mores—social, political, and cultural—that shape thinking. This volume is interested
in how the real-life experiences of different communities, countries, and organizations have
been inspired by, and have contributed to, thinking on development (Kanbur 2009). Devel-
opment has always been about much more than foreign aid, which constitutes a modest and
shrinking portion of the financial flows into and out of most countries, systematized rela-
tively recently, in the post-war era. More important than the strategies pursued by donors,
development has to do with choices on the ground, how states marshal the resources availa-
ble to them in order to care for their citizens.
Thinking on development refracts through politics, which mediates between public
aspirations and policy. Tremendous advances in access to education, electricity, water,
health, and other services encourage further rises in what citizens expect of development.
Such advances can also foster a sense of complacency if they seem to arrive too easily
through ultimately unsustainable government largesse, or natural resource wealth. By
necessity, political leaders must be pragmatic; they define and pursue the art of the possi-
ble, navigating among established interests and the watchful eye of the opposition parties
(or less formal forums, groupings, and dynamics that express criticism). Where there is
public debate and periodic changes in leadership, opportunities exist for government by
discussion, for people to understand each other’s positions. Ultimately, governments do
what their citizens force them to do.5
These considerations lead us back to the increasing overlap in the challenges faced and
how development is pursued by the North and South. The first decade of the twenty-first
century has shown that the West no longer has a monopoly on defining the terms of the
development debate, if indeed it ever had one. Its countries increasingly struggle to afford
their existing social policies. Add to this the need for a smarter, greener economy and it is
clear that all nations are a work in progress, at grips with matching finite state resources ill-
matched with infinitely expandable goals. The increased interdependencies created by glo-
balization add an additional dimension to the discussion. In a very real sense, we are all
developing.
As more global powers emerge, ideas and the policy recommendations that follow them
are less likely to be hegemonically driven. The only unity in future development thought and
practice might be at the broadest possible level—that there is no such unity and that its appli-
cation must be intelligently pursued by local actors (how local would depend on the issue at
hand). The aim of this book has been to trace the history of thought in various segments of
development that are presently in a state of flux, map the current range of approaches for
each sector, and set out options and possibilities for the future, some of which may open new
avenues for research.
We hope to have demonstrated that as with any study of thought and practice, there will
be fads, deviations, bumps, and other inconsistencies from a logical progression of reason.
But equally, that the development arena is one massive laboratory for the scientific method.
Ideas born of context and necessity are floated, developed, applied, modified, or discarded
only to be succeeded by others. Despite the seeming messiness of this process, the field is in
fact advancing. The lack of a resultant unified theory of development is entirely to be
expected and it is no bad thing.
Thus, three major conclusions emerge from our exploration of co-evolution of development
thought and practice. First, both the generation of ideas of development and their application
in practice can be properly understood only within their particular historical, political, and
institutional contexts. Second, contemporary thinking on development is increasingly gener-
ated in a more diverse set of locations, while policy-makers are also progressively going beyond
the intellectual capitals that loomed large in the past. Third, as a consequence, consensus on
what constitutes “development” and how to best pursue it may well be a thing of the past.
Notes
1. Adam Smith is most often cited for his analogy in the Wealth of Nations of a “hidden hand”
of self-interest guiding economic growth. However, tellingly, his earlier work Theory of
Moral Sentiments opens with the sentence “How selfish soever man be supposed to be,
there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of
others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it
except the pleasure of seeing it.” Thus, even great minds preoccupied with economic
growth and efficiency understood that social solidarity is a core human characteristic,
albeit displayed in many varying ways.
2. For an account of the classical contribution to current development thought see also
Chapter 2 in Jolly et al. (2004).
Although this body of work has not been given the systematic attention that it merits, we
should also acknowledge the contributions through history of non-Western sources,
ranging from Kautillya’s Arthashastra (circa 300 bc) to Dadabhai Naoroji’s contributions
in his The Wants and Means of India (1870) and Poverty of India (1876), Khayr Al-Din
Al-Tunisi’s The Surest Path to Knowledge Concerning the Conditions of Countries (1867) in
the Arab region, and Benito Juarez’s enduring influence on reformists in Latin America
via his rule in Mexico during the middle of the 19th century.
3. Several short, lucid and admirably clear books can be recommended on the progression
of ideas relating to development in Western countries from the 18th century onward,
notably Stedman Jones (2004) which focuses on the French Revolution through too
much of the nineteenth century; and Arndt (1981), which, after a bracing canter through
“pre-history” to 1945, bears down on how notions of growth, social and other objectives
have been pursued by “right” and “left” since then.
4. There is a rich and thoughtful literature on the subject, for example see Bardhan (1989)
and its review by Lipton (1992). More recent treatments include Rist (1997), Kanbur
(2002), Rapley (2007), and Kanbur and Riles (2008).
5. The editors gratefully acknowledge the personal insights of Amartya Sen and Ricardo
Lagos, among others, in drawing our attention to these points.
References
Arndt, H. W. (1981). Economic Development: The History of an Idea. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Bardhan, Pranab (1989). Conversations between Economists and Anthropologists: Methodological
Issues in Measuring Economic Change in Rural India. New Delhi: Oxford U niversity Press.
Bauer, Peter T. (1972). Dissent on Development: Studies and Debates in Development Economics.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Beland, D. and R. H. Cox (2011). Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press.
Bentancor, Modrego y Berdegué (2008). “Crecimiento Agrícola y Pobreza Rural en Chile y sus
Regiones.” Working paper no. 6. Dynamic rural territories program. Santiago, Chile:
RIMISP.
Jolly, Richard, Louis Emmerij, Dharam Ghai, and Frédéric Lapeyre (2004). UN Contributions
to Development Thinking and Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 16–45.
Kanbur, Ravi (2009). “The Co-Evolution of the Washington Consensus and the Economic
Development Discourse,” Macalester International, 24.
Kanbur, Ravi (2002). “Economics, Social Science and Development,” World Development,
30(3): 477–86.
Kanbur, Ravi and Annelise Riles (2008). “And Never the Twain Shall Meet? An Exchange on
the Strengths and Weaknesses of Anthropology and Economics in Analyzing the Com-
mons” in Pranab Bardhan and Isha Ray (eds.), The Contested Commons: Conversations
between Economists and Anthropologists. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
Lewis, W. Arthur (1988). “The Roots of Development Theory,” in Hollis Chenery and
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lands: North-Holland, 27–37.
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Rapley, John (2007). Understanding Development: Theory and Practice in the Third World.
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Rist, G. (1997). The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, London:
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Holland, 9–26.
Stedman Jones, Gareth (2004). An End to Poverty. New York: Columbia University Press.
pa rt 1
C R I T IC A L IS SU E S
In preparation for the detailed sectoral, regional, and country specific discussions which
form the core of this volume, chapters in this opening section adopt broad perspectives on a
range of overarching critical issues in the development discourse. They take up the evolution
of theories of development, including growth theories; long running debates on the balance
between state and market; the focus on poverty, inequality, and gender in the development
discourse; and the perspective of evaluation of development interventions.
Three themes emerge from the nine chapters in this part of the volume. First, is the pro-
gressive expansion of the notion of development, beginning with straightforward increases
in average income, to incorporate broader aspects of well-being such as education and
health, and with a growing focus on the distribution of well-being. These distributional
concerns are reflected in increased attention to poverty and to inequality, including gender
disparities in development. Second, related to the broadening of the content of development,
is a broadening of the disciplinary range of the development discourse through the gradual
introduction of social science perspectives from outside of economics. A third theme,
however, is the ever present tensions in the development discourse—between growth and
distribution, between state and market as the engine of development, between broad
prescriptions and their specific applications, and so on.
The progressive expansion of the notion of development is captured well by Maria Emma
Santos and Georgina Santos (Chapter 8) in the specific context of the emergence of compos-
ite measures of development. They document how the landscape evolved from the predomi-
nance of Gross National Product (GNP) per capita as the dominant measure of development,
to include distributional and poverty measures, as well as a panoply of “basic needs,” includ-
ing health and education indicators, such as infant mortality rates and literacy rates. This
move, which began in the 1960s and 1970s, is now well ensconced in the broad perspective
on development outcomes as reflected in the range of the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs). But even the range of the MDGs has been criticized as being too restrictive, as not
being sufficiently strong on climate change outcomes, and taking into account at all out-
comes on voice and accountability.
18 critical issues
The conventional focus on economic growth is taken up by Shahid Yusuf (Chapter 3), but
the chapter shows well the broadening of perspectives and the tensions that have arisen even
with this narrow focus. Starting with a simple perspective on the rate of investment as the
determinant of economic growth, thinking has evolved to a broader and much richer discus-
sion of a range of factors such as efficiency of resource allocation, technological innovation,
human capital investment, and institutional quality. The policy implications have thus
ranged from market liberalization to achieve better resource allocation, state intervention to
encourage innovation and to invest in education, and legal and other reforms to strengthen
the foundations for credit and investment. These new demands are stretching the discourse
on economic growth.
For many, the central feature of the evolution of the development discourse from its post-
war roots in per capita GNP growth, which occurred with accelerating speed from the 1960s
onwards, was the focus on the distribution of the gains from growth. Two chapters in this
opening part of the volume take up different aspects of this broadening of the development
discourse—poverty and inequality. David Hulme (Chapter 5) gives an account of how the
discourse on poverty has evolved in the post-war period. As the author tellingly observes,
the 1961 goals of the first UN Development Decade (5 percent per annum economic growth)
contrast with the MDGs of 2001, which had as one of their goals the halving of extreme pov-
erty between 1990 and 2015. However, the author also highlights the central tension in the
discourse between those who see the primary cause of poverty as lack of economic growth,
and those who instead see the primary cause as being inequality. Of course, there is always
the simple answer of “both.” But this tension in the discourse goes deeper, and relates to dif-
ferences on how the economy functions, and the role of economic and political power in
determining outcomes.
The issue of inequality is taken up in detail by Frances Stewart and Emma Samman (Chap-
ter 6). A key distinction is that between vertical inequality and horizontal inequality. Vertical
inequality has been conventionally the focus of economic analysis. The Gini coefficient of
income inequality is the standard measure of income difference between persons and is the
workhorse measure of inequality in the analytical and the policy discourse. Inequality is one
of the areas where the development discourse has broadened from its economic base, and
with economics being complemented by linking to deep philosophical investigations into
whether and how such inequality should be addressed. In the narrow economic sphere, there
are vigorous debates on whether such inequality is conducive to economic growth, or
whether it is inimical to investment and growth. However, in recent years the inequality
discourse has been enriched considerably by broadening to include horizontal inequality—
inequality between broadly defined groups. It has also been the entry point for insights and
analysis from other social science disciplines such as sociology and anthropology.
One key aspect of inequality between groups is gender inequality, and a central feature of
the evolution of the development discourse in the post-war years has been the rise to promi-
nence of a gendered perspective on development analysis and development policy. Irene
Tinker and Elaine Zuckerman (Chapter 7) provide an overview of this evolution. They argue
that fifty years ago women were invisible to development theory. However, research by
women scholars began to show the role of women in market production and in the economy
of the household. At the same time, agitation by feminist activists brought to the attention of
policy-makers the adverse impacts of a range of economic and social policies. The perspec-
tives of disciplines like sociology and anthropology were crucial in the questioning and
critical issues 19
modification of economic models. While there is a long way to go and tensions remain, this
is a field in which tensions have been creative and have moved the discourse in the right
direction.
The tensions raised by the ever broadening dimensions of development outcomes is well
reflected in Santos and Santos’s (Chapter 8) discussion of the formation of composite indices
of development. That there is a need for such indices is itself indicative of the tension between
the specificities of the different dimensions, and measuring the overall direction of develop-
ment. The tension between specificity and generality is also found elsewhere in the
development discourse. The specific approach to assessing development outcomes is well
reviewed by Patricia Rogers and Dugan Fraser (Chapter 9) in their chapter on Development
Evaluation. The most recent development in this literature is the great emphasis being placed
by some on Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) as the “gold standard” of evaluation of
development interventions. While having strong “internal validity” because of the control-
led nature of the intervention, for this very reason RCTs have weak “external validity” once
we move beyond the specific intervention to draw more general conclusions. For this, Rog-
ers and Fraser argue, earlier traditions in development evaluation are more appropriate and
better suited.
RCTs represent one end of a spectrum in the development discourse between specificity
on the one hand and generality on the other. Broad issues such as the balance between state
and market have been an important part of the development discourse. Shanta Devarajan
and Ravi Kanbur (Chapter 4) provide an account of the evolution of the state versus market
debates in the post-war era. In the immediate post-war era statist approaches reigned
supreme, partly as the result of the failure of market-oriented approaches in the 1930s, and
the perceived success of the centrally planned economies in the 1940s and 1950s. But the
pendulum swung, partly in reaction to some of the failures of these statist approaches, to
the Washington Consensus of the 1980s and 1990s. But the pendulum swung too far, and
the authors argue that the current perspective is a synthesis between market and state
approaches, with a key role for civil society. Their overall conclusion is that, at least on state
versus market, the development discourse has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
The chapters by John Harriss (Chapter 2) and David Williams (Chapter 1) continue the
theme of tensions in the evolution of development thinking. Both authors are, however, opti-
mistic about the current state of development thinking and point to some resolution in the
tensions. In his chapter, Harriss traces the evolution of development theorizing starting from
the structuralist theories of the 1950s and 1960s. These approaches emphasized the role of the
state, but then came under attack from neo-liberal development economics. However, in the
view of the author, the success of the East Asian economies, in particular, called for theoriz-
ing that takes us beyond the orthodoxies of the 1950s and 1960s to those of the 1980s and
1990s. Rather, a renewal is called for which recognizes the very diverse institutional basis of
development success. At the same time, the author calls for a recognition of the limits of the-
ory itself. The importance of contextual knowledge is increasingly recognized by economists
and political scientists as well as other disciplines. Harriss argues for “liberal institutional
pluralism” with no single discipline or approach having dominance and that there should be
a built-in tendency in the development discourse to resist “one-sided” consensus.
The chapter by Williams, which begins this part of the volume, identifies some of the tensions
highlighted at the start of this introduction: between widely applicable lessons versus specific
knowledge of successes and failures; between development as structural transformation versus
20 critical issues
lack of development as leading to specific problems; and between economics and other disci-
plines. Williams traces the origins of the modern study of development and finds these tenden-
cies present at the start, although becoming sharper in recent times. However, we appear to be at
an interesting conjuncture in the interplay of these various tensions. The growth of development
studies as an area of study which brings together the strengths of a range of disciplines is encour-
aging. Development agencies which in the past espoused narrow approaches to development
have moved to a more empirical and pragmatic stance on policy formulation and implementa-
tion. The author ends by noting that in recent years the tensions have been recognized and that
the future “holds out the possibility of steering a path through them.” This is a conclusion that
would be endorsed by the chapters in this opening section of the volume.
chapter 1
th e st u dy of
dev el opm en t
david williams
Introduction
The study of what we now call “development” goes back at least to the Scottish Enlighten-
ment, emblematically in the works of Adam Smith. As an institutionalized and specialized
academic area of study, however, it emerged in the period after the Second World War under
the auspices of U.S. hegemony and it expanded dramatically as the number of developing
countries rose, especially from the 1960s. In many ways the study of development has been a
tremendous success. It has become a vital component of the work of bilateral and multilat-
eral development agencies, led by the work of the research arm of the World Bank (for some
history see World Bank 2010). A significant number of specialist research centers have been
established to study the processes and problems of development, and it has become a well-
established academic area of study, with professional journals, conferences, and professional
associations. It has also become an increasingly popular area of study for students, with many
degree programs, particularly at the postgraduate level. The study of development has also
dramatically expanded in scope alongside the expansion of the agenda of development
agencies themselves. In the contemporary period it includes a huge variety of things from
trade policy to marine conservation, and from banking regulation to maternal health.
The sheer size and variety of the study of development makes any kind of simple summary
impossible. There are too many issues, too many institutions involved, and too many
approaches for them to be even sketched out. But some kind of overall account and even
assessment of the study of development is possible by viewing it at a somewhat higher level
of abstraction. The approach taken here is that the study of development has been character-
ized by three tensions right from its origins in the post-war period. First, there is a tension
between generating widely applicable knowledge and policy prescriptions, and generating
knowledge of particular development successes and failures. Second, there is a tension
between generating knowledge of “development” as a process of structural transformation
(that in some way replicates the transition to “modernity” with all that implies—industrializa-
tion, urbanization, and so on) and generating knowledge of the particular problems and issues
22 david williams
associated with a lack of development (access to clean water, malnutrition, maternal mortal-
ity, and so on). Third, there is a tension between economics as the primary discipline within
which development was studied, and the contribution of other academic disciplines (politics,
area studies, anthropology). In many ways these tensions have been very productive, but they
have also been very hard to overcome, and the challenges they pose remain.
Origins of the Study of Development
The full title of Adam Smith’s most famous book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations, provides the founding questions of the study of what we now call develop-
ment (Smith tended to use the term “improvement”): what did being “developed” look like,
what made it different from its opposite, and how did countries achieve it? The intellectual
ambitions of the Scottish Enlightenment shaped the grand narratives of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, whether in the form of Marx’s account of the development of capi-
talism or the sociology of Weber and others who concerned themselves with the origins and
characteristics of “modernity.” But the study of “development” only emerged as an institu-
tionalized and professionalized area of study in the period after the Second World War, and
it is this period that forms the focus of this chapter. The study of development in this period
is defined by attempts to understand the process of “development” in the less-developed
world, and, importantly, to provide knowledge that could generate policy prescriptions to be
used by developing country governments and development agencies.
This locates the origins of the modern study of development in a particular international
and institutional context. Internationally it emerges alongside the institutionalization of the
“project of international development” itself in international politics—the establishment of
bilateral and multilateral development agencies and the provision of foreign aid (Williams
2011). In turn this is significantly the result of the emergence of the U.S. as the hegemonic
state in international politics. “Development” played an important role in the hegemonic
order established by the U.S. in three related ways (Gilman 2003: ch. 3). First, U.S. policy-
makers recognized the need to integrate developing countries into the multilateral political
and economic order they were creating. Of the forty-four countries present at the Bretton
Woods Conference in 1944, nineteen were from Latin America, and they generally enthusi-
astically supported the agreements reached at the conference (Helleiner 2006). Second, the
broad aims of U.S. hegemony were advanced through the development of developing coun-
tries. As Truman put it in his famous “Four Point” speech, “all countries, including our own,
will greatly benefit from a constructive program for the better use of the world’s human and
natural resources.”1 Economic development expanded economic opportunities for the U.S.
and reduced the likelihood of war. As Cordell Hull put it, “if we could get a free flow of
trade . . . so that one country would not be deadly jealous of another and the living standards
of all countries might rise thereby eliminating the economic dissatisfaction that breeds war,
we might have a reasonable chance of lasting peace” (Hull 1948: 81). Third, and increasingly,
development played in important role in Cold War competition. The promise of “develop-
ment” was the U.S. alternative to communism and the practice of aid giving was shaped by
the logics of Cold War competition. In terms of the study of development this meant, as
the study of development 23
Lucian Pye noted, that “the increasing academic interest in the problems of new states . . . has
been inspired more by world events than by any indigenous advance in . . . theory” (Pye
1966: 31). In other words, the study of development was driven as much by the need on the
part of the U.S. to manage its relations with developing states as by purely academic interest.
And as the number of developing states grew rapidly with the process of decolonization, so
this need only increased, and over time the study of development expanded in other coun-
tries, such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands that also needed to find ways to manage
their relations with their ex-colonies.
The emergence of the modern study of development was also shaped by other related
factors. It can trace part of its lineage to the explosion of public policy “expertise” more gen-
erally and developments within the discipline of economics more specifically. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “experts” were playing an increasingly important
role in public policy debates, and the New Deal, for example, was imbued with the view that
social and economic problems were to be solved through the application of expert, “scien-
tific” knowledge, and that attitude carried over into the study of development (Maier 1978).
The emergence of economics as a separate and specialized academic discipline was also
associated with this rise of public policy “expertise.”
As noted above, in many ways the study of development has been remarkably successful.
But it has also been beset by at least three tensions that, while they have been productive in
many ways, have also created a series of intellectual and practical problems.
General versus Specific Knowledge
The first is a tension between generating knowledge and policy prescriptions that are
generally applicable to a large class of developing countries and generating knowledge
of the success and failures of particular countries at particular times. There is something
of a paradox here. The Keynesian revolution in economic theory provided an important
precondition for the emergence of a specific economics dedicated to the study of “devel-
opment” by showing that different kinds of economic circumstances might require
different kinds of economic policies. This break with what Albert Hirschman (1981) has
called the “mono economics” claim was vital in carving out an intellectual space dedi-
cated to the study specifically of development. The division of countries into those for
which classical economics was appropriate and those for which some other kind of eco-
nomic theory and polices were appropriate can also be found as early as List and later in
thinkers such as Rosenstain-Rodan and Gershenkron (List 1841; Rosenstein-Rodan
1943; Gershenkron 1962; see also Harriss, this volume). The legacy of this generated two
issues that were played out in this tension between the general and the specific. The first
was a questions of where to draw the line: it might be that developing countries had
different circumstances such that they required a different kind of economics, but did
they have enough in common such that meaningful generalizations could be drawn
about them, or were they all so different from one another that such generalizations
were likely to be very difficult? Second, there were always students of development who
rejected the claim that developing countries were relevantly different such that they
24 david williams
required a d ifferent kind of economics (Johnson 1964; Bauer 1976, 1984; for example).
While this view was marginal during the 1950s and 1960s, it emerged very forcefully
in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The first generation of development economists accepted that developing countries were
different and then tried to generalize about them, focusing particularly on the problems and
possibilities of industrialization. As Hollis Chenery put it, “successful development in virtu-
ally all countries has been characterized by an increase in the share of manufacturing in total
output” (Chenery 1979: 70). Classic studies of this kind include those by W. Arthur Lewis
and Albert Hirschman, and in a slightly different vein by Raul Prebisch. Lewis argued that
within subsistence (or “traditional”) agriculture there was a high level of under-employment
of resources and low productivity, and thus very little surplus was produced. Given this, there
were potentially large supplies of labor in the agricultural sector that could move to the
industrial (capitalist) sector without any decrease in agricultural production (there were
“unlimited supplies of labor” for the capitalist sector). Wages in the industrial sector would
remain low (depressed by the unlimited supply of labor) and thus profits would accrue
quickly within the capitalist sector, providing a surplus that could be taxed and invested. In
this dualist model, the industrial sector would be the dynamic element, sucking labor out of
the stagnant subsistence agricultural sector (Lewis 1954). Lewis was clear that this model was
designed to “help understand the contemporary problems of large areas of the earth” (Lewis
1954: 140, italics added). While Hirshman’s account was different, stressing the role of “for-
ward and backward linkages” in stimulating industrialization through a cumulative process,
it was also clearly a general theory (Hirschman 1958).
By the late 1970s the kinds of policy prescriptions that followed from these accounts came
under attack as a result of the growing economic crisis affecting many developing countries,
the more general global economic slow-down and the resurgence of neoclassical economics
(for more detail see Toye 1987 and Williams 2011). In its place emerged another kind of gen-
eralization derived from what was seen as the universal applicability of neoclassical eco-
nomic theory. Deepak Lal, one of the most famous advocates of this position, argued that
“there is by now a vast body of empirical evidence from different cultures and climates which
shows that uneducated peasants act economically as producers and consumers” (Lal 1983:
105). In other words, developing economies were not different in their fundamentals from
developed economies: they were poorer of course, but the same kind of economic theory
and the same kinds of economic policies applied to them as to all economies.
This position characterized what became known as the “Washington Consensus” and has
continued to shape the study of development in important ways (Williamson 1989). The
assumption of economic rationality has been extended and elaborated in both the New
Political Economy and New Institutional Economics approach to development. The former
extended the rational actor model to politicians, bureaucrats, and social groups more gener-
ally, and in doing so drew on theoretical accounts of the process of decision making and the
role of “interest groups” in the politics of western states (Krueger 1974; Bates 1981; Olson
1982). The latter stressed the role that institutions, broadly understood, might play in shaping
the decisions of rational economic actors, and showed that the institutional structures could
play an important role in determining a country’s developmental path, especially by chang-
ing the transaction costs facing economic agents (North 1990; more generally Williamson
1979). Both of these approaches were melded into the concern with good governance that
emerged through the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s (for more detail, see Williams 2008).
Here again, the approach taken was that the consequences of good and bad governance could
be generalized, and hence that policy prescriptions could be designed that were applicable to
a large number of countries.
Another very important strand in the study of development that took as its aim producing
generally applicable knowledge has been economic growth theory (see Yusuf, this volume).
The general impetus behind this has been to develop and then test theoretical models that
can explain differential rates of economic growth. Within this broad analytical tradition
there have been a number of different models. The Harrod–Domar model was an important
influence on early development economists, and to some extent the World Bank too (Harrod
1948; Domar 1957). Derived from Keynesian economics, it purported to show the links
between changes in investment and changes in national income. In turn this model was
amended and critiqued by other growth models, including the Solow (neoclassical) Growth
Model and more recently by Endogenous Growth Theory. Also associated with this was a
significant amount of statistical work on the correlates of economic growth. Here again, the
idea was to determine the contribution of certain factors to economic growth by using data
sets that covered a large number of countries (for a discussion see Kenny and Williams 2001).
The underlying assumption of both growth theory and this kind of statistical work was that
economies work in fundamentally the same way and thus that it was possible to discover
general causes of growth that applied to a large number of states.
These forms of generalization have always been challenged by studies of particular devel-
opment successes and failures that have located the reasons for success and failure in the
specific conditions and circumstances of particular countries at particular times. The most
obvious examples here are the East Asian success stories. A lot of effort has gone into captur-
ing the experience of these states under more general theories. So, for example, the World
Bank in its East Asian Miracle report, argued that while governments in these countries did
intervene selectively in the economy, the bulk of the success of these states can be put down
to sound macroeconomic policy, a high level of private investment, and export growth
(World Bank 1993). Somewhat paradoxically, of course, some years later it was argued that
some of those countries experienced a financial crisis because they did not have adequate
regulation or appropriate relations between the government and the private sector (“crony
capitalism”) (Johnson 1998). But there have also been studies of these countries that chal-
lenge this kind of generalization. So, for example, studies of the developmental success of
South Korea have identified a long list of contributory factors: Japanese colonialism, land
reform, high levels of literacy, nationalism, geography, Confucian culture, U.S. support and
protection, regional investment and trade flows, the suppression of social divisions, the par-
ticular circumstances of the global economy, and the emergence at a particular time under a
particular regime of a “developmental state” (for a selection, see Belassa 1988; Amsden 1994;
Kholi 1994; Leftwich 1995; Wade 1996). And, of course, all developing countries have their
own set of specific features, derived from their own specific histories, including the form of
colonialism, the make-up of society (social forces), forms of economic specialization, level
of human capacity, and forms of government, to name just a few.
The issue here is not that some countries do not “fit” a general theory (no general theory
and no statistical conclusions can “work” for all countries and their proponents do not argue
that they can); it is that the development success (or failure) of individual states might be
down to particular, country-specific, contingent factors. And the more we know about indi-
vidual countries and their particular contingent factors, the less plausible the general theories
26 david williams
become. The final twist here is that the more we know about particular cases, the less likely it
seems that general “lessons” can be drawn for other states. The utility of the “developmental
state” cannot be doubted, but it certainly can be doubted whether any such state might plausi-
bly be created in countries with very different histories and characteristics.
So we are left with a tension. On one hand, the condition of being “underdeveloped” seems
like a general one (lots of countries have experienced this) with certain general features
(poverty, dominance of agriculture, and so on), thus it seems to require general theories and
accounts to explain it and to provide policy prescriptions for overcoming it. On the other
hand, the more we know about individual countries, the more we find significant particularity
and contingency that makes general theories seem inappropriate.
“Development” versus the Problems

of Underdevelopment
A second tension revolves around what the study of development should be generating
knowledge of and for. Within discussions of “development,” a situation of “underdevelop-
ment” or a “lack of development” is usually understood to involve two related components.
The first is “development” in some large sense—that process of economic and social trans-
formation to something like Western modernity—with all that entails, or at the very least
sustained levels of economic growth. The second is a series of particular problems that are
associated with a lack of this, from malnutrition, lack of access to clean water, and high levels
of maternal death, to poor infrastructure and a “shallow” financial system. It is this that gen-
erates the enormous diversity in the study of development, but the links between knowing
something about the large-scale process of development (or even the causes of sustained
economic growth) is not necessarily the same as knowing how to deal with child malnutri-
tion, for example. And of course the reverse is also the case.
As noted above, a significant part of the study of development has been concerned with
large-scale transformation, whether in the form of industrialization or long-run sustained
economic growth. The most ambitious of these attempts was “modernization theory.” For
modernization theorists, development was a transition to something like “modernity” as
evidenced in the industrialized West and was accompanied not just by economic changes
but by a host of other related shifts in the character and organization of politics, the spread of
“rationalization,” the growth in technology, and the diffusion of certain norms, habits, and
attitudes (for discussions, see Gilman 2003; Higgott 1983). At its most simplistic the “transi-
tion” from “backward” to “modern” was presented in an almost mechanical and certainly
linear way as a series of “stages” (Rostow 1959, 1971). For Gabriel Almond the stress was on
political modernization, and he regarded “modern” political systems as those that exhibited
a high degree of functional specialization, a secular political culture, a skepticism towards
overly ideological politics (and a concomitant stress on the importance of bargaining and
compromise), and a commitment to pluralism (Almond and Powell 1965; Almond and Verba
1965). Lucian Pye (1965) stressed the commitment to equality, the growth of the capacity of
the political system, and the growth of specialization and differentiation within politics.
David Apter (1965) took a broader focus and argued that “modernization” could be defined
as the growth of complexity in human affairs, the growth of an attitude of enquiry and a
questioning about the sources of political authority, and a growth of organizational com-
plexity and functional differentiation. For Dankwart Rustow (1968: 40), “modernization”
involved the growth of centralized authority, the formation of a national identity, the growth
of political equality and participation and the “widening control over nature through closer
cooperation among men.”
This kind of stress on the large-scale transformations that accompanied the transition to
modernity, and which in these views define the process of development itself, stands in con-
trast to a focus on the particular problems associated with a lack of development. It has often
been argued that large-scale changes might be a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for
the amelioration of some of these other problems. Classically in the 1970s there was an
increasing recognition that economic growth had not done enough to alleviate poverty, par-
ticularly rural poverty. As the then President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara said in
1973, “the data suggest that the decade of rapid growth has been accompanied by greater
maldistribution of income in many developing countries, and that the problem is most
severe in the countryside” (McNamara 1973). This led to a concern with, among other things,
“basic human needs” as a way of thinking about the problems and possibilities of develop-
ment (Streeton 1981). In more recent years more stress has been laid on the alleviation of the
problems associated with a lack of development, inspired in large part by the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) (Fukado-Parr 2004). Indeed, given the evident difficulties
experienced by many states in achieving sustained development, especially in sub-Saharan
Africa, tackling the problems suffered by individuals as a result of a lack of development has
taken on a new urgency.
At one level it seems quite reasonable that the study of development would include
attempts to understand the process of development writ large, and attempts to understand
how to alleviate the problems experienced by people in less-developed states. There is a ten-
sion, however, because the causal connections between the two are not always clear. As noted
above, it is possible to have growth without significantly alleviating some of these problems
(and growth always throws up new problems); it is possible that growth might in the end be
necessary to alleviate some of these problems, but we also know that the problems them-
selves can be tackled with some success in the absence of sustained development. Many
human development indicators—such as life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal
death rates—have improved over the years in many countries, even those that have experi-
enced sustained economic crisis (Kenny 2011). Finally, it is not clear (at least not in any
straightforward way) how tackling these specific problems will lead to “development” in the
larger sense, raising the possibility that a country could experience higher life expectancy,
greater access to clear water, a reduction in infectious diseases, and so on, and still not expe-
rience sustained development.
Another way of approaching this is to recognize that within the study of development
there just are different ways of understanding the term “development” and different priori-
ties attached to elements of it. Studying the process of modernization or the causes of sus-
tained economic growth is just not the same as studying how best to eradicate polio or ensure
access to clean water. The contemporary situation reflects this. Achievement of the MDGs
remains central to the work of many development agencies and students of development,
and even if they are unlikely to be fully realized, the view that one of the principal tasks of the
provision of development assistance is to reduce the suffering of people in poor countries is
28 david williams
unlikely to go away. At the same time, as a number of countries, particularly China,

have experienced high growth rates, industrialization, and urbanization, so there has been
a renewed emphasis on growth strategies and what is in some respects a return to older
concerns with transformation (World Bank 2005; Lin 2009).
Disciplinarity versus Inter-

(Multi-)disciplinarity
A third tension relates precisely to the very evident disciplinary diversity found within the
study of development. The study of development has sometimes been captured under the
label of “development studies.” But this is not a discipline in the classic sense of that word. It is
an object of study, but it is not a discipline because it does not have at its core a series of theo-
ries, methods, or even a clear intellectual history through which students are initiated into the
discipline. As such it lacks some of the conditions for the integrated accumulation of knowl-
edge (Harriss 2002: 487). Instead, there are lots of different disciplines that contribute: eco-
nomics, politics, sociology, anthropology, agricultural engineering, marine conservation,
public health, and so on. This diversity is in many ways entirely appropriate as the problems
experienced by development counties are diverse and multi-faceted. This has led some to sug-
gest that “development studies” is inter-disciplinary, although it is probably better labeled as
“multi-disciplinary” or “cross-disciplinary.” This is because there are significant barriers to
what Kanbur has called the “deep integration” of the different disciplines (Kanbur 2002).
There certainly are ways in which the different disciplines have interacted fruitfully, but the
diversity of ways in which development can be studied creates its own set of problems.
One issue here is about the particular contribution of various disciplines to the study of
development and whether there is some kind of hierarchy among them. In one sense eco-
nomics has clearly been a dominant discipline within the study of development, and changes
within that discipline have had a profound impact on the study of development (development
economics, neo-liberalism, new institutional economics). In addition, it has often been
assumed that economics should be the dominant discipline as the problem of development is
significantly an economic one—low growth rates, low levels of investment and productivity,
and high rates of poverty. This view certainly informed much of early development econom-
ics, for example. In this view, other disciplines might have something to contribute, but often
in a subsidiary way—providing some insight into the difficulties of economic policy change,
for example, or providing technical solutions to particular developmental problems (how best
to design irrigation systems, for example). It is also fair to say that the major development
agencies have been dominated by economists and economic thinking (Kanbur 2002).
While there is a certain plausibility to the dominance of the discipline of economics, there
have always been approaches to development that privileged other disciplines. For many
modernization theorists, the sphere of politics was the most important (Almond and Verba
1965). Samuel Huntington, for example, stressed the importance of political order, created
through strong political institutions, as the key to the process of development (Huntington
1968). In the period after the Cold War, with the emergence of good governance and democ-
racy promotion as important parts of the agenda of many aid donors, political variables were
seen as not just important, but in some respects as primary. The logic of this is clear: it is only
through “good” politics that appropriate economic policies and strategies can be developed
and implemented. In other words, while the discipline of economics might be able to i dentify
the right thing to do, it is only students of politics who can know whether and how this
knowledge can be implemented.
Some attempts have been made to marry economics and politics. One of the most impor-
tant was the extensive literature that emerged about the political economy of adjustment (see
Krueger et al. 1991/2, and Krueger 1993 for some examples). The problem here was how to
understand the successes and failures of attempts to liberalize the economy and reduce the
role of the state in developing countries. While some important conclusions no doubt
emerged from this effort, it was in fact largely an attempt to use the tools of economic analy-
sis in the study of political processes, rather than any genuine dialogue between economists
and students of the politics of developing countries (Harriss 2002). This is one example of
what has been criticized as the intellectually domineering character of economics more
generally (Milonakis and Fine 2009).
Beyond the discipline of politics, other disciplines have also been seen as crucial to under-
standing the problems and processes of development. Both sociology and anthropology
have been seen as making a vital contribution. This can be seen at both a macro and a micro
level. At the macro level it has often been argued that forms of politics in developing coun-
tries derive from the kinds of social forces or groups that make up society. This has been
argued to be important in both successful countries such as South Korea, where the state was
able to achieve a certain kind of autonomy from social groups, and in more troublesome
cases in Africa where the state is “captured” by its society (Hyden 1983; White 1988). In both
these cases the ability of politics to deliver developmentally successful economic policies is
shaped by the society over which it governs. At the more micro level it has been argued that
anthropology for example, can tell us a lot about the local circumstances within which devel-
opment projects and programs are implemented and, following from this, how these might
be made more effective. The increased importance attached to community participation and
ownership and to the role of civil society organizations reflects in important ways this more
anthropological approach to development and the necessity of gaining more detailed knowl-
edge of the local and thr particular. At their most ambitious these kinds of approaches have
produced a kind of anthropology of economic policies and practices, stressing the ways in
which certain kinds of economic practices—market exchange for example—get adapted and
transformed within existing institutions and practices (Harrison 2010). In turn, however,
this kind of knowledge forces us to question the utility of certain economic theories, for
example, as the expected outcomes derived from them are often not forthcoming because of
the ways local actors adapt or subvert them. Privatization of state-owned enterprises might
be a very sensible way to reduce government deficits and increase productivity, but it also
provides an opportunity for local actors to adapt this process to their own political or eco-
nomic ends in ways that may subvert these aims (Tangri 1999).
This points to the complexity of the issues involved in development, and it might simply
result in a call for the various disciplines involved to learn from one another. But there are
serious barriers to this. In the first place each discipline has its own journals, professional
associations, academic departments, conferences, and so on. Students of development, from
whatever discipline, face pressures to work within these to gain promotion or peer respect.
Related to this, but probably more serious, is that different disciplines value different kinds of
30 david williams
study: they have different epistemological orientations. The production of general models
and theories is highly valued in economics, but much less so in anthropology, for example.
Detailed local knowledge (and language acquisition) is the cornerstone of anthropology
(and area studies), but not something most economists bother themselves with. Associated
with this has sometimes been a mutual antagonism between disciplines based on what they
perceive as the evident methodological inadequacies of other disciplines. Economics, for
example—with its emphasis on parsimony, logical deduction, and hypothesis testing, often
involving extensive quantitative analysis—has sometimes presented itself as being more
“rigorous” than other social sciences disciplines. According to this view, those disciplines
that are more qualitative, or do not generate testable hypotheses can be seen as less rigorous
or “softer.” On the other hand, of course, anthropologists often counter by criticizing econom-
ics for being too abstract and formal and uninterested in the detailed understanding of the
rules, norms and self-understanding that, anthropologists think actually shape human
choices (see Harriss 2002 for a discussion). Anthropologists also sometimes counter by
applying the tools of anthropology to economic study of development, exposing, so they
think, the contextual character and unacknowledged assumptions that underpin it (see
Escobar 1995; Li 2007; and for a discussion, Kanbur and Riles 2004). Related to this, different
disciplines simply see different things when they look at the world—they have different onto-
logical orientations. It is all very well to say that economics and anthropology ought to learn
from each other, but it is not clear how this can begin when the starting point of each disci-
pline comes close to denying the utility of the other: economists see a world of economies
many of which are thought to operate in the same kind of way and which can be perceived as
discrete “things” that can be analyzed in isolation from their broader context; while anthro-
pologists tend to deny that there are any such generally applicable economic laws, or at least
if there are, they operate within a dense web of other social and political interactions.
There is a danger here of a kind of mutual rejection, a disciplinary policing that demarcates
what can count as proper knowledge of developing countries. But there seems no very good
reason why different disciplines might not be able to contribute in different ways to different
kinds of questions. Anthropologists might not have much to say about exchange rates, but
equally, economists might not be best placed to talk about gender dynamics within house-
holds. The real difficulty comes when some more substantial combination of the insights from
different disciplines is attempted. As we have suggested, there are some real difficulties with
this. On the other hand it may be that one way to do this is during the process of policy formu-
lation: ensuring that different voices can be introduced into the conversation and some kind
of rounded account of the problems and possibilities of different policy options developed
(Kanbur 2002). This puts the onus on development agencies to create the conditions for these
kinds of exchanges, but at least in principle there is no reason to think this cannot be done.
Conclusion
It is important to note that in spite of these tensions, and possibly because of them, we have
learned a huge amount from the study of development. Our knowledge would certainly be
depleted if we only had general theories of development or if development was only studied
within economics or politics. And in many respects the study of development has generated
significant knowledge that has proved vital to the process of development itself. One cannot
help feeling, however, that these tensions are going to be hard to overcome, and it is going to
be hard to reach any kind of middle ground within any of the three that have been identified
here. There are too many disciplines and methodologies involved and too many different
kinds of problems to study. And the great diversity evident in the study of development illus-
trates the tremendous complexity and multi-faceted character of the process itself and the
wide scope of the agenda of development agencies.
There are, however, some signs that at least some of these tensions have been recognized,
and perhaps some tentative signs that students of development are trying to think again
about how the study of development should proceed in the future. At the most general level
this involves trying to balance general accounts of the necessary conditions for development
with a recognition of the specific circumstances facing different countries at different times.
The World Bank, for example, has recently argued that more attention needs to be paid to
“the need for differentiated policy recommendations for different countries at different
stages of development. Differences between countries . . . lead to different implications
regarding the appropriate institutions and policy frameworks” (World Bank 2010: 10).
“Greater emphasis on development strategy must be balanced against the now well-under-
stood fact that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to the challenge of promoting growth and
overcoming poverty” (World Bank 2010: 11). Associated with this, the Bank argues that a
“more pragmatic and empirical approach to policy making needs to be encouraged” (World
Bank 2010: 9). This points in the direction of recognizing more explicitly the limits of general
models or theories of development, or at least of trying to understand where and when diver-
gences from the policy implications of general models might be appropriate. It also points
clearly to the need for more country specific knowledge—a recognition of the fact that coun-
tries are different in their physical and human capital endowments and in the structures of
their economies.
In the course of discussing the future direction of its research on development, the Bank
has also made some important points about the economic study of development. It argues
that “many research economists do not start with the key knowledge gaps facing develop-
ment practitioners but rather search for questions they can answer with the field’s currently
favored tools. Considerable emphasis is given to internal validity, but external validity is not
addressed with the same rigor” (World Bank 2010: 11). In other words, economists approach
development through the theories and methodologies that dominate the discipline, and the
value of this work is defined in these terms rather than in terms of what it might contribute to
the business of development policy making. This points in the direction of recognizing that
the sometimes rather abstract work done in the discipline of economics needs to be more
firmly anchored in an appreciation of the complexity of the process of development.
For an institution like the World Bank, which has long been criticized for having a “one
size fits all” approach to development policy derived from general economic theories, to
make these claims is an important sign of how some of the tensions within the study of devel-
opment have been recognized, and it is also a sign of an attempt to make more explicit the
need to steer some kind of middle path through them. A number of others have made simi-
lar points. Justin Lin, until recently chief economist at the World Bank, has argued that the
role of the government in the process of development might be significant, and importantly,
that it will vary from country to country (see Lin 2009). Dani Rodrik has argued that while
32 david williams
certain basic conditions are necessary for development, “the appropriate growth policies are
almost always context specific” (Rodrik 2007: 4).
It is too early to say how widely adopted these general prescriptions for the study of
development will be, and they do not resolve in any simple way the tensions this chapter has
identified. But they do suggest a potentially important way forward. They also suggest that
there some kind of “learning process” is at work within the broad field of the study of devel-
opment. It might be slow and faltering, but as the example of the World Bank shows, the
commitment to development can drive a process of reflection that holds out the possibility
that the study of development will tell us more and more about what governments and
development agencies ought to do to encourage development.
Note
1. The full text of Truman’s speech is readily available; the most authoritative source is
probably (<http://www.trumanlibrary.org/calendar/viewpapers.php?pid=1030>).
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chapter 2
dev el opm en t th eor ie s

john harriss
Introduction: What Development

Theories are About
The word “development” in the English language connotes such ideas as “unfolding,”
“growth,” “the fuller working out of the details of anything,” and bringing out the potential
that is latent in something (as in the case of an image that is latent within the chemicals
coating a piece of old-fashioned film that must be “developed” in order to be revealed). All
these ideas are relevant to the concept of development that has informed so much public
policy over the last half-century and more, both in the “core” of industrialized countries
and in the “periphery” of the erstwhile colonies that came to be described as the “less devel-
oped countries” (LDCs) of the “Third World.”1 This concept, too, embraces ideas of “change”
but also of “progress”—an idea which, in European thought, goes back to the philosophers
of the Enlightenment, who found in it a rational basis for ethical judgment. “Right action”
may be understood as action that is conducive to the “progress” of people and society. The
idea of “development,” then, in relation to societies, implies a process of change to what is,
in some sense, a more “advanced” state. Development theories, therefore, are about under-
standing how this process takes place.
Of course the idea of a process of change to a more advanced (or “progressed”) state
raises the question of what we understand by “advance” or “progress.” The simplest way
of understanding these ideas, and the one that has informed so much of what has been
done in the interests of “international development” since about 1945, is in terms of
“increasing wealth” or economic growth, which is measured in terms of changes in
gross domestic product (GDP). Over the past half century, growth of GDP has become
ever more of an obsession of nation-states. A whole new branch of economics—
development economics—was set up to explain how economic growth comes about,2
and there is a great deal of both theoretical modeling and empirical analysis upon the
subject (see Kenny and Williams 2001). Some economists, however, argue that there is
no need for a distinct body of theory about “ developing economies,” since the general
principles of economics apply universally—and one of them, Deepak Lal, wrote an
36 john harriss
influential pamphlet entitled The Poverty of Development E conomics (1983), to which

we will have occasion to refer again.
The notion that “development” is synonymous with “economic growth” has, however,
been subjected to severe criticism. By far the most significant is that of Amartya Sen, who
has argued that “commodities”—the production of which is a major part of economic
growth—are only of value to us in terms of what they allow us actually to do. Sen advocates
that we should think about development rather in terms of people’s capability to achieve
those things that they have reason to value: “The focus here is on the freedom that a person
actually has to do this or be that—things that he or she may value doing or being” (Sen 2009:
231, emphasis added). It is inherent in this approach that freedoms, both the “negative”
freedoms—being free from unjustified coercion, and freedoms of speech and expression, of
association, and of movement—and the “positive” freedoms, which have to do with what
makes it possible for people actually to enjoy their freedom (including the material
[commodity] means for this), are of fundamental importance. According to this view,
therefore, development “can be seen as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people
enjoy” (Sen 1999: 3).
Going back to the idea of development in the sense of “to realize the potential that is
latent in something,” we may understand international development as meaning the
creation of conditions that make it possible for people to realize their potential as
human beings, or to live full human lives that they value. This is very close to what the
first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, said early in 1947. Refer-
ring to the tasks that lay ahead for the new country, Nehru spoke of the need “to give
every Indian the fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity.”3 And
while individuals may differ widely concerning the capabilities they value, it seems
reasonable to suppose that most of us value life itself, good health, and at least basic
education (and these surely are essential if “every person is to be given the fullest
opportunity to develop herself according to her capacity”4). Though these values are of
course not entirely independent of wealth (and of economic growth), n either are they
reducible to it. They are sought through in measures of “human development,” consid-
ered further below.
Whether conceived of in terms of economic growth or of capabilities, however, the idea of
development in human societies postulates a process whereby “traditional,” primarily agrar-
ian societies shift from premodern institutions (such as feudalism, patrimonialism, and
patriarchy), in which freedoms are constrained in various ways, to “modern” ones that are
intended to supply those freedoms. There remains much debate about just what constitutes
the optimal set of institutions, and this is at the heart of development theorizing. Develop-
ment theories, which are about a complex process of becoming amongst human beings, are
inherently normative and inescapably teleological.
In the remainder of this chapter I will explain the development of development
theories historically, emphasizing what I see—following Edwin Brett (2009)—as the big
cleavage between a range of “structuralist” theories, which in one way or another stress
the role of the state, and liberal and recently neo-liberal theories that give priority to the
role of the market. Latterly there are indications of the resolution of the long-standing
tensions between these great meta-theories, in the form of pluralist institutional theories
that pay more attention to context, and that at least promise to advance the objective of
“development as freedom.”
development theories 37
The roots of development theories
The message of the preceding section of this chapter is that development is not just a matter
of economic growth: the way the economy is organized and the productivity of economic
activity are also unquestionably of central importance in any consideration of development.
Development theories have to be concerned with economic development, even if not with
economic development alone.
Theorizing about development did not begin in the middle of the twentieth century, and
we may look for the roots of contemporary development theories in the work of classical
economists such as Adam Smith, in that of Marx and Engels, or in that of Friedrich List, who,
writing in the 1840s, was critical of Smith and advocated state intervention to ensure
national prosperity.5 Another earlier theory that influenced some more recent development
thinking was that of the economic nationalists in India (notably Dadabhai Naoroji and
R. C. Dutt) who argued that India was being systematically impoverished—or actively
“underdeveloped”—by colonial rule. Their ideas influenced the later formulation of
“dependency theory,” largely through the more direct influence of Paul Baran’s The Politi-
cal Economy of Growth (1957), in which they are referred to. Born in present-day Ukraine,
Baran was one of a number of remarkable scholars—born in Russia or in Eastern Europe
or as German Jews—who emigrated to the West in the 1930s and 1940s, and whose work
constitutes much of the foundation of modern development theory. They include, as well
as the Marxist Baran, such scholars as Alexander Gerschenkron (born in Odessa), Albert
Hirschman (born in Berlin), Paul Rosenstein-Rodan (born in Krakow), Ragnar Nurkse
(born in Estonia), Hans Singer (a German Jew), and Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek
(both born in Vienna, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire). We may speculate that for some
of them, at least, it was their observation and experience of economic backwardness, espe-
cially when compared with what they came to know in the West, that prompted their
interest in economic development, or their experience of the mid-twentieth century world
crisis that led to their desire to contribute to the post-war construction of a more secure
world. Other important figures are from countries that experienced colonial rule, such as
Arthur Lewis (later Sir Arthur Lewis), an economist from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, and
Raul Prebisch, an Argentine economist who headed the United Nations’ Economic Com-
mission for Latin America (ECLA) in the 1950s.
The scholars whose names I have listed, and others, all made significant contributions to
thinking about the great problems of economic and social reconstruction in the aftermath of
the Great Depression and the ensuing world war. This took place in the context of the emerg-
ing contest between the two great superpowers of the end of the Second World War, the
United States and the Soviet Union. The two powers offered their competing visions of
progress: what the historian Arne Westad has called “the empire of liberty” of the United
States, which championed liberal values, and “the empire of justice” of the Soviet Union,
which stood for equality (Westad 2005). Both were led by their ideologies to seek to bring
about the end of colonialism, and then to foster the remaking of the former colonies of the
European powers in their own images. This led, in turn, to the many disasters of Cold War
interventions in Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America, in which international develop-
ment policies often played a part (as Robert Bates has crisply explained, 2001).
38 john harriss
The many, somewhat different arguments about development of the mid-twentieth

century do not map at all perfectly onto the political differences of the Cold War. It was only
after 1978–9, after the development efforts of the period from the late 1940s to the 1970s had
reached an impasse, that economic liberalism reasserted itself (Harvey 2005). Now, with the
advantage of hindsight, we can discern an era in which “structuralist” theories, emphasizing
the role of the state and of planning, were pre-eminent, followed by the ascendancy of
liberalism—coinciding in part with the demise of the Soviet Union.
The sharply opposing views of two men who were both active in Vienna in the 1920s before
finding refuge in Britain, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi, represent the fundamental
cleavage in development theory. Both men published great works towards the end of the
Second World War, in 1944. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom argues that all forms of
collectivism—whether those of the Soviet Union or of Nazi Germany—lead inevitably to
tyranny, because of the faulty logic of central planning. The book has come to be regarded by
some as a foundational statement of the case for economic liberalism, though this accolade
should rather be awarded to Hayek’s later work, The Constitution of Liberty (1960). Polanyi’s
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times, on the other
hand, is a powerful critique of economic liberalism. Polanyi argues that the idea of the self-
regulating market—“the market” of mainstream economic theory—is utopian, because it
requires that labor, land, and money all be treated as commodities, which they are not.
“Labor” is nothing other than the activity that is essential to our humanity; “land” refers to
the natural environment; and “money” is a medium of exchange. The first attempts (in nine-
teenth-century Britain) to implement the principles of economic liberalism and to make a
reality of the self-regulating market provoked a counter-movement as some people resisted
the commodification of their labor, others resisted the commodification of nature and strug-
gled for the protection of agriculture, and in the end states were led to intervene to protect
businesses against the effects of treating money as a commodity, as it was under the gold
standard. The Great Transformation shows how the tensions and contradictions driven by
these moves and counter-moves over the self-regulating market economy (what Polanyi calls
“the double movement”) finally saw the rise of fascism and communism in Europe, and of
Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States, and how they account for the world crisis of the
early to mid-twentieth century.
The year 1944 also saw the holding of the Bretton Woods conference at which the Western
nations, headed by the United States, that were by that time gradually winning the world war
sought to establish the principles according to which the international economy would be
managed after the war. Like Polanyi, the principal architects, Harry Dexter White of the U.S.
and Maynard Keynes of Britain, were in no doubt that governments would have to assume
much more direct responsibility for domestic social security and for economic stability than
had been the case before (contra the strict principles of economic liberalism). There were,
says John Ruggie, “differences amongst the industrialized countries concerning the forms
and depth of state intervention . . . not the legitimacy of the objective” (1982: 394). Bretton
Woods saw the foundation of what Ruggie calls “embedded liberalism”—and the beginning
of an era of unprecedented economic growth internationally.
Polanyi, writing before the Bretton Woods agreements, argued (partly anticipating Sen)
that “the passing of market-economy [the would-be self-regulating market] can become the
beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom. Juridical and actual freedom can be made
wider and more general than ever before; regulation and control can achieve freedom not
only for the few but for all.” He feared, however, that “the path [is] blocked by a moral
obstacle. Planning and control are being attacked as denial of freedom [as they were by
Hayek]. Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essentials of freedom. No
society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free” (Polanyi 1944/2001:
265). But the Bretton Woods agreements proved his pessimism unfounded, and for many
years the arguments of economic liberalism only lurked “in the wings of public policy” (Har-
vey 2005: 19). They were fostered, however, by the members of the Mont Pelerin Society who
gathered around Hayek after 1947, and neo-liberal thinking became increasingly influential
academically, especially at the University of Chicago. Hayek won recognition as the recipient
of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974; and neo-liberalism finally emerged from the wings
of public policy at the end of the 1970s, as we shall discuss (and, see Harvey 2005).
State First: Structuralist

Theories Dominant
In the 1950s and 1960s, however, the centrality of the role of the state and the need for the
regulation of markets was hardly questioned. It was generally understood that economic
development must involve industrialization, following the path beaten first by Great Britain
and then by other Western European countries, Russia, and the United States. Alexander
Gerschenkron’s reflections on this process in his essay “Economic Backwardness in Histori-
cal Perspective” (1962, original essay written 1951), in which he analyzed especially the expe-
riences of France, Germany, and Russia in the wake of Britain, suggested, however, that the
development of a backward economy might differ considerably from that of the now
“advanced” economies. There could even be advantages for late industrializers because they
might be able to leapfrog into more technologically advanced sectors, by learning from and
imitating the pioneers. Gerschenkron, like other pioneers of development economics,
emphasized the centrality of capital as the necessary means of overcoming the technological
gap confronting the “backward” nations, and argued that state intervention compensated for
inadequate supplies of capital, skilled labor, or entrepreneurship in the later developers.
Indeed, in later elaborations of his thinking Gerschenkron argued that “the greater the
degree of backwardness, the more intervention is required in the market economy to chan-
nel capital and entrepreneurial leadership to nascent industries” (Fishlow 2003)—and he
thought, too, that this would probably involve higher levels of coercion.
In this period, therefore, as Colin Leys has argued, “the goal of development was growth:
the agent of development was the state and the means of development were [national eco-
nomic planning in the context of the macroeconomic policy instruments established at
Bretton Woods]. These were the taken-for-granted presumptions of ‘development theory’ as
it evolved from the 1950s onwards” (Leys 1996: 7). The growth models adopted by develop-
ment economists assumed a central role for capital accumulation. This was the case, for
example, in the model of “economic development with unlimited supplies of labor” devel-
oped by Arthur Lewis (1954), which also assumed that the opportunity cost of the shift of
labor out of agriculture would be zero; in Ragnar Nurkse’s balanced growth theory; in the
Harrod–Domar model, which posited a linear relationship between investment levels and
40 john harriss
growth rates; and in Walt Rostow’s theory of the stages of economic growth (1960), which
was, for a time, probably the most influential single theory of development. In the context of
the Cold War, it was significant that Rostow’s book was sub-titled “an anti-communist
manifesto”: his was emphatically a right-wing version of structuralist theory.
It was generally thought, too, in this period, as it was in the Economic Commission for
Latin America, headed by Raul Prebisch, that development had to be based on what came to
be known as “import substitution industrialization” (ISI). Towards the end of the 1940s,
Prebisch and Hans Singer advanced similar theories that were critical of the economic ortho-
doxy of the time. What later became known as the Prebisch–Singer thesis holds that there is
a tendency over the long-run for the terms of trade for primary commodities to fall. In other
words, left to themselves, market forces would lead to ever greater inequity between the
manufacturing economies of what Prebisch began to call the “core,” and the primary com-
modity producers of the “periphery” within the international economy. The further implica-
tion was that developing countries would be advised to diversify their economies by
developing their domestic markets, and through industrialization, by requiring that their
states take on an activist role. Their infant industries had to be guided through licensing,
promoted through subsidies and other industrial policy measures, and protected from
important competition through tariff barriers and quantitative restrictions (quotas). Such
import substitution policies were generally pursued in Latin America and in India, in par-
ticular, though the emphasis in the latter case—particularly in the period of the Second Five
Year Plan (1956–61), also known as the “Mahalanobis Plan,” from the name of the great statis-
tician who was its principal architect—was somewhat different because of a focus on the
development of heavy industry and the manufacture of machinery rather than on the pro-
duction of consumer goods. However, in India and in other countries that pursued ISI, agri-
cultural development was generally neglected. It was widely thought that in Asia and Latin
America agricultural productivity would be enhanced by redistributive land reform, that is,
by taking land away from relatively inefficient landlords and giving it to more efficient small
family farmers (Lipton 2009). But such reforms proved to be politically infeasible except in
China, after the revolution there, and in South Korea and Taiwan, with support from the
United States. Elsewhere, however, as in Guatemala in 1954, the United States opposed
governments that promised land reform because they seemed to be left-leaning and too
sympathetic to communism.
The arguments of the development economists came to be linked with social and political
theories about the process of “modernization,” which the Comparative Politics Committee of
the American Social Sciences Research Council adopted as a strategic term—reflecting oppo-
sition to communism—in the context of the Cold War. In essence, modernization theory held
(as did Rostow in his model of the stages of economic growth) that societies must pass through
similar stages to reach an end state not unlike the mid-twentieth century United States. This
was a society of “high mass consumption” (in Rostow’s terminology) that was politically
liberal and economically efficient because it relied on principles of meritocracy, that is, on
allowing people to achieve according to their abilities rather than compelling them to con-
form to “traditional” roles ascribed to them by virtue of their position in their family, tribe, or
other kinship group. These ideas were perhaps as much ideological as theoretical. Insofar as
modernization theory postulated a causal mechanism that would drive the movement of soci-
eties through the various stages, it was the idea that it would come about through changing
values—for example, from “ascription” to “achievement,” or values of entrepreneurship.
Criticism from the Left and the Faltering

of Structuralism
Modernization theory came to be subjected to withering criticism, especially from scholars

who, influenced in part by the work of Prebisch’s Economic Commission for Latin America,
argued that the relationships in the international economy between the centre and the
periphery led to the systematic underdevelopment of the latter. The book that most strongly
influenced studies of development in the late 1960s, and established “dependency theory,”
was Andre Gunder Frank’s Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967), an
excoriating critique of modernization theory. The whole flimsy edifice rested, Frank argued,
on ignorance of history and of how capitalism works on a world scale. The assumption that
the past and present of the so-called “underdeveloped countries” are like earlier stages in the
history of the now-developed countries is fundamentally wrong, and the latter never were
underdeveloped, even if they might once have been undeveloped. “Contemporary underde-
velopment is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic relations
between the underdeveloped (dependent) satellite and the now developed metropolitan
countries” (Frank 1967). And in the context of his understanding of international capitalism,
Frank appeared pessimistic about the prospects for the poor countries. It seemed that the
only hope for them would be to disengage from the international system and pursue a social-
ist path under conditions of autarky.
Even as Frank’s ideas were sweeping through universities elsewhere in the world,6
however, they were being subjected to criticism within Latin America, as Gabriel Palma
explained in what remains the best review of dependency theories (1978). Palma saw
Frank’s conception of capitalism as unhistorical, and his theory mechanical. In the same
year that Frank’s Capitalism and Underdevelopment was published, there appeared a book
by the Brazilian sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the Chilean historian Enzo
Faletto, Dependencia y Dearrollo en America Latina (1967), which was finally published
in English (in 1979) as Dependency and Development in Latin America. Cardoso and Fal-
etto, who drew more directly than Frank on the work of Prebisch’s ECLA, argued that
there is “no single or inevitable specific form of dependency” and that there is “space for
agency within the global political economy.” Their emphasis “was on the variability of the
forms of integration into the world market and on the existing alternatives for the coun-
tries’ economic growth even when in situations of dependency” (quotations from Car-
doso 2009: 298). Countries in the global periphery were not necessarily condemned to
underdevelopment, as Cardoso helped to demonstrate, years later, as President of Brazil
from 1995 to 2003.7
As this criticism of the orthodox development theory of the 1950s and 1960s gathered
momentum, the experience of the developing countries, too, began to reveal the limita-
tions of that orthodoxy. The many countries that had tried to plan industrial development
behind protective trade barriers had begun to experience great difficulties in continuing
to finance their investments (as was the case in India), and the industries that had been set
up were generally run very inefficiently. Raul Prebisch, by this time, criticized Latin Amer-
ican countries for excessive protectionism. At the same time it was recognized—notably in
the report on international development commissioned in 1968–9 by the World Bank
42 john harriss
and chaired by former Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson—that successful

economic growth had done very little to reduce poverty.
Consequently, in the 1970s the focus of development theory shifted to the problem of
tackling poverty. The approach taken was that of Redistribution with Growth, as in the title of
a study undertaken by economists from the World Bank and the Institute of Development
Studies (Chenery et al. 1974). This work argued the importance of targeting development
efforts on both smallholder agriculture and activities in what had by now, thanks to the work
of an anthropologist, Keith Hart, come to be referred to as the “informal sector” (Hart 1973):
the many small businesses and enterprises that fall outside most of the regulations of the
state and in which, in most “developing” countries, the great majority of the labor force is
employed (or, very often, self-employed). Development policies began to be focused as they
had not been before on agriculture and rural development (the subject of an influential sec-
tor paper published by the World Bank in 1975), and some economists began advocating an
“agriculture and food first strategy for economic development” (for a review, see Mellor and
Johnston 1984). By this time the adoption from the later 1960s of modern varieties of the
major cereals8—wheat, rice, and maize—in what came to be called the “green revolution”
(because it seemed to have the potential to head off the possibility of “red revolution”) had
begun to have a positive impact on the productivity of agriculture, at least in Asia and Latin
America, if not in Africa, and Mellor and Johnston sought to show how the forward and
backward economic linkages from this more productive agriculture had the potential to
drive growth through the economy as a whole.
However, by the time these various ideas for reforming the structuralist orthodoxy had
begun to be discussed, a major economic policy shift was taking place, influenced by neo-
liberal thought. The great shift in development thinking can be seen, in retrospect,
reflected in particular in the World Bank’s report on Accelerated Development in Sub-
Saharan Africa (commonly known as the Berg Report from the name of its author; World
Bank 1981) which attributed the failures of development in Africa to “inappropriate state
dominated policies” that had led governments to take on more than they could handle,
distorted economic incentives, and created all manner of possibilities for unproductive
rent-seeking. The pendulum in development theory now swung emphatically away from
the ideas that emphasized the necessity for state intervention to those that argued for min-
imizing the role of the state so as to allow market forces to do their work of driving greater
economic efficiency.
Even as the pendulum swung, however, it was being more widely noted that some “devel-
oping countries” in East Asia, the two states of South Korea and Taiwan, and the city states of
Hong Kong and Singapore had been growing very fast indeed. They came to be known as the
“Asian Tigers” or “East Asian NICs” (newly industrializing countries), and by 1986 their suc-
cess had led Nigel Harris, in a book with this title, to announce The End of the Third World.
Scholars began to turn their attention to explaining the developmental success of South
Korea and of Taiwan in particular, and an answer was found in the idea of “the developmen-
tal state,” articulated by Gordon White (1988). White and others drew their inspiration from
the work of Chalmers Johnson (1982) on the role of the government, particularly through the
Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), in the Japanese “economic miracle” of
the post-war period—an argument that was altogether opposed to the new neo-liberal
orthodoxy. We will return to the critique of neo-liberalism that is inherent in the story of the
NICs and of the “developmental state.”
Market First: Neo-liberalism Ascendant
“Events, dear boy,” was how British prime minister Harold Macmillan once described the
progress of history. In the history of international development, two events of great impor-
tance took place in the 1970s: first, the decision by the Organization of Petroleum Countries
(OPEC) to raise oil prices after the Arab–Israeli war of 1973; second, the so-called “Volcker
shock” of October 1979.
The first greatly increased the revenues of the petroleum-producing countries, and the
recycling of their dollars made for a period of easy credit for developing countries. But
then Paul Volcker, as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, brought about a major change
in U.S. monetary policy by raising interest rates in an effort to tackle the long-running
problems of the U.S. economy (Harvey 2005: 1). This decision threatened to push some
countries into default, and a major debt crisis was announced in Mexico’s default on its
debts in 1982–4. In this context, in order to secure assistance with rescheduling their debts,
countries were required by the international finance institutions to implement major
reforms of economic policy, involving cuts in public expenditure, liberalization, and pri-
vatization. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank embarked on a new
approach to economic development with the introduction of programs for economic sta-
bilization and structural adjustment, intended to reduce the role of the state and ensure
the implementation of liberal policy.
But ideas matter, too, and this was the moment of Lal’s The Poverty of Development Eco-
nomics (1983), which was greeted by The Times, then still London’s most respected newspa-
per, as marking an intellectual counter-revolution (Toye 1985). Lal asserted the universality
of the rational economic behavior of the standard economics textbook against the idea of the
need for some special branch of economics for developing country contexts, and launched
an attack on what he labeled as the “dirigiste dogma” that originated with Keynes. “Dirigism”
holds, Lal argued, that the price mechanism must be replaced by extensive government con-
trols; that such controls are essential if poverty is to be reduced; and that arguments for free
trade are not valid for developing countries. All this, he held, is demonstrably wrong. The
best advice economists can possibly give to the governments of developing countries is “get
the prices right,” and this was indeed the advice the World Bank gave in the 1980s.
It is a matter of later history that the World Bank’s own research demonstrated, by the end
of the 1980s, that structural adjustment programs were having mainly negative effects. Much
of sub-Saharan Africa experienced a “lost decade” as a result (Mkandawire 2004). So the
“new orthodoxy” of development theory was coming undone even as it was influentially
described as “the Washington Consensus,” on the desirability of fiscal discipline, competitive
exchange rates, trade liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and the restriction of public
expenditure to a narrowly defined set of public goods (Williamson 1990). It was, as Joseph
Stiglitz has said, “the modern day version of liberal orthodoxy”—and in his view, as a some-
time Chief Economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, it
has had similar negative outcomes (Stiglitz 2002).
It was at this time, in the early 1990s, that an important debate took place over the “devel-
opmental states” of East Asia. The policies pursued by South Korea had been compared very
favorably by Deepak Lal to those of India. South Korea, Lal argued, was characterized by free
44 john harriss
trade and the absence of government controls. A different story emerged from Alice
Amsden’s more detailed work (1989) on the Korean experience, and from that of Robert
Wade (1990) on industrial policy in Taiwan. These writers showed that the governments of
these East Asian states had intervened extensively, often to “get the prices wrong,” so as to
promote particular industries. They had made selective use of trade restrictions, as well as
encouraging export competiveness. But both governments imposed strict performance
standards on the industries and the companies that they aided. Their developmental success
appeared to be based politically on regimes that were distinctly authoritarian (rather as Ger-
schenkron had anticipated), with competent economic ministries (comparable with Japan’s
MITI) that were embedded in networks with private industry, but insulated by politicians
from selective lobbying by the private sector. They were regimes that combined carrots and
sticks with regard to labor, ensuring labor discipline but also that labor benefited from eco-
nomic growth. They were what Atul Kohli calls “cohesive capitalist states” (Kohli 2004; and
see also Evans 1995).9 Yet the notion that the success of the East Asian states was to be
explained essentially as being the result of “export-oriented industrialization” in the context
of liberal economic policies died hard. The World Bank set up a study in the 1990s that was
supposed to demonstrate this case. In the end, however, partly because of objections from
the Government of Japan (which provided funding for the study but did not recognize its
own experience in this story), the book that resulted was much more in line with what
Amsden and Wade had argued (on this story, see Wade 1996). In other words, the story of the
East Asian NICs provides support neither for the development orthodoxy of the 1950s nor
for the new orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus. But it does show that there may be a
very good case for state intervention in the context of late development.
The role of the state was also recognized in the work carried out under the aegis of the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in calculating an index of “human develop-
ment,” starting in 1990 with the first of what is now a long series of Human Development
Reports. The index, which takes account of life expectancy and basic education as well as
income per head, is a crude but robust reflection of Sen’s capabilities approach, and it was
devised explicitly as a counter to GDP as a measure of development (Sen 2006). It was also
part of a counter-move to the Washington Consensus by a group of economists who sought,
at least, to give adjustment “a human face” (Cornia et al. 1989). Their influence may have
been reflected in the shift away from adjustment programs by the World Bank to a renewed
focus on poverty reduction and then to the introduction of the instrument of poverty reduc-
tion strategy papers (PRSPs) by the end of the 1990s.
From Crisis in Development Theory

to a New Synthesis?
Edwin Brett (2009) argues that by the 1990s development theory was in crisis, given the
practical failures of both structuralism and of liberalism, and the fact that many developing
countries, particularly in Africa, were experiencing violence and civil war (for reasons which
are considered by Bates 2001, 2008). Both the evidence of state failure in some parts of the
world and the experience of the failure of structural adjustment brought renewed attention
to the role of the state. The World Bank published a significant paper on good government in
1992, highlighting the importance of transparency and accountability, as well as sound mac-
ro-economic and public sector management. This was followed by an issue of the annual
World Development Report devoted to “The State in a Changing World” (World Bank 1997).
These publications reflected the recognition that the state could be “rolled back”—as the
neo-liberals had wished—only so far. As the Bank said, “Development without an effective
state is impossible . . . an effective state—not a minimal one” (World Bank 1997: 18), though it
went on to say that the role of the state should be facilitative rather than directive, and that it
should complement markets rather than trying to replace them. This is what came to be
called the “post-Washington Consensus” on the need for a balance between the market and
the state, recognizing that there are market failures as well as state failures, and assigning a
significant role in governance to civil society. It is a consensus that is predicated on the view
of the indispensability of liberal capitalism (Fine et al. 2003). It has also become rather mud-
dled up with the policy idea that it is possible for outsiders to “build democracy” in other
parts of the world, which has generally had poor and sometimes disastrous results
(Fukuyama 2004); and in its advocacy of the roles in civil society of voluntary association
and social capital, it has been found by some scholars to have the effect of depoliticizing
development by suggesting that there are technocratic solutions to what are fundamentally
political problems (Harriss 2001). For Brett, however, it points the way towards what he sees
as a renewal of development theory that draws on the recognition of the need for institu-
tional diversity, in a new paradigm: “liberal institutional pluralism” (2009: 7).
Brett’s conception of a new synthesis that has renewed development theory rests on the
turn in economics and across the social sciences to the analysis of institutions (Harriss et al.
1995; Hall and Taylor 1996), which embraces both macro- and micro-levels of analysis. “Insti-
tutions,” in this extensive literature, are understood as the rules, norms, and conventions that
must exist for social life to be possible, and which both constrain and provide incentives for
human action. The “macro” level of research includes that on the institutional conditions for
successful economic growth by such scholars as Douglass North (1990; and North et al.
2009), and Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, who find that “economic
institutions encouraging economic growth emerge when political institutions allocate power
to groups with interests in broad-based property rights enforcement, when they create effec-
tive constraints on power-holders, and when there are relatively few rents to be captured by
power-holders” (2005, abstract). One of the problems that has been pointed to in some of
this work is that different institutions may have similar outcomes while the same institutions
give rise to different outcomes in different contexts (Rodrik 2008, especially ch. 6). There are
some serious questions, therefore, about how far the recent mantra in development thinking
that “institutions matter” is helpful in development policy making.
The “micro” level of institutional analysis is about what makes organizations function
effectively, and this may in the end be more fruitful (as indeed Brett’s analysis suggests). One
valuable empirical study is by Judith Tendler (1997), who draws on recent research on indus-
trial work and performance in analyses of how the quality of government and the delivery of
public services were improved in one of Brazil’s more backward states (Ceara, in the north-
east). The case provides some material for the general argument advanced by Lant Pritchett
and Michael Woolcock (2004) for thinking through the possible institutional solutions to
the delivery of different sorts of public services, depending on the number and intensity of
the transactions they involve and the extent to which their provision calls upon the judgment
46 john harriss
and discretion of the providers. This kind of analysis is a long way, perhaps, from grand theo-
ries about development, but such “middle-range” theory may be much more useful in helping
to improve the way both states and markets work towards improving human well-being.
Conclusion
There is much, of course, that I have been unable to cover in this short review. In particular, I
have not discussed various “alternative” theories of development, nor the work of the influ-
ential thinker Robert Chambers (on whose work, see Cornwall and Scoones 2011), or the
vein of “anti-” or “post-development” thinking, perhaps most strongly reflected in the work
of Arturo Escobar (1995), which holds that an alternative is to be found in support for social
movements that reject the concept of development altogether as a Western project. It is not
at all clear, however, that the members of such movements do reject the concept—if it con-
notes the expansion of human freedoms, as Sen suggests it should.
Finally, the trajectory of development theories as I have analyzed it here seems to
reach one important conclusion: namely, that we must recognize the limits of theory.
The economists Kenny and Williams, for example, conclude their review of economic
growth theory and of the empirical analysis of growth (drawing on quantitative mode-
ling based on large-n cross-country studies) by arguing that there is really no substitute
for the specific historical analysis of different cases that takes account of circular and
cumulative causation (2001). Such analysis reveals that the same factors have different
implications in different contexts. The importance of contextual knowledge is also
emphasized by Fukuyama (2004). We should heed the words of an eminent economic
historian, the late Phyllis Deane, speaking before the Royal Economic Society in 1982
(and cited by Toye 1985: 4):
The lesson that we should draw from the history of economic thought [and, I would add,
of development theories –J.H.] is that economists [and others, of course –J.H.] should resist the
pressure to embrace a one-sided or restrictive consensus. There is no one kind of economic
truth which holds the key to fruitful analysis of all economic problems, no pure economic
theory that is immune to changes in social values or current policy problems.
Notes
1. The idea of the “Third World” held connotations of the French tiers état, or “third estate,”
referring to the mass of the people, and implied the idea of “the people” on a world scale—
those who had been oppressed by colonial rule.
2. There are many texts on development economics. A classic is Gerald M. Meier’s Leading
Issues in Development Economics (2000).
3. Jawaharlal Nehru, in a speech before the Constituent Assembly of India, January 22, 1947.
4. The obverse of development in this sense in globalizing India is powerfully reflected in
Katherine Boo’s poignant study of a Mumbai slum in Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life,
Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012).
5. List (1841).
6. Dependency theory was extended, too, from the analysis of Latin American experience
to that of other parts of the world. See, for example, Rodney (1972).
7. The work of Cardoso and Faletto is considered in the context of globalization in a special
issue of Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 44, No. 4 (2009).
8. The introduction of the modern or high-yielding varieties provided an answer to what
the economist Theodore Schultz had argued for in an influential book, Transforming
Traditional Agriculture (1964).
9. The best explanation for the rise of the development states of East Asia, and for the limits
of their followers in Southeast Asia, is provided by Doner, Mitchie, and Slater (2005).
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chapter 3
fift y y e a rs of grow th
econom ic s
shahid yusuf
Introduction
As the global economy recovers from the financial crisis of 2007–8 and struggles with the
smoldering eurozone crisis, two questions are uppermost for policy-makers: (i) whether and
how industrialized and industrializing countries might be able to restore the robust per-
formance of the 1993–2007 period (minus the bubbles), and (ii) the contribution that growth
economics could make to the policy agenda. Most developing and middle-income countries
continue to envisage growth rates averaging 6–8 percent. They are convinced that the
extraordinary performance of a handful of countries during the past quarter century can be
replicated by the many in the decades ahead.
The purpose of this chapter is to review how thinking on growth has evolved since the
1950s through the interplay of international politics, country-level experience, and theoriz-
ing almost exclusively conducted in Western countries. It reflects on how this body of think-
ing has diffused through a variety of channels and influenced policies in virtually all
developing countries. Finally, the chapter considers whether economic research based on
the experience of a few countries, over a limited period of time, can provide relevant and
effective policy guidance.
The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part examines the experience of the early
post-war decades and the worldwide spread of a “growth ideology” that marked a shift from
the prewar beliefs and experiences of the majority of nations. The second part discusses
economic theory and empirical findings underlying the new growth ideology from the
1960s onwards. The final part reflects on the policy prescriptions to be garnered from
growth economics.
fifty years of growth economics 51
Industrialization and Growth:

The New Normal
Starting in the 1950s, with post-war recovery and decolonization in full swing, industrializa-
tion moved into high gear. Many factors contributed to this surge: for example, cheap energy,
the transport revolution, and changing terms of trade. Perhaps most significant was the germi-
nation of a growth ideology among national elites, who had become increasingly aware of
enhanced economic opportunities and were eager to secure material prosperity comparable to
what they saw in the West. In the grip of this new fervor, developing countries began planning
for rapid growth. They took their cues from the leading Western economies and also drew
lessons from compressed development achieved by the former Soviet Union, Japan, and China.
The nascent growth ideology of national elites was powerfully reinforced by the ideologies
of the great powers that defined the political economy of international development through-
out the more than three-decade-long Cold War. Michael Latham (2003: 9) observes that
“though American visions of the true and only heaven differed from Soviet visions of the
‘end of history,’ both models stressed the ability of enlightened elites to accelerate an inevita-
ble, universal movement through historical stages and posited that technological diffusion
would engender a new consciousness and a new society.” And both sides used virtually
identical means to achieve desired geopolitical and economic outcomes: foreign aid, power
projection and arm twisting, technical assistance, training programs, arming of militaries,
soft power, and, not infrequently, proxy wars to prop up favored regimes (some of which
persisted for years, making life nastier and more brutish for millions). Econometrically
sharpened hindsight shows that aid in pursuit of geopolitical objectives contributed little to
investment, growth, or poverty reduction.1 However, it cemented alliances with ruling elites,
trained the focus on modernization and development, and through technology transfers
hard as well as soft, kept growth at the center of policy attention and the preferred yardstick
for measuring economic progress.
Post-war thinking was influenced by the efficacy of state economic control during the
Second World War and the embracing of Keynesian policies following the Great Depression
to help smooth business cycle fluctuations, or at least reduce their amplitude. The belief was
that policy-makers had the tools to sustain economic activity at high levels or, in other words,
to minimize the threat of prolonged downturns that eroded past gains. As a result of these
policies and beliefs, the role of the state, already greatly enlarged during the course of the
long war, was steadily augmented, and the state acquired the responsibility to strive for and
maintain rapid growth. The emergence of a large and initially economically successful Com-
munist Bloc (and active economic proselytizing by the countries of the Bloc) contributed to
a widespread belief in the augmented role of the state. Fiscal policy, including direct public-
sector intervention, was seen as a way to promote private initiative and industrialization.
State-guided capitalism2 received a strong endorsement from the performance of the Repub-
lic of Korea; Taiwan, China; Singapore; Malaysia; and Thailand, and it provided other devel-
oping economies with both inspiration and a proven model, at least through the early 1990s.3
The performance of the Chinese economy, once market-oriented reforms were introduced
in the early 1980s, further underscored the advantages of market institutions tempered by
state control and an outward orientation to harness the power of globalization.
52 shahid yusuf
The growth expectations that took root during the halcyon 1960s were reinforced by wide-
spread growth accelerations during that decade, and—in spite of what followed—they
proved to be remarkably durable. Europe endured a long spell of stagnation during the 1970s,
and growth was slow also in the United States through the early 1980s. Latin America, after
an initial surge, lost ground starting in the 1980s and suffered from “lost decades.” China was
hobbled first by the havoc caused by the Great Leap in 1958–60, and then, after a short spell
of recovery in the first half of the 1960s, by more than ten years of disruption resulting from
the Cultural Revolution that Mao choreographed in 1966. By the mid-1970s, Africa had
entered a long economic twilight that persisted for over two decades, and India remained on
the treadmill of the “Hindu growth rate” induced by stifling state regulations, until the onset
of reforms in the early 1990s.4 Only the “tiger economies” in East Asia defied gravity and
exploited international market opportunities to grow their economies at high speed with the
help of investment in industry and buoyant exports.
The gloom lifted in the 1990s, arguably because of four main developments: (i) accelerat-
ing globalization assisted by the lowering of trade barriers; (ii) the stripping away of capital
controls and declining transport costs; (iii) the tonic effects of general-purpose technologies
(GPTs), such as semiconductors and the Internet, that released a flood of innovations; and
(iv) the spread of regulatory reforms to weed out market distortions that stifled competi-
tion,5 caused inefficiency, and promoted rent seeking. The neo-liberal argument for enlarg-
ing the role of markets and reining in the activities of the state 6 received a boost first from the
collapse of the former Soviet Union and the discrediting of the socialist planned approach to
development, and then, more convincingly, from the surge in global economic activity.
Could the growth ideology have become so all-pervasive absent the parallel rise of growth
economics? This is difficult to answer because growth and development have become inextri-
cably linked, and growth is widely accepted as the touchstone of performance. However, it is
fair to say that the rise and teaching of neoclassical growth economics in leading Western uni-
versities from the mid-1950s did much to build the analytic and empirical scaffolding to sup-
port the idea that a steady-state growth path was theoretically feasible and was being
demonstrated in practice by a number of countries. After a slow start, growth modeling
exploded in the 1960s as economists became more accustomed to using mathematics and
began elaborating the “science of growth” in conscious imitation of the methodologies of the
hard sciences.7 As national income data accumulated, especially on the United States, theo-
retical models were put to the test and the growth industry was born, providing much-needed
intellectual underpinnings for the growth ideology and a few conceptual tools for policy-
makers wanting to translate political promises into tangible economic results. The second and
third parts of this chapter discuss how economics accounts for growth, but before getting to
that it is worth listing a number of other reasons for the popularity of the growth ideology and
why it has survived and will continue to survive setbacks and disappointments.
Growth as a Belief System

The growth “ideology” has permeated the discourse on development and proven compelling
for good and bad performers alike for several reasons. First, the growth rate for the global
economy between 1950 and 1999 averaged 4 percent per year, well in excess of pre-1850 levels.
Moreover, there is the demonstration effect generated by highly successful performers,
however small they might be—and Singapore; Hong Kong SAR, China; Taiwan, China;
and the Republic of Korea were small economies in the 1970s and 1980s. These resource-
poor countries on the periphery showed that steady progress from the lowest rung to near
the top of the income ladder was possible in as little as four decades through technological
catching-up and the patient building of human and physical capital largely from internal
resources. Growth was achieved not through the virtuosity of policy but through macr-
oeconomic and political stability, successful efforts at resource mobilization, learning and
absorbing technologies from abroad, and the exploiting of market opportunities opened
up by globalization. The early and later “tigers” served as a beacon of hope for the majority
of economies that have struggled with low or negative growth rates. Had the tigers not
materialized, it is doubtful that the growth ideology could have acquired such a loyal fol-
lowing. No amount of modeling can substitute for 7 percent rates of growth sustained for
three decades.
Second, perhaps one can claim with little exaggeration (witness the concerns expressed in
the United States circa 2012) that in democracies and autocracies alike, political legitimacy of
governments has come to hinge on the delivery of good economic results over the medium
term. If incomes stagnate and become more unequal or employment is hard to come by,
democracies will show governments the door. The Arab Spring uprisings have demonstrated
that populations can eventually become restive even in tightly policed autocracies. Rightly
or wrongly, the notion that governments must deliver growth has acquired worldwide cur-
rency—and politicians have had a large hand in embedding it more firmly through the
promises they make as they seek office.
Third, a number of developments over the past fifty years have rendered growth more
urgent and made it harder to think of a world without growth. Population increase is a criti-
cal concern for a number of countries and, even as it slows, they will still have to convert a
youth bulge into a youth dividend. A related factor is the promises many governments—and
the international community—have made (and will continue to make) to reduce if not elim-
inate poverty and, more guardedly, inequality. The evidence suggests that countries (such as
China) that have successfully tackled poverty have relied upon high rates of growth, which
generate jobs, finance social safety nets, and enable governments to provide the poor with
services that will equip them with capabilities.8 Hence out of necessity, all parties must hold
tight to the growth ideology and hope for the best.
Increasing resource and energy scarcities, climate change, and environmental degrada-
tion demand an urgent greening of growth. Although debate continues on the advantages of
early and precautionary action, the weight of evidence points increasingly to net growth
benefits of green policies and green technologies.9 The evidence also suggests that two to
three degrees of warming is becoming unavoidable, a development that will entail costly
mitigating efforts in the future, in particular to increase the resilience of cities. In anticipa-
tion of a harsher environment, countries need to build their resource bases, because wealth-
ier countries are far better able to weather shocks and repair the damage.10 These three
developments increase the pressure on governments to assign priority to growth.
Fourth—and there are other factors I will not list—industrialized and industrializing
countries are aging and faced with a shrinkage of the workforce a decade or two into the
future. A number of economies are weighed down with large debts and even larger contin-
gent liabilities, which will be difficult to play down or accommodate (absent a drastic
downscaling of the safety net) without fairly robust growth. Therefore, for fiscal and
54 shahid yusuf
elfare reasons at the very least, a resumption of “adequate” growth rates in these coun-
w
tries is vital if they are to maintain or improve their current living standards.
The above sketches the emergence and sixty-year dominance of the growth ideology. But
while average growth rates are handily above the levels reached prior to the mid-nineteenth
century for many countries, sustaining growth rates of 7 percent or more has proven difficult,
and this confronts growth economics with a severe challenge: to convincingly explain the rel-
atively few instances of high growth rates sustained for a decade or more, and with the benefit
of such analyses, to arrive at policy recommendations tailored to individual country circum-
stances that will enable others to replicate what thus far has been the lot of a favored few.
Growth: Supply Push and Demand Pulled
The literature on growth is forbiddingly large and the expanding international army of
researchers guarantees an endless stream of additions. The two volumes of the Handbook of
Economic Growth provide a sense of the scope and richness of the research.11 These were pub-
lished in 2005 and much new material has appeared since then. Capturing the many-sided-
ness of this literature in a few pages is impossible. However, mercifully, the central threads
and stylized facts are few and they have changed little over time.
Growth can be viewed from two angles and because this is economics, they are supply and
demand. In a contribution to the debate on capital theory that raged between the two Cam-
bridge (Massachusetts and UK) schools, Paul Samuelson (1966: 444) ringingly announced
that “until the laws of thermodynamics are repealed, I will continue to relate outputs to
inputs—i.e., to believe in production functions.” And factor inputs have remained the d rivers
of growth in the supply side version of growth economics. However, whether or not s upply
materializes is a function of demand for outputs. Thus demand provides a complementary
perspective on growth.
The Reign of Capital followed by Total Factor Productivity

In the beginning, when the Harrod–Domar model was the workhorse of growth economics,
only capital and labor mattered (Harrod 1939; Domar 1946). These were the two basic factors
whose entry into the production function caused growth, depending on a combination
determined by technological relationships. The dominance of capital lasted until the middle
of the 1950s, when papers by Trevor Swan (1956) and more famously by Solow (1956, 1957)
revolutionized thinking on the sources of growth. These papers showed that as much as 70
percent of the growth in the United States could not be traced to factor inputs but instead
was caused by a residual, including technology and other intangibles.12 By singling out tech-
nological change as a key factor, Solow (and others such as Abramovitz13) highlighted the
role that knowledge had come to play since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Solow’s findings were subsequently validated by others, and triggered theoretical and
empirical research to track down the “quarks” that inhabit the residual—or total factor
productivity (TFP), as it has come to be known. This quest is now in its sixth decade,
and although a multitude of suspects have been identified, a theory that convincingly
accounts for the residual/TFP, lays bare its dynamics, and points unequivocally to effec-
tive policies has proven elusive. Researchers attempting to explain the differences in
performance among countries have marshaled scores of so-called fundamental varia-
bles including geography, entrepreneurship, financial deepening, religion, ethnic frac-
tionalization, and natural resources.14 But after examining the explanatory robustness of
the leading candidate growth theories, Durlauf, Kourtellos, and Tan (2008: 344)15 are
forced to conclude that there is a lack of “strong evidence that any of the new growth
theories are robust direct determinants of growth when we account for model uncer-
tainty. . . . [However,] variation in growth rates across countries are more robustly
explained by differences in macroeconomic polices and unknown heterogeneity associ-
ated with regional groupings.”
Recent attempts at estimating TFP for a large number of countries range from a quar-
ter of growth to over two-thirds, with the average falling somewhere in the 50 percent
range.16 Over the longer term, the consensus is that growth of GDP and divergences in
per capita GDP will be closely tied to individual country performance with regard to pro-
ductivity. Technological change and innovation (some embodied in new equipment) are
seen as the mainsprings of productivity growth. Underlying these is a learning and inno-
vation system that produces human capital and determines its quality; helps to absorb
technology and refines it through incremental innovations; generates ideas, some of
which are translated into commercial innovations; and through the agency of greater
technical, vocational, managerial, and organizational skills, brings about gains in effi-
ciency. Physical capital is still very much in the picture by creating productive capacity
and serving as a vehicle for research and technology transfer. In addition, since 1995,
information technology (IT) capital has acquired a substantial role, especially in the
United States and Europe. IT is complemented by technology that is at the heart of what
Baumol (2002) describes as the “capitalist growth machine.” As Parente and Prescott
(2000), Comin and Hobijn (2010), Allen (2012), and many others note, the main reason
that some countries are so far down on the income scale and convergence is so halting is
that these economies have difficulty borrowing technologies from more advanced coun-
tries and tailoring it to their own purposes.
A number of reasons have been put forward to explain why frontier technologies have
been slow to diffuse. Bad institutions that place limits on absorptive capacity, regulatory con-
straints, vested interests, and poor governance must take some of the blame. But the nature
of technologies closer to the frontier may also slow diffusion. These technologies tend to be
capital intensive because they were developed in countries where labor is relatively expen-
sive and skills are abundant. They are less cost effective in countries where labor costs are low
relative to those of capital.
A country such as China offers a good illustration of how technology gaps can be
narrowed and productivity raised. China has invested massively in state-of-the-art
production equipment, financed by equally massive domestic savings channeled to
enterprises through state-owned banks at state-controlled rates of interest that sub-
stantially depress the cost of capital.17 At the same time, China has successfully enlarged
its pool of skills, thus facilitating absorption of technology from overseas. This brings
us back to the refinements and advances in growth theory, as expounded in work by
Paul Romer18 that modeled endogenous growth and explicitly accounted for the role of
knowledge.
56 shahid yusuf
From Solow to Endogenous Growth

The Solow model, by clarifying the relationship between capital accumulation and growth,
helped to partially dislodge the orthodoxy that saw capital as the key to growth and focused
growth-augmenting policies exclusively on measures to raise the rate of investment. Solow
showed that increasing capital accumulation eventually runs into diminishing returns as an
economy shifts from extensive to intensive growth, but in avoiding the problem the model
assumed exogenous technological change that limited its explanatory power. This deficiency
was remedied by explicitly incorporating (endogenizing) knowledge into the growth model.
Endogenous growth theory assumes that learning by doing 19 and investment in education
creates knowledge and knowledge spillovers. Thus, externalities reverse the diminishing
returns to capital, allowing growth to be sustained. In other words, the continuous produc-
tion of knowledge through a variety of avenues staves off what would otherwise be an inevi-
table onset of diminishing returns that would negate the deepening of capital.20 It is arguable
whether endogenous growth theory constitutes a significant advance, however, as Solow
(2007: 6) remarks, “the most valuable contribution of endogenous growth theory has not
been the theory itself, but rather the stimulus it has provided to thinking about the actual
production of human capital and useful technological knowledge.”
The literature is replete with an immensity of small variations and minor extensions,
including the role played by institutions (whether viewed as rules or as organizations with
specific governance mechanisms),21 but the action revolves around capital and TFP and ways
of parsing TFP. The contribution of TFP appears to be rising, according to a recent study by
Arezki and Cherif (2010) of 94 countries covering the period 1970–2000. The question that
refuses to go away is whether all the fuss over TFP is increasing the stock of effective policy
instruments and institutions, and helping us understand why growth is so persistently une-
ven and all too often unresponsive to the moving of conventional policy levers. Policy instru-
ments and institutions are discussed in the next section.
Introducing Demand
Much of the attention of growth theory has been on the supply side, with demand attracting
sporadic attention during business downturns, as has been the case since 2008. During the
extended period of calm prior to 2008,22 the majority of macroeconomists were content to
track the movements of the economy using variants of dynamic stochastic general equilib-
rium (DSGE) models that incorporated consumption smoothing and rational expectations,
which papered over the differences between the Keynesian23 and new classical models.
From the perspective of growth economics, this neglect of demand management (includ-
ing the demand generated by net exports) and the risk of crises are hard to explain, given
crises’ frequency (though mainly in developing countries). A literature going back several
decades has established that poor demand management—by injecting macroeconomic vol-
atility,24 inflationary pressures, or adverse expectations—has been responsible for depressing
investment and growth in many countries.25 One reason the East Asian tiger economies per-
formed at such a high level is that, for the most part, they were able to create stable macr-
oeconomic environments conducive to investment and to risk taking. A second reason of
equal importance was the emphasis that East Asian economies placed on trade (and foreign
direct investment) policies aimed at maximizing the growth impetus from exports. Thus,
growth was supported both in the form of demand and through gains in productivity, tech-
nology transfer, and the encouragement that an open trading environment offered to foreign
investors. It was the relative neglect of such policies at the very time when globalization was
widening opportunities for growth through trade that stifled growth in many developing
economies and enabled the East Asians to pluck the low-hanging fruit.
The experience of Japan also shows how poor macroeconomic management can under-
mine efforts at accumulating knowledge and inducing innovation. Japan is home to some of
the most innovative multinational corporations, spends in excess of 3 percent of GDP on
research and development (R&D), is second only to the United States in the number of pat-
ents it registers each year, and is not short of science and technology skills. Nevertheless, fol-
lowing the bursting of the real estate bubble in 1989 and the ensuing financial crisis, Japan’s
growth slowed to a crawl, with TFP growing by just 0.6 percent per year between 1990 and
2003.26 In other words, investment in knowledge to augment science, technology, and inno-
vation (ST&I) activities cannot boost growth if demand is persistently weak.
As Keynes (1936) observed, deficient demand tilts the odds against the entrepreneur and
can stifle innovation and eat into the growth of productivity. Amazingly, after so much
research on macroeconomic policy, the financial crisis and the problems of the eurozone
have uncovered a singular lack of consensus regarding the efficacy of demand management
and how it can be most effectively conducted, once monetary policy is reduced to near impo-
tence when interest rates are at the zero bound. Perhaps most disconcerting is that the debate
is being conducted exclusively among participants drawn from a handful of schools (with
strong ideological leanings) in North America and Western Europe. On demand manage-
ment as on the supply-related aspects of growth, a few Western universities continue to call
the shots by training and indoctrinating the majority of those who worldwide conduct influ-
ential research and advise policy-makers. The epicenter of growth economics remains highly
localized, and more than sixty years after the birth of growth economics Western ideas, fash-
ions, and methodologies continue to determine what is researched, how it is researched, and
what gets translated into policies.
Policies for Growth: A Small Pot of Gold
Long immersion in the literature on growth leaves one with the feeling that a lot of incre-
mental innovation is afoot wherever economics is being taught or practiced—and not just in
a few Western hotspots. But then one stops to remember the last 1,000 papers read. That
is when the sense of moving in circles becomes apparent and the impossible task of
summarizing a few stylized policies begins to seem manageable.
King Capital
Although the spotlight might have shifted to TFP, capital is the driver of growth for most
low- and lower-middle-income countries far from the technological frontier, with low capi-
tal labor ratios, and still on the extensive margin of development. For these countries, the
first order of business is to put in place the infrastructure that undergirds development and
58 shahid yusuf
to build the productive capacity. Capital investment does this, and also serves as the avenue
through which technology is transferred from more advanced to developing countries.
China is the foremost exemplar of this approach. It telescoped decades of development into
years by pulling out the stops on capital investment and in the process transferring technol-
ogy at a much faster pace than would ordinarily have been possible. How can a country raise
investment to upwards of 25 percent of GDP? Only a few have managed this through a com-
bination of resource mobilization through the fiscal system and public sector entities; by
harnessing publicly owned and controlled banks; by exerting financial repression, which
depresses interest rates over long periods; through state capitalism in combination with
industrial policy vigorously implemented through fiscal and organizational incentives; and
with the help of an exchange rate policy that undervalues the domestic currency relative to
that of major trading partners. This is impossible to codify, much less customize, for indi-
vidual countries, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) now disallows some of the
incentives utilized in the past. In fact, even countries that once achieved high rates of invest-
ment, such as Malaysia, have fallen far below earlier levels. Other countries such as Brazil
and South Africa have been unable to approach East Asian levels in spite of the introduction
of generous fiscal incentives for investment and a deepening of the financial sector to mobi-
lize and allocate savings.
Improving the business climate can in principle increase investment, but it is difficult to
identify countries that have moved to a high growth path by working on the indicators that
affect transaction costs. In the 1980s and a part of the 1990s, low rates of saving and invest-
ment in Latin American and sub-Saharan countries was blamed on macroeconomic mis-
management. However, better macro-management has increased investment only modestly,
if at all. Between 1995 and 2009, gross investment was unchanged in Latin America and rose
from an average of 18 percent to an average of 21 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Low levels of
private investment in productive capacity and limited investment in physical infrastructure
constrain growth, both directly and by dampening the gains in TFP from embodied techno-
logical progress and learning.
Horizontal and matrix-based approaches (as distinct from the earlier vertical ones) to
industrial policy that were pushed aside by market fundamentalism in the 1990s are back in
favor,27 and past state failures28 are being airbrushed as countries struggle to raise the level of
investment and orient it towards the productive sectors rather than housing or real estate.
The jury is still out on whether such policies or others will make a tangible difference in
primarily market-based economies operating with reference to WTO rules.
Human Capital, the Knowledge Producer

Endogenous growth theory and the research on human capital have brought out the vital
role of education and ST&I skills. They serve both as drivers of (inclusive) growth in them-
selves and as complements to increasingly more sophisticated capital/IT equipment based
on technologies introduced in the advanced countries. Research by Hanushek and others29
has demonstrated that the quality of human capital (based on standardized tests) counts for
more than quantity, especially in the race to narrow technological gaps and to raise factor
productivity by improving management, soft skills, allocative efficiency, and policy imple-
mentation. Learning from countries that are high on the quality ladder has become a growth
industry in its own right, even as some of these countries (for example, Singapore and
Finland) begin to worry about the emphasis on rote learning and on the inability to instill
sufficient creativity and problem-solving skills. It is clear from Western experience that
greater spending on education, smaller class size, and provision of computers do not suffice.
A teacher’s knowledge of a subject and the incentive regime can make a difference but each
success story (as in the case of Finland) has tight and unreplicable cultural correlates. Human
capital has emerged as an axis of growth economics, and many of the answers countries are
seeking must be found in the swampland of education “science,” itself full of interesting
papers and dead ends (Glewwe et al., 2011).
Innovation Systems
Human capital development—and the learning economy it represents—is inseparable from
the ST&I system that uses human capital to generate ideas and commercial innovations
facilitated by legal and regulatory institutions to move the TFP needle. The architecture of
innovation systems in the leading economies has been exhaustively mapped to the following
conditions: the role of the government, universities, and the financial system (including ven-
ture capital providers); legal institutions supporting intellectual property and the trading of
ideas; industrial composition; the entrepreneurial dynamics of the business community,
both domestic and foreign; and the contribution of a competitive market environment.
A series of OECD reports 30 elucidates country experiences and offers policy advice. Lundvall
(2007) provides a historical perspective and Martin (2012) nicely summarizes the state of the
field and notes the challenge of coordinating the actions of several participants in the inno-
vation game. The idea- and innovation-generating machine must function smoothly to
extract the maximum TFP from capital investment and the accumulation of human capital.
This is very much in the spirit of endogenous growth theory, but it should be noted that
endogenous growth policies and innovation activities are not really separable. They are car-
ried out more or less in tandem, given the fast-moving nature of the technological environ-
ment. A universal roadmap exists only as a broad sketch. With the U.S. and Finnish
innovation systems showing signs of strain, two of the global icons are tottering on their
pedestals.
Demand Management
Demand management is linked to economic openness and the role of trade in creating
opportunities for firms (especially in small countries). Through demand management, firms
can realize economies of scale and connect with international value chains. This creates ave-
nues for technology transfer and subjects domestic firms to competitive pressures. Whether
or not trade enhances productivity through these channels remains undecided. Bernard and
his co-authors31 show that firms entering export markets are already the productive ones.
Others find that trade does cause productivity to rise.32 As with macroeconomic policy, the
answer seems to boil down to a matter of belief, because there are an equal number of papers
arguing both sides of the case. I tend to go with the ayes. But this expression of belief only
underlines the larger question: How does a country become a successful exporter? If one
takes China as a model, then the answer appears to lie in making massive investments in
60 shahid yusuf
physical and human capital to build manufacturing capability; creating an innovation sys-
tem to enhance absorptivity; exploiting foreign direct investment to increase access to tech-
nology; maximizing fiscal, financial, and exchange incentives; and applying pressure from
the party organization to achieve state-mandated export targets. However, hard-won export
successes can give rise to structural imbalances that China now has to correct.
Conclusion
There is no denying the scale of the economic research conducted over the past half century,
but growth economics is struggling to provide detailed and meaningful answers to policy
concerns. If TFP is indeed the driver of growth, its measurement is becoming something of
an art,33 appreciated by practitioners (there are scores of estimates, no two alike) but contrib-
uting little to the content and precision of policies for raising TFP. There is no consensus on
how growth that is evenly shared might be accelerated in advanced countries and sustained
by middle-income ones fearing the onset of sclerosis. The limitations of theory and policy
are highlighted by two facts: between 1960 and 2011, only eight of 190 countries averaged a
growth rate of 7 percent or more for two decades; and the correlation between decadal rates
of growth is low—in fact, between growth in the 2000s and that in the 1990s it is close to
zero. In the absence of fresh ideas, the professional and public debate mindlessly regurgitates
well-worn nostrums on investment in education and science and technology; on stimulating
innovation; and on creating an institutionally well-stocked, regulation-lite, market-friendly,
enabling business environment. The one apparent innovation is the greening of several of
the latest offerings on growth.
Since the early 1970s, leading economists have periodically warned that their profession
would be marginalized by the trend towards technical specialization, mathematical mode-
ling, and a focus on the testing of narrow hypotheses using increasingly abstruse economet-
rics. These warnings have gone unheeded. As a consequence, in the face of a crying need for
rapid and effective policy action on many fronts, growth economics is not forthcoming with
convincing analysis, plus the kind of fine-grained policy informed by the institutions and
political economy of individual countries, that determine whether and how policies are
implemented and the nature of outcomes (also noted by Harriss in this volume). Policy-
makers looking for practical proposals are not helped by recommendations to “strengthen
institutions,” or move from the periphery to the “core of the product space,” or increase R&D,
or improve the quality of education, or, most dishearteningly, raise TFP.
Notes
1. A large literature on the relationship between aid and growth comes to at best inconclusive
findings. See Doucouliagos and Paldam (2006, 2009); Easterly (2006); Roodman (2007).
2. See also the discussion on the role of the state in Kanbur and Devarajan (this volume).
3. State-guided capitalism in the Republic of Korea and Taiwan, China was the subject of
two well-known publications by Amsden (1989) and Wade (1990). A sampling of the
voluminous literature on industrial policy is summarized in Yusuf (2011).
4. In the Indian case, the first steps towards deregulation in the 1980s had already begun rais-
ing growth rates, but the release from the prolonged stagnation took place in the 1990s.
5. This was a time when concerns about state failure were making deep inroads into think-
ing in the United States, spurred by the ideas emanating from the Chicago School and
the activities of increasingly influential neo-liberal and libertarian think tanks (Back-
house 2010).
6. This was enshrined in the “Washington Consensus,” first tabled by John Williamson in
1989.
7. The introduction of a “Nobel” Prize (actually the Swedish Central Bank Prize in
Economic Sciences) in 1969 encouraged economists to imitate the physical sciences. On
“scientific economics,” see also Willams (this volume).
8. The capabilities approach is associated with Amartya Sen (1985) and his co-authors—for
example, Martha Nussbaum. See <http://www.iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/>; <http://plato.stanford.
edu/entries/capability-approach/>; <http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26146-creating-capabilities-
the-human-development-approach-2>.
9. See Hallegatte et al. (2012).
10. On investment and growth under conditions of climate change, see EIB (2012).
11. See Aghion and Durlauf (2005). These are volumes 1A and 1B. Volume 2 is to come.
12. Kuznets (1966) recognized the importance of capital saving innovations and investment in
education and the development of skills.
13. For Abramovitz (1993), technology accounted for only a part of the coefficient of ignorance
or the residual.
14. One compact source of cross-country growth analysis is Barro (1997).
15. See also the detailed weighing of approaches to modeling growth and econometrically tracing
its causes in Durlauf, Johnson, and Temple (2005). Kenny and Williams (2001) also observe
that the empirical evidence does not enable one to select among competing explanatory factors.
16. Among a legion of TFP enumerators, see Bosworth and Collins (2003), Crafts (2010),
Jorgenson and Vu (2010), and Allen (2012).
17. Financial repression is a notable accompaniment of capital-intensive development in
several of the East Asian economies.
18. Romer (1986, 1994).
19. The endogenizing of technological change as a profit-making activity in its own right
was foreshadowed by Arrow in a landmark 1962 paper where he used capital investment
as the vehicle through which learning/technological change occurs endogenously rather
than being introduced exogenously.
20. See Howitt (2004); and Aghion and Howitt (2009).
21. According to some researchers, institutions (represented by a proxy for which data can
be found) are the keys to growth. Institutions such as property rights and intellectual
property surely matter, but how and how much they impinge on TFP is difficult to deter-
mine. As policy instruments, institutional variables are tricky to define and manipulate,
and the returns can accrue non-linearly over a long period of time.
22. Between the mid-1980s and 2007, there was a relative lull in financial crises and defaults,
which, according to Reinhart and Rogoff (2008), set the stage for the “big one.”
23. New Keynesian models assume (difficult to measure) sticky prices.
24. Burnside and Tabova (2009) find that a country’s average growth rate is correlated with
its exposure to risk factors: the greater its exposure to shocks, the lower its average
growth. In other words, riskier countries depress domestic investment and attract less
capital from abroad.
62 shahid yusuf
25. See Sirimaneetham and Temple (2009) for a reexamination of the evidence using a new
index of instability and for references to a large earlier literature.
26. Jorgenson and Motohashi (2005).
27. See Aiginger and Sieber (2006); Aiginger (2007, 2011); and Van Reenen (2012).
28. On the role of the state and state failure, see also Harriss and Kanbur and Devarajan (this
volume).
29. Hanushek and Woessmann (2008, 2012); Pritchett and Viarengo (2008).
30. See <www.oecd.org/document/62/0,3746,en_2649_34273_38848318_1_1_1_1,00.html>.
31. Bernard (2006). Iacovone and Javorcik (2012) also find that potential exporters upgrade
quality prior to entering the export market.
32. See Lopez (2005).
33. A survey of the econometrics of TFP by Van Beveren (2012) indicates how many tools
and tests the modeler can now marshal to enhance the joys of estimation.
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chapter 4
dev el opm en t str ategy:

ba l a nci ng m a r k et a n d
g ov er n m en t fa ilu r e
shantayanan devarajan and ravi kanbur
Introduction
“Markets versus the State” has long been one of the central themes of the development eco-
nomics discourse. Broadly speaking, development strategies lie on a continuum, with more
regulation of economic activity, less integration into the world economy, a greater role for
the public provision of social services, more redistribution, etc., at one end; and the opposite
at the other end. A policy package, or development strategy, will reveal its orientation by
where it lands on this stretch between state- and market-oriented approaches. Those who
come down on the more statist end stress “market failure,” while those who come down on
the market end stress “government failure.”
In this chapter we examine the evolution of development economics thinking in the post-
Second World War period as a constantly shifting balance between an emphasis on market
failure and an emphasis on government failure. The swing of this pendulum can be traced
back to the pre-war period, and even well before that. Development thinking in any phase
was influenced by experience of the immediate past—successes or failures. The dominant
strand of thinking was in turn challenged by new experiences and new realities. The next
section of the chapter identifies three main phases in post-1945 thinking: the immediate
post-war period, where statist strategies reigned supreme, the era of the Washington
Consensus in the 1980s and 1990s, which represented a market oriented reaction to this
orthodoxy, and the current phase, where the pendulum has swung back in the direction of
the statist dominance of the 1940s and 1950s.
However, the current phase of thinking has elements that take us beyond the simple “market
versus state” pendulum swings, important as they are. The subsequent section takes up a
strand of development economics thinking that has come to the fore in the last two decades:
namely, the shift from a technocratic perspective on the balance between market and
government failure to the political economy of policy making and strategy. Which policies
66 shantayanan devarajan and ravi kanbur
get chosen, and how they get implemented, reflect the balance of political power in a coun-
try, and we will not fully understand the choice of strategy without understanding these basic
forces. Indeed, to the extent that government failure is the result of these political forces, we
cannot understand a key component of the old debate either.
The “state” in the development economics discourse has been the nation-state, and most
of the discourse on economic strategy in the balance between market and state has centered
on the nation-state, its policies, and its strategies. But the nation-state in the conventional
sense is now facing two challenges, one global and the other local.
The final section introduces the issues that arise as we look out from the nation-state in
these two directions—the need for cross-national coordination to address externalities
across countries and international public goods, and the need to address growing sub-
national disparities within nation-states, disparities which could undermine the legitimacy
of the state in the “market versus state” debate.
The chapter concludes by asking whether there are in fact revolutions in development
strategy and thinking, or whether evolution is more likely to be the order of the day.
The Evolution of Development Thinking

and Outcomes since 1945
Development Thinking Pre–1945

The focus of this chapter is on development economics in the post-Second World War era.
There was, of course, thinking and writing about economic development before 1945. One
can go right back to the classics, such as Ricardo’s analysis of the joint determination of
accumulation and income distribution, an analysis that was refreshed in the immediate
post-war era by Arthur Lewis (1954). Or one can find in the neoclassical analysis of Alfred
Marshall “the hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives
indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth
century” (Marshall 1961: 3).
But it is in the early part of the twentieth century, especially in the inter-war period, that
one begins to see a focus in the rich countries on the problems of poor countries or, in many
cases, poor colonies of rich empires. The economic reports of the League of Nations, includ-
ing on territories with mandates and other areas, began a discussion of low incomes and the
investment needed to raise them. The colonial powers themselves could be said to be taking
a “developmental interest” in their colonies, although the interests of the metropole were
always central:
From about the turn of the century, the UK Government began to take a slightly more active
interest in colonial economies, and a variety of committees studied education, the use of
natural resources, and similar topics in selected colonies. . . . In 1929, for the first time, provi-
sion was made for assisting colonial governments to develop their economies by means of
grants and loans for what is now called “infrastructure”; for improving transport, research,
power and water supplies, land surveys, and so on. Education was excluded, and a strong
subsidiary aim of the new Colonial Development Act of 1929 was to promote employment in
balancing market and government failure 67
Britain by stimulating the colonial economies and their demand for British exports. Funds
therefore had to be spent on British products as far as possible. (Little and Clifford 1965: 31)
In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, the Colonial Economic Advisory C ommittee
(CEAC) was set up by the Colonial Office, and none other than Arthur Lewis, a 28-year-old
lecturer at the London School of Economics, was recruited to be its secretary (Mine 2006).
The exchanges between Lewis and Sydney Caine, head of the Economic Division of the Colo-
nial Office, are instructive, and the debates seem very modern. As Lewis wrote of Caine in a
confidential memorandum in 1944, just prior to resigning from the CEAC:
He is a religious devotee of laissez-faire, and his headship of the Economic Department at this
juncture is fatal. . . . [His approach] is fatal not only in the decisions he makes, especially on
secondary industry, on marketing and on co-operative organisation, but also in the appoint-
ments he recommends to important jobs in the Colonies, for which he chooses almost invari-
ably people as laissez-faire as himself. (Quoted in Mine 2006: 335)
Of course the debates between Caine and Lewis reflected wider debates on market versus
state. If there is any surprise it might be that the laissez faire view persisted so strongly in the
inner reaches of government into the mid-1940s, being reminiscent of the “Treasury view”
that Keynes battled in the 1920s and 1930s. The generally accepted consensus is that this view
was discredited by the economic disasters of the interwar period, and a more interventionist,
state-led view of economic policy in general, and development policy in particular, was
dominant by the time the war ended.
A Global Perspective on the Balance between

Market and State
The discipline of economics in general, and the sub-discipline of development economics in
particular, emerged from the Second World War with a deep concern about market failures
as a hurdle to rapid development and growth. The classic paper by Rosenstein-Rodan (1944)
highlighted these concerns, focusing on the lack of development as the result of coordina-
tion failure, and the need for state intervention to coordinate the “big push.” We have already
referred to the thinking of the young Arthur Lewis in the 1940s, which eventually crystal-
lized into his Nobel Prize-winning paper (1954) on development with surplus labor. A slew
of other publications, such as Myrdal’s (1968) monumental Asian Drama, testify to this
mindset in development economics thinking.
Policy reflected this thinking nationally and internationally. Surprising as it may seem
now, the World Bank’s assistance in the 1950s and 1960s supported state-led industrializa-
tion. Reflecting, and leading, the evolution of India’s Five Year Plans was the steady increase
in emphasis given to poverty reduction directly, through phases such as the focus on rural
development and on “basic needs” (ILO 1976). Robert McNamara, then President of the
World Bank, gave a celebrated speech (McNamara, 1973) emphasizing poverty, and the Vice-
President for Development Economics and his team published a book (Chenery et al. 1974)
entitled Redistribution with Growth. The greater focus on poverty seemed to strengthen the
case for the role of the state in development strategy.
Alongside India, countries in Africa and Latin America were very much in tune with these
global perspectives. In a speech to the United Nations in 1957, Ghanaian President Kwame
Nkrumah said that, because institutions in his country were so weak, Ghana had to rely on
state-led development. Houphouet Boigny, who would soon be his counterpart in Côte
d’Ivoire, disagreed: because institutions in his country were weak, he would rely on market-
led development. Despite this “West African Wager,” both countries, as well as most of
Africa, adopted strategies with a strong role for government. The disappointing perform-
ance has been called “Africa’s growth tragedy.” By the 1980s, Africa’s slow growth and high
poverty were attributed to excessive and inappropriate government intervention in the econ-
omy (World Bank 1982).
Meanwhile, the success of the export-led East Asian “tigers” in delivering historically
unprecedented growth together with falling or at least stable inequality, with substantial
poverty reduction as the result, raised major questions on the inward-looking strategy in
India and globally. The growth success of China through opening up and liberalization,
albeit with rising inequality, also raised questions on the inward looking import substitution
strategies favored in the immediate post-war period. It should be noted, however, that the
role of the state in the success of East Asia and China has been much debated. Freeing up of
some controls has been emphasized by some, but the role of the state in guiding exporting
industries through credit and other instruments has been emphasized by others. The lesson
from these experiences is not necessarily a light state but a pragmatic, efficient state as the
basis for development. Be that as it may, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 seemed to be the
final verdict on the type of central planning that went on behind it.
The 1980s thus culminated in a shift away from concern with market failure toward a
concern with government failure—the seeming inability of statist strategies to deliver sus-
tained growth and poverty reduction. Williamson (1990) captured this shift in a list of
policy positions that, he argued, constituted the Washington Consensus. Some of the
points in his list (for example, a more equitable distribution of public expenditure—see
Kanbur 2009) may surprise those who are familiar only with summaries of the “consen-
sus.” Nevertheless, by and large the consensus does represent a move toward the market-
oriented end of the spectrum of policy stances, and the shift that started in the 1980s
continued into the 1990s.
A certain triumphalism accompanied this swing in the pendulum. Fukuyama (1992)
spoke of “the end of history,” meaning that all previous debates had been settled, and that
market economics (and liberal democracy) had won the day. However, as is already clear
from India, and would have been clear in light of the long arc of development thinking, such
declarations were premature. As Kanbur (2001) noted, “the end of history lasted for such a
short time.” No sooner had the Washington Consensus been announced, indeed even before
it was formulated, than the arguments against it began to coalesce, driven by a number of
development outcomes of the market-oriented 1990s and 2000s: (i) the East Asia financial
crisis of 1997, driven by liberalization of international capital flows; (ii) the “shock therapy”
experience of many Eastern European economies’ transition to market in the 1990s; (iii) the
poor growth performance of Latin America and Africa in the 1980s, even after having
adopted the tenets of market liberalization; (iv) the fact that India and China had not, in fact
adopted full-throated market liberalization, especially on their international capital
accounts, and yet had delivered high growth rates in the 1990s; and (v) the sharp rise in ine-
quality that accompanied several fast-growing countries in the 1990s.
These challenges to the Washington Consensus were in turn absorbed in development
thinking to produce a swing back to a better balance between state and market, but without
returning all the way to the statist strategies of the immediate post-war phase. The Growth
Commission of the mid-2000s, whose members included leading policy-makers from
developing countries, captured this emerging consensus well:
In recent decades governments were advised to “stabilize, privatize and liberalize.” There is
merit in what lies behind this injunction—governments should not try to do too much,
replacing markets or closing the economy off from the rest of the world. But we believe this
prescription defines the role of government too narrowly. Just because governments are
sometimes clumsy and sometimes errant, does not mean they should be written out of the
script. On the contrary, as the economy grows and develops, active, pragmatic governments
have crucial roles to play. (Commission on Growth and Development 2008: 4)
The Commission strongly believes that growth strategies cannot succeed without a commit-
ment to equality of opportunity, giving everyone a fair chance to enjoy the fruits of growth.
But equal opportunities are no guarantee of equal outcomes. Indeed, in the early stages of
growth, there is a natural tendency for income gaps to widen. Governments should seek to
contain this inequality, the Commission believes, at the bottom and top ends of the income
spectrum. Otherwise, the economy’s progress may be jeopardized by divisive politics, protest,
and even violent conflict. Again, if the ethical case does not persuade, the pragmatic one
should. (Commission on Growth and Development 2008: 7)
The Growth Commission’s report was published before the global financial crisis of 2008.
The caution against the simple injunction to “stabilize, privatize, and liberalize” can only be
stronger in the second decade of the new millennium.
Beyond State and Market

Our account of post-war development thinking and policy has focused, by design, on the
debates between market-oriented and state-oriented development strategies. This debate, as
we have seen, dates from before the war, is still at the core of the development discourse, and
will no doubt continue. However, there is a key element in the debate that was not present in
pre-war or immediate post-war thinking, or indeed for the first three decades after the
Second World War. This is the role of civil society.
In Devarajan and Kanbur (2007) we have argued that between market failure and govern-
ment failure is an area that is the domain of civil society:
When markets do not work well, the economic system generates outcomes that are not effi-
cient, nor need they be equitable. . . . If the interventions that are needed in theory can be
implemented by a benevolent, informed and competent government, market failure can be
easily overcome. Of course in reality, governments are not fully benevolent, informed, or
competent. . . . This is government failure. . . . Just because there is some market failure does
not mean that all markets fail all the time. Just because there is some government failure
does not mean that all government fails all of the time. Moreover, even when markets and
government both fail, perhaps especially when they both fail, sometimes civil society organ-
izations step in and provide services and activities that fill the gap. . . . However, the gap is not
filled completely, by a considerable m argin—otherwise the record on poverty reduction
would be stronger and more widespread. This is civil society failure. (Devarajan and Kanbur
(2007: 379–80)
Three examples can illustrate what we have in mind (these are discussed in greater detail in
Devarajan and Kanbur 2007).
There is clearly market failure in the credit markets for poor people in many developing
countries. This failure has been the rationale for government interventions in credit markets.
But alongside these government schemes one finds microfinance initiatives led by civil soci-
ety organizations like Grameen in Bangladesh and Self Employed Women’s Association
(SEWA) in India. This is partly because the government schemes display key features of gov-
ernment failure—incompetence and corruption. Civil society has stepped in to fill the gap.
As another illustration, self-help groups in Andhra Pradesh, the Rural Support Program
in Pakistan, and the National Solidarity Program in Afghanistan are all examples of partner-
ships between government and civil society to help deliver government programs that
attempt to overcome market failures, but to deliver these while minimizing government
failures.
A third example is that of Citizen Report Cards in Bangalore, where an NGO, the Public
Affairs Centre, collected and collated information about the quality of public services and
then publicized its findings to put pressure on local government to do better. Such a per-
spective clearly takes us beyond the simple state-versus-market dichotomy that dominated
so much of the post-war debate on development. It changes the question as to what can
improve the functioning of the state even as the state tries to improve the functioning of
markets.
Civil society is now a player in the development discourse in two senses. First, its role in
directly correcting market failures, and its role in addressing government failures, is the
centerpiece of much development thinking. Second, civil society is itself engaging in the
development debates, bringing their ground level experience to bear on matters which were
previously thought to be the domain of technical analysis. The heated exchanges between
Arthur Lewis and Sydney Caine on laissez faire versus state intervention in development
policy were carried out behind closed doors. Today the debate would be between Lewis,
Caine, and Ela Bhatt, the founder of the SEWA in India, or Mohammed Yunus, the founder
of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.
The greater involvement of civil society in development debates raises another aspect of
the evolution of development thinking on markets and the state. The debates reviewed so far
have been somewhat technocratic in nature, concerning a range of policies that would be
adopted, and if adopted then implemented well. But the political process through which the
policies were adopted and implemented, whether for good or ill, have not been explored.
A greater awareness of the political economy dimension of development policy making is a
characteristic of the current phase of development thinking. We turn now to a closer exami-
nation of this dimension.
Politics and Policy
The previous sections have described a stylized process by which development economics
thinking translates into policies that in turn lead to outcomes; and then, in light of these out-
comes, the thinking is revised and policies adjusted accordingly. The truth is that all three—
thinking, policies, and outcomes—are influenced, if not driven, by underlying political
forces and institutional incentives. In this section, we attempt to explain the emergence,
persistence, and transitions in development policies, drawing on recent research on politics

and institutions in development.
The pre-war colonial era bias toward laissez faire—against which Arthur Lewis rebelled—
could be attributed to what Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) call “extractive institutions.”
The colonial powers wanted to extract from the colonies as many resources as possible, as
efficiently as possible. Minimizing government intervention, with little regard for equity,
would come close to maximizing efficiency.
The heavy government intervention after independence in South Asia and Africa was
partly a reaction to the laissez faire of the colonial era. Now that India was independent, so
the argument went, it would develop its own industry, rather than be the supplier of raw
materials to British industry. But this does not explain the persistence of the state-led model
for so long, especially in the wake of anemic growth and poverty reduction.
The period of statist intervention was sustained, and eventually abandoned, because of
politics and institutions. In the case of India and other democracies, although growth was
slow, the policies and regulations, including import controls, created huge rents in the
domestic economy. These rents were shared between the few industrialists who were for-
tunate enough to receive import protection (and monopoly power in the domestic eco
nomy) and the highly educated civil servants who had discretion in implementing policies,
such as issuing import licenses. Inasmuch as these two groups constituted most of the
elites of society, they commanded considerable power. Furthermore, in heterogeneous
societies like India, with (at least then) a strong caste system, the prevailing Fabian social-
ist principle of free, public provision of basic services like health and education did not
translate to universal access to these services. Doctors and teachers, who were themselves
part of an educated elite, did not want to treat or teach those of a different caste. The result
was that health and education levels of the poor remained low, further increasing the
premium for the educated elite.
In non-democracies, such as the military dictatorships in Africa in the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s, the state-led model persisted, but for slightly different reasons. To stay in power, mili-
tary leaders needed to curry favor with those who might overthrow them. This included
other military officers (who might launch a similar coup to the one that brought the current
dictator into power), as well as the urban elites, who might support such an attempted takeo-
ver. One way to keep these groups satisfied was to ensure that food and import prices were
low (Bates 2008). Accordingly, these countries maintained overvalued exchange rates and
subsidies or controls on food prices. These policies discriminated against producers of food
and exports (most of which were in agriculture), which was the majority of poor people in
the country. Bates (1981) offers a further explanation for this “urban bias,” which rests on the
idea that industrial products are more differentiated, so that it is easier for producers of spe-
cific manufactured goods to mobilize for protection (and harder for consumers to register
the impact of protection on the prices they face), whereas a more homogeneous commodity
like food requires millions of farmers to organize and demand protection.
If this statist model of development was a political equilibrium, how did it change? While
individual circumstances differ, a common feature was that almost every country faced an
external shock, such as the oil price spikes of the 1970s (or the price collapse of the late
1980s), and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, which made the current policy
regime unsustainable. The shocks triggered a balance of payments crisis (which had already
been brewing, thanks to the overvalued exchange rates). The knee-jerk response to the
shocks—imposing exchange controls, for instance—exacerbated the problem. Moreover,

the East Asian countries, which had liberalized their trade regimes earlier, fared better dur-
ing the shocks (Balassa 1985). Lacking intellectual legitimacy and rents to capture, the elites
either lost power (as in Ghana) or had to re-think their development strategy (as in India).
Those that had been advocating for more market-oriented policies were now given more
credence. And because it was a balance of payments crisis, external organizations, espe-
cially the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, became important players.
Despite being triggered by a crisis and supported by a volume of academic work, the tran-
sition to more market-based policies was by no means smooth. First, because the balance of
payments support was being provided by the IMF and World Bank, the accompanying poli-
cies or “structural adjustment programs” were seen as externally imposed. Political protests
ensued, policy reforms were reversed or not enacted at all, and some countries found them-
selves in worse circumstances than before the crisis. As Devarajan, Dollar, and Holmgren
(2001) show, the problem was not that these were the wrong policies. Rather, it was that they
were designed from outside the country (usually in Washington, DC), which made it diffi-
cult to build a domestic political consensus around them. Desperate for the money, govern-
ments agreed to the “conditions” but did not implement them because the political costs
were too high.1 Countries such as Uganda, Ghana, and Tanzania, where the reform program
was designed from within, with widespread consultation in the country, were able to sustain
reforms and register strong growth rates.
Secondly, even for reforms designed in the country, there were problems particularly with
trade reform. In addition to the usual phenomenon of losers (protected industrialists and
government bureaucrats) colluding to resist reforms, there was an issue with exporters—
who would normally benefit from the reform—because of the uncertainty associated with
entering new markets (Fernandez and Rodrik 1991).
Uncertainty about whether they would be winners or losers led people to vote against
reforms, resulting in a status quo bias in reform programs. However, when the initial bias
was so extreme, as in Ghana with a severely overvalued exchange rate, and there was political
competition (also in Ghana since 1992), then there was widespread support for reforms that
shifted the terms of trade in favor of agriculture (Block and Bates 2012).
Notwithstanding the difficulties in the transition, most developing countries by the early
2000s had transformed into macroeconomically stable, market-oriented economies. Trade
barriers had come down; there were fewer state-owned manufacturing enterprises; and so
on. In a sense, these countries had adopted the Washington Consensus, but rather than being
imposed from outside, it was increasingly developed from within. Their strategies were
expressed in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, which were written by the government,
based on widespread consultation. The substantial increase in political competition in Africa
contributed to the reform momentum (Chauvet and Collier 2009). Furthermore, these
countries were experiencing rapid economic growth—5–6 percent a year in Africa, 8–9 per-
cent in India.
Nevertheless, this growth was not reducing poverty fast enough. India’s rate of poverty
decline was the same as before the 1990 reforms; fast-growing Tanzania saw only a slight
decline in poverty during the 2000s. One reason was that agricultural productivity growth
was still quite limited in Africa and South Asia (where the gains from the green revolution
had dissipated). Another was that there was little growth in productive employment. About
70–80 percent of the labor force remained engaged in low-productivity informal farms or
household enterprises. Finally, human development was lagging: Africa and most of South
Asia had stubbornly high child mortality rates; while primary enrolment rates were soaring,
learning outcomes were disappointing; and India had about double the child under-nutri-
tion rate of Africa.
These indicators confirmed the worst suspicions of the anti-globalizers. It looked as if
market liberalization had led to the rich getting richer and the poor poorer. In India, elec-
toral sentiments appeared to be moving back to the center. An alternative interpretation is
that the problems with agriculture, employment, and human development have to do with
government failures that were not tackled during the first wave of reforms. For instance, the
high level of subsidies to farmers in southern Indian states (estimated at 1 percent of state
GDP) crowd out much-needed public investment in agriculture, resulting in slow produc-
tivity growth. But these subsidies are politically sensitive: any politician who attempts to
reduce them is likely to lose the next election. Likewise, formal-sector employment growth is
hampered in India by restrictive labor regulations and in Africa by infrastructure con-
straints. The latter too are the result of policies and regulations that are politically difficult to
reform. And the weak human-development indicators have a lot to do with poor service
delivery—absentee teachers and doctors, leakage of public funds—that are in turn a reflec-
tion of politically powerful teachers’ and doctors’ unions that remain unaccountable to poor
citizens (World Bank 2003).
Given that they represent a new political equilibrium, even in countries with competitive
elections, these government failures will be difficult to overcome. Some solutions such as
increasing the accountability of service providers by tying their pay to performance, have
shown encouraging results (Basinga et al. 2010). But these can only be attempted if they have
political support. If the underlying political system is distorted by clientelism, then the only
way to get reform may be by informing the public about the costs of these distortions, so they
can bring pressure to bear on politicians for reform. Even this approach may not always work
(Keefer and Khemani 2012), but there is scope, especially with the widespread use of cell
phones in these countries, so that citizens can be better informed, and in turn inform elected
officials about their views.
Looking Ahead: Markets and State

in the Global and the Local Context
Having described and interpreted the evolution of development economics thinking in

terms of balancing market and government failure, we now look ahead and ask how this
debate will play out in the future. Our view is that the nature of both states and markets—and
hence of their failures—will change over time.
The Nation-state at the Confluence of the Global and Local

The nation-state has been at the foundation of development debates. The implicit assump-
tion in much of the development policy discourse, from the Second World War right up to
the present, is that the policies being discussed and debated are national policies. Whether
with regard to monetary stability, fiscal balance, trade liberalization, public expenditure, etc.,
the policies are applied by the national government, taking into account global conditions
but without regard to the repercussions on other nations.
There are at least two senses in which the nation-state’s being the fulcrum of policy is prob-
lematic. First, when a nation is large its policies have a direct impact on other countries.
Chinese exchange rate policies or reserve accumulation policies of emerging markets are
examples. Second, even if each country is small, the collectivity of their actions can impact
the group as a whole. An example of this is when each country attempts to grow by exporting
the same commodity: the expansion of global supply leads to a fall in the price of the export,
hurting all countries together.
More generally, as cross-border trade, investment, and migration have expanded, and as
environmental resources come under stress, externalities from one country’s actions to
another country’s well-being have multiplied and intensified. Managing these spillovers
requires policies at the level above the nation-state, and yet we do not have those structures
in place. Rodrik (2007: n.p.) has gone further and posited a trilemma for the world economy:
“I have an ‘impossibility theorem’ for the global economy. . . . [D]emocracy, national sover-
eignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two
of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full. . . . Pretending that we can
have all three simultaneously leaves us in an unstable no-man’s land.”
Looking outward globally from the nation-state is only one of two perspectives. The other,
of looking inwards at the components of the nation-state, has been and always will continue
to be important. In The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State, the his-
torian Basil Davidson assessed the colonial legacy to Africa—a collection of artificial states
formed more for the convenience of, and through bargaining among, colonial powers. The
Berlin Conference of 1884–5 left a map of Africa whose straight lines reflect the arbitrariness
of the nation-states at independence. These states had to develop a national identity, adopt
mechanisms to give effect to national policies, and manage the politics of these policies. If it
took Europe more than a century to solidify the Westphalian state, why would we expect
Africa to do it any faster?
Today, the nation-state is coming under greater pressure from within, particularly in large
nations that have ethnic, religious, historical, geographical, and other cleavages. The formu-
lation and implementation of national level policies must take into account their impact on
local jurisdictions. These twin departures from the conventional focus on the nation-state,
one toward the global and one toward the local, form the focus of this section of the chapter.
International Public Goods

Let us start with some basic economic theory of public goods. A “pure public good” is defined
as one which is “non-rival” and “non-excludable” in consumption. By non-rival is meant
that consumption by one does not reduce the amount available for another. By non-excludable
is meant that it is in fact not possible to exclude anyone from consuming that good. National
defense would be a concrete example of a pure public good: all citizens are equally and
simultaneously defended from foreign attack, and no citizen can be excluded from such
defense. Exchange rate policy is another example of a national level public good: all citizens
are simultaneously affected by it, and no citizen can be excluded from its impact. Somewhat
more abstractly, the symbols of “national identity”—the flag, the national anthem—are pub-
lic goods. In practice many goods are only “impure public goods” since they only partially
satisfy the conditions of non-rivalry and non-excludability. But the sharp formulation of
a pure public good is analytically useful.
Basic economics teaches us that markets will supply inefficiently low levels of public goods
(Cornes and Sandler 1996). This market failure is one of the major arguments for state inter-
vention in a range of activities, including activities to mitigate externalities, spillovers from
one individual’s actions to another which are not meditated through markets. Such
mechanisms to address externalities—for example, a coordination mechanism to manage
deforestation—are themselves public goods: the mechanism by definition applies equally to
all. It follows that such mechanisms will also be undersupplied by the market, leading to an
argument for state intervention.
The basic structure of analysis at the level of the individual can be translated up one level
by replacing the community of individuals in a nation-state by the community of nations in
the world as a whole. What nations do—their national policies—have spillover effects on
other countries that are not fully mediated by markets. Refugees, greenhouse gases, defor-
estation, underground water exploitation, infectious disease immunization, financial regu-
lation, etc., are all cross-national externalities in an integrating world economy. Mechanisms
to address these many externalities are public goods. Markets will undersupply these public
goods. What is needed, then, is the equivalent of a state at cross-national level to provide the
public goods that are the coordinating mechanisms to manage cross-border externalities.
Without them, global development and well-being will be lower than they would be
otherwise.
Cross-national coordinating mechanisms will of course mean the giving up of some
national sovereignty in deciding some national policies, as in Rodrik’s trilemma. One solu-
tion is to not have as much “hyper-integration” in the world economy, “I am skeptical about
the global governance option. . . . There is simply too much diversity in the world for nations
to be shoehorned into common rules. . . . The only remaining option sacrifices hyperglobali-
zation” (Rodrik 2011: 203–4).
One can make three observations about the comment above. First, there is still something
to be said for at least some cross-national coordination. Second, as Rodrik recognizes, some
aspects of globalization may now be beyond us to “walk back,” linked as they are to techno-
logical and social changes. Third, where walking back is possible, this will itself require inter-
national coordination.
There are two further aspects of the public good of international coordination that need to
be emphasized. First, some cross-border spillovers are not necessarily to do entirely with
global economic integration. Greenhouse gas emissions or deforestation would be issues
even if there were less hyperglobalization. Second, Rodrik’s focus seems to be primarily on
global spillovers and global public goods. There are often spillovers and externalities between
neighboring countries within a region—for example, vector borne diseases in Africa, or
countries that share a common water table—that require a more localized but still cross-
national coordination.
Viewing the evolution of the development discourse as an ever-shifting balance between
state-oriented and market-oriented strategies, as we have done in this chapter, comes up
against an interesting variation in the case of International Public Goods. Public goods at the
national level are of course ones where market failures are inherent, and perhaps where
attempts to supply public goods through the state led to government failure. But Interna-
tional Public Goods are also a case where there is clearly market failure, but the experience of
international non-market provision is limited, because the experience of international coor-
dination is limited. Perhaps strong instances of international government failure will arise
when we try such mechanisms, but we will not know until we try.
Sub-national Pockets of Poverty

The terrain of development has shifted significantly, especially in the last quarter century.
The conventional classification of countries is in terms of their Gross National Income (GNI)
per capita using the World Bank’s Atlas method. The latest available classification uses data
for 2010: (i) Low Income Countries (LICs), less than $1,005; (ii) Lower Middle Income Coun-
tries (LMICs), $1,006–$3,975; (iii) Upper Middle Income Countries (UMICs), $3,976–
$12,275; and (iv) High Income Countries (HICs), more than $12,276. Strong growth in a
number of large developing countries has moved them from LICs to LMICs. Countries that
have made this transition include India, Indonesia, Ghana, Zambia, and Philippines. China
is now an Upper Middle Income Country, as is Thailand. Brazil, Mexico, and other Latin
American countries are also UMICs, and South Korea is an HIC. Mexico and South Korea
are members of the OECD.
If development were to be defined by increasing per capita national income, the world can
point to considerable success in the post-war period. However, there are two features of this
global picture that sound notes of caution. First, there is a group of countries stuck in a low
income trap for a number of reasons, including conflict and political fragility. Second, even
within countries that have exited from the LIC category, significant numbers of people
languish in poverty. Using official definitions, Sumner (2012) establishes the following
stunning stylized fact. Twenty years ago, 90 percent of the world’s poor lived in LICs. Today,
70 percent of the world’s poor live in MICs. In other words, the vast bulk of the world’s poor
now live in non-poor countries. In nation-states that have succeeded according to the con-
ventional definition of development, there are significant pockets of poverty.
These pockets of poverty almost invariably have a geographical nature. Spatial disparities
are and always have been a feature of development the world over. These disparities have
intensified in the past two decades in almost every developing country (Kanbur and Vena-
bles 2005). This divergence of economic performance within nation-states can be linked to
globalization, which has led to sharper expression of comparative advantage within each
nation-state. In Mexico, regions furthest away from the U.S. border have lagged behind; in
India, states with an educational advantage have raced ahead; in Indonesia, the outer islands
have not done as well as the core; in China, coastal provinces have performed more strongly
than inland ones.
When the pockets of poverty align with cleavages such as geographical divisions, which
are themselves the product of history, the nation-state itself may be challenged. The chal-
lenges come along a spectrum from political activities by regional parties, through claims for
greater regional autonomy, to outright wars of secession. Even where political dissent cannot
be expressed in the open, the ruling elite has to address it one way or another. Examples of
such tensions are abundant. In China, the Western provinces have significant Islamic and
ethnic minority populations. In India, pressures to split up large states into smaller entities
are constant, and have been conceded periodically—for example, the new states of Uttara-
khand, Jharkhand, and Chattisgarh, and ongoing agitations for a new state of Telengana. In
Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire, the north–south divide coincides with a religious divide
and regional economic balance, and is central to political balance and viability. In large
federations such as Brazil, regional disparities are prominent in the political discourse.
We thus come to an issue which is largely missing from the “market versus state” spectrum
that has structured so much of the development discourse in the post-war period: whether
the state itself can survive as currently structured. The question of “too much state” or “too
little state” becomes moot if divisions within the state lead to challenges to the legitimacy of
the state. Indeed, if the divisions within the state are intensified with a market-oriented
development strategy, then the state which adopted this market-oriented strategy may be
called into question. Paradoxically, perhaps, we need the state to maintain regional balance
and legitimate the nation-state, through which a national policy of market-oriented reforms
can in turn be legitimated! This certainly puts the “market versus state” debate in a new
perspective, a perspective that is likely to endure in the coming decades.
Conclusion: Revolutions or Evolution

in Development Thinking?
To those engaged in the cut and thrust of development debates, the twists and turns seem
large and significant. The turn toward market oriented development strategies in the 1980s
appeared to both supporters and opponents as “revolutionary.” For Fukuyama (1992)
these shifts were epochal in the right direction. For others the “neo-liberal” or “Washington
Consensus” strategies were equally epochal but in the wrong direction. However, viewed in
the perspective of the long arc of development thinking, stretching back to the Second
World War, the inter-war period, and before, these decadal shifts appear as relatively small
adjustments.
In fact, it would be difficult to identify “revolutions” in the progression of development
thinking that we have described in this chapter. Rather, what we have seen is the pendulum
swinging back and forth between two visions of development strategy, where each swing
absorbs key features of the challenges to the previous dominant mode of thinking and con-
verts itself into the next consensus waiting to be challenged. New challenges and issues may
appear, such as the increasingly important role of civil society, but older issues do not entirely
disappear. Mechanisms such as state intervention in agricultural research, discussed by
Arthur Lewis in his challenges to Sydney Caine, which became orthodoxy in the next phase
but were then dethroned in the phase thereafter, are once again present as policy
possibilities.
Development economics thinking does not seem to have revolutions in the sense of Kuhn’s
(1962) “scientific revolutions” which sweep all in their path and establish a new discourse
and completely new ways of thinking. This is perhaps because, as argued by Bronfenbrenner
(1971), the evolution of economic thinking itself cannot be seen in these terms:
Ptolemaic astronomy, phlogistonic chemistry, and humoral medicine are examples from
natural sciences. . . . But in economics, where are their equivalents? Currently fashionable
incomes-policy proposals are based on elements of the medieval justum pretium. . . . A French
physiocrat or économiste of the eighteenth century is brain brother to an American agricul-
tural fundamentalist of the twentieth. The Keynesian and the Hicksian crosses—paradigms
in the most literal sense of the term—have supplemented but never displaced the Marshallian
cross of supply and demand. The quantity theory of money, once considered moribund, has
been resuscitated, after a brief trance, by Professor Milton Friedman and his Chicago col-
leagues. Economic paradigms, economic “normal science,” both display a certain tenacity
Kuhn has not found in the natural sciences across the quadrangle. (Bronfenbrenner 1971: 2)
Bronfenbrenner goes on to characterize the progression of economic thinking as being

more dialectical in nature. The thesis of the dominant paradigm is under continuous chal-
lenge from a range of antitheses, which are not necessarily in agreement with each other.
The synthesis involves the paradigm modifying itself by absorbing some but not all of these
challenges, many of which live to fight another day. This synthesis becomes the thesis for
the next phase, and new and old challenges act as the antitheses as circumstances change
and issues arise. We have certainly seen this in our brief assessment of the post-war devel-
opment economics discourse. The “market versus state” debate has gone back and forth,
ever constant but also ever changing. If there is a synthesis now, it is perhaps one that has
learned the lessons of the overzealous embrace of markets at any cost, but one that is not
prepared to go back to the simple nostrum that state intervention can solve everything. This
synthesis now faces challenges to the notion of the role of the state itself, and so the evolu-
tion continues.
Note
1. A further problem was the behavior of the donors. Knowing that a withdrawal of funds
would leave these countries in disastrous shape, the international financial institutions
continued to provide assistance. The countries quickly learned this. For example, the
World Bank issued three structural adjustment credits to Kenya for the same agricultural
price reform (Devarajan, Dollar, and Holmgren 2001).
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chapter 5
pov ert y i n dev el opm en t

thought: sym ptom
or cause
david hulme
Introduction
The concept of poverty is central to contemporary meanings invested in “development.”

Whether reviewing the academic literature, the documents produced by international and
bilateral aid agencies, the plans of governments in developing countries, the World Wide Web,
or the media, “poverty” and its alleviation, reduction, and eradication appear as a major—
often the major—development issue. From early twenty-first-century perspectives this might
look natural, but, like all analytical and narrative positions, the relationship between poverty
and development is socially constructed. Indeed, poverty has not always been at the heart of
development thinking. The goals of the UN’s first Development Decade, declared in 1961
(5 percent economic growth per annum in developing countries, and foreign aid at 1 percent
of rich country GDP), stand in stark contrast to 2001’s Millennium Development Goals (with
their detailed lists of poverty reduction targets and indicators) and contemporary discussions
of “what comes next” (Pollard et al. 2010; Wilkinson and Hulme 2012).
This chapter examines how the concept of poverty has waxed and waned within develop-
ment thought and how these fluctuations have shaped development policy and action
toward, or away from, direct goals of poverty reduction or eradication. It provides an over-
view of poverty in social thought; examines the contestations over how poverty analysis is
positioned in development theory; charts the conceptual contestations around poverty;
presents a brief history of poverty in development thought and action; looks at the contrast-
ing geographies of contemporary poverty; and concludes by considering whether a synthesis
is emerging from structuralist and liberal understandings of poverty at present, or merely an
uneasy compromise while each “side” looks for a way to regain a dominant position.
The chapter is a review essay informed by the analytical framework of Robert Cox (2002),
which interprets the way things are at any specific time (the historical structure) as the
outcome of the dynamic and evolving interaction of ideas, institutions, and material
82 david hulme
capabilities. To illustrate this, the sidelining of poverty in development thought in the

1980s can be seen as resulting from (i) the global ascendancy of neo-liberal ideas priori-
tizing economic growth, (ii) the dominant position of the World Bank and the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund (IMF) within the international institutional architecture, and
(iii) the economic and military strength of the U.S. and its allies, and the influence of
business interests and the corporate sector (material capabilities) as the Soviet Union
weakened and collapsed.
Poverty in Social Thought
While contemporary ideas and concerns with poverty—especially the recently constructed
idea of global poverty (Hulme 2010)—are closely interwoven with development thought,
many of poverty’s conceptual roots lie in the historical analysis of social problems in Western
Europe. These go back to theological debates within Christianity about the responsibilities
of the better-off to the poor that began to shape public policy in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, when England introduced the Poor Laws and France tackled indigence.
It was in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the Enlightenment unfolded, that
social thought in Europe addressed poverty as a core issue. This included de Condorcet and
Paine’s search for an end to poverty; Burke and Malthus’s warnings of the dangers of such
radical thinking; Marx and Engels’s examinations of the evolution of capitalism and class
relations; and Booth and Rowntree’s identification of who exactly was poor (Stedman Jones
2004). Many ideas from these times—including the separation of the “deserving” and “unde-
serving” poor, the role of charity, poverty as a structural or individual phenomenon, poverty
lines, targeting, and welfare dependency—continue to influence contemporary develop-
ment thinking.
Ravallion’s (2011) analysis of digitized books identifies two “poverty enlightenments” that
display peaks in references to poverty in book titles between 1700 and 2000 (Figure 5.1). The
first is near the end of the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment thinkers focused on the big
social problems of their era and identified poverty as a scourge. The second, gaining momen-
tum from around 1960, comes at the end of the twentieth century, as “developing countries
become more prominent in the literature” (Ravallion 2011). Toward the millennium, the
intellectual focus of poverty analysis shifted from moral philosophy and welfare economics
toward development theory.
Positions and Concepts
As Harriss (this volume) elaborates, there have been and remain a number of contesting
development theories. Structuralists, Marxists and neo-Marxists, neo-liberals, and the broad
church of the post-Washington Consensus have different ideas both on the concept of pov-
erty and how it fits into development theory. Such debates have tremendous practical signifi-
cance. If poverty is understood as a lack of income, policies to increase income are likely to
0.004%
0.0032%
0.0024%
0.0016%
0.0008%
0.00%
1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
poverty
Figure 5.1 Incidence of reference to “poverty” in Google Books, 1700–2000

84 david hulme
be prioritized. By contrast, if poverty is conceptualized along other dimensions, such as

limited access to basic education and health services, policies to expand and improve access
to basic services are more likely to be prescribed.
The positioning of poverty within any particular school of thought, and the theorized
relationships between poverty, economic growth, and inequality, are especially important
(see the chapters by Yusuf and by Stewart and Samman in this volume). While the contem-
porary post-Washington Consensus declares poverty reduction to be at the center of its
analysis and to be the primary goal of development, this was not the case for most of the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century. Structuralists (see Harriss, this volume, for an elaboration
of the different schools) instead viewed the overarching goal of development as catching up
with the West. This meant prioritizing state-led industrial growth to reduce per capita
income inequality between nations. The mass consumption associated with high levels of
per capita income was assumed to reduce poverty through “trickle down” processes. Neo-
Marxists and dependency theorists placed the primary focus on reducing inequality, which
they viewed not only as income inequality but as exploitative social relations. Development
required radical social transformation into classless societies autonomous of the capitalist
system. Poverty was a symptom of inequitable social relations and potentially an analytical
distraction from the underpinning causes of global inequality. Neo-liberals placed poverty
in a subsidiary position, embracing economic growth through market forces as the analyti-
cal and policy priority. Poverty would automatically decline as economic growth accelerated.
Inequality was not a problem: indeed, for some neo-liberals inequality was desirable, as it
fostered competition and contributed to economic efficiency and higher growth rates.
At present, post-Washington Consensus liberals (both center right and center left) are in
agreement that poverty analysis and reduction are the central tenets of development theory
and action. Whether this is a “synthesis” (see Harriss, this volume) or an uneasy compromise
remains to be seen. However, where the center right champions poverty reduction by “pro-
poor growth” (growth with poverty reduction), the center left adopts rights-based and
human development concepts to create a more redistributive framework (poverty and ine-
quality reduction). These positionings of poverty within development thought can lead to
the excessive highlighting of poverty (in poverty measurement and analysis and as a priority
goal), as in the heady days around the millennium, or to its relative neglect, as in the neo-
liberal 1980s.
Alongside contestations about how poverty fits into development theory are debates
about “what is poverty.” It is useful to draw attention to four particularly important, but
overlapping, conceptual issues: narrow versus broad conceptions of poverty; absolute and
relative poverty; objective and subjective poverty; and whether poverty is due to individual
agency-related or to structural factors.
Poverty can be framed in narrow or broad terms (Lister 2004: 13). A narrow approach is
easily comprehensible and measurable, while a broader approach explores the multifaceted
nature of poverty and the processes that create, maintain, or reduce poverty. At the narrow
end of this continuum are national poverty lines, based on subsistence concepts of per capita
household income or consumption (in most countries around 2,300 calories per day per
adult) (Dercon 2006). The greatest “narrowing” is the application of a global US$1.25 per day
(in purchasing power parity or PPP terms) to all of humanity.
Unidimensional concepts contrast with multidimensional notions that view poverty as a
set of material and non-material deprivations. Amartya Sen’s work on capabilities (Sen 2001)
poverty in development thought: symptom or cause 85
has been particularly important in promoting broader understandings of poverty. For Sen,
development is about people’s ability to raise their capabilities so that they have greater free-
dom to achieve the “functionings” they want to do or be (for example, living a long and
healthy life, being a respected member of a community, raising a family, achieving satis-
faction in sports or cultural activities). From this perspective, people experience poverty
when they are deprived of basic capabilities: the ability to avoid hunger, become literate,
appear in public without shame, or take part in social activities, for example. While Sen
remains skeptical about the merits of reducing human development to a single indicator,
he was persuaded by Mahubub ul Haq to help operationalize this complex idea (Sen 2006),
in the process creating the Human Development Index (HDI) that combines three crude
indicators of capabilities—life expectancy, educational attainment, and average income—
for measuring progress in human development. The United Nations Development Pro-
gramme (UNDP)’s Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has further broadened this
measurement (UNDP 2010).
While some argue passionately for a narrow or broad concept, others use both simultane-
ously. Institutionally one can see this playing out by contrasting the measures championed
by the World Bank and by United Nations agencies, particularly UNDP (Therien 1999). The
World Bank has pioneered the dollar-a-day concept and helped many countries undertake
Household Income and Expenditure Surveys (HIES) for calculating income and consump-
tion poverty. The UNDP has championed broader human development measures such as
the HDI and the MPI.
There are also heated debates around the merits of absolute and relative concepts of pov-
erty. Rowntree’s (1901) seminal work has been interpreted as defining poverty in absolute
terms. From this perspective, poverty occurs when people cannot meet their minimum
physical needs because of lack of income. This leads to an unambiguous poverty line. This
method is simple and measurable and focuses on paramount human needs. Without suffi-
cient food, people cannot function effectively, their health declines, and eventually they die.
These absolute measures were advanced beyond headcounts in the 1980s when the Foster,
Greer, and Thorbecke (FGT) (1984) measures were introduced, measuring poverty inci-
dence, depth, and severity.
Major technical concerns arise, however, in dealing with differences in the minimum
amount of nutrition that people need according to age, health status, employment, and
household size. Even analysts such as Ravallion (who developed the dollar-a-day measure)
confirm that the specification of a poverty line always involves a degree of arbitrary selec-
tion. Absolute poverty lines are also criticized for treating people like livestock—being
reared individually, but not as part of broader society. This perspective recognizes that
human beings are social actors, and argues that poverty must be defined relative to others
in a society. How could someone in Canada, for example, participate in society if they did
not have access to television, cell phones, the Internet, or culturally appropriate (and warm)
clothing—things which most fellow citizens see as “normal?” OECD countries have
embraced this perspective, with their official poverty lines almost always defined in relative
terms. In European countries, the poverty line is usually set at 60 percent of a country’s
median income (Lister 2004: 42). For some, however, relative poverty is only a small step in
the right direction. It is relational poverty that needs to be analyzed—not merely income
inequality but the unequal power relations between different groups in a society. (See, for
example, du Toit 2009.)
86 david hulme
A third axis of debate concerns objective and subjective poverty measurements. Objective
definitions and measures of poverty (dollar-a-day and FGT measures) are specified by
researchers who decide who is poor and non-poor according to their definitions and survey
analyses. Such definitions and measures are rigorously conceptualized and specified,
permitting comparisons to be made over time and space. However, critics point out that
such definitions inevitably involve explicit or implicit value judgments, and so the claim to
objectivity is open to challenge.
Subjective definitions and measures of poverty are made by people about their own status
and others in their community or society. They are subjective, since the respondents, not the
external analyst, determine what constitutes poverty and the minimum levels of goods,
services, or well-being. This has the advantage of letting those most knowledgeable about the
experience of poverty determine how poverty is defined and measured. It can also be argued
to be ethically more justifiable than objective approaches, as it requires public deliberation
(Sen 2001) and recognizes the right of poor people and communities in creating and dis-
seminating social knowledge, thereby potentially empowering them (Chambers 1997). It
also has the disadvantage that people living in different areas may set different criteria that
may change over time, making subjective comparisons difficult (Qizilbash 2003).
Finally, and of particular importance for understanding debates about relationships
between poverty and inequality, comes the contrast between theoretical approaches focused
on human agency and individual behavior and those focused on the operations of social
structures. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, and Giddens (1984) has
proposed a conceptual means—structuration—of integrating both approaches. Individual-
istic approaches benefit from the precision with which they identify their units of analysis
(individuals) and the simplicity of their behavioral models (rational choice). Structural
analyses find it hard to match such precision and simplicity, as they argue that the units of
analysis are multiple and overlapping and that behaviors are complex and, at best, only
partly predictable.
Individualistic analysis has links to many powerful ideas about poverty, some with deep
historical roots. Golding and Middleton (1982) have shown that from the sixteenth century
the poor in Europe were seen as either “deserving” or “undeserving.” These ideas carry
through to today, particularly in elite perceptions of the poor (Reis and Moore 2005). The
“deserving poor” are theorized as a group of people who are unable to participate in eco-
nomic activity because of factors beyond their control: disabled persons, accident victims,
the elderly, the infirm, and orphans. They merit social support. In contrast, the “undeserving
poor” are a group of voluntarily indigent people who choose to be poor because of character
defects: laziness, lassitude, work-shirking, drunkenness, promiscuousness, or immorality,
among others. Society has no obligation to such people, as they choose to live in poverty.
Implicitly, this theorizes the undeserving poor as living in an economy that can provide all of
them with adequate incomes if they choose to take advantage of opportunities. Under- and
unemployment, excessively low wages, and worker exploitation (debt bondage, slavery, child
labor) are temporary market imperfections in such models.
Structuralist accounts directly challenge rational choice analyses and argue that
inequality is the cornerstone of processes that create poverty. Their units of analysis are
collectivities—classes, races, genders, ethnic groups—and the focus is on social relations
between entities. While economic inequality is important to structuralists, they are also
concerned about social and political inequalities. These frameworks highlight the ways
more powerful groups are able to impose their preferences on less powerful groups
through the exercise of economic, social, and political power.
There are many ways that social structures create poverty. Childhood experiences and
outcomes are of great significance. Children born into low-income households—with low
social standing and limited political power—fall into vicious circles of capability depriva-
tion. They are underweight at birth and likely to have weakened immune systems and cur-
tailed physical and cognitive development due to their mother’s under-nourishment and a
lack of prenatal, postnatal, and infant care. Unequal access to schooling and their need to
work in income-generating activities means many remain illiterate. Their social networks
are limited to other disadvantaged people, constraining the information and support they
can access when they mature. They also remain unlikely to inherit land or other physical
assets, and may have to take on their parents’ debts. In oversaturated labor markets the
majority have no choice but to take up low-paid, irregular, physically demanding jobs that
make it virtually impossible to accumulate productive assets or develop the human capital of
their children through good food, education, and health care. Vulnerability further fuels
processes of impoverishment and inequality.
The structuralist case powerfully argues that poverty is not the result of indolence, lassi-
tude, immorality, or character deficiencies. Rather, it is unequal social relations that permit
the poor to be economically exploited, socially subordinated, and politically marginalized.
Powerful groups even “have the power to construct ‘the poor’ as other through words, images
and deeds” (Lister 2004: 178).
Across different schools of development theory there are considerable tensions between
those who pursue concepts of poverty that facilitate measurement (narrow, means-based,
absolute, and objective) and those who believe that such simplifications are flawed as they
avoid the more structural aspects of poverty essential to understanding how poverty is pro-
duced and reproduced. The “measurement camp” is usually occupied by economists,
econometricians, quantitative sociologists, and social statisticians. Governments, interna-
tional agencies, and policy-makers gravitate toward this camp. In the “structuralist camp”
are critical sociologists, anthropologists, radical political economists, and heterodox econo-
mists. Their analyses are most often picked up and supported by activist non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and civil society groups, trade unionists, environmentalists, and left-
of-center political parties.
The die-hard measurers argue that qualitative approaches lack rigor and permit the
analysts to select non-representative empirical materials to advance their argument. The
die-hard qualitative analysts argue that by focusing on what is readily measurable at the indi-
vidual and household level, these dominant measurement approaches neglect the analysis of
culture, identity, agency, and social structure that are central to the processes that c reate
wealth and poverty (see Chambers 1983). In a particularly trenchant criticism, du Toit (2005:
1–2) identifies the “poverty measurement blues”; (see also du Toit 2009):
. . . the difficulties arise out of the domination of development studies and poverty research
by . . . the “econometric imaginary”: an approach that frames questions of social understand-
ing as questions of measurement. . . . [They] are undermined by their reliance on a mystifica-
tory theoretical metanarrative that tries to imbue poverty judgements with a spurious
objectivity, and . . . they direct attention away from structural aspects of persistent poverty. (du
Toit 2009: 1)
88 david hulme
A Brief History of Poverty in Development

Thought and Practice
If one moves to the start of the development age in the late 1940s and 1950s, then I believe an
important and persistent characteristic of the use of poverty in development, as a concept
and narrative, is evident: namely, that presenting development as poverty reduction or elim-
ination is much more attractive (and necessary) for leaders and governments in developed
than in developing countries. U.S. President Truman’s inaugural speech in 1949 illustrates
this well. Late in the drafting process a Point Four was added “for making the benefits of our
scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of
underdeveloped areas” (Truman 1949). This focused on poverty reduction: “More than half
the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate.
They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is
a handicap and a threat to them and to more prosperous areas” (Truman 1949).
As leaders of the newly independent nations—Sukarno (Indonesia), Nehru (India),
Jinnah (Pakistan), and later Nkrumah (Ghana), Nyerere (Tanzania), Kenyatta (Kenya), and
many others—moved from barracks and jail cells (and demanding freedom) to presidential
and prime ministerial offices (and drafting national plans), they promised rapid moderniza-
tion (economic growth, industrialization, infrastructure, durable goods, mass consumption)
and national development more than poverty reduction. At the UN General Assembly in
New York, with a membership mainly of industrialized countries, the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR) Article 25 might declare that “[e]veryone has the right to a stand-
ard of living adequate for the health and well-being of his family, including food, clothing,
housing and medical care,” but the leaders of new nations were rarely so unambitious or
candid as to talk of the mere achievement of basic needs.1
While mass poverty was the norm across Asia and Africa (and much of Latin America, the
Caribbean, and the Pacific) during their era of independence, reducing poverty was rarely an
explicit analytical or policy focus in the 1950s and 1960s in the way that it became in the early
1970s and in the mid-1990s (Hulme 2010). Rather, the pursuit of economic growth, through
the transfer of finance, technology, and institutions from the U.S./Europe or USSR, would
transform economic and social conditions, including poverty. National leaders’ speeches
might reference ending poverty, ignorance, and disease, but not directly. Modernization and
growth would ensure that poverty became a residual problem that could be dealt with by
social policy or charity.
For all except a few East Asian countries, post-Second World War promises of moderniza-
tion were not delivered. Across Asia and Africa, relative economic stagnation and mass pov-
erty remained the norm (although some social advances were being made, especially in
public health, life expectancy, and literacy). This led to two different responses. From the
developing world came the analysis that “underdevelopment” (Fanon 1961; Rodney 1972 ) or
the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA)’s structural obstacles (Prebisch 1984)
were blocking economic and social progress. Africa, Asia, and Latin America (the periph-
ery) were underdeveloped because of their relationships with the U.S. and Europe (the core),
which meant that development required the reform of the core’s exploitative relations of the
periphery (Frank 1969) rather than limited financial, technological, or institutional transfers
from advanced nations. These radical ideas were prepared to shift to revolutionary if
required, identifying their priority for action as tackling the root causes of poverty and
underdevelopment, namely, the structures and relationships of post-colonial capitalism.
In the early 1970s, development thought in the major international agencies began to focus
directly on poverty. The International Labour Organization (ILO) and other UN agencies
proposed a “basic needs” approach to development that encouraged national governments
and aid donors to prioritize policies, budgets, and actions that would ensure disadvantaged
people achieved their basic needs. The exact nature of these basic needs was heatedly
debated—food, potable water, clothing, shelter, and basic health care . . . probably educa-
tion . . . perhaps law and order—but development was about governments directly meeting
basic needs everywhere.
A few years later, in 1974, the World Bank shifted its focus to poverty. In his famous Nai-
robi speech, World Bank President Robert McNamara (1973) declared that a direct assault on
poverty in rural areas was the priority and could be achieved by a greater focus on rural
development through Integrated Rural Development Projects (IRDPs) rather than urban
industrialization.2 IRDPs focused on increasing rural incomes through infrastructural
investment and agricultural development, with social dimensions—education, nutrition,
women in development, and others—as related components. While “basic needs” and “rural
development” both sought to reduce poverty directly, the former focused more on social
protection while the latter focused on income generation and enterprise promotion.
Also from the World Bank but from a different perspective came Chenery, Ahluwalia, and
Duloy’s (1974) call for redistribution with growth. This advocated that poverty reduction
would require tackling inequality directly, and the rich world would need to redistribute
some of its wealth. This moved a little toward the underdevelopment framework, recogniz-
ing a need for structural change. Depending on one’s reading of the motivations of World
Bank research, this could be seen as arising pragmatically from the desperate conditions of
mass poverty in developing countries or as a carefully constructed tactic to divert attention
from the much more radical underdevelopment analyses coming from the Third World.
As it turned out, this emphasis on poverty analysis and direct poverty reduction within
development thinking and practice was to prove only a brief interlude. By the late 1970s neo-
liberal ideas were ascendant around the globe, and over the 1980s and 1990s the Washington
Consensus (Williamson 1990) and its structural adjustment policies dominated the intel-
lectual and policy agenda, arguing that economic growth was the key to development. This
could be achieved if countries deregulated, privatized, and liberalized: as a side effect,
poverty would automatically be reduced. Throughout the 1980s economic growth (through
liberalization) became the dominant analytical focus in development thought, and this con-
tinued into the 1990s as Russia took the “shock medicine” that was presumed would solve all
its economic and social challenges. Poverty, framed as the social consequence of structural
adjustment, took a secondary position, serving mainly as a critique of neo-liberal thinking
and policy. Below the surface of the neo-liberal versus anti-neo-liberal intellectual confron-
tation, however, alternative ways of understanding poverty were advancing, particularly in
terms of human development and gender and development.
The year 1990 marked a tipping point in the evolution of ideas about development and
how poverty was positioned within development thought. Against the backdrop of the end
of the Cold War and growing doubts about structural adjustment, the World Bank’s World
Development Report 1990 chose poverty as its theme, acknowledging the need for economic
90 david hulme
reform to be accompanied by social policies. The report presented the first serious attempt to
count the world’s poor using a common measure. It introduced the dollar-a-day headcount
measure of global poverty and estimated that around 1.1 billion people lived in extreme pov-
erty. More significantly, UNDP (1990) published the first Human Development Report,
promoting the idea of human development as an alternative to economic growth as a concept
and goal. This facilitated the promotion of a broader understanding of what poverty reduc-
tion was about than previous measurements of income and consumption poverty had
allowed, and made this alternative more accessible to a wider group of professionals and the
media. It gave left-of-center scholars and social activists a relatively coherent framework
from which to argue for policy change (although it gave them limited guidance for challeng-
ing macroeconomic policy orthodoxy).
In the same year, 1990, the World Summit for Children was held in New York, back to
which the processes leading to the creation of the poverty-obsessed Millennium Develop-
ment Goals (MDGs) can be traced (Hulme 2010). This summit achieved its goals of mobiliz-
ing political commitment and setting concrete targets to improve the prospects of the world’s
children. In addition, it re-established the notion that global summits—large meetings of
national leaders—could motivate processes of change and lead to improvements in human
welfare. Norm entrepreneurs (Fukuda-Parr and Hulme 2011) throughout the UN and civil
society were on a roll in the early 1990s, and other major UN conferences followed: on
Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro in 1992), Human Rights (Vienna in 1993),
and Population and Development (Cairo in 1994).
The peak year for UN summitry was 1995 with the World Summit on Social Development
(WSSD) in Copenhagen and the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. The
Social Summit was crucial in pushing global poverty reduction onto the international agenda
and stimulating an unprecedented conceptual, empirical, and policy focus on poverty. It was
here that a global consensus (with 117 heads of state and government present) was first
reached placing poverty reduction as the priority goal for development (UNDP 1997: 108).
The WSSD approved the target of eradicating dollar-a-day poverty and reaffirmed declara-
tions made at New York, Rio, and Cairo. Implicitly it drew on the idea of human develop-
ment, viewing poverty as multi-dimensional. After Copenhagen, explaining how poverty
would be tackled became a significant focus of international relations and development
thought. Tackling global poverty moved onto the “international agenda” at the UN, G7,
OECD, European Union, African Union, and other venues.
In the same year, the UN Women’s Conference at Beijing—driven to a great degree by the
women’s movement—reaffirmed goals of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Many
delegates saw the time was ripe for ambitious, post-Cold War global strategies of empower-
ment and social transformation rather than the technical and target-focused approach of
Copenhagen (Eyben 2006). However, the energy and drive of the Beijing conference were
not matched by any impact on global policy making or development thought. Being the sec-
ond conference that year proved disastrous: only two heads of state attended, giving it little
political leverage in the international arena.
UN conferences continued in the latter half of the 1990s but many observers reported
a “conference fatigue.” The forum for shaping the global agenda on poverty reduction
shifted from these vast and diverse UN jamborees to much smaller formalized meetings
centered on Paris, attended mainly by men from industrialized countries working for aid
agencies.
The debates and declarations of these global conferences and summits were impressive.
They led to increased media coverage of the issues and raised public awareness about devel-
opment and poverty. However, action after these events, with the exception of the Child
Summit, was often relatively limited. The annual budgets and policies of developing coun-
tries did not systematically shift toward declared goals, and levels of official development
assistance (ODA) continued to decline. This created unease among the donor club—the
OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC)—leading them to produce a report in
1996 that listed seven International Development Goals (IDGs) in an attempt to generate
public support for foreign aid. These goals brought together components from the declara-
tions of recent Summits and Conferences, although the Copenhagen commitment to eradi-
cating poverty (by an unspecified date) was converted into halving extreme poverty by 2015.
IDGs achieved political traction in some OECD countries, such as the UK, but had little
impact over powerful donors such as the United States and France, or the World Bank and
IMF (Hulme 2010). In developing countries the poverty-focused IDGs had little or no reso-
nance, coming from a document produced entirely by rich countries in which promises of
“partnership” sounded like well-worn rhetoric. However, this list would make a comeback.
In 1998 the global poverty agenda continued to be reshaped in preparation for the UN’s
Millennium Assembly, held in New York in September 2000. The UN’s new Secretary-
General, Kofi Annan, was keen to make global poverty reduction central to the UN agenda.
He identified four main themes for the Millennium Assembly. The second was “develop-
ment, including poverty eradication,” signifying the institutionalization of the shift in devel-
opment thought that had emerged at Copenhagen. Development was no longer about
economic growth and generalized improvements in welfare; rather, it was synonymous with
targeted poverty eradication (or at least poverty reduction). Between 1998 and 2000, a com-
plex set of formal and informal negotiations and releases of competing reports sought to
specify exactly what poverty eradication/reduction was. The aid donors of the OECD pushed
their conceptual and strategic preferences based on the original IDGs and supported by the
World Bank and IMF. In parallel, the UN was producing a declaration for the Millennium
Summit, a document that had to satisfy a larger constituency with very different interests:
the 189 members of the UN General Assembly.
Over the summer of 2000 there were frantic negotiations about what should finally go
into the Millennium Declaration regarding goals of development and poverty eradication.3
With around 150 heads of government or state due to attend, and Annan seeking a mandate
for UN reform, the Millennium Summit had to be a success. As the big day approached,
a compromise was reached that included goals for rich countries (for aid, debt, trade, and
policy reforms) and strengthened the goals related to gender equality and child and mater-
nal mortality. These additions, deletions, and compromises worked. The Millennium Decla-
ration was unanimously approved at the UN General Assembly on September 18, 2000, and
what had once been “development” officially became “development and poverty eradication”
(UN 2000).
The next formal stage of the process was for the Secretary-General to draw a “road map”
showing how the world would achieve its global commitments to poverty reduction. Before
the UN could develop a plan for implementing the Millennium Declaration it needed final
agreement on what the exact goals and targets were. Negotiations over 2001 eventually led to
the creation of a task force comprised of officials from the DAC (representing OECD), World
Bank, IMF, and UNDP. This was the task force that finalized the Millennium Development
92 david hulme
Goals (MDGs), bringing together concepts of human development and results-based man-
agement in an unlikely pairing (Hulme 2010). Notably, in conceptual terms, human rights
are part of the preamble to the MDGs but no goals are set, and the only reference to inequal-
ity is in terms of reducing gender inequality at the national level. The international political
economy of the millennium could accommodate gender, but any broader notion of equality,
or of less inequality between countries, was unacceptable to those with material power.
While the MDGs, and recently the post-2015 development agenda, have remained impor-
tant in official public discussions (which remain excessively influenced by the aid industry’s
interests), keeping global poverty genuinely on the international agenda since the Monterrey
Summit of 2002 has been difficult. Other global priorities—terrorism, trade policy, eco-
nomic growth, national security, energy security, the financial crisis—have proved more
pressing, and national self-interest remains the dominant force in international negotiations,
as evidenced by the lack of progress over climate change.
At the national level, within some (perhaps most) countries with large poor populations,
thinking and policy have shifted away from poverty analysis (and prioritizing individual
human development) toward national economic development. Low-income countries such
as Bangladesh, Ghana, Uganda, Vietnam, and others have discontinued Poverty Reduction
Strategies, returning to five-year national development plans that prioritize growth. Emerg-
ing economies, most obviously China and India, focus on maintaining growth as their top
national goal. As discussed below, contemporary development thought can be seen as hav-
ing moved to a synthesis position combining elements of structuralism with liberalism—so
that growth, inequality, and poverty all have a major analytical role—or to an uneasy com-
promise in which liberals promote the analysis of market-based growth by demonstrating
growth’s (absolute) poverty-reducing effects, and structuralists seek to promote the analysis
of inequality through more relativist and relational poverty analysis.
The Geography of Poverty
Over the years the geography of poverty (i.e. the areas where poverty is most concentrated)
has changed and different ideas about how to understand this geography have been pro-
posed. In the early development decades (after the Second World War), when poverty was
not a major analytical focus, the underlying assumption was that poverty (then meaning low
GDP per capita) was pervasive across the “developing world” or “Third World.” It was
assumed that poor people lived in poor (i.e. low-income) countries; the idea that poverty
levels might be very different in countries with similar GDP per capita was often ignored.
The Third World was a broad region stretching across Asia, Africa, Latin America, the
Caribbean, and the Pacific, covering the majority of the world’s population (excluding only
North America, Western Europe, and Australia and New Zealand). Its boundaries were not
precisely specified, however, and they became increasingly blurred as Japan and later the
East Asian Tigers (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong) rapidly achieved
middle-income and later high-income status.
Although the idea of developing countries remained in play for many years (indeed, it is
still used today), the meaning of this term became even more blurred as Malaysia, Thailand,
Mauritius, Turkey, Chile, the oil economies of the Middle East, and others achieved high
growth rates. The increasing availability of reliable data on social indicators and the inven-
tion of measures such as the Human Development Index (HDI) permitted development
analysts to focus more and more on the conditions of specific countries and to explore the
ways in which progression to middle-income country (MIC) status was and was not associ-
ated with improvements in other dimensions of well-being. The oil exporting countries of
the Middle East and others (such as South Africa) reached MIC status but their high levels of
inequality meant that income and multidimensional poverty did not dramatically decrease,
as development theory had earlier assumed.
After the end of the Cold War in 1989–90, with growing integration of the world economy,
globalization became an important concept. Not surprisingly, the idea and measurement of
“global poverty” came into currency and it proved an attractive idea for OECD aid donors,
who increasingly had to justify aid budgets not in foreign policy terms but in terms of human
need. Mapping the geography of poverty and justifying the allocation of aid to poorer parts
of the world became an important part of discourse and policy for aid agencies.
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), often referred to as “Africa,” was identified as the region facing
the most severe challenges and where poverty was most widespread and deepest. This was
not new—the Berg Report in 1981 had focused on SSA (Berg 1981)—but took on growing
momentum after 1990. Africa was seen as special because of its low rates of economic growth,
poor human development indicators, high levels of violent conflict, and the HIV/AIDS pan-
demic. During the UN conferences and summits of the 1990s running up to the Millennium
Summit, declarations often highlighted Africa’s special needs: while average world per capita
income had risen by 40 percent in the last quarter of the twentieth century, average income
per capita in Africa remained unchanged. Many countries, including Nigeria, South Africa,
and Uganda, had in fact seen average incomes decline since the 1970s. Staggeringly, average
per capita income in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire) dropped
from $730 in 1973 to $220 in 1998—extreme poverty had become a national norm.
Social indicators were also a cause for alarm in sub-Saharan Africa, with the HIV/AIDS
pandemic reducing life expectancy in many countries and literacy, nutrition, and child and
maternal mortality making little progress (Hulme 2010).The international media also con-
stantly examined crises and conflicts in Africa, but rarely covered day-to-day life or African
successes, bolstering public “Afro-pessimism.” Against this background, the Millennium
Declaration, approved unanimously by the UN’s 189 member countries, included a chapter
on “Meeting the Special Needs of Africa” (UN 2000: 7). The belief that the heartland of
contemporary poverty is in Africa was reinforced by Paul Collier’s (2007) influential book
The Bottom Billion, which argued that 70 percent of the world’s poorest people live in Africa
and that the geography of global poverty is “Africa plus,” meaning SSA and a set of other
countries scattered around the world.
However, if one maps the data for Asia and disaggregates it for Indian states and Chinese
provinces—which is not unreasonable given that most of these sub-national units have pop-
ulations much bigger than those of the average African country—a more complex pattern
emerges (Alkire 2010). A second poor continent can be identified: sub-Siberian Asia. This is
an almost contiguous area that stretches across northern India and Nepal to Bangladesh,
Burma, and Laos, takes in much of central and western China with Mongolia, includes
Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan), and
completes in Afghanistan and Pakistan (see Hulme 2010: 44 for a map). Economic indicators
94 david hulme
of poverty (the $1.25-a-day headcount) and social indicators (illiteracy, maternal mortality,
gender equality) for sub-Siberian Asia are much higher than to the north in Russia, the west
(Iran and Turkey), the south (southern India and Sri Lanka), and the east (Thailand and
coastal China). Research financed by NASA, using night-time lights as indicators of wealth,
reaches similar conclusions: sub-Saharan Africa and sub-Siberian Asia are the two vast
regions of the world where the populations are too poor to shine a light at night (Elvidge
et al. 2009). While this can be argued to be the world’s second poor continent, it must be
recognized that with the exception of Afghanistan, the depth of income poverty in sub-
Siberian Asia is not at the extreme levels of sub-Saharan Africa. What it suggests, however, is
that the geography of the world’s extreme poverty needs to be understood as “sub-Saharan
Africa and sub-Siberian Asia plus some other countries.”
Relatedly, Sumner (2010) has charted where poverty is concentrated in terms of country
income status. He points out that while the assumption that most poor people lived in poor
countries was earlier correct, this is no longer the case. With the graduation of China and
India to middle-income status (and to a lesser degree Brazil, Indonesia, and other large pop-
ulation countries), the majority of the world’s $1.25-a-day poor now live in middle-income
countries. This has created a dilemma for donors who wish to target poverty reduction but
whose citizens are reluctant to provide aid to countries with sizable wealth. That India can
afford a space program, while the UK cannot, has made UK aid to India contentious, culmi-
nating in the UK’s recent commitment to end financial assistance to India by 2015.
Synthesis or Uneasy Compromise?
If one rates the significance of an idea by how widely cited it is, then the last fifteen to twenty
years have been a bumper time for poverty (Ravallion 2011). Since the demise of structural
adjustment and the end of the Cold War, the concept of poverty has risen in prominence and
has been very closely associated with development—indeed, leading agencies have at times
seen these two as synonymous. Whether this will continue, and whether this has been advan-
tageous or disadvantageous to poor people is unclear.
In his review of development theory, Harriss (this volume), citing Edwin Brett (2009),
posits that we may have reached a new synthesis that recognizes “the practical failures of
both structuralism and liberalism.” This new synthesis moves away from grand theorizing to
produce middle-range theory that sees that both states and markets have to work to improve
human well-being. He identifies Brett’s concept of “liberal institutional pluralism” as chart-
ing a theoretical way forward. One could argue that for poverty this is already the case, with
analysts of both structuralist and liberal tendencies agreeing to the MDGs and the shift of
the international financial institutions (IFIs) away from one-size-fits-all policy prescriptions
to a greater focus on customized national poverty reduction strategies (PRSs) and institu-
tional development.
However, whether this is a genuine synthesis or merely a temporary lull in the structural-
ism versus liberalism contestations remains to be seen. Both sides may agree that poverty
reduction is a good thing, but there remains a yawning chasm between those who theorize
that the cause of poverty is inequality (and to whom reducing national and international
inequality is the paramount issue) and those who theorize it is lack of growth (and to whom
releasing the power of the market to increase growth is the top priority). In recent work,
Rehman Sobhan (2010), a long-time structuralist, has attempted a Brett-type synthesis
through a “conception of poverty as injustice,” but neo-classical economists view his
approach not as a synthesis but as structuralism in disguise.
The burgeoning number of consultations, debates, and meetings about the post-2015
development agenda are trying to shape the future of poverty in development thinking.
Analysts of a structuralist tendency are concerned that with David Cameron as the OECD’s
representative on the three-person UN steering committee, the next set of goals will shift
toward market-based growth, leaving human rights and reducing inequality to be men-
tioned as “principles” but omitted from the actual goals (as in 2000–01). Scholar-activists
such as Richard Jolly and colleagues (2011) are arguing for a revised set of goals that place
reducing inequality at their heart. These liberal versus structuralist debates will rumble on
until the last minute when one can anticipate a new compromise on the goals of development—
not a synthesis—between these two intellectual camps. The concept of poverty will be central
to this compromise.
Notes
1. The two main exceptions were Gandhi and Nyerere, with their agrarian visions of
development. They stood at odds to the visions of most other independence leaders in
Asia and Africa.
2. Michael Lipton’s (1977) influential book on “urban bias” supported the focus on rural
poverty.
3. The focus here is on the “development and poverty eradication” goals and not the entire
document.
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chapter 6
i n equa lit y a n d
dev el opm en t:
a n ov erv iew
frances stewart and emma samman
Whichever way we look at it, we always return to the same conclusion: namely that
the social pact establishes equality among the citizens in that they all pledge them-
selves under the same conditions and all enjoy the same rights.
(Rousseau 1968 [first edition 1762]: 76)
It is precisely because the force of circumstances tends continually to destroy
equality that the force of legislation should always tend to its maintenance.
(Rousseau 1968: 97)
Introduction
This chapter analyzes inequality—why it matters, how it is defined, how it has been chang-
ing, and how it might be reduced.1 It considers inequality among people and among social
groups, and the issues associated with each. While many countries have succeeded in raising
their growth rates in the 2000s compared with the previous two decades, in the majority of
cases this has been accompanied by rising income inequality—and inequalities among
groups are a key source of unrest and conflict. The issue of inequality is consequently becom-
ing increasingly central to development, because it has many deleterious effects on society
and is intrinsically unjust. Moreover, without redistribution, the position of poor individuals
and groups can only be improved by economic growth, which generally involves adverse
environmental consequences.
inequality and development: an overview 99
Defining Inequality
Several issues have to be considered in defining inequality. Important aspects are:
• inequality among whom;

• inequality in what space or dimension; and
• inequality over what time.
Inequality among Whom

Inequality may be measured among individuals within a particular society, or in a region
or in the world as a whole. Inequality among individuals (or households) is most com-
monly measured within a particular country, but there are some efforts to measure ine-
quality among all citizens of the world. We shall term inequality among individuals (or
households) vertical inequality.
Alternatively, inequality may be measured across groups of people within a society—for
example, ethnic or religious groups, or people grouped by region, age, or gender. We shall
term this type of inequality horizontal inequality. Inequality is also often measured among
countries or groups of countries (like developed and developing countries), which is a type
of horizontal inequality.
Each of these types of inequality is relevant in particular contexts. For example, to find out
how a particular level of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita translates into poverty,
vertical inequality measures are appropriate. Horizontal inequalities (within a nation) are
relevant as a source of the type of injustice that can lead to societal conflict. And inequalities
among nations are relevant to issues of global justice and global redistribution policies, such
as aid flows.
Inequality in What Space

Although traditionally inequality is measured in income space, and this or inequality in con-
sumption is still dominant in measures of vertical inequality, income has been widely criticized
as an unsatisfactory indicator of welfare or development. Sen has been a leading critic (Sen
1977): he argues that development is about advancing freedoms or capabilities, defined as what
people can do or be, and consequently that inequality should be assessed in the space of capa-
bilities (Sen 1980; Sen 1999). This suggests a multidimensional concept. Inequality may then be
measured independently in relation to each important capability (such as the ability to be well
nourished or healthy), or in the resources needed to achieve each important capability (such as
access to food or health services), or through a multidimensional index. Nonetheless, income
distribution remains important in helping to determine access to v arious freedoms. But
because the correlation between the distribution of income and that of various capabilities is
not very strong, one cannot simply substitute one for the others (Samman et al. 2011).
Some capabilities seem to be of greater importance than others, either because they seem
intrinsically important or because they are essential for the realization of other capabilities.
100 frances stewart and emma samman
For example, living a long life represents an important capability in itself, and being alive is,
of course, essential for all other capabilities. Consequently, it is essential to separate out the
important dimensions, sometimes known as basic capabilities (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000),
and to measure inequality in the distribution of each one, paying particular attention to the
capabilities that affect other capabilities.
Inequality over What Time

Clearly, if inequality fluctuates a lot, then one needs to measure it over several years to get
a true picture of the distribution of capabilities among individuals. The nature and extent
of injustice and the societal consequences of inequality are very different if particular indi-
viduals move in and out of poverty or riches, that is, if there is social mobility. Panel data
would be necessary (and desirable) to inform us about whether a stable overall distribu-
tion is indicative of stability in the placement of particular individuals. The limited evi-
dence available indicates considerable movement among individuals in and out of income
poverty: for example, one study showed that in the Central and Western Regions of
Uganda, nearly a quarter of households moved out of poverty over a twenty-five-year
period (Krishna 2005).
Horizontal inequality (notably between ethnic and racial groups, and between men
and women) often (but not always) persists over decades and even centuries (Stewart and
Langer 2008; Thorp and Paredes 2010). Tilly defined such “durable” inequality as categor-
ical inequality and provided an explanation of why such inequality tends to persist in
terms of opportunity, exploitation, and imitation—that is, a group that gets an initial
advantage (opportunity) exploits and sustains this advantage in whatever way it can (e.g.
by exclusion and discrimination), and this is widely imitated (Tilly 1998). In addition, an
initial advantage can become cumulative (e.g. extra income enables better health and
education in the next generation, which in turn leads to additional incomes). While this
applies to individuals, among groups the forces of persistence tend to be greater as they
lead to asymmetries of social capital (groups having more contacts with other members
of the same group than with outsiders), and this is compounded by overt discrimination
(Stewart and Langer 2008). Panel studies have shown that upward mobility among indi-
viduals is greater for people in more advantaged groups (Devine, Plunkett, and Wright
1992; Corcoran 1995).
It follows that inequality (and mobility) needs to be measured over different time periods
to understand its full welfare implications.
Is High and Growing Inequality Undesirable?
There are many ways of approaching the complex question of whether inequality (both ver-
tical and horizontal) is undesirable. Two sets of reasons can be distinguished: first, those
which relate to the intrinsic merits or demerits of inequality; second, instrumental reasons,
in which inequality is assessed for its consequences for other objectives. For both, the argu-
ment depends partly on the “among whom” question, since different considerations apply to
horizontal and vertical inequality; and partly on the dimension or space being considered,
since both the intrinsic merits of equality and the instrumental consequences of equality or
inequality vary according to the space.
Intrinsic Reasons
Philosophers have reached different conclusions about the intrinsic desirability of equality.
One (humanist) approach is based on the premise that all humans share the right to be
treated equally by virtue of being human (Kant 1949; Williams 1962). Kant interprets this as
requiring “equality of respect,” which does not necessarily mean equality of material wealth,
but would rule out gross inequalities. Williams argues that shared humanity implies that “for
every difference in the way men are treated, a reason should be given; . . . further that the
reasons should be relevant, and that they should be socially operative” (Williams 1962: 123).
Here, much depends on how one defines “relevant reasons.”
A different approach starts from the premise of a social contract; Rousseau, as shown in
the quotation that opens this chapter, concludes that the social contract implies equality as,
he argues, people would not sign up to it if it involved inequality. Yet Rawls’ (1971) conclusion
is that a social contract agreed under a “veil of ignorance” leads to maximin—that is, inequal-
ity is justified so long as it means that the poorest person is better off than he/she would be
with equality. This then justifies some inequality where it is instrumentally helpful in improv-
ing the position of the poorest.
The fundamental principle behind human rights approaches to development is the
Kantian idea that every person is morally equal and therefore entitled to certain basic rights.
A human rights approach implies universality in access to certain basic aspects of life (for
example, adequate nutrition, housing, water, and education) and consequently limits ine-
quality in these dimensions. An important difference between the “humanists” and the social
contractarians is that the arguments of the former apply to the whole of humanity, irrespec-
tive of where people reside, while the social contract is argued to apply only to people who
share a government, that is, not across nations (Nussbaum 2004; Nagel 2005).
A very different approach is taken by libertarians, who argue that inequality is justified so
long as the wealth was acquired legitimately (Locke 1773; Nozick 1974). Nozick argues that
just outcomes are those that result from legitimate acquisition and transfer of goods and
services. Since, according to Nozick, legitimate transfer includes bequests, any initial inequal-
ity, which may emerge even from an equal starting point, can lead to substantial and rising
inequality over time—which is just, according to his theory. However, a major exception to
this unconstrained situation arises from the principle of rectification, which justifies redistri-
bution if resources are not obtained legitimately. As Nozick accepts, “some people steal from
others, or defraud them, or enslave them” (Nozick 1974: 152). The principle of rectification
would apply to horizontal inequality in particular, including much North–South inequality,
since the majority of group inequalities have their origins in historic injustices, such as coloni-
alism, conquest, slavery, and discrimination.2
Economists’ views of inequality have evolved historically, starting from an intrinsic per-
spective, but moving to an instrumental one. According to utilitarians, the optimum degree
of inequality is that which maximizes utility. Pigou argued that this led to a highly egalitarian
conclusion, assuming that a person’s marginal utility would diminish as he/she acquired
more of it (Pigou 1952); but this assumption was famously disputed by Robbins (1938, 1945),
whose assertion that one cannot compare the utility gained by different individuals became
the dominant view among economists.3 Consequently, economists have tended to shy away
from making judgments about the desirable degree of inequality except from an instrumental
perspective.
However, in recent years, “happiness” economists, in line with utilitarians, have argued
that the overriding objective should be maximization of the sum total of happiness. Meas-
ures of how much happiness people at different income levels derive from that income
mainly seem to support the Pigou hypothesis that poorer people get more satisfaction/
happiness from additional income than richer people (Krueger et al. 2006; Sacks, Stevenson,
and Wolfers 2010). However, this has yet to inform economists’ views broadly.
Instrumental Reasons
Nonetheless, without making judgments about the intrinsic justice of a particular distribu-
tion, economists have accepted that instrumental reasons are relevant to determining the
desirable extent of inequality. The prime justification for a particular income distribution
rests on the effects on efficiency, with the desirable distribution being that which would max-
imize output. A certain amount of vertical inequality may be needed to encourage people to
work hard, use their talents, and direct their energies in a way that exploits their comparative
advantage and maximizes societal output.4 But there is also an efficiency case against too
much inequality, since it can reduce societal human capital (as poorer people are likely to be
less well nourished and educated) and can also reduce the size of domestic markets, leading
to under-consumption and unemployment, though there are ways of compensating for this.
Thus there are instrumental efficiency arguments both for and against vertical inequality,
and the power of these reasons depends on empirical relationships.
A number of studies have found that higher inequality leads to less growth, although this
has been questioned.5 Considerable evidence links a less equal income distribution to poorer
outcomes in education (Mayer 2000) and health (Hildebrand and Van Kerm 2009; Kondo et
al. 2009), which in turn reduce growth (Birdsall and Sabot 1994; Ranis, Stewart, and Ramirez
2000). It has also been argued to affect growth adversely through its impact on political pop-
ulism and political instability. Moreover, for any given level of per capita income, vertical
income inequality increases poverty.6 Research also consistently shows that it increases
intentional homicides and robbery (Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza 2002). Empirical evi-
dence on the links between inequality and measures of happiness at the country level are
more mixed, with studies pointing in both directions,7 but suggesting that perceptions of
fairness and mobility appear to be crucial (Alesina, Di Tella, and MacCulloch 2004; Bjornskov
et al. 2009; Oishi, Kesebir, and Diener 2011), that reference groups matter (Luttmer 2004;
Eggers, Gaddy, and Graham 2006), and that even within countries, interpretations of
inequality can shift over time.8
One plausible conclusion from economists’ instrumentalism is that the objective should
not be equality of outcomes but equality of opportunities, since efficiency should, in principle,
be maximized if everyone faces the same opportunities (Roemer 1998). Genuine equality of
opportunities, defined as equality in all dimensions over which the individual has no control
(which includes all inherited inequalities, including those due to social background, etc.) is
likely to rule out much horizontal inequality, since differences in group outcomes are gener-
ally the result of historic or current discrimination. While inequality among individuals may
be due to differences in efforts and talents, these should even out between groups consisting
of large numbers of individuals, since a similar dispersion of effort and talents can be
expected within each group, unless historic or current disadvantages have led to differences—
that is, unless there is an absence of genuine equality of opportunity. However, in the short
run this type of equality of opportunity—which goes beyond eliminating current discrimi-
nation—may not be output maximizing.
The bulk of empirical evidence on horizontal inequality has focused on conflict. This
research generally finds a positive relationship (Gurr 1970; Stewart 2000; Mancini 2008),
particularly where there are both economic and political inequalities simultaneously and in
the same direction (Østby 2008; Stewart 2008; Cederman, Weidmann, and Gleditsch 2011).
There is also evidence that horizontal inequalities are associated with other forms of group
violence, including milder types such as riots (Blau and Blau 1982) and horrendous forms
like genocide (Fein 1993; Harff 2003; Stewart 2011). In addition, some work links gender ine-
quality to domestic violence (Bailey and Peterson 1995; Yodanis 2004).
Measuring Inequality
In order to ascertain prevailing levels of inequality and changes over time, there is a need to
have an effective means of displaying distributions and of comparing them to one another—
ideally through a summary index. Deriving such an index is complex, as it involves compar-
ing the incomes (or other attributes) of all individuals within a society and incorporates an
implicit or explicit sensitivity to transfers among them. Further complexities arise when
incorporating group affiliation into measurement and when considering inequality along
multiple dimensions.
Vertical Inequality
Measures of vertical inequality seek to represent how income or another attribute (we refer
here to income for simplicity) is distributed among individuals or households in a popula-
tion. The simplest measures are ratios of the amount of a given good in the top versus the
bottom of the population (e.g. the top quintile versus the bottom quintile). More sophisti-
cated measures consider the whole of a distribution—most simply represented by ranking
the members of a society from poorest to richest and then plotting their cumulative share in
the population against their cumulative income, as in the well-known Lorenz curve (Lorenz
1905). To summarize distributions, researchers have devised measures either because they
fulfill certain desirable properties or axioms which establish their robustness, or for more
“ad hoc” reasons such as mathematical or graphical appeal (Lugo 2007).
Some basic properties which it is generally agreed that inequality measures should fulfill
are anonymity or symmetry, population size and scale, independence, and transfer sensitiv-
ity (Shorrocks 1980, 1984; Cowell 2008).9 The first three imply that inequality measurement
should be invariant to any other characteristic of individuals (including population size) but
their incomes, or to any uniform, proportional changes in income. The property of transfer
sensitivity (Pigou–Dalton “principle of transfers”) makes the important claim that any trans-
fer from a poorer to a richer member of society must increase inequality. To these four prop-
erties is sometimes added that of decomposability: the measure of inequality for a population
as a whole should be the (weighted) sum of inequality among its constituent parts. In other
words, it should be possible to look at inequality overall and to divide it up by any subgroup
characteristic, for example men and women.
The most popular measures of inequality are the Gini coefficient, general entropy meas-
ures (Theil 1967), and Atkinson class of indices (Atkinson 1970), all of which obey the first
four properties just enumerated. But each measure has some distinct features—a key issue is
their sensitivity to transfers that take place in different parts of the distribution.
The Gini coefficient is the most widely applied because it is intuitive and straightforward
to compute. It is most sensitive to transfers occurring in the middle of the distribution. The
family of general entropy measures derives from information theory, and represents the
entropic “distance” of a population from full equality. The three general entropy meas-
ures—of which the Theil index is the best known—are not only decomposable, but also vary
in terms of the weight they place on different parts of the distribution. Finally, the Atkinson
class of measures explicitly considers the welfare loss associated with inequality according to
a normative “inequality aversion” parameter, higher values of which are more sensitive to
changes at the lower part of the distribution.
Because all these measures have differing sensitivity to performance at different parts of
their distributions, they may rank the same distributions in different ways; for this reason,
researchers have devised alternative approaches to rank distributions (Litchfield 1999). In
particular, stochastic dominance techniques apply certain preferences to generate partial if
not complete orderings: for example, one distribution may be said to “Lorenz dominate”
another if every point on its curve lies above that of a second curve.
Horizontal Inequality
Many issues involved in measuring vertical inequality apply equally to measuring hori-
zontal inequality. But here some additional problems arise. One is that groups differ in
size, making it necessary to decide whether to weight any inequality by group size.
Another is that there is generally inequality within each group, raising the question of
whether to compare the distributions of each group with every other group as a whole,
or simply take the mean—which is what is typically done. Yet it is desirable to take into
account the distribution as a whole, as the political, economic, and policy implications
differ according to how the whole distributions compare. The “mean of means” approach
(Foster, Lopez-Calva, and Székely 2003)—simply the mean of mean levels of different
subcategories within each group—is one way of doing so (see Mancini, Stewart, and
Brown 2008; Stewart, Brown, and Mancini 2010). One common approach to measuring
group inequality is to decompose overall inequality in a society into inequality between
groups (BG) and within groups (WG), and to take the ratio of BG/WG as the measure
of group inequality (Kanbur and Zhang 1999). But this makes the value of the
between-group (or horizontal inequality) element dependent on how much within-
group inequality there is, with the value of BG (and of the ratio BG/WG) falling as WG
rises. Yet for most purposes, what researchers and policy-makers need to know is the
actual extent of inequality between groups, and not its relationship to within-group or
total inequality.
Multidimensionality Issues
The measurement of inequality in multiple dimensions of well-being is vital to incorporate a
fuller range of outcomes, yet this poses additional issues. A key issue is the ordinal and
bounded nature of many indicators of interest, in contrast to income which is continuous
and unbounded. Researchers have approached the issue of ordinality by devising median-
based measures (see Allison and Foster 2004), and by transforming ordinal data into cardi-
nal indicators so that standard indices can be applied (see van Doorslaer and Jones 2003).
However, the resulting rankings display considerable sensitivity to which of, and how, these
two approaches are applied (Madden 2010).
Challenges arise, too, in establishing dominance along multiple aspects of well-being
(Kolm 1977; Atkinson and Bourguignon 1982) as well as the need to weight dimensions rela-
tive to one another and to consider the extent to which inequality in different dimensions is
substitutable (Lugo 2007). Here too, an axiomatic approach to measurement is often taken
(see Tsui 1999), but a key difference relates to how to establish transfer sensitivity along mul-
tiple dimensions (Kolm 1977; Tsui 1999). Given these complexities, which make the interpre-
tation of any single multidimensional measure difficult, there is much to be said for
presenting measures of inequality of important dimensions separately.
Inequality and Development:

Historical Trends
A key issue is whether inequality changes systematically as countries develop, as suggested

by Kuznets (1955). Data limits are severe for the investigation of this relationship, even where
income is concerned; even so, there have been some efforts to bring non-income dimensions
into the picture and these quite often significantly change our view of the extent and evolu-
tion of inequality.
Does the Kuznets Curve Exist, and What Explains it?

In a seminal paper published in 1955, Simon Kuznets proposed that in the course of develop-
ment, income inequality would first rise owing to a shift from the agriculture to non-
agriculture and the countryside to city, and then fall, as the returns across sectors
equalized—“the range first tends to widen and then to diminish” (Kuznets 1955: 15). Kuznets
cautioned that this conjecture was “perhaps five percent empirical information and
ninety-five percent speculation” (Kuznets 1955: 26). Since then a large body of scholarship
has investigated whether this relationship holds, and has derived policy conclusions accord-
ingly. Early study drew by necessity on cross-country data and compared the experiences of
countries at different levels of development (Adelman and Morris 1973; Ahluwalia 1976).
These studies found support for a Kuznets relationship, but later studies argued that “the use
of cross-country data to analyze what are essentially dynamic processes can be strongly mis-
leading” (World Bank 2006: 44), while empirically, the findings turned out to be very sensi-
tive to the economic specification, sample size, and time period adopted (Anand and Kanbur
1993; Fields 2001). Advances in data collection over time have made it possible to look at
trends within countries—studies here gave little support to the Kuznets hypothesis (e.g.
Bruno, Ravallion, and Squire 1998). The absence of a clear structural relationship is argued to
point to the importance of policy in shaping distributions (Kanbur 2011).
What Trends do the Data Suggest?

Nonetheless, at a country level, there is a general—though not universal—finding that ine-
quality has been increasing, on average, in past decades, but with evidence of regional varia-
tion. Cornia and Kiiski (2001) found that the Gini coefficient rose in two-thirds of
seventy-three countries they examined between 1980 and 2000. Ortiz and Cummins (2011),
drawing on data for 141 countries over the past two decades, show that inequality increased
most in Eastern Europe/former Soviet Union and Asia, that it declined significantly in Latin
America after 2000, and that while sub-Saharan Africa remains highly unequal, its Gini
index appeared to have fallen by almost five points, on average, since 1990. The fall in ine-
quality in Latin America has attracted widespread attention: it has been so marked that
inequality is now approaching pre-liberalization levels (Lustig, López-Calva, and Ortiz-
Juarez 2011; Cornia 2012).
Limited information on the distribution of health and education over the past fifteen to
twenty years suggests considerable reductions in inequality along both dimensions in six
Latin American countries (Sahn and Younger 2006; Cruces, Domench, and Gasparini 2011)
and little progress on health but some on education in twenty-three sub-Saharan African
countries (Sahn and Younger 2007).
The question of inequality within countries is of deep interest not least because it has
strong implications for national policy. However, the evolution of inequality between coun-
tries and among global citizens has also attracted attention, especially since prevailing ine-
qualities are so much larger. Between countries, patterns of inequality would seem to hinge
on whether the focus is on income or on other dimensions, with the evidence suggesting
some convergence in health or education but not income (UNDP 2010). However, if data are
weighted by population size, the rapid growth of India and particularly China has brought
about some modest convergence for incomes, starting perhaps around 1960 (Boltho and
Toniolo 1999; Melchior, Telle, and Wiig 2000; and Firebaugh 2003).10
The vertical global income distribution (i.e. among the global population) again shows
deep-seated inequality: the top quintile of the global population enjoys more than 70 percent
of global income, and the bottom quintile just 2 percent (Ortiz and Cummins 2011). How-
ever, there is little consensus on the direction of shifts in global inequality in the last two to
three decades (Anand and Segal 2008).
Finally, trends in horizontal inequality are harder to trace at an aggregate level because
while there are some common markers of disadvantage (namely caste, race, ethnicity,
language, religion, gender . . . ), the specific groups that are disadvantaged and the nature
of the disadvantage they face vary significantly from country to country. One analysis of
“intersecting inequalities” at a regional level with respect to the Millennium Development
Goals cited a narrowing of disparities for some groups and deprivations, and the persist-
ence or widening of others. But it found that “in almost every society and in almost every
region of the world, certain groups of people face systematic social exclusion as the result
of multiple inequalities that constrict their life chances” (Kabeer 2010: 1).
Policies toward Inequality
Given the widespread acknowledgment that high and rising inequality is undesirable,
systematic policies to reduce inequality are needed. Below we provide a brief outline of
policies likely to reduce inequality, first for vertical, then for horizontal inequality.
Vertical Inequality
These may broadly be divided into policies likely to affect primary (pre-tax and benefits)
distribution and those directed toward post-tax and expenditure distribution.
Asset redistribution is in the first category, and land reform is the most frequently advo-
cated and adopted form. Historically, redistributive land reform has played an important
part in improving primary redistribution, including in South Korea, Taiwan, and a number
of Latin American countries (El Ghonemy 1990; Lipton 2009). Nationalization of major
industries reduced inequalities in asset ownership in a number of countries in the 1960s,
while privatization contributed to increasing inequality from the 1980s. Without nationaliz-
ing assets, specific schemes aimed at wealth sharing from natural assets can improve the dis-
tribution of benefits from these resources. For example, the Alaskan Permanent Fund (APF)
was established to ensure that the population at large would benefit from the discovery of oil
and natural gas. A 1976 amendment to the constitution of the State of Alaska specified that
“at least twenty-five percent of all mineral lease rentals, royalties, royalty sale proceeds,
federal mineral revenue-sharing payments and bonuses received by the state shall be placed
in a permanent fund.”11
Income distribution from earnings. Improving the distribution of labor earnings can be
achieved by extending access to education at all levels; supporting rapid growth combined
with labor-intensive patterns of development; and introducing minimum wages for unskilled
employment. Extending education and raising minimum wages are believed to have con-
tributed to the recent improvements in income distribution in some Latin American coun-
tries, in addition to cash transfers (Cornia and Martorano 2011). In contrast, the improved
distribution achieved in some East Asian countries in the 1960s and 1970s was attributed to a
combination of land reform and labor-intensive growth. Maximum incomes, in principle,
could restrict the earned income of the rich. While this approach has never been adopted,
the idea of putting pressure on companies to restrain payments to highest-earning employ-
ees is gaining ground. Atkinson (2000) has pointed out that incomes at the top are partly
determined by convention and norms, and these have been moving in an inegalitarian
direction.
Policies towards secondary distribution (post-tax and benefits). Progressive taxation can
improve the distribution of both assets (through estate duties and capital taxes) and income.
However, in recent decades there has been a tendency to move in a regressive direction, with
lower marginal income tax rates, an increasing role for indirect taxation, and uniform rates
of indirect taxation on all goods (via a value-added tax). In principle, there are ways of
making both direct and indirect taxation more progressive. For many countries, evidence
suggests that taxation is broadly proportionate with incomes (i.e. does not change the distri-
bution) but that expenditure is mostly progressive, benefiting the poorer sections of the
population more (in proportion to their original incomes) than the rich. Consequently,
increasing both taxation and expenditure as a proportion of GDP reduces secondary ine-
quality (Chu, Davoodi, and Gupta 2000; Cornia 2004). Public expenditure itself can be made
more or less progressive according to the sectoral distribution, with social services generally
benefitting poorer people more than others; and according to the distribution within sectors,
with some sorts of expenditure being more progressive than others (for example, primary
health as compared with hospitals) (van de Walle and Nead 1995; Chu, Davoodi, and Gupta
2000). A range of benefits in kind or cash can also be targeted to poorer sections of the popu-
lation. These include conditional and unconditional cash transfers, which can materially
affect the secondary distribution (Barrientos and Hulme 2008). For example, conditional
cash transfers in Brazil, Mexico, and Chile have reduced inequality by 15–21 percent at a cost
of less than 1 percent of GDP (Soares et al. 2007).
Globalization tends to constrain progressive taxation, since companies and individuals
may move to other countries to escape such taxation. This tendency could be overcome by
global (and regional) coordination on tax rates, or by changes in the basis of taxation (for
example, by taxing individuals in their country of citizenship irrespective of where they live
or where their incomes are earned).
Horizontal Inequality
Here we can differentiate between direct and indirect policies. The former target particular
groups (though quotas, etc.), while the latter aim to achieve a similar inequality-reducing
effect through general policies, such as taxation (Stewart 2008). The first type of policies are
often described as affirmative action, and have been adopted quite extensively in multi-ethnic
societies (Simms 1995; Brown, Langer, and Stewart 2012). They can be effective in reducing
inequalities, but have some undesirable effects in entrenching identity distinctions. Indirect
policies are much the same as the policies noted for vertical distribution, although they
include geographic targeting of expenditure in countries where groups are geographically
concentrated. Like the policies toward vertical distribution, they tend to take more time than
direct policies and to meet political resistance.
Political Economy of Policy Making

Despite the accepted view that reducing inequality is generally desirable, by and large policy
change in this direction has been limited. This, broadly, is not because of lack of knowledge
about policies that would be effective, if adopted, but because of political constraints. Indeed,
many policies being adopted are likely to increase inequality, such as the reduction of
marginal rates of income tax, cutbacks in public expenditure, privatization of public serv-
ices, and land entitlement schemes, while the unregulated market economy appears to be
unequalizing. At the international level too, a lack of support for tackling inequalities is also
apparent. Ultimately, the question of reducing inequality comes down to politics. Where
there is strong political support for progressive policies—for example, as a result of social
movements, workers’ and peasants’ associations, or powerful ethnic or religious groups—in
the case of horizontal inequality, policies to correct inequalities have been adopted. But
where poorer groups are badly organized, political parties are weak, and non-ideological
and corporate pressure groups are strong, progressive policy change is unlikely. However, in
those societies which have succeeded in achieving full or near full employment, the relative
bargaining and market position of poorer members of society is improved, and policy change
to reduce inequality becomes much more feasible. This occurred in Europe after the Second
World War, and in several developing countries in recent decades, including Taiwan and
South Korea. Currently, China is approaching this situation. Thus a combination of organi-
zation of poorer groups and rapid employment growth appears to be most propitious for
reducing inequality.
Conclusion
Scholarly interest in inequality has grown over time. In the years immediately following the
Second World War, the focus was on growth, which was thought to be both necessary and
sufficient to eliminate poverty. Yet the supposed “trickle down” from growth was grossly
inadequate, and the number of poor people grew. Consequently, in the 1970s development
economists and policy-makers began to focus on poverty, and their concern grew with the
prolonged deflation of the 1980s. It is only recently that inequality has been widely recog-
nized as important in itself and for its effects on poverty and social stability. Vertical inequal-
ity came to the fore with the rising inequality that appeared to accompany the increased pace
of globalization, while horizontal inequality was recognized as a major factor behind the
high numbers of civil wars and other social disturbances. While inequality has therefore
gained a central role in analysis and measurement, less progress has been made in identify-
ing equalizing policies, and even less in gaining political support for them.
Notes
1. We are grateful to the authors that participated in the Ottawa workshop towards this
volume.
2. Similarly, the concept of fair difference suggests that some present-day inequalities ought
to be supported to redress long-standing inequalities—for instance, in the case of
indigenous peoples.
3. “In our hearts we do not regard different men’s satisfactions from similar means as equally
valuable” (Robbins 1938: 635–41; 1945: 156–7).
4. Galenson and Leibenstein (1955) argued that greater inequality would raise savings and
thereby growth.
5. Adelman and Morris (1973), Alesina and Perotti (1994), Alesina and Rodrik (1994),
Bénabou (1996), Panizza (1999). Inequality may affect other characteristics of growth,
reducing the duration of growth spells (Berg and Ostry 2011). For opposing findings, see
Li and Zou (1998), Forbes (2000).
6. See Datt and Ravallion (1992, 1998); Kalwij and Verschoor (2007); Fosu (2009).
7. For the argument that inequality has either no effect or modest positive effects on hap-
piness, see Bjornskov et al. (2009), Berg and Veenhoven (2010). For the counterargu-
ment, see Graham and Felton (2006), Knight and Gunatilaka (2011).
8. In Poland, Grosfeld and Senik (2010) show that in the early stages of transition, people
interpreted income inequality as a positive symbol of opportunity, while later on it came
to be associated with dissatisfaction with the country’s economic situation, and
perceptions of a flawed and corrupt income-generating process.
9. Shorrocks (1980) also argued for two technical properties of indicators: that measures
should have a norm of zero, and that they be continuous in nature. This raises issues for
the measurement of inequality in other dimensions, as we discuss below.
10. Also, because the Gini emphasizes changes around the middle of the distribution, it
emphasizes the current experiences of China, a middle-income country (Wade
2001).
11. <http://www.apfc.org/home/Content/aboutAPFC/constAndLaw.cfm>, accessed July 5,
2013.
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chapter 7
wom en’s econom ic rol e s

a n d th e dev el opm en t
pa r a digm
irene tinker and elaine zuckerman
Introduction
Women were invisible in early economic development theory. First, the world view prevail-
ing in Europe and the United States in the post-Second World War era, which assumed
women did not work, was incorrectly perceived as universal. Second, the economic con-
structs based on this assumption proposed the household as an economic unit whose mem-
bers were well served by its patriarch. Finally, this lack of cultural variability could be traced
to some extent to inaccurate information about women’s economic roles and gender rela-
tionships in developing countries.
Development theorists took as given this view of gender, and utilized it in designing the
stages of growth that would lead to modernization. Liberal economists wished to counter
Marxism with an alternative inevitable path, but they tended to dismiss the importance of
women in both the economic and caring economies. Marxist theory does recognize women’s
importance in reproducing the labor force as well as their work, yet provisions for assisting
women in their caring functions were seldom adequate in socialist countries. Both these
economic constructs lacked an understanding of women’s reality, especially in developing
countries.
The social construction of gender reflected in development theory was increasingly
challenged by women in both developed and developing countries. Scholars documented
the work that women did and concluded that many development programs were having
an adverse impact on women. As the women’s movement grew, women demanded greater
emphasis on their rights. Rapid socio-economic transitions altered family structure and
drew greater attention to gender relationships. Gender-sensitive programs and policies
further changed development programs. Activists today are working to ensure that rheto-
ric is matched by expenditures and by greater political power and representation for
women.
women’s economic roles and the development paradigm 117
This chapter traces the evolution of the development paradigm in response to the recogni-
tion of women’s economic roles. It charts the shifts in thinking and in action, and relates
them to developments in scholarly research, to activism in developing and developed
countries, and to global fora that helped change the paradigm.
Alternative Voices
The rhetoric of democracy and equality espoused during the Second World War resonated
in both former colonies and in industrial countries. Constitutions of newly independent
countries granted women’s suffrage. China passed the 1950 Marriage Act to counter tradi-
tional practices (Zuckerman 2000). Independence movements brought women to the fore-
front of struggle, especially when the male leaders were jailed. Many women were given
high-level positions at home and in the United Nations in the newly independent countries
(Tinker 2004b). International women’s organizations participated in the Economic and
Social Council and lobbied the UN to include social issues in the UN First Development
Decade 1960–70, which focused on infrastructure and industrial projects. In 1964, Sweden
became the first Western country to alter its development policies explicitly to include
women; the USSR had initiated a few such projects earlier in the decade. Activists spurred
the U.S. Congress to amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1973 and require the U.S. Agency
for International Development to administer its programs with a view “to integrate women
in national economies of foreign countries, thus improving their status and assisting the total
development effort.” A similar resolution was passed by the UN General Assembly in
December 1974 (Tinker 1990).
In her book Woman’s Role in Economic Development, Ester Boserup studied the introduc-
tion of cash crops into subsistence economics in Africa. Not only did policies that privileged
cash crops result in increasing women’s work in the fields, but income from these crops—
which flowed exclusively to the men—allowed men to seek higher-paying jobs in urban areas
with no obligation to support their rural families (Boserup 1970). In this manner, develop-
ment programs frequently had an adverse impact on women’s work and also contributed to
the disintegration of the family, which led to increasing poverty among women-headed
households (Tinker 1976a, 1976b; Buvinic and Youssef 1978; Chant 1997). Barrig (2006)
recorded the conflict between Northern donors and local NGOs in her study of indigenous
women of the Andes. Ghodsee (2003) links the limited success of “Women in Development”
(WID) projects in post-communist Europe to their situation within free-market capitalism
rather than a more socialistic welfare state closer to the Scandinavian model.
Research about women’s work in subsistence economies recorded the many hours
women actually worked carrying out such survival activities as growing, harvesting,
processing and preparing food, as well as carrying water and fuelwood. These time-alloca-
tion studies clearly show that women worked more hours than men; further, while men had
some leisure time, women did not. They carried babies on their backs as they worked; girls
assisted their mothers as soon as they could walk. Many assistance projects failed because
they ignored the fact that the real rural energy crisis was women’s time.1 Time-allocation
studies also distinguished between societies that utilized bride price and those that practiced
118 irene tinker and elaine zuckerman
the dowry system. In female agricultural systems, women’s work is highly valued and
requires a payment to the bride’s family to compensate for losing her labor. Where male
farming systems predominate, women are a burden on the family and must pay a dowry to
the husband.
Still, development agencies continued to conceive of programs that ignored cultural vari-
ations, political considerations, and women’s work demands (and undervalued women’s
work). Even within a country, similar projects often had opposing consequences on different
groups of women. Buvinic (1986) complained that projects often “misbehave” because elite
women benefitted more that the poor. Boserup (1990) noted how age–class–race hierarchies
modify women’s roles in different types of societies. Papanek and Sen both emphasized how
women’s lower entitlements, both within families and within society, affect the efficacy of
development programs (Papanek 1990; Sen 1990).
The 1974 UN World Conference on Population brought together scholars who had been
studying population trends with activists trying to implement family planning. This popula-
tion conference, along with the Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm
in 1972, began a series of official UN world conferences dealing with emerging issues
addressed in the original UN Charter. Participants in these conferences included national
delegations and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in consultative
status to the UN. In addition, all arranged a Forum where a wide range of groups interested
in the topic could debate. Women learned to lobby delegates at the UN meeting to include
women in pertinent sections of the conference document. For example, at the World Food
Conference held in Rome in 1974, women staff of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organiza-
tion (FAO) ensured that women’s roles in food production were recognized (Pietila and
Vickers 1990: 82–3).
The 1975 World Conference of the International Women’s Year (IWY) provided the first
opportunity for a discussion about the impact of development on women. Irene Tinker organ-
ized an international seminar of women and men scholars, practitioners, and activists con-
cerned with development which preceded the official conference. Most participants became
advisors to their country’s delegations; others organized panels at the NGO Tribune, as the
Forum was called. As a result, many recommendations from the workshops were incorpo-
rated into the Plan of Action.2 Delegates argued that one conference was insufficient to address
women’s inequalities; a decade for women was declared, with conferences in 1980 and 1985
(Allan, Galey, and Persinger 1995). The International Women’s Tribune Center was established
in New York City, and published a newsletter so that activists could keep in touch; the Center
also compiled resource books for women’s groups in developing countries (Walker 2004). The
IWY conference proved to be an incubator for a global women’s movement (Antrobus 2004).
As with subsequent women’s conferences, political maneuvering by countries concerning
issues outside the purview of the conference frequently conflicted with the conference par-
ticipants’ desire to focus on topics more closely related to women’s concerns. While some
women were convinced that governments used women’s conferences as a proxy for global
debates because women lacked the political muscle to contest, others welcomed such debates
as an indication that women as citizens needed to be part of such discussions (Jaquette 1995;
Snyder 1995; Tinker and Jaquette 1987).
The growing disconnect between Northern feminists, especially Americans like Betty
Friedan, and women from the South was highlighted at the Mexico City NGO Tribune and
caused by the American feminists’ assumption of the universality of women’s issues. Lucille
Mair, as secretary-general of the 1980 Copenhagen Conference, funded a series of research

papers written by women from the South to balance the dominance of documentation by
Northern scholars. Increasingly, the WID approach of integrating women into development
was met with the question: into what? Mair argued in “Women: A Decade is Time Enough”
(1986) that such integration, far from benefitting women, was actually making them work
harder. Elise Boulding cautioned that integration into the present world order only increased
women’s dependency. She opted for a “strategic separatism that frees up the potentials of
women for economic and social experiments on a small scale, outside the patriarchal social
order” (1991: 23). Socialist feminists criticized the capitalist project, echoing many of the com-
plaints made by WID advocates about the values and biases in liberal development thought.
The women’s social movement became a transnational network of diverse groups and inter-
ests encompassing class, religious, and geographic variations (Moghadam 1994, 2005).
In 1983, Devaki Jain presented a paper at the OECD/DAC WID group: “Development As If
Women Mattered: Can Women Build a New Paradigm?” This concern blossomed into a series
of meetings among women scholars from the South who drafted the influential Development
Alternatives with Women for a New Era: Development, Crisis, and Alternative Visions: Third
World Women’s Perspective. This book was unveiled at the Nairobi Women’s Conference in
1985 (Sen and Grown 1985). Project participants formed a new global organization, DAWN,
to continue the presence of women of the South in the development debate (Jain 2004).
As the women’s movement expanded, women’s organizations began to hold world confer-
ences themselves. A 1974 feminist meeting in Frankfurt, Germany, demanded increased sur-
veillance over international prostitution rings and called for a ban on female circumcision.
Aware of the “male-dominated transnational-controlled press,” Women’s International Bul-
letin was started by Isis, a documentation center based in Geneva and Rome, to enable
women from North and South to exchange grassroots experiences (Portugal 2004: 105).
Today, Isis operates out of Santiago, Chile; Kampala, Uganda; and Manila, the Philippines.
A World Congress for International Women’s Year, convened in East Berlin in October
1975, was a hybrid conference. Organized by the Women’s International Democratic Federa-
tion (WIDF) to celebrate that group’s 30th anniversary, the meeting was planned with the
support of the United Nations and attended by then UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim,
who thanked the WIDF for first suggesting the idea of celebrating IWY. Participants included
many Asian and African women and men who had attended workshops in the socialist
countries that promoted integrating women into revolutionary causes, as opposed to the
WID model designed to incorporate women into a capitalist model (Ghodsee 2012).
All this activity of women around the world underscored the critical role women were
playing in developing countries while at the same time challenging the WID model.
Shifts in Development Agencies:

Women, Work, and Income
Advocates for women in development emphasized programs that recognized women’s eco-
nomic roles. Previous programming for women was concentrated on their role as mothers,
and was supported by well-funded population programs. To avoid the welfare approach to
women, WID encouraged separate offices, or “machinery” in UN parlance, to design new

ways to fund, monitor, and carry out programs that would integrate women into the econ-
omy of the country. They argued such projects would be both more effective and more effi-
cient if women were included. This was a tactical decision, given agency administrators’
somewhat chilly attitude toward women’s rights.
Activists, both within and outside agencies, criticized the development policies and pro-
grams being pursued. For example, agricultural projects promoted cash crops; research
showed clearly that introducing these crops increased women’s work. Further, cultural blind-
ness often led to teaching African women to can foods or set a table while teaching men to
farm. In both Asia and Africa, women farmers were taught to sew in countries where men
were the tailors. Cooperatives were introduced to replace marketing boards under the
assumption that producers and land owners were the same. For three years, Kenya’s coffee
production fell after women no longer received payment for their crop: the funds went
instead to the men, who were usually in the city. Efforts to provide new improved cookstoves
were mired in cultural assumptions about fuel types, efficiencies at the micro level, and
women’s time constraints. As a result, few rural women adopted these cookstoves.3
Such programs were conceived in response to the women’s demonstrable need for money
as monetization expanded. More successful were projects assisting women who were already
working. Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), started by Ela Bhatt in Ahmedabad,
India, set up a bank in 1974 to provide loans for members. Similarly, the impetus for the
Grameen Bank came when its founder, Mohammed Yunus, observed a woman making
chairs one at a time. He realized that credit would allow her to increase her output and buy
goods in bulk. The Grameen model evolved into organizing women so that the group became
collateral for loans to set up microenterprises.
For feminists, the philosophical distinctions between SEWA and Grameen are critical.
SEWA organized women by their existing jobs, insisted they become literate, and trained
members to become leaders. In contrast, the Grameen Bank is headed by men and has a
largely male staff. While SEWA is organized around a union philosophy, Grameen has a
strong social movement foundation. Members are expected to follow Sixteen Decisions that
include calisthenics, birth control, and refusal to pay dowry or for lavish weddings. The use
of loans is also controlled by the bank. Such a “father knows best” approach reflects a patriar-
chal mentality. Devaki Jain, reviewing income-generating projects in India to assess how the
nature of leadership influenced women’s agency, concludes: “All work did not necessarily
empower women. . . . It took something more, and that seemed to be feminist leadership”
(Jain 2004: 132).
None of these microenterprises would be considered work under early ILO guidelines.
In the 1970s, the ILO did begin a series of studies on the informal sector, which it defined as
an enterprise with five or more employees. Because women tended to be sole or family
workers, this definition once again excluded them. Market women in West Africa had been
the subject of studies for years, yet their considerable income fell outside definitions of
employment. A seven-country study of street foods was greatly influential in influencing
policies at the ILO (Tinker 1997). The study underscored how cultural factors influence the
roles women and men play in the enterprises and identified methods to increase both the
income for vendors and the safety of the food sold.
Gender roles became even more central to the debate over the informal sector in the 1980s
when industries around the world began to “informalize” their workforce (Portes, Castells,
and Benton 1989; Rakowski 1994). The impact of industrial homework on social relations
has been profound (Beneria and Roldan 1987). Some women were employed in assembly
centers; other women made the same goods at home (Boris and Prugl 1996). The line between
formal and informal work became blurred (Tinker and Prugl 1997). How to collect data on
women’s employment in the informal sector is central to United Nations statistical indices,
especially as they are utilized in both the Human Development Report and the Gender
Inequality Index.
Organized Women Move beyond Economics
While development agencies continued to follow the WID approach of integrating women
into economic programs for efficiency reasons, the expanding women’s movement was
asserting women’s rights as the basis for broadening programs beyond the economic sector.
Twenty years after its 1980 founding, the Association for Women in Development (AWID)
expanded its focus by changing its name to the Association for Women’s Rights in Develop-
ment. Maintaining its acronym, AWID today is the global umbrella organization leading the
struggle for women’s human rights. Although women’s income was shown to increase wom-
en’s bargaining power within the family and to diminish the incidence of domestic violence,
other research showed that men often reduced family support as women increased theirs
(Dwyer and Bruce 1988; Blumberg 1991; Sen 1990). Formal sector jobs paid women less than
men; women in the informal sector were often compelled by household responsibilities to
work fewer hours (Molyneux 1985; Tinker 1997). This unequal income particularly affected
women-headed households.
As the socio-economic transition continued, poverty increased among female headship
households. Structural adjustment policies in Latin America (Safa and Antrobus 1992) and
Africa (Ladner et al. 1987) which decimated social programs and stifled growth tended to
exacerbate this trend toward the “feminization of poverty.”4 A major resource for women is
control of land. Traditional farming systems allocated usufruct rights to women, but the men
controlled ownership and could evict widows. In post-genocide Rwanda, distant relatives
often ejected grandmothers caring for grandchildren. The AIDS epidemic had a similar
result in Uganda. Although both countries have recently passed laws to remedy this situa-
tion, enforcement is lax (Lee-Smith and Trujillo 2006). The Landesa Center for Women’s
Land Rights “champions women’s secure access to land.”5 A pioneering project in India has
arranged micro-plots that include women’s names on land titles: the plots are too small to
threaten existing landholders (World Bank, FAO, and IFAD 2009).
Housing is even more critical for women’s empowerment: a home provides not only shel-
ter but a site of income and space for growing or raising food. Further, home ownership
allows women to eject abusive partners, not only reducing domestic violence but lowering
the incidence of AIDS.6 Costa Rica passed a law in 1990 that guaranteed women’s ownership
rights to any home subsidized by the government: if the woman was married the house was
registered under both names, but if she was not married the house was in her name alone. In
Bangladesh, where floods regularly wash away traditional rural huts with their bamboo poles
and matting sides, the Grameen Bank granted loans to its members. Before a loan could be
granted, however, the applicant’s husband had to deed the land to her in the virilocal village
where the house was to be built, thus ensuring her right to stay in her tiny house even if the
husband migrated to the city (Tinker 1999).
The culmination of women’s demand for equality came at the 1993 World Conference on
Human Rights, when the body adopted the statement that the human rights of women are an
inalienable, integral, and an indivisible part of universal human rights. Essentially, this dec-
laration is a frontal attack on patriarchy because it implies that existing laws that privilege
men and maintain the subordination of women must be eradicated. This mantra was reiter-
ated in the Platform of Action, which was passed at the 1995 World Conference for Women
in Beijing despite a concerted effort of the Vatican and several Muslim nations to backtrack
on the pivotal assertion that women’s rights are human rights.
Gender and Development (GAD)
Participants at a 1978 workshop on “The Continuing Subordination of Women in the Devel-

opment Process” at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University underscored
challenges to WID coming from Marxist feminists. Noting that the growing literature on
development was largely descriptive, the participants found that this approach, by treating
women as a distinct and isolated category, ignored gender relationships within the house-
hold and labor force. In this ground-breaking volume, the authors analyze “the persistent
forms of gender inequality in the processes of development” (Young, Samarsinghe, and
Kusterer 1993: xix).
An added dimension to this critique has come from transnational feminist scholars who
echo the complaint that women are not a universal and homogeneous category as presup-
posed by Western feminist scholarship. Rather, as Mohanty argues, Third World women
must be viewed through an anticolonial, anticapitalist lens. From this view, the subordina-
tion that characterizes these women must include not only gender relations, but the
“hegemonic imperialism” that describes the present capitalistic system (Mohanty 2003: 20).
But the DAWN network insists that any struggle against these forms of oppression must not
compromise “the struggle against gender subordination” (Sen and Grown 1985).
Gender refers to the socially constructed roles of women and men and is distinct from
biological sex. As such, gender describes what is accepted femininity and masculinity in a
particular society. These characteristics are learned behavior and easily manipulated by
government or religious leaders who seek to change women’s roles. They change the gender
division of labor but not the fact that women are responsible for most of the unpaid labor in
the household. As the development discourse recognized women’s economic roles and as
commodification required earned income, traditional methods of combining work in the
home and in the field have increasingly lengthened women’s double day. In both developing
and developed economies, women’s caring work continues to be undervalued and is seldom
included in economic data, further disadvantaging women. The new Caring Economy
Campaign aims to value unpaid care work.7
Since an individual’s gender is the kaleidoscope of all that person’s characteristics,
the question arises as to what should be considered the predominant attribute. The
Marxist discourse had emphasized class as the organizing principle. In the 1980s, social
movements organized around ethnic or religious identity gained prominence. While
most focus today is on Islamic societies, the break-up of Yugoslavia and the subsequent
Balkan wars illustrate the power of cultural identity. Control of reproduction, and
therefore of women, is central to identity politics because women are celebrated as the
embodiment of culture and values. Some women see this role as “an onerous burden,
one they would just as soon not assume, especially if it is predicated upon control and
conformity. But for other women, it is an honor and a privilege. . . . This is why all
‘fundamentalist’ movements have women supporters as well as women opponents”
(Moghadam 1994: 19).
Identity politics, by seeking an idealized past, reasserts customary patriarchal family law.
Similarly, Robert Mugabe railed against a new constitution that would give women rights to
land; he declared that he did not lead Zimbabwe to independence to undermine patriarchal
privilege. Such visions of the past are selective, applying primarily to gender relationships.
Modern armaments are never embargoed, whether by Iran or the Taliban, but their version
of the idealized past is retrogressive with regard to women’s rights.
During the 1980s, both scholars and practitioners began to utilize the term “gender” when
discussing household relationships, especially when describing the sexual division of labor
(Overholt et al. 1985). This substitution has led to widespread use on data forms and now
encourages transgender groups to request yet a new category for census gathering.
Mainstreaming and Holding

Agencies Responsible
Transforming this nuanced concept of gender into programmatic reality turned out to be
much more problematical than expected when, toward the 1990s, many development agen-
cies adopted the terminology. Proponents declared that such programs were less likely to
cause a backlash from men, who often objected to donors’ focus on women. Acknowledging
gender relations in planning, they believed, would result in more sustainable projects. They
also hoped that a new approach would reinvigorate agencies to improve and increase projects
for women. The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) was perhaps the first
development agency to adopt “gender” in its policy statements.
Not all practitioners were pleased with the change. They pointed out that when trans-
lated the term was problematical (Jahan 1995). In Vietnam, some five words were used and
all of them meant physical sex. Others have suggested that men running development
agencies were uncomfortable with the growing strength of the women’s movement and
wished to deflect its power. In practice, however, the word “gender” simply became a
euphemism for “woman.”8
Caroline Moser, who had run training workshops on gender and housing for women from
developing countries at the University of London, published Gender Planning and Develop-
ment in 1993, while she was working at the World Bank. Noting that historically, bureaucratic
efforts to introduce WID were often “symbolic,” Moser comments on the hypocrisy of many
donor agencies because they employed so few staff in relevant offices (Moser 1993: 126, 149).
The book reviews institutional obstacles to the adopting of any new policy and asks whether
the preferable strategy is to create a separate institution or to mainstream gender throughout
the institution.
Many donor agencies, disappointed in the limited impact that WID/GAD offices were
having on policies or programs, embraced gender mainstreaming as a method to insert the
issue of gender throughout the organization. In 2001 the World Bank synthesized global
gender mainstreaming experiences in a landmark report, Engendering Development (World
Bank 2001). It correlated greater economic growth and poverty reduction with greater gen-
der equality worldwide. This report provided the intellectual basis for the Bank’s “Gender
Equality as Smart Economics” campaign, featuring a unilateral instrumentalist approach to
empowering women to attain economic growth, which neglected advancing women’s and
men’s equal rights (Zuckerman 2007; Arend 2010). Case studies of UNDP, the World Bank,
and ILO indicate that “to a surprising degree” these multilateral agencies have incorporated
mainstreaming into their practices, but in keeping with their organizational goals so that
gender equity is only one of their policy objectives. The result is that adoption of gender
mainstreaming by the United Nations “turned a radical movement idea into strategy of
public administration” (Prugl and Lustgarten 2006: 55, 68–9).
A 2011 gender mainstreaming workshop organized by Oxfam GB and the UK Gender and
Development Network recorded that some in the women’s movement felt that “gender main-
streaming has become just part of the technocratic language . . . devoid of passion.” However,
participants from the global South hailed mainstreaming as a beacon beyond institutions
that is a political statement favoring gender justice and women’s rights (Cooke 2012).
Ultimately, feminists recognize that constant pressure is necessary to ensure that women’s
issues are not sidelined. Several donor agencies abolished their Women in Development/
Gender and Development (WID/GAD) units when they switched to gender mainstreaming
and lost a crucial advocate.
Working inside the World Bank’s central gender unit during 1998–2000, Elaine Zucker-
man (co-author of this chapter) was struck by how environmental concerns took off more
deeply than did gender issues.9 A key reason that environmental concerns received much
more attention than did gender issues was that civil society groups created the environmen-
tal campaign on the World Bank in the early 1980s. All Bank country offices have environ-
mental experts. In contrast, although the Bank’s gender unit is strategically housed in the
Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, it has fewer than twenty profes-
sional staff members, supplemented by gender focal points in fewer than half of Bank coun-
try offices, who spend a fraction of their time addressing gender issues (Zuckerman and
Wu 2005; Lauterbach and Zuckerman 2013). The Bank’s gender mainstreaming invest-
ments, at 0.13 percent of the total budget, are paltry (Gender Action 2012). Trust funds
rather than core Bank funds support most of this spending. Gender expenditures by the
Bank and other International Financial Institutions (IFIs) lag far behind their environmen-
tal investments (Zuckerman and Qing 2005).
Inspired by the environmental campaign, Gender Action launched in 2002 to lead civil
society advocacy for gender justice in IFI investments.10 Gender Action remains the only
organization dedicated to holding IFI investments accountable for ending harmful gender
impacts, promoting women’s rights, and positively benefiting poor men and women. Gender
Action works in many civil society coalitions because of power in numbers, monitoring IFI
investments and leading advocacy to prevent detrimental gender impacts of IFI climate
change, extractive industry, gender-based violence, agriculture and food security, pre- and
post-conflict, post-tsunami and post-earthquake Haiti reconstruction, and HIV/AIDS and
sexual and reproductive health and rights investments and policies. To scale up this work, in
2012 Gender Action launched the Global Gender IFI Watcher Network.11
Clearly, to affect institutional change, putting gender into all policies and programs must
be accompanied by a well-staffed and -funded office that lobbies for funding and monitors
programs for women. Perhaps an analogy exists in the conceptualization of this volume. All
authors were urged to include gender in their chapters, but after a year of planning, the
editors recognized the need for a separate chapter on women, gender, and development.
Demanding Political Power through Quotas
Political participation of women has become a major goal throughout the global women’s
movement. Frustrated at the slow pace of change and impatient with the resistance from
governments and agencies to laws and regulations recognizing women’s rights and capabili-
ties, the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women (held in September 1995 in Beijing,
China) demanded in its Platform of Action that 30 percent of all decision-making positions
in government should be allocated to women. Recognizing that appointed positions are
more difficult to control, women focused on elected bodies, promoting the idea that 30 percent
of membership is necessary to provide a critical mass that would allow significant changes in
policies and procedures. Today, over half the world’s countries have some sort of electoral
quota system for their legislatures.12
Research shows that quotas do not consistently result in increased numbers of women
elected. More important, even in countries with significant women representatives, policy
change is uneven (Tinker 2004c, 2009; Ballington and Karam 2005). The 2002 Human Devel-
opment Report notes that “Quotas are primarily a temporary remedial measure, and are no
substitute for raising awareness, increasing political education, mobilizing citizens and
removing procedural obstacles to women getting nominated and elected” (UNDP 2002: 70).
Much debate centers on the rationale for more women legislators. If the goal is equality,
then an increase in numbers constitutes success. But if the goal is to empower women to
implement a more feminist agenda, then outcomes, not numbers, are crucial. Thus how
women candidates are selected and who supports them must be analyzed before numbers of
women in legislatures can be equated with empowerment.
The most efficacious method for ensuring that women are elected to legislatures is through
the party list system utilized by some 35 percent of countries. Parties determine who is on the
list: in this system, if every other candidate were a woman, the party would elect 50 percent
female legislators. In contrast, over half of the world’s states use an electoral system based on
a territorially defined constituency. Requiring that a specific single-member constituency in
national elections be reserved for a woman is politically impractical, so women winning
these races have a stronger voice in their parties than women put on the list by male party
leaders.13
Clearly, the number of women in a legislature does not necessarily correlate with women’s
empowerment. A history of women’s attempts to pass laws against violence against women
in Sweden and India illustrates this critical point. In Sweden, as a result of both major politi-
cal parties’ deciding in 1972 to alternate women and men on their list of candidates, the coun-
try has had the world’s highest percentage of women legislators (until Rwanda surpassed
them in 2008). Feminists argue that this action moved debate on women’s issues into the
parties and made a unified voice for women outside parties more difficult. They complain
that most social policy legislation, such as improved working conditions and pay, affordable
child care, and paid maternity (and paternity) leave, drew on a socialist ideology and were
passed with little input from independent feminist organizations (Gustafsson, Eduards, and
Rönnblom 1997). Further, because of outdated attitudes, legislation passed in 2003 meant to
protect women from domestic violence has not been assertively implemented; incidences of
violence are increasing, according to a 2004 report by Amnesty International (2004). In 2005
a women’s party, The Feminist Initiative, was formed to agitate for the reform of rape laws
and the creation of programs to address domestic violence (Wängnerud 2005).
India has had active women’s organizations for years, but most focused on charitable
work or development projects. For ten years, these groups agitated for a law dealing with
violence against women. Finally, in 2005, women organized a national lobby, Women Power
Connect, with full-time lobbyists in New Delhi. This coalition of women’s organizations
was instrumental in the passage of the Domestic Violence Bill, which finally became law in
November 2006.14
The Human Development Reports, when calculating the Gender Inequality Index, meas-
ure empowerment as the number of women in parliaments plus women’s educational attain-
ment. A more accurate method of indicating empowerment would be to consider the impact
of legislation passed by elective bodies, and also the numbers of politically active women’s
organizations. Similarly, to achieve greater equity in realizing the other two indicators in the
Gender Inequality Index, reproductive health and employment, laws and customs that pre-
serve male privilege must be changed. Until women can control their own bodies, they will
be unable to realize their reproductive rights. Also, women’s capabilities will not be achieva-
ble until women can own their homes and until the care economy is included in economic
calculations.
Conclusion
The story of women and international development is a story of women organizing to chal-
lenge the development paradigm. Over fifty years, women have influenced development
agencies to include women’s concerns, and formed a global social movement that has altered
gender relations throughout the world. Today women are seeking political power to advance
their claims for equity.
To envisage the years to come, a historical perspective refreshingly underlines that tre-
mendous progress has been attained for women’s rights and gender justice (although mas-
sive work remains to achieve full women’s empowerment). In developed countries a century
ago, women could not vote and rarely worked outside the home. Now they do both, although
globally gender gaps persist in earnings, household responsibilities, asset ownership, and
decision making. Going forward, countries most resistant to the notion of women filling
civic and economic roles will certainly continue to experience an erosion of traditional cul-
tural and religious barriers to women’s empowerment in response to citizens’ bottom-up
organizing and government reforms.
While challenges to closing gender gaps worldwide remain immense, there is unprece-
dented energy today toward realizing women’s and men’s equal rights. The global women’s
movement has exploded into a myriad of new organizations and networks led by women in
every country. Such organizations also empower women as political, community, and social
leaders. As these leaders influence development policies and initiate national legislation,
world society and gender relationships will surely become more equitable.
Notes
1. For a review of many time allocation studies, see Tinker 1987.
2. For papers from the AAAS Seminar on Women in Development, workshop reports, and
a list of participants, see Irene Tinker and Bo Bramsen 1976.
3. See Tinker and Jaquette 1987 for an exhaustive critique of inappropriate technology.
4. The term “feminization of poverty” as well as the indicators that are used to measure
poverty are widely contested (see Chant 1997; Razavi 2000). Research suggests that
women’s capacity to command and allocate resources is more crucial to empowerment
than simply receiving them (see Kabeer 1994; Chant 2006).
5. See <http://www.landesa.org>.
6. For case studies, see <http://www.icrw.org>.
7. <http://www.caringeconomy.org>.
8. An illuminating discussion of the WID/GAD debate may be found in Jaquette and
Staudt 2006.
9. In 1981, when Zuckerman first joined the World Bank, the Bank had one WID and one
environment advisor. Since then environmental ranks in the Bank have grown to
roughly 800 while gender experts hover around 100, mostly composed of part-time
country gender focal points (Zuckerman and Qing 2005).
10. Zuckerman previously worked inside the Bank as a project economist, as the founder of
the program to address structural adjustment’s impacts on poor women and men, and
in the gender unit.
11. See <http://www.genderaction.org>.
12. See <http://www.quotaproject.org>.
13. For a detailed review of electoral systems and women, see Tinker 2004c and 2009.
14. See <http://www.womenpowerconnect.org>.
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chapter 8
com posite i n dice s of

dev el opm en t
maria emma santos and georgina santos
Introduction
The question of how to measure development has attracted the attention of economists and
other social scientists as well as non-government organizations (NGOs) and policy-makers
for many decades now, especially since the post-war period. Broadly, we can identify three
approaches to measuring development that emerged more or less sequentially over time, but
now co-exist.
One approach considers that development can be measured with some specification of a
monetary indicator: Gross National (or Domestic) Product (GNP and GDP, respectively),
usually in per capita terms, and typically with special attention to its growth rate.1 Most of
the proponents of this view do not necessarily regard economic growth as the “end” of devel-
opment, but consider GNP per capita to be a good enough proxy for well-being, highly cor-
related with other indicators that are less arguably considered as development goals.
The second approach states that GNP per capita has too many deficiencies as an indicator
of well-being and that it does not always correlate well with development goals; therefore, a
portfolio or dashboard of social indicators (including but not limited to monetary indica-
tors) should be used to measure development.
A third approach considers that while portfolios of development indicators are informa-
tive and necessary, there is also a need for a summary measure that combines a few of these
indicators into a single number. This approach has given rise to the construction of compos-
ite indices of development. A composite index is a function of variables and weights that
maps attainments in a variety of attributes into a single real number, which may have cardi-
nal meaning or be merely ordinal.
In this chapter we examine the motivation for the emergence of composite indices of
development and the main grounds on which they have been criticized, which naturally
coincide with the decisions involved in their construction. For simplicity, in most of the
chapter we refer to “composite indices” in a broad sense, including multidimensional
134 maria emma santos and georgina santos
indices, clarifying below the distinction between the two. There is a discussion of some
issues specific to gender-related indices, and we conclude with a review of the trade-offs
around composite indices alongside a few recommendations for their design.
The Emergence of Composite Indices

of Development
In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, the System of National
Accounts was developed with the aim of providing a complete accounting framework for
reporting and evaluating the performance of an economy.
This was a natural response to the Great Depression, two devastating wars, and the influ-
ence of Keynesian theory. Attention was focused on obtaining accurate computations of
GNP and fostering their increase in per capita terms. Many argue that in those years GNP
per capita was the primary—if not the sole—indicator of development (Hicks and Streeten
1979; UNDP 1990; ul Haq 1995, among others). Srinivasan (1994) argues that this was not the
case, as policy-makers also considered indicators such as child mortality and life expectancy.
Certainly, it would be unfair to say that there was no concern for human well-being. Rather,
the underlying idea was that growth was the best instrument to reduce deprivation and war-
rant human flourishing, and thus it was a good measure of development. We identify this as
the first approach to measuring development, namely using GNP per capita.
Yet in the early 1970s one empirical fact caught the attention of economists and interna-
tional agencies: thirty years of outstanding economic growth performance had been accom-
panied by notable rising dualism within nations and a failure to reduce poverty. The
limitations of GNP per capita as an indicator of development and of the power of economic
growth as an instrument for poverty reduction started to be exposed. This gave rise to a
change of emphasis in the conceptualization of development. It was time to measure devel-
opment more directly, paying attention to the evolution of unemployment, poverty, and ine-
quality (Seers 1969). An emerging new approach would emphasize the need to refocus
development on removing mass deprivation and ensuring that all human beings met their
basic needs.2
Thus efforts were redirected to push the development of a set of cross-country comparable
social indicators, as evidenced by the work of the UN and reports by other international
organizations, cited in Hicks and Streeten (1979: 570). These publications considered not just
economic indicators, such as the distribution of household income by deciles, but also health
and education indicators, such as per capita protein consumption, infant mortality rate,
combined primary and secondary enrolment ratio, and literacy rate, to name just a few.
The Basic Needs Approach advocated a parsimonious set of core indicators covering six
areas: nutrition, basic education, health, sanitation, water supply, and housing, and related
infrastructure which would supplement GNP (Hicks and Streeten 1979). We identify this as
the second approach to measuring development, namely using a portfolio or dashboard of indi-
cators, more or less broad depending on the intended focus.
About the same time as efforts to measure development were shifting from GDP per cap-
ita to a portfolio of indicators, interest in constructing composite indices started to emerge.
composite indices of development 135
In fact, as early as 1964, Harbison and Myers proposed a composite indicator that focused on
human resource development (as distinct from development in general). The index was the
arithmetic total of enrolment at secondary level of education and enrolment at tertiary level
of education, the latter multiplied by a weight of five (Harbison and Myers 1964: 31–2).
A few years later, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)
proposed an index of socio-economic development designed by McGranahan et al. (1972).
The index was composed of nineteen indicators, including several indicators of economic
development (defined as GNP per capita) alongside various indicators of structural change
(such as manufacturing share of GNP), some of education (such as combined primary and
secondary enrolment), and two of health (per capita-per day consumption of animal pro-
tein, and life expectancy at birth). The scaling and weighting of the variables was based on a
statistical procedure. This index was expressly intended to fill in the gaps of GNP per capita
as a measure of development.
Inspired by the basic needs approach, Morris (1978) proposed a composite index: the
Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI), which was the arithmetic mean of (normalized) life
expectancy, infant mortality, and literacy. Notably, the index did not include any measure of
economic performance. Ram (1982) proposed two variants of the PQLI, where the main
innovation was the technique used to construct the index: the multivariate method of prin-
cipal components.
The Basic Needs Approach also had a practical influence on poverty measurement in the
1980s. In Latin America, poverty started to be measured with census information as the pro-
portion of people in households that reported one or more Unsatisfied Basic Needs (UBN)
out of a total of five indicators for housing and education. The UBN Index was the predeces-
sor of multidimensional poverty measures.
Other proposed composite indices were the Index of Social Progress (ISP, Estes 1984) and
the Human Suffering Index (HSI, Camp and Speidel 1987). The ISP was composed of over
forty indicators grouped in ten sub-indices: education, health status, women status, defense
effort, economic, demography, environment, social chaos, cultural diversity, and welfare
effort. The IHS was composed of ten indicators representing various dimensions of human
suffering, not all of them obvious.
The early work on composite indices of development expressed “the need for a single
number which, like GNP per head, can be quickly grasped and gives a rough indication of
‘social’ development” (Hicks and Streeten 1979: 577). Although GNP per capita alone was
insufficient as an indicator of development, the information provided by a dashboard of
indicators could be, for many, too much to digest.
Each of the aforementioned composite indices of development received some attention.
Yet it seems that it was not until the appearance of the Human Development Index (HDI) in
the first Human Development Report (HDR) in 1990 that composite indices of development
received wider attention, naturally accompanied by deep scrutiny and a host of critiques.
Conceptually, the HDI was rooted in Sen’s capability approach, which started with Sen’s
(1979) Tanner Lecture, “Equality of What?” where he proposed the need to shift the focus of
attention from means of development, such as income and resources, to ends of develop-
ment: the opportunities a person has. The capability approach differs from the basic needs
one in that it broadens the scope of interest to all human beings (not just the poor), and it
states the need to change the space of analysis to the capability set. Capabilities are defined as
the various combinations of functionings (beings and doings) that the person can achieve.
Capability is, thus, a set of vectors of functionings, reflecting the person’s freedom to lead
one type of life or another, to choose from possible livings (Sen 1992: 40). Human develop-
ment in this context is the process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy (Sen
1999: 3).3
Inspired by these ideas, the intention of Mahbub ul Haq in introducing the HDI was to
consolidate the concept of development beyond growth in GNP. “The new index would
measure the basic concept of human development to enlarge people’s choices . . . at least a few
more choices besides income and to reflect them in a methodologically sound composite
index” (ul Haq 1995: 177).
The HDI (Anand and Sen 1994) considers a country’s achievements in three dimensions:
living standards, health, and education. In its original formulation, the indicator for living
standards was the log of the real GDP per capita (in PPP$),4 the health indicator was life
expectancy at birth, and the education indicator was the literacy rate. The index was the
arithmetic mean of these (normalized) indicators. Although inspired by the capability
approach, the components of the HDI were present in previous indices; the health and edu-
cation indicators reflected functionings insofar as data permitted at the time, and thus there
was no advance on that front.
However, the HDI did have several advantages over its predecessors. First, unlike the
PQLI, it included GNP per capita, and thus it was not blind to the relevance of the economic
dimension for development. Second, unlike the UNRISD index, the ISP and the HSI, it had a
small number of components, which anyone could remember. Third, all these components
were intuitive indicators of development. Fourth, although the subject of intense debate,
unlike the indices proposed by Ram (1982) and the UNRISD index, the weights as well as
the normalization formula for each indicator were transparent, easily understandable, and
replicable.5 These features, together with the fact that UNDP started to publish the HDR
annually with continuous updates of the index, placed the HDI as the showcase of what we
identify as the third approach to measuring development, namely using composite indices of
development.
The three main criticisms leveled at the HDI are related to (1) the selection of dimensions
and indicators, (2) the implicit trade-offs, and (3) the insensitiveness of the HDI to inequali-
ties in the distribution of human development in the population. Many of the critiques were
accompanied by proposals of modifications to the HDI or suggestions for completely differ-
ent alternative indices. Some of these critiques were echoed by UNDP, and over the subse-
quent years the HDI experienced methodological modifications.6
After the HDI, three other composite indices were introduced in the HDR, aiming at cap-
turing more directly certain specific areas related to development, namely gender equality
and poverty.7 The 1995 HDR introduced the Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) and
the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). In 1996, a Capability Poverty Measure (CPM)
was introduced but was replaced the following year by the Human Poverty Index (HPI)
(Anand and Sen 1997), which more accurately expressed failures in the three dimensions of
the HDI. The components of the HPI were: for health, the probability at birth of not surviv-
ing to age 40; for education, the adult literacy rate; and for living standards, the average of the
percentage of the population without access to an improved water source and the percentage
of children under weight-for-age. In 1998 a variant of the HPI for developed countries was
introduced. These indices were reported in every HDR until 2009.
UNDP has certainly not been the only institution producing composite indices of devel-
opment. Several other institutions, NGOs, and think tanks have developed composite indi-
ces, which usually focus on certain aspects of development. For example, on economic
aspects there is the Index of Economic Freedom (Heritage Foundation); on governance, the
Ibrahim Index of African Governance (Mo Ibrahim Foundation); on sustainability, the
Environmental Performance Index (EPI, Yale University); and we briefly review some gen-
der indices below. Bandura (2008) surveys 178 composite indicators that rank or assess
countries according to some economic, political, social, or environmental measure, all of
which can be related to development.
The understanding that development is about improving people’s lives, which motivated
the construction of composite indices, also led, at a political level, to the Millennium Decla-
ration in 2000, by which 189 heads of state committed to eradicating poverty and promoting
other fundamental aspects of development by 2015. The Declaration was materialized in
eight development goals (Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs) with eighteen associ-
ated targets and forty-nine quantitative indicators to follow them up (UN 2003). The MDG
Indicators pushed the improvement in data collection in many countries, as progress towards
each goal and target needs to be tracked. Interestingly, while fostering a multidimensional
approach, the MDGs counterbalanced the interest on composite indices of development,
favoring a dashboard approach. Likewise, the World Development Indicators offer a pleth-
ora of indicators related to different areas of development.
The 20th anniversary edition (2010) of the HDR introduced a number of changes in the
measures of development. First, the living standard and educational indicators, the goal-
posts, and the aggregation formula of the HDI were modified. Second, the Inequality-
Adjusted HDI was introduced. Third, the Gender Inequality Index (GII) replaced previous
gender indices. Fourth, the HPI was replaced by the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI;
see Alkire and Santos 2010). The MPI covers the three HDI dimensions (health, education,
and living standards) using the indicators (nutrition and child mortality, school attendance
and years of education, access to drinking water, improved sanitation, electricity, clean cook-
ing fuel, non-dirt floor, and two small assets or one big one). The MPI was designed to reflect
acute multidimensional poverty in a cross-country comparable way.8 A distinctive feature of
the MPI is that it looks at joint deprivations, requiring that the data come from the same
source. In fact, the MPI is the product of two intuitive sub-indices: the incidence of poverty
and the intensity of the deprivation that the poor experience. The 2010 HDR changes rekin-
dled the debate on composite (and multidimensional) indices of development.
To sum up, there are currently three approaches to measuring development. Growth is still
regarded by many as the key measure of development: “growth is a necessary, if not sufficient,
condition for broader development, enlarging the scope for individuals to be productive and
creative” (Commission on Growth and Development 2008: 1). Others explicitly favor a multi-
dimensional approach as long as each indicator is kept separate, and they cast some doubt
about the value-added of composite indices and their policy relevance (Ravallion 2010a).
Finally, other researchers and institutions, such as UNDP, favor composite and/or multidimen-
sional indices of development, as “they have a stronger impact on the mind and draw public
attention more powerfully than a long list of many indicators combined with a qualitative
discussion” (Streeten 1994: 235) and, in the case of multidimensional indices, allow looking at
the joint distribution of achievements (or deprivations).
Critical Issues in Designing

Composite Indices
Basic Notation
In order to discuss the main issues of debate around composite indices of development, it is
useful to introduce some common mathematical notation.
Given m indicators across a population of n individuals, let X = [ xij ] denote the n × m
matrix of achievements. The typical entry xij ≥ 0 represents individual i’s achievement in
indicator j. A composite index of development can be written in a general form as:
I ( X ) = j [w j h ( A j ( x .j ))] (8.1)
where Aj is a function that aggregates individual achievements in an attribute j across the

population to obtain an indicator of that achievement, for example at country level. η is a
normalization function that expresses all indicators in the same unit of measurement
m
(typi-
cally between 0 and 1). wj is the (explicit) weight attached to attribute j (with ∑w j = 1), and φ
is an aggregation function. j =1
A typical aggregation function Aj of individual data in attribute j is given by the general-

ized mean of order β:
 1 n b
1/ b
  ∑(xij )  b ≠0
m b (x.j ) =   n i=1 
 n
∏ i=1 (xij )
1/n
b = 0 (8.2)
When β = 1, the expression is reduced to the arithmetic mean. When β < 1, higher weight is
given to lower xij values. In this range, the general means capture inequality in a distribution
of achievements: for a given value of β, the more unequal a distribution is, the lower the
β-mean will be with respect to the arithmetic mean. Thus, given a distribution, the more one
wants to penalize inequality, the lower the β value chosen should be. Two cases are frequently
used: when β = 0, the β-mean is called the geometric mean, and when β = –1, it is called the
harmonic mean.9 When β < 1, higher weight is given to higher xij values; this is used to penal-
ize for inequality when the xij arguments are deprivations rather than achievements. Most
commonly, the arithmetic mean is used to obtain the indicator of achievement to construct
composite indices, as it is the case for GDP per capita, the literacy rate, and the gross enrol-
ment ratio, to name a few.
A typical normalization function is that used by the HDI:
h ( Aj ) = ( Aj − Amin ) / ( Amax − Amin ). The normalized indicator expresses the proportion
achieved by a country of a total potential achievement.10
A typical aggregation function φ has most commonly been the arithmetic mean over the
normalized weighted indicators, but other members of the general means are frequently
employed as well.
Equation (8.1) can also be used as a general expression for multidimensional (rather than
composite) indices, but with some important differences. First, although the equation
presents the composite index as a function of the matrix of achievements, access to micro-
data is not necessary when computing them. Only information on the indicators A j ,
already aggregated across the population, is required, and thus, information on each indi-
cator can come from different data sources. Moreover, different indicators may have differ-
ent base populations. For example, while income per capita is computed over the total
population n, the literacy rate is typically computed over the population age 15 years and
older. When computing multidimensional indices, on the other hand, all data need to come
from the same source. Aj is in this case the identity function, that is, Aj will no longer return a
scalar but keep the column that contains the individual achievements in dimension j. All
aggregation is performed with the φ function, allowing to first aggregate across attributes for
each individual, and then across individuals. This implies that multidimensional indices can
capture the joint distribution of achievements. This is clear in multidimensional indices of
poverty, where first the poor need to be identified, generally based on the number of depri-
vations experienced by each person, for which one needs to consider the joint distribution.
For example, the MPI identifies as “poor” anyone living in a household deprived in 33.33 per-
cent of the weighted indicators. Even when an identification step is not required, as in a well-
being index, aggregation across attributes is still the first step, as there is usually interest in
accounting for relations of substitutability or complementarity across attributes.11 Note, then,
that in multidimensional indices the base population of all attributes needs to be the same.
A second difference, specific to multidimensional indices of poverty, is that the normali-
zation function usually transforms achievements into shortfalls with respect to a desired
threshold z j . That is: h( xij ) = ( z j − xij ) / z j for those with xij < z j and who have been identified
as poor, and h( xij ) = 0 otherwise. When variables are of an ordinal nature (that is, the magni-
tude of the distance between categories is meaningless, as in “sanitation facility”), a robust
normalization procedure is simply to dichotomize the variable with reference to the depriva-
tion cutoff: 1 being deprived, and 0 non-deprived. This is the procedure followed in the MPI.
Selection of Dimensions and Indicators

One of the key debates about composite indices relates to the selection of the relevant dimen-
sions and the indicators to measure them—the xij of equation (8.1). These are obviously linked
to the purpose of the measure, which can be to track development across countries, or to
monitor national poverty reduction, or to target a poverty reduction program, or some other.
In practice, the selection of dimensions and indicators for composite indices has usually
been based on (a) existing data or convention, (b) theory, (c) public consensus, (d) ongoing
deliberative participatory processes, or (e) empirical evidence or analysis (Alkire 2008); but
also (f) pragmatism or intuitive appeal, or some combination thereof (Booysen 2002: 119).
Methods (b) to (e) seem preferable to (a), and especially to (f). Robeyns (2005) recommends
a thorough justification of the reasons and methods used in the selection as well as an expla-
nation for any omissions, and Sen (2009) argues that any list of basic capabilities should
enjoy a high degree of consensus built upon a process of public reasoning.
However, it is frequently the case in the construction of composite indices that while the
“ideal” list of dimensions and indicators follows some of the preferred methods, the actual
indicators included in the index are constrained by data availability (method [a]). This
usually happens with indices that intend to make cross-country comparisons, such as the
HDI or the MPI. Nonetheless, the binding constraint of internationally comparable data
is not exclusive of composite indices.12 Thus, rather than deterring their use for cross-
country comparisons, this should foster international homogenization of data collection.
When the intended purpose of the measure is restricted to a country, there is scope for the
use of better data.
In the construction of most composite indices, researchers have offered a justification for
the selection of dimensions and indicators. Yet McGillivray and Noorbakhsh (2007) argue
that the selection is ultimately always ad hoc. In fact, no composite index so far has escaped
criticism in this respect. Discussions on this matter typically reflect the trade-off between
parsimony, with its inherent risk of omitting relevant variables, and comprehensiveness,
with the risk of being redundant. In the case of the HDI, for example, the intention was to
“keep it simple and manageable” (ul Haq 1995: 182). Other indices reflect the other option,
such as the Mo Ibrahim Index of African governance, which contains fifty-seven indicators.
Statistical techniques can be of aid in dealing with this problem. Provided a selection of
the dimensions has already been done, the selection of indicators to represent those dimen-
sions can be guided by correlation analysis, Principal Components Analysis, or Factor
Analysis. The use of these techniques can help reduce the set of indicators.
Correlation analysis has also been used to scrutinize some popular composite indices of
development, fuelling arguments both for and against composite indices. Hicks and Streeten
(1979), for example, oppose the use of composite indices by arguing that if the individual
indicators are highly correlated any of them alone would serve as an adequate index, and if
they are not correlated but move in different directions across countries and in time, averag-
ing would only conceal important issues. Larson and Wilford (1979) find that the three
PQLI’s components are closely correlated, and McGillivray (1991) finds the same for the HDI.
Thus using just one component of these indices would yield similar findings as using the
index itself. However, Noorbakhsh (1998) shows that the correlation coefficients between
the component indicators of the HDI are much lower and often insignificant for sub-samples
of countries grouped, for example, by level of human development. In this case, using differ-
ent components of the index would result in different rankings within these groups.
Moreover, although higher correlation between indicators is often criticized as redun-
dancy, Foster, McGillivray, and Seth (2012) show that the more correlated the component
indicators of a composite index, the more robust the weighting, something usually desired
for a composite index. They suggest that the trade-off between redundancy and robustness
needs further research (Foster, McGillivray, and Seth 2012: 51–2).
Aside from the choice of specific dimensions and indicators, there are also choices to be
made in terms of the type of indicators to be used. One of them is whether to use indicators
of inputs or means (such as resources), indicators of outputs or ends (such as functionings),
or a combination of both. Interestingly, variables such as literacy represent measures of both
ends and means (Booysen 2002: 120). Statistics on inputs are more available than on outputs,
but outputs tend to be better measures (Atkinson et al. 2002: 20; Booysen 2002: 120 and
144–5). For example, Das et al. (2008: 3) argue that higher investment in health care infra-
structure in many low income countries has not translated into improved health. Composite
indices usually have some combination of both means and ends variables.
Another decision to be made is whether to use indicators of stock (such as assets or wealth)
or flow (such as income). As remarked by Atkinson et al. (2002: 32), flow measures are easier to
change through policy; moreover, flows may have impacts on stocks: higher qualifications of
those entering the labor market may have an impact on the qualifications of those in the exist-
ing labor market. Concentrating on either flow or stock variables might yield a misleading pic-
ture. For example, Klasen (2007) notes that focusing on life expectancy (flow) for women and
men in countries such as China might indicate that gender bias is being reduced, as women’s
mortality rates are decreasing. However, this conceals an increase in sex-selective abortions
(Sen 2003). Including both stock and flow variables would uncover this issue (Klasen 2007).
In sum, choosing dimensions and indicators is a critical step in the construction of com-
posite indices. Given the outlined difficulties, it seems worth clearly delimiting the purpose
of the measure, fully justifying the selection of dimensions and indicators, and exploiting the
index to its full potential while recognizing that such selection may still fall short of fulfilling
the intended purpose.
Normalization, Weights, and Aggregation

Another line of significant debate over composite indices of development has been the
embedded trade-offs between their indicators. This is given by the relative weights between
components, called in economics the marginal rate of substitution: for a given level of devel-
opment or well-being, how much of one achievement must be resigned in order to obtain an
extra unit of another achievement? It can be verified that these trade-offs are typically deter-
mined by three elements expressed in equation (8.1): the normalization procedure η, the
explicit weights attached to each component (wj), and the aggregation function φ (Decancq
and Lugo 2012). Ravallion (2010b, 2011) argues that while the explicit weights attached to
components are usually transparent, the trade-offs between them are not.
The normalization procedure η involves selecting goalposts or deprivation cutoffs or some
other normative reference. Higher maximum goalposts or deprivation cutoffs lead to an
implicit higher relative weight of that indicator as it becomes more difficult to achieve the
same relative increase in that particular variable (Booysen 2002: 125).13
As for the weights of explicit attributes, the approaches that have been used for setting
them can be grouped into statistical, normative, or hybrid, which combines statistical and
normative (Decancq and Lugo 2012).
Statistical approaches include principal components analysis, correlation, and regression
coefficients of the variables with some selected variable not included in the index (hedonic
weighting). The problem with these approaches is that the weights depend on the particular
data set used, making comparisons over time difficult. They are also less transparent to and
understandable by non-scholars.
Normative approaches imply setting weights based on explicit value judgments. Within
this category, Decancq and Lugo (2012) include using prices, an option advocated by many,
such as for example, Srinivasan 1994; Ravallion 2010a, 2011. However, markets are imperfect
and prices depend on the distribution of income (Lustig 2011; Seers 1969). Thus, meaningful
prices may not be available across all dimensions of relevance to poverty (Alkire, Foster, and
Santos 2011: 503), and—we could add—to development.
The limitations of prices as weights have led to the frequent use of equal weighting. This
has been the case of the HDI as “there was no a priori rationale for giving higher weight to
one choice than to another” (ul Haq 1995). The MPI also follows an equal weighting approach,
a structure criticized by Ravallion (2010a, 2011). Yet equal weighting has been favored by
experts, following a wide consultation (Chowdhury and Squire 2006), and it has also been
recommended by Atkinson et al. (2002).
A promising hybrid method is that of setting weights based on participatory studies where
people express their relative valuations of different attributes. Although this has not been
implemented in the widely used composite indices of development (Ravallion 2011), there
are some small-scale exercises (see Decancq and Lugo 2012) that may shed some light on the
design of broader-scale indices in the future.
In terms of the aggregation function φ, ideally, one would like to know the functional
form of a well-being production function (UNDP HDR 1993: 109). Yet this function remains
unknown (McGillivray and Noorbakhsh 2007). The typically used arithmetic mean implies
that the normalized attributes are considered perfect substitutes: failures in one area of
development can be compensated by achievements in another. Many see this as conceptually
problematic. An alternative is to use a member of the general means with β < 1. This penal-
izes uneven development across attributes. The use of such an aggregation function with 0 <
β < 1 has been proposed by Chakravarty (2003). It has also been proposed by Foster, Lopez-
Calva, and Szekely (2005) in the range of β < 1, together with using a general mean of the
same order β for constructing the aggregate indicators Aj, so that the index also captures
inequality in the distribution of each attribute across people. This last idea was taken by
UNDP to construct the Inequality-Adjusted HDI, introduced in the 2010 HDR.
The HDI used a linear form until 2009. Because GDP per capita was logged, the trade-off
between longevity and income was dependent on the country’s income level. Thus, the HDI’s
implicit monetary valuation of an extra year of life went from very low levels in poor coun-
tries to very high levels in rich ones (Ravallion 1997: 633). In 2010, UNDP changed the aggre-
gation formula of the HDI to the geometric mean, in order to capture “how well rounded a
country’s performance is across the three dimensions” (UNDP HDR 2010: 15, emphasis
added). The goalposts for the living standards and the life expectancy indicator were also
changed. Given the data, these changes led in practice to an even lower (higher) valuation of
longevity in poor (richer) countries, and a similar problem with every extra year of school-
ing, something Ravallion (2010b) calls “troubling trade-offs.” Klugman, Rodriguez, and
Choi (2011) responded to this critique, arguing that in rich countries income contributes
very little to further expanding capabilities and this is why the “value” of anything in terms of
income appears very high. However, it should not be concluded that more resources should
be devoted to increasing longevity in rich countries than in poor ones.
The challenges faced by defining a normalization function, a weighting structure, and an
aggregation function, with their implied trade-offs alongside the controversies in the partic-
ular selection of dimensions and indicators discussed in the section entitled “Selection of
Dimensions and Indicators,” lead some to lean towards a dashboard approach to measuring
development (Hicks and Streeten 1979; Ravallion 2011). However, dashboards also suffer
from several problems as detailed in Alkire, Foster, and Santos (2011: 503–4). First of all, pol-
icy-makers prefer a summary statistic to show how overall poverty (and development) has
changed. Second, dashboards leave trade-offs completely open; thus they do not catalyze
public scrutiny on these trade-offs, nor encourage transparency. Third, dashboards are blind
to the joint distribution of achievements (or deprivations), something also acknowledged by

Lustig (2011) and even Ravallion (2011). There is increasing consensus on the importance of
considering the joint distribution (see, for example, Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi 2009: 15; Dea-
ton: 14–15). Finally, in the particular case of poverty measurement, a dashboard is unable to
answer the basic question of who is poor.
Thus, despite the challenges, many still argue for summary indices of development. One
possible “way out” of potential controversies is to make each choice as transparent, explicit,
and justifiable as possible. A common practice in this respect is to follow an axiomatic frame-
work that clearly states the direction of change of the summary measure (or the requirement
not to change) under different possible transformations of the achievements. This has been
the tradition followed in the unidimensional inequality and poverty measurement. It is also
being followed by multidimensional indices of poverty, as evidenced by several papers in
this area, including Alkire and Foster (2011), on which the MPI is based. This has been less
common in the area of composite indices of development, but not totally absent, as shown by
Chakravarty (2003) and Foster, Lopez-Calva, and Szekely (2005). Axiomatic frameworks are
helpful in selecting indices and in identifying trade-offs between the desired properties. For
example, for policy relevance, it is useful for a composite index to be subgroup consistent,
such that if the development level of one subgroup (say a geographical region) rises and the
rest are unchanged, the value of the overall index rises. Yet not all indices satisfy this prop-
erty (see Foster, Lopez-Calva, and Szekely 2005). Similarly, also for policy convenience, one
may want to break the index down into the contributions of its dimensional components;
however, this requires assuming independence of the considered attributes.
A second important “way out” of controversies is to perform thorough robustness checks
of the particular selection of normalization procedures and weighting structures, as done by
Slottje (1991) and stressed by Ravallion (2010a), among others. In the particular cases of the
HDI and the MPI, these checks suggest that country rankings are highly robust to alternative
weighting structures. (For the HDI, see Foster, McGillivray, and Seth 2012; for the MPI, see
Alkire and Santos 2013.)
Issues Specific to Gender Indices

Gender equality is central to development. It is well documented that in some regions of the
world there is an anti-female bias that starts as early as before birth, with female children
more likely to be aborted; they are also more likely to die earlier because of neglect (Sen 1990,
2003). Gender bias also exists in other dimensions such as food consumption, education,
employment, and income-earning opportunities (Anand and Sen 1994: 11). Aside from the
obvious unfairness of this bias, enhancing women’s achievements in the mentioned dimen-
sions is instrumental to other development goals.
Naturally, there have been efforts to capture gender bias in composite indices of develop-
ment. In particular, the 1995 HDR, which focused on Gender and Human Development,
introduced the Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment
Measure (GEM). The GDI considered gender equality in the same three dimensions as the
HDI and with very similar indicators (life expectancy by gender; adult literacy and enrol-
ment by gender; female and male income shares). The objective was to discount the level of
human development by the degree of inequality between these two groups, and thus was
similar in spirit to the IHDI (Seth 2011). This was achieved using the harmonic mean to
aggregate achievements of males and females within each dimension, and then the three
indicators were aggregated with an arithmetic mean.
The GEM was designed to capture women’s participation in economic and political deci-
sions through women’s representation in parliaments, women’s share of managerial and
professional positions, women’s participation in the active labor force, and women’s share
of national income. As with GDI, achievements of each gender were aggregated using the
harmonic mean within each dimension and then aggregated across dimensions with an
arithmetic mean.14
Both GDI and GEM had important limitations.15 A key one was that because of data limi-
tations they had to rely significantly on imputations, especially for the income component.
Additionally, since they aggregated across dimensions with an arithmetic mean, they were
not penalizing uneven development across dimensions.
In 2010, these two indices were replaced by the Gender Inequality Index (GII), which
followed the methodology proposed by Seth (2009). The index considers three dimen-
sions: women’s reproductive health, as measured by the (inverse of the) maternal mortal-
ity ratio and the (inverse of the) adolescent fertility rate; empowerment, as measured by
the share of parliamentary seats held by each sex and attainment at secondary or higher
educational level; and labor market participation, as measured by the labor market partic-
ipation rate for each gender. By not including income as an indicator, GII avoids the need
to impute values for a significant number of countries, and thus the estimates are more
reliable. Like the GDI and GEM, GII captures inequality across genders by aggregating the
male and female indices with the harmonic mean. However, GII also captures inequality
in achievements across dimensions within each gender using the geometric mean.16
Although the GII is an improvement over the GDI and GEM, it has a number of short-
comings (summarized in Seth 2011: 16). One in particular is that the health indicators are
only applicable to women; thus men are given a value of “one” as if they had achieved the best
possible outcome. However, this does not really provide a basis for comparison of achieve-
ments across genders. Another is that the indicators of empowerment have a bias towards
elites. To avoid that, they should include participation at the local government level and else-
where in the community and public life.
There are several other gender indices. Van Staveren (2012) compares five of them: the
GII, the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI, used by the World Economic Forum), the Social
Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI, OECD), the Gender Equality Index (GEI, Indices of
Social Development database of the Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotter-
dam), and the Women’s Economic Opportunities Index (WEOI, Economist Intelligence
Unit). She finds that the Pearson correlations between the indices are relatively high (between
0.50 and 0.81). However, each index yields quite different ranking results. This is because
they focus on different dimensions of human development, which she classifies into
resources, capabilities, functionings, and institutions. For example, while GII uses mostly
indicators of functionings, SIGI focuses on institutional gender equality and WEOI uses
mainly indicators of resources. The rankings at the bottom are more similar than those at the
top, suggesting that the different dimensions of human development do not automatically
move together as countries develop.
The discussion above suggests that the construction of gender-related composite indices
faces additional specific challenges on top of those that affect the design of composite indi-
ces in general. Klasen (2007) reviews some of these issues. Essentially, he notes that a great
deal of gender inequality is generated within the household, be it allocation of income,
food, or educational opportunities. This is obviously influenced by women’s empowerment,
a variable difficult to measure as women are typically willing to forgo resources for their
children and to delegate decision-making power. In order to uncover these intra-household
allocation dynamics, Klasen highlights the need for better quality data on functionings
such as nutrition and health status, cognitive abilities, time use, and so on. Additionally, he
notes that combining stock and flow indicators becomes particularly crucial in gender indi-
ces, where life expectancy should be complemented by some stock measure in order to cap-
ture gender-selective abortions.
Conclusion
Composite indices stand as one of the options to measure development, as an alternative to

using a portfolio of indicators or simply the GNP (or GDP) per capita. With composite
indices we broaden the considered dimensions of development, an advantage with respect
to GNP, and we gain power of synthesis such that countries or regions can be ranked, an
advantage with respect to portfolios of indicators. Yet by aggregating “incomparables” we
compromise on not expressing all components in market prices. Additionally, we cannot
sensibly integrate all the relevant dimensions present in a dashboard.
While no single measure will suffice for measuring development, different measures may
suit different purposes. Composite (and multidimensional) indices offer a flexible frame-
work that can prove helpful in many instances. However, their construction faces a number
of trade-offs. In selecting dimensions and indicators one can be comprehensive, albeit pos-
sibly redundant, or parsimonious, at risk of omitting significant variables. Furthermore,
avoiding redundancy by including lowly correlated indicators can compromise the robust-
ness of the index to alternative weighting structures. The index components can be “univer-
sal” and available for a wide number of countries, but possibly not as relevant to specific
contexts. Also, the index can be a composite one, overlooking joint deprivations, or a multi-
dimensional one, imposing high data requirements.
None of these decisions is trivial for development policy, and none is free from value judg-
ments. As argued by Atkinson (2001), there is a need to bring back into economics the study
of normative principles that underlie our welfare assessments. In line with this observation, a
number of practices related to their use seem recommendable. First, to fully specify the pur-
pose of a measure. Second, to select dimensions, indicators, and weights (in the broad sense of
implicit trade-offs of components) with as much public scrutiny and justification as possible.
In this respect, it is desirable to extend the practice of participatory processes to perform legit-
imate choices. Third, to elicit at least some of the alternative roads not taken. Fourth, to choose
the mathematical structure of an index in view of alternative axiomatic frameworks, so that
the direction in which the index will move under specific transformations is transparent.
Fifth, to perform robustness tests in order to make explicit the scope of the conclusions that
may be derived from the index values. Finally, to leave composite indices open to revision, as
feedback from the different stakeholders may offer new insights into measurement.
The design and use of composite indices would also benefit from improvements in data
collection, in particular at least a core set of outcomes (functionings) measurements in a
cross-country comparable way.
Notes
1. From now onwards we refer to GNP generically, which may in fact be GNP or GDP. The
implications of each of these specifications for measuring development are not addressed
in this chapter.
2. See UNEP/UNCTAD (1974) for a first articulation of the Basic Needs Approach. Other
relevant reports were those of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (1975); Herrera et al.
(1976); and ILO (1976). In 1978, the World Bank started to foster the approach (Streeten
et al. 1981).
3. Incidentally, there are important coincidences between the capability approach and the
Christian view of economic development, as presented by the Social Doctrine of the
Roman Catholic Church: “Development . . . cannot be restricted to economic growth
alone . . . it must foster the development of each man and of the whole man” (Pope Paul
VI, 1967, Populorum Progressio, point 14).
4. The use of the log of the real GDP per capita was to reflect the diminishing returns of
income on development.
5. Slottje (1991) showed empirically that the choice of the weighting technique is quite
critical.
6. See OPHI (2011).
7. We concentrate on indices that were reported annually for several years.
8. Acute poverty is understood as a person’s inability to meet minimum internationally
agreed standards in a set of core human functionings and rudimentary services
simultaneously.
9. The general means with β < 1 correspond to what Atkinson (1970) called the “equally
distributed equivalent (EDE) income” (YEDE), which is core to his inequality measure
defined as: I b = 1 − YEDE / m = 1 − mb / m .
10. See OECD (2008: 83–8) for other normalization functions.
11. See, for example, Seth (2009).
12. The construction of cross-country comparable unidimensional indices also requires
imputations, intra- and extrapolations, and other assumptions regarding the compara-
bility between countries.
13. This issue was early raised by Hicks and Streeten (1979) and later by Kelley (1991: 319)
and McGillivray and Noorbakhsh (2007).
14. For details on the computation of both GDI and GEM, see UNDP (HDI 1995, Technical Note).
15. There are many reviews of the GDI and GEM indices. Klasen (2007) is one.
16. Note that, in contrast to GDI and GEM, GII is an index of gender inequality. For a
detailed description of the steps to compute GII, see UNDP (HDI 2010) or Seth (2011).
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chapter 9
dev el opm en t eva luation

patricia j. rogers and dugan i. fraser
Introduction
Evaluation has long been considered an integral part of effective development, but over time
there have been different views about how development evaluation should be undertaken.
This chapter shows how these different approaches to development evaluation reflect differ-
ent ideas about what development is and how evaluation can contribute to improving it.
If development is primarily understood to be about implementing effective development
projects, then development evaluation needs to support this by helping to choose the right
projects to invest in, and supporting their management. If development is primarily under-
stood to involve scaling up effective technologies within a country or across countries, then
development evaluation needs to focus on identifying effective technologies, communicating
these findings clearly to policy-makers, and monitoring implementation fidelity during
scaling up. If development is primarily about building the capacities of government and
non-government organizations to create, adapt, and implement technologies that are appro-
priate to their diverse and changing situations, then development evaluation needs to build
capacity, supporting implementers to improve their practice. (Note that these different assump-
tions reflect the distinctions that Ocampo (in this volume) has drawn between different
approaches to “technological catching up.”)
All of these concepts focus on evaluation’s role in informing rational decision making, but
there are other ways of thinking about how evaluation can influence development. Evaluation
can contribute to positive incentives for good performance and to negative incentives (sanc-
tions) for poor performance through its role in accountability to funders or to the community.
By reassuring funders that money is being well spent, evaluation can also serve an important
function in ensuring that effective programs and organizations receive ongoing funding.
Rather than seeing these as mutually exclusive, incommensurable approaches to develop-
ment evaluation, in this chapter we discuss them as potentially appropriate choices for particular
situations, depending on what is being evaluated and the purpose of the evaluation. None of the
approaches described here are irrelevant, nor are any of them universally appropriate.
Despite the somewhat chronological presentation of different approaches in this chapter,
there has not been a simple progression of theory and practice: in fact the various different
approaches highlighted sequentially in this chapter have for the most part been present
152 patricia j. rogers and dugan i. fraser
throughout the history of development evaluation. Specific techniques have simply been
emphasized and promoted more successfully than others as a result of the interplay of
a range of different political, economic, and ideological factors at specific conjunctures.
In part this is because the different approaches retain some degree of relevance and
appropriateness, at least in some circumstances. In part the lack of informed evolution of
evaluation theory and practice is due to the limited knowledge of earlier evaluation theory
and practice among practicing evaluators and those who develop evaluation guidelines.
Because in most contexts there is no accreditation or certification among evaluators, no
agreed curriculum or required training, and because evaluation draws on many different
disciplines that tend to publish in different journals and books, there is often little under-
standing of what has already been done and what is currently being done in different disci-
plinary or organizational circles. This chapter attempts to bring together insights from
different disciplines and sectors that often co-exist in mutual ignorance.
Informing Investment Decisions by Donors
Early development evaluation began at the same time as the growth in international aid
following the Second World War. In a review of evaluation across different time periods,
Basil Cracknell, former Chair of the OECD’s Expert Group on Evaluation, pointed to the
emphasis in the late 1960s and 1970s on “economic project appraisal, which was seen as
crucial to good project selection and formulation” (Cracknell 2000). Little and Mirrlees
(1968, 1974), initially in an OECD manual and then in revised form in a book, set out a
process for ex ante evaluation of proposed projects, including the use of shadow prices for
non-traded goods.
Ex ante evaluation, sometimes called economic project appraisal, is intended to improve
development interventions in two important ways. First, the process itself helps improve the
quality of planning by assessing the quality of the needs analysis that has been undertaken,
the plausibility of the planned intervention in terms of the needs and the stated goals, and
the compliance of planning processes. Second, ex ante impact evaluation can contribute to
better investment decisions by providing estimates of the benefits, cost–benefit ratios, and
return on investment for potential projects through a model linking inputs with estimated
outcomes and impacts.
The approach has been criticized for lacking a critical analysis of the intended benefits and
their likely distribution (in particular whether the very poor are likely to benefit), for pro-
ducing misleadingly precise results that conceal the assumptions and judgments underpin-
ning the calculations, and for favoring larger projects over smaller ones (which might
arguably be more locally appropriate) because of the high technical costs of conducting cost–
benefit analyses in the ways recommended (Stewart 1978; Chambers 1978). It also does not
take account of the broader impact of development assistance which frees up government
expenditure for other purposes (World Bank 1998).
Despite these concerns, ex ante evaluation continues to be widely used to inform invest-
ment decisions. Different terms are used for this approach, including ex ante impact assess-
ment, return on investment (ROI), and value for money (VfM). A primary focus is on
development evaluation 153
ensuring that investments are guided towards the projects most likely to produce benefits—
and on reassuring donors that this is the case. These can vary from quick estimates of likely
benefits, as in the poverty impact assessment approach developed by the OECD’s Develop-
ment Assistance Committee (DAC) (1997), or more precise estimates based on econometric
models. Another use for these models is to support simulations that can suggest changes to
improve the reach or impact of projects, or reduce their cost without reducing their impact—
for example, the ex ante evaluation of conditional cash transfer projects (Bourguignon,
Ferreira, and Leite 2002). As development moved from discrete projects to more integrated
and complex programs and broad policy reforms, and as aid moved from projects to more
general budget support, the feasibility and relevance of this emphasis on ex ante project
evaluation was further questioned.
Improving Planning and Accountability
Another early focus of development evaluation was to improve planning and management,
especially by donor agencies. Much of this focused on the use of the logical framework,
commonly referred to as the logframe. This is one of the most common and persistent
approaches to evaluation in development, whose roots go back to the introduction of
program budgeting in the U.S. Department of Defense in 1961.
Building on this experience, in 1965 a new Planning-Programming-Budgeting System
(PPBS) was introduced across the U.S. federal government (Lyden and Miller 1967). In 1969,
the U.S. Agency for International Development commissioned the company Practical
Concepts to develop a guide applying the approach to the planning and evaluation of inter-
national aid projects. The approach centered around the use of a matrix, the logical frame-
work, which was further developed for use by UN agencies by Gesellschaft für Technische
Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), the German international development agency.
The logframe consisted of four components, each contained in a separate row of
the matrix: activities, outputs, purpose (the rationale for producing the outputs), and
goal (a higher-level objective to which this program and others contributed). For each
component, four aspects were articulated, each in its own column: a narrative descrip-
tion, objectively verifiable indicators, means of verification, and assumptions and risks
(factors outside the control of the program on which the success of achieving that com-
ponent depended).
In addition to its use for planning and developing performance monitoring indicators, the
logframe also provided a framework for external evaluation. These external evaluations tended
to use the same criteria as research, emphasizing comprehensiveness and rigor, rather than
producing timely and relevant information to inform decisions. This way of framing and
describing programs continues to be a key feature of development evaluation. While logframes,
and the logical framework approach more broadly, have helped provide a structure for both
planning and evaluation, there are concerns about their use. These concerns relate to:
“logic-less frames,” where only an illusion of logic is provided; “jamming” of too much into
one diagram; “lack-frames,” which omit vital aspects of a project; and “lock-frames,” whereby
programme learning and adaptation are blocked. (Gasper 2000: 21–2)
Some changes have been made to the format of logframes—for example, the UK Depart-
ment for International Development (DFID) has changed some of the terminology being
used, and the level of detail required. However, it is not clear that these innovations actually
address the most potent criticisms of the approach.
The logframe-inspired approach to evaluation has also been reflected in the broader results-
based management (RBM) emphasis in the UN system and more widely. The 2005 Paris Declara-
tion on Aid Effectiveness committed partner countries and donors to manage for results,
“managing and implementing aid in a way that focus[es] on the desired results and uses informa-
tion to improve decision making,” and to “work together in a participatory approach to strengthen
country capacities and demand for results-based management.” The Accra Agenda for Action in
2008 prioritized a results focus to improve aid effectiveness, and the Busan Partnership for Effec-
tive Development Cooperation in 2011 again supported the principle of focusing on results.
Development evaluation training, such as the International Program for Development Evalua-
tion Training, has focused on incorporating evaluation as an integral part of results-based man-
agement, with its textbook The Road to Results (Morra Imas and Rist 2009).
Studies of RBM in practice, however, have found that its performance often falls short of its
promise. A survey of members of the UN Evaluation Group in 2006 found that indicators and
evaluations were rarely used as practical management tools, but were used mainly for report-
ing purposes. Studies of the UNDP and UN Secretariat found similar problems (Bester 2012).
Developing appropriate indicators and using them appropriately for management are not
easy tasks. They require adequate resourcing of time, technical expertise (in content and
monitoring), and legitimacy to overcome a tendency to focus on procedural compliance in
terms of inputs, processes, and outputs. Perrin (2002), in his report of an OECD meeting on
challenges to results-focused management, summed it up succinctly: “If the data that are
reported do not reflect actual performance, they are meaningless or worse. It would be
misleading or even dangerous to use them for policy- or decision-making.” Gaming, data
corruption, and goal displacement are predictable risks that need to be directly addressed.
More recently, the need for credible evaluation of performance has increased with the intro-
duction of “performance-based aid,” where governments or non-government organizations
receive additional aid if they meet performance targets (Eichler and Levine 2009; Olken,
Onishi, and Wong 2012).
Rapid Appraisal
Traditional external evaluations, with their emphasis on rigor and comprehensiveness, often
lacked focus and timeliness, which limited their usefulness. Rapid rural appraisal emerged
in response to these concerns. While many of the shifts in approaches to development evalu-
ation relate to debates and dynamics in the broader evaluation field, rapid rural appraisal
arose from development evaluation experience. Rapid rural appraisal grew out of Farming
Systems Research and Extension experiences and techniques promoted by the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR). Agriculture development
specialist Anthony Ellman developed rapid rural appraisal after undertaking a study of the
achievements of four different land settlement schemes in Sri Lanka (Ellman 1981). It took
nine months to collect data and six months to complete the 305-page report for the study, by
which time it was no longer relevant, as government policy had changed. Ellman’s next
evaluation took a very different form: after the minimum data required had been identified,
a concise 25-page report was produced, on the basis of six weeks of data collection by a team
of ten people, with clear recommendations that were largely accepted (Crawford 1997).
Rapid rural appraisal is not a single method of data collection, but an overall approach to
focusing and prioritizing data collection, and then mobilizing a team to collect and analyze
data quickly to produce a succinct and targeted report. It should not be confused with the
“quick and dirty” approach sometimes used in development evaluation, where one or two
evaluators produce a report on the basis of a review of existing documentation and a brief
field visit, limited to interviews with readily accessible sites and informants. Robert Chambers
(1980) labeled this superficial approach “rural development tourism” and criticized its inher-
ent biases in data collection and analysis. Rapid rural appraisal, by contrast, was intended to
be “fairly quick and fairly clean,” and to use a larger team with the necessary expertise to
ensure an adequate standard of data collection and analysis in a short time.
Unlike the other approaches discussed in this chapter, rapid rural appraisal has not con-
tinued to be used widely. Some of its elements were incorporated in participatory approaches,
but it seems to have been largely ignored in more recent discussions of development evalua-
tion, again reflecting the lack of learning from previous practice and the continuing empha-
sis on methodologies advocated by academics publishing in refereed journals.
Participatory Approaches
While rapid rural appraisal addressed concerns about the timeliness of evaluations, it was
still primarily focused on how external evaluators could provide information to inform deci-
sions to be taken by external funders or policy-makers. With the increasing emphasis on the
role of communities in producing sustained and effective development came a matching
emphasis on involving communities in evaluation (Estrella et al. 2000) and a realization that
their involvement in data collection could achieve greater coverage, more valid interpreta-
tion of data, and greater local ownership.
This trend reflected discussions in the wider evaluation literature about the value of
involving project stakeholders in some way in an evaluation. Utilization-focused evaluation
(Patton 2008) was based on two principles: identifying the primary intended users of an
evaluation and their intended uses of it, and then making every subsequent decision about
the design and conduct of the evaluation to ensure it was appropriate for their intended use.
Action research focused on supporting those implementing a service to engage in cycles of
improvement through an iterative process of observe–reflect–plan–act (Kemmis and
McTaggart 2005; Burns, Harvey, and Aragón 2012).
Some approaches to participation focused on engaging local project staff; others focused
on community members or intended beneficiaries. This participation could be at one of
three levels, depending on whether the underlying rationale for using a participatory
approach was primarily to improve the quality and relevance of data collected or to engage
participants in implementing changes.
The first level of participation involves participants (especially community members) as
important sources of information about the implementation of projects and programs, their
outcomes and impacts, and how well these match community needs. One approach to this
level of participation, beneficiary assessment, was developed by the World Bank as “a process
of listening systematically to key actors” (Salmen 2002) in order to document the experiences
and values of the people who were intended to benefit from programs and projects. The ration-
ale for beneficiary assessment was that “by encouraging people to express their beliefs and val-
ues, [it] leads to development which responds to, while it promotes, the fuller participation of
people in their own development” (Salmen 2002). Its primary intended purpose, however, was
to inform decisions by managers responsible for the particular project or program.
Using a combination of direct observation, conversational interviews, and participant
observation, beneficiary assessment developed a picture of the concerns and experiences of
intended beneficiaries. This could be used to check if the goals of the project matched the
aspirations and needs of the community, to understand barriers to engagement and imple-
mentation, and to gather evidence about the causal paths by which the project or program
produced its results. By 2002, over 300 projects funded by the World Bank in more than sixty
countries had used the approach. However, in part because of the time needed, its wide-
spread use has not continued, although most development evaluations seek to have some
processes for including the “voice” of intended beneficiaries.
The second level of participation involves the community in collecting data. Participatory
rural appraisal comprised a range of methods that could be readily used with a range of partici-
pants (including non-literate community members), such as community sketch maps, group-
generated timelines, and trend lines. Participatory data collection can improve the quality of
data collected (where community members can gain better access to key informants) and
improve the quality of data analysis (by appropriately interpreting responses). It can also build
community engagement in a project (Chambers 1994). It is important not to conflate participa-
tory data collection with qualitative methods. Many of the approaches used in participatory
rural appraisal involve quantifying data, with a particular emphasis on ensuring the right things
are counted in the right way in order to represent the situation accurately (Chambers 2007).
The third level of participation involves control over the evaluation process itself. Some-
times this involves participatory data collection as well, and at other times it involves com-
munity members being part of the decision-making process, overseeing the activities of
external evaluators who collect and analyze the data.
Many further developments of participatory approaches have emphasized strengths-based
approaches to evaluation to support strengths-based approaches to development. The “posi-
tive deviance” approach, initially proposed by Marian Zeitlin and operationalized and devel-
oped by Jerry and Monique Sternin in the 1990s (Pascale, Sternin, and Sternin 2010), was
developed for situations where, although the average experience is poor, there are some success
cases that can enhance learning. Rather than having an external evaluator conduct an evalua-
tion, identify lessons to be learned, and then try to convince community members to adopt
them, the “positive deviance” approach involves the community in the entire process, includ-
ing deciding what constitutes success. In an early example in Vietnam, researchers worked
with community members to identify “outlier” families whose children were unusually well
nourished and healthy, in a poor community where child malnutrition was widespread and
seemingly intractable. Discussions with these families revealed differences in their feeding
practices (adding crustaceans to the rice, providing several small meals) that could be adopted
by other families. “Appreciative inquiry” takes a similar strengths-based approach, working
with implementers to identify examples of good practices and explore ways of increasing their
frequency (Elliott 1999).
Concerns have been expressed about the rigor and credibility of participatory approaches,
especially when they have a strengths-based focus. In particular there are questions about
possible bias in data collection because of participants’ prior involvement (Leeuw and
Vaessen 2009) and concerns that such evaluations can too easily be co-opted to avoid hard
questions. Skills in group facilitation are needed for the effective use of these approaches.
Accountability to Communities
Earlier approaches to accountability emphasized the upward accountability of recipient gov-

ernments to donors, and of program managers to senior management and elected officials in
government. To complement this there developed an interest in downward accountability to
the communities. Most governments have some level of accountability to their communities
in the form of elections, but even when elections are free and fair and voting provides a level
of accountability to the government, this is a “long path” of accountability, with infrequent
opportunities to provide overall feedback on the government’s performance.
Various evaluation approaches have been developed to provide a shorter path for account-
ability, each with its own logic of what constitutes good development and how evaluation
can help to achieve it. Some approaches have focused on identifying gaps and shortfalls in
service delivery, responding to basic problems such as teacher absenteeism, service opening
hours, and availability of supplies. Citizen Report Cards, developed in the Indian state of
Bangalore by the Public Affairs Centre, a local NGO, gathered user feedback on the perform-
ance of public services, such as whether health clinics were open at the advertised times. The
process involved extensive media coverage and civil society advocacy to achieve change by
“naming and shaming” poor performers (Ravindra 2004).
Technological developments have made it easier for communities to report on observable
aspects of service delivery performance. The increasing use of mobile phones, especially in
Africa, has provided a way to get information quickly from a dispersed team of data collec-
tors or from community members. For example, the Stop Stock Outs project in Kenya con-
ducted coordinated surveys of the drugs available at health clinics, reporting on those that
did not have first-line medicines for malaria, HIV/AIDs, and other common diseases.
All of these projects depend on the willingness and ability of government agencies to
respond to identified problems. Some approaches to community accountability work to help
develop this capacity. For example, “Citizen Voice and Action,” developed by the international
NGO World Vision, also includes processes to support dialogue between communities and
service providers so they can together develop solutions to identified problems and monitor
progress in addressing them, rather than taking an adversarial approach (Walker 2009).
Finding Out “What Works”
The increasing focus on the improvement of programs led to concerns that hard questions
were not being asked about terminating ineffective programs, and that insufficient attention
was being paid to identifying successful technologies that lend themselves to being scaled up.
There was also concern that public support for international aid was faltering, requiring a
demonstration of the value of investments in development. These concerns, combined with
the rise of the “what works” movement in the USA and UK, led to systematic efforts to increase
the use of experimental research designs in development evaluation. These efforts were
explicitly inspired by the use of randomized control trials (RCTs) in clinical trials to test the
effectiveness of different drugs or medical treatments, and they borrowed the concept of
the “gold standard” and the “hierarchy of evidence,” where RCTs were seen as the highest
quality research design, some quasi-experimental designs (propensity scores, difference-
in-difference) as the second highest quality, and non-experimental designs as poor quality.
While RCTs had been used in social program evaluations since the 1960s, their use in
development began much later. In 2003 the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology (MIT) and Innovations for Poverty Action based at Yale University were
established with the aim of creating a network to both undertake and advocate for the use of
RCTs. In 2004, the Center for Global Development in Washington convened an “evaluation
gap” working group to examine why what it termed “rigorous impact evaluations” of social
development programs were rare, and what could be done to change this situation.
The resultant working paper, “When Will We Ever Learn?” (Savedoff, Levine, and Birdsall
2006), identified the fact that much of development evaluation did not adequately address
questions of impact. Far too often it consisted of a “quick and dirty” evaluation planned and
conducted towards the end of a project, drawing on project documents and monitoring data,
interviews with key informants, and sometimes some cursory observation in a field visit and
group interviews with beneficiaries, all of whom were well aware that the continuation of the
project depended on its being seen to be effective. The paper argued that weak evidence of
effectiveness was produced by these evaluations, given the absence of good quality measures
of impacts and information about any negative impacts, little attention to the match between
intended beneficiaries and those who had actually benefited, similar inattention to the likely
sustainability of these impacts, and little effort at attribution beyond noting that the intended
impacts had occurred. These discussions led in 2009 to the launch of the International Initia-
tive for Impact Evaluation (3IE), an organization created to generate, synthesize, and sup-
port the use of rigorous evidence to inform policy in development.
Advocates for the approach claimed it was particularly well placed to be able to identify
interventions that work well so that they can be scaled up and rolled out more widely (Duflo
2004; Duflo, Glennerster, and Kremer 2007). Its particular strength was the construction of
a counterfactual: a group that does not receive the intervention that is to be evaluated, but
that can be compared statistically to the group that did receive the intervention. A central
plank in the case made by proponents of randomized control trials is that by randomly
assigning subjects to either the experimental or the control group (i.e. the group that receives
the intervention or the group that does not), the only difference between them will be the
intervention, and thus differences between the two groups can logically be ascribed to the
intervention and the intervention alone. Yet RCTs need to manage the risk that random error
will produce non-equivalent group needs. This can be achieved through large sample sizes,
inspecting groups for comparability on relevant variables, and conducting multiple studies.
The RCT approach to evaluation has been criticized on a number of grounds. Concerns
have often been expressed about the ethical implications of experimental research designs,
where only some participants receive a potentially beneficial program. This can however be
readily addressed, especially in resource-constrained situations, by ensuring that the control
group is queued to receive the program if it is shown to be effective. Other critiques have
highlighted the fact that evidence-based medicine does not use RCTs alone, but draws on
both quasi-experimental research (epidemiological designs) and non-experimental designs
(including single case studies). RCTs have also been criticized for their “misunderstanding
of exogeneity and the handling of heterogeneity” (Deaton 2010).
Some concerns have related to the methodological aspects of the approach and its ability
to produce useful knowledge, given its assumption that an estimate of mean differences in
outcomes is the most useful finding for informing policy and practice (Heckman 1992). A
key concern has been that the emphasis on the average effect risks masking differential
effects, which can be large and important. A narrow focus on “what works” does not distin-
guish between the winners and losers from a particular project or policy, nor identify
whether the result is desirable.
For example, a microfinance project might have a slightly positive impact, on average: by
producing strong positive impacts for less poor people who are better able to put the money
to productive use to generate income, and strong negative impacts for very poor people who
are more likely to access money to meet immediate needs. Very poor people lack the capacity
to use loans to generate income to improve their situation or even repay the principal. While
it is sometimes possible to identify subgroups whose experience is likely to be different from
the average—men and women, urban and rural, indigenous and other people—in other
cases these subgroups are not evident in advance, being based on factors other than simple
demographics (for example, the level of family violence in the household). Because the sta-
tistical power of RCTs is designed with these identified subgroups in mind, it is not always
possible to disaggregate them by factors that become evident only during the implementa-
tion of the project.
Some concerns relate to the practical implementation aspects of RCTs and their claims of
rigor. Achieving the high standards required can be challenging. In many instances, com-
parison groups are used instead of control groups, or the process of randomly assigning par-
ticipants to different groups is poorly done, because of high attrition rates or other
breakdowns in the experimental design. Whatever the reason, if random assignment is
poorly done, its key purpose, which is to address selection bias, is not achieved and the abil-
ity to demonstrate causal attribution is drastically reduced. Deaton (2010) has concluded
that “actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any
claims to statistical or epistemic superiority.”
Another concern has been that the focus on developing evidence of what works and con-
vincing donors and governments that they should support certain initiatives is not helpful
when the focus of agencies is to improve programs to which a formal (or political) commit-
ment has already been made. This has highlighted the need to work on the “demand” end of
evidence-based policy as well as on the “supply” end. Demand includes the individual skills
and motivations of policy-makers and other decision-makers to request evidence to support
their decisions, and the political and organizational environment that either supports or
inhibits this—for example, requirements for evidence to be systematically included in plan-
ning proposals. Supply includes the skills and motivations of evaluators, researchers, and
community members to generate appropriate evidence to inform decisions.
Concerns have also been expressed about the limited range of interventions suitable for
experimental research designs. RCTs are at their best in discrete projects with a large popula-
tion size, where randomization is an option and where impacts will be discernible within a
reasonably short time. Development interventions that operate at the level of the commu-
nity, region, or nation do not lend themselves to using random assignment, as the unit of
analysis is often too large (thus masking internal variation) and too few in number (thus
negating meaningful comparisons).
More recently, increasing attention has been paid to the limitations of single studies, how-
ever large and well-designed and -implemented. Results from a single study can still be sub-
ject to random error, which random assignment does not reduce, and its external validity, or
its ability to generalize findings from one site or population to another, is limited. As a result,
there is increasing attention on conducting multiple studies and undertaking systematic
reviews that summarize the range of credible evidence on a topic. This has included creating
a new international development coordinating group in the Campbell Collaboration, an
organization that focuses on supporting systematic reviews of evidence in social programs.
Some systematic reviews include only evidence from RCTs, despite concerns raised in evi-
dence-based medicine about the risks of excluding potentially relevant evidence from other
research designs.1 Other reviews include some quasi-experimental designs, such as propen-
sity score matching and regression discontinuity. Evidence can be synthesized using meta-
analysis, producing an overall statistical summary, or narrative synthesis along the lines of a
literature review. Meta-analyses cannot successfully address contextual variations adequately
unless all the studies have presented disaggregation of their data using the relevant variables.
Another significant development in this approach has been increasing interest in using
causal inference techniques from natural science and social science, such as multiple lines
and levels of evidence, process tracing, comparative case studies, qualitative comparative
analysis, and contribution analysis (Iverson 2003; Stern et al. 2012) to identify “what works”
in situations where experimental or quasi-experimental designs are not possible. More radi-
cally, some approaches argue that, given the multiple contributors to impacts, it is not
possible to undertake credible attribution of impacts to an intervention. Outcome mapping
(Earl, Carden, and Smutylo 2001) focuses on identifying “boundary partners”—organiza-
tions outside the control of an intervention but within its sphere of influence, and critical
to achieving the intended impacts—and articulating progress markers of intermediate out-
comes related to their activity.
What Works for Whom
Realist evaluation (Pawson and Tilley 1997) has been increasingly used in health and com-
munity services evaluations, particularly in the UK and Canada. Its use in evaluation
addresses some of the limitations of the “what works” agenda. A realist evaluation asks: What
works for whom, under what circumstances, and how? This goes beyond simply identifying
and reporting patterns of results. Realist evaluation involves iteratively constructing and
testing (against a variety of evidence) “context-mechanism-outcome configurations”—
different theories about causal mechanisms that operate in particular contexts (implementa-
tion environment or participant characteristics) to produce certain outcomes. The strength
of this approach is its investigation of heterogeneity and external validity, producing results
with more information about their potential for transferability to other sites. However, the
approach has been criticized for providing less clear messages for policy-makers.
A further development of this approach has been realist synthesis (Pawson 2006), a sys-
tematic review using a realist framework. It draws on a range of credible evidence, including
impact evaluations that use non-experimental research designs, and seeks to explain how
the evidence reflects causal mechanisms that work differently in different contexts. These
reports lend themselves to moving beyond knowledge collection to knowledge translation—
helping policy-makers and practitioners understand the situations in which interventions
are likely to be effective, and the types of adaptation that will be appropriate.
Responding to Complexity
At the same time as RCT-oriented understandings of evidence-based policy came to the fore,
other researchers seeking to inform policy were exploring how insights from complexity
science could be used to help individuals, communities, and organizations develop the
resilience needed to respond to local circumstances and ongoing change (Ramalingam
et al. 2008). Interestingly, given the emphasis on drug trials as an exemplar for research and
evaluation, many of the examples of applying complexity concepts in evaluation have been
undertaken in the health area (Sibthorpe, Glasgow, and Longstaff 2004).
Complexity-based approaches recognize the rapid, continuing, and discontinuous nature
of change, which can be poorly served by evaluation approaches that are premised on a fairly
stable situation where what works largely remains constant and evaluation is mostly about
checking compliance with plans. In the complexity-based approaches, effective development
is seen not as identifying what works and then scaling it up, but rather as supporting ongoing
adaptation and responsiveness to new needs, risks, and opportunities, and to individuals’
different needs.
Complex-adaptive approaches to development evaluation draw on Glouberman and
Zimmerman’s (2002) distinction between simple, complicated, and complex. In this taxon-
omy, “simple” describes situations in which there are rules that can be followed and there is
agreement on a single way to achieve a result; “complicated” indicates the presence of many
components, each of which requires expertise and coordination; and “complex” indicates
the presence of emergent and responsive features, with relationships being the key to suc-
cess. Kurtz and Snowden (2003) characterized simple as the domain of the “known,” where
cause and effect are well understood, and best practices can be confidently recommended.
They see complicated as the domain of the “knowable,” where expert knowledge is required,
and complex as the domain of the “unknowable,” where patterns are evident only in retro-
spect. Simple interventions need competent transfer of findings. Complicated interventions
need communication of differentiated findings, and support to select and adapt them appro-
priately. Complex interventions need support for ongoing learning.
Dynamic and emergent interventions present a challenge to conventional linear processes
of developing an evaluation, implementing it, and reporting the findings. Dynamic inter-
ventions will change substantially over time, and their specific impacts cannot always be
identified in advance. For example, community development projects often work by bring-
ing together community members to identify local issues, develop a plan for addressing
them, gather resources and implement the plan, and then review progress and plan again.
Where projects have a similar desired outcome, they are unlikely to implement the same
activities. Developmental evaluation (Patton 2010) aims to support ongoing adaptation and
learning to respond to emerging opportunities and priorities and to the different needs of
individual communities or beneficiaries.
Because complexity-based approaches to evaluation are relatively new, there are still few
examples of the approach or analyses of its strengths and weaknesses. There has been con-
cern that evidence generated by such evaluations is insufficiently clear and does not provide
either policy-makers or program implementers with clear direction or instruction on what
should constitute good practice. A related concern appears to be that this approach can pro-
vide an overly persuasive reason not to do good, rigorous planning, and that generalized
rough frameworks may suffice. There is also a concern that it assumes a high level of skills
and knowledge among service deliverers and a commitment to ongoing learning, assump-
tions that might not be appropriate in many resource-limited situations.
Country-led Evaluation
The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (OECD 2005)2 outlined “far-reaching monitora-
ble actions” to reform how aid is delivered and managed. The overarching concern was to
strengthen governance and improve development performance. The declaration directly
addressed the shift in how development should be curated. Previously, the underlying
assumption was that much of the work being done in development was focused on meeting
the expectations of donors and providing evidence to be accountable to the North. The Paris
Declaration shifted this explicitly and made it clear that developing country processes should
belong to and be owned by the country concerned. The corollary is that evaluation should
also be for use by the government responsible for the country.
More recently this trend has been accelerated by the strong growth in the developmental
state, or state capitalism. In this model, the state makes highly deliberate and purposeful use of
market mechanisms to achieve developmental outcomes. The prime examples of this approach
are China and Brazil. In a developmental state, the focus shifts from discrete, individual evalua-
tions that provide evidence to external donors for accountability purposes, to a greater concern
with evaluation systems that generate useful knowledge for use in informing policy and
improving program implementation. The long-term implications of this shift have yet to show
themselves. Associated with this is increasing emphasis on building national evaluation capac-
ities, in terms of supply and demand, including the skills and expertise of internal and external
evaluators and evaluation users, as well as organizational incentive systems. Evaluation associ-
ations can play a role in both of these (Holvoet, Dewachter, and Gildemyn 2011).
Conclusion
The different types of evaluation are summarized in Table 9.1, in terms of their underlying
assumptions about what constitutes development, and how evaluation can support this.
Effective development evaluation matches the approach to development that is being used,
Table 9.1 Different types of evaluation
If development is mostly about And evaluation supports development by Then the type of evaluation needed will be
PROVIDING INFORMATION FOR DECISION-MAKERS

Choosing the right programs to invest in Helping to manage investment risk Ex ante impact evaluation
Effective planning and management of projects and Helping to clarify what needs to be done and Performance monitoring (logical framework
programs providing ongoing feedback on progress analysis, results-based management); external
review; rapid rural appraisal
Scaling up effective projects and programs Identifying “what works” and monitoring fidelity of Experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations
implementation that provide estimates of average net impact;
compliance monitoring of activities
Translation and adaptation of appropriate technology Identifying what works in what circumstances and Explanations of how interventions work, and
supporting implementers in translating findings to under what circumstances (“what works when,”
new situations “good practices,” realistic evaluation)
Resilience in the face of uncertainty and rapid Supporting ongoing adaptation and responsiveness Real-time evaluation to support front-line
change workers; dialogue between partners
Supporting local people in becoming agents of their Supporting beneficiaries and other stakeholders in Participatory approaches; strengths-based
own development developing and sharing solutions, including approaches; building national capacity for
managing, conducting, and using evaluation; evaluation
learning from success
CHANGING BEHAVIOR THROUGH INCENTIVES

Donors and central government ensuring that Identifying those not doing the right thing so they Upwards accountability
national partners (government agencies and NGOs) can be sanctioned, and motivating all to do the
do the right thing right thing
Identifying those doing the right thing so they can Rewards systems (performance-based aid)
be rewarded, and motivating all to do the right thing
Civil society ensuring that government agencies and Identifying and sanctioning those not doing the Community accountability
NGOs do the right thing right thing and/or supporting agencies to improve
their performance
Source: Author’s own design (Patricia Rogers and Dugan Fraser).

and how evaluation is intended to support it. The various approaches to development
evaluation discussed in this chapter differ in important ways in terms of:
• What should be the main focus of evaluation: pilot projects or all projects; discrete
projects or broader policy initiatives.
• When evaluation is most important: before, during, or after implementation.
• Who should be involved in doing evaluation: internal staff, external evaluators, com-
munity members.
• Who should control it: individual donors, a joint group involving partner governments,
or an alliance of donors, national governments, and community groups.
• What relative emphasis should be placed on monitoring versus evaluation.
• Whether the methods and standards for evaluation should be the same as those for
research.
An awareness of the different approaches, and the types of development for which they are
best suited, increases the likelihood that evaluation will be appropriately matched to its
situation and succeed in contributing to development.
Notes
1. This point was made eloquently by Smith and Pell (2003) in their review of evidence for
the effectiveness of parachutes as a technology to reduce trauma from jumping out of
planes.
2. The full text of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is available online at <http://www.
oecd.org/dac/effectiveness/34428351.pdf>.
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pa rt 2
C ONC E P T S A N D
T H E OR I E S
State and Society
The role of the state arises in nearly every chapter of this volume, so central an actor has it
been to development efforts since the Second World War. Indeed, it is the primary actor of
the field, even though we identify many others in Part 3 of this volume. But, pace Margaret
Thatcher, there is such a thing as society. It plays an important role both as modeling clay (or
subject) for the state, and as a sum total of individuals and groups organized to achieve a
myriad of goals (including developmental ones). It operates under the authority of a (more
or less legitimate) state, but the bona fides of those speaking and acting for the state (more or
less legitimately) have in turn at times throughout history been challenged by elements
within society through methods ranging from all-out revolution to those of non-violent
contestation and resistance.
Because the concepts of state and society are each subject to manifold interpretations, it
may be useful to consider some of these. We tend to equate the notion of state today with that
of countries recognized under international law within circumscribed territories. It was not
always so: early notions of the state related to ideas of power and authority, specifically the
relationship between human beings and political authority. Aristotle (384–322 bc)’s concept
of the “polis” applied both to a city-state and to a society. Cicero (106–43 bc) was concerned
with authority, which stemmed from the Roman (Republic’s) Senate. Machiavelli (1469–
1527) is credited with the first use of the word “state” in The Prince, a textbook on statecraft.
Although mostly referring to small but prosperous Italian city-states, he employed the term
170 state and society
in its modern meaning of a territory with defined borders and a central authority which had
to be obeyed (Bealey and Johnson 1999). Among contemporary scholars, Craig Calhoun
highlights “Max Weber’s influential definition, a set of institutions that possesses a monop-
oly on rule-making and the legitimate use of force within a bounded territory—powers
collectively termed sovereignty” (Calhoun 2002b).
In essence, society represents a web of associative human relationships (OED 2013). Con-
trasted to the state, it is commonly known as civil society, a distinction formed in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries through early modern reflection on the origins of the social
order and the nature of the state by, for example, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith,
and Adam Ferguson (Calhoun 2002a). Today, definitions can range from those centered on
“a group of people who share a common culture, occupy a particular territorial area, and feel
themselves to constitute a unified and distinct entity” to, more loosely, “human association
or interaction generally, as in the phrase ‘the society of his friends’” (Scott and Marshall 2009;
Frisby and Sayer 1986). “The crucial innovation of the Early Modern era was to understand
society as at least potentially self-organizing, rather than organized only by rulers. This was
exemplified by the market but not limited to it. It formed one basis for understanding society
as a distinct object of analysis, not reducible to either state or individual” (OED 2013).
Albert Berry (Chapter 10), in a wide-ranging discussion on economic development, inclu-
sion and human satisfaction, notes that most economists have now retreated from earlier
assumptions that the main societal “good” to which the economics discipline can contribute
is growth, today recognizing that other economic outcomes matter to human welfare. The
recent claim, echoing a line from the U.S. Constitution, that human happiness matters above
all, underscores both that we need economic systems better able to respond to existing
human needs and ones that allow “humankind to get more out of whatever the economy
does produce.” In such systems, greater economic, social, and political equality are all likely
contributors to the sense of inclusion that most human beings crave. Berry considers ways in
which income growth, socio-economic equality and healthy inclusion interact to determine
levels of satisfaction and happiness in a society. He argues, among other propositions, that
because people are influenced by the character of the society and economy within which
they live, it is important that the economy and public policy “foster the better side of human
nature and discourage the dark side.”
State and society come together in many ways. One is social protection for the poor and
other disadvantaged sectors of a country’s population—the topic tackled by Armando Bar-
rientos (Chapter 11). Social protection has emerged as one of the fastest growing areas of
development policy and practice. Large-scale social assistance programs in middle-income
developing countries providing direct financial transfers make an important contribution to
the reduction of poverty and vulnerability, and to knowledge on poverty and its remedies. In
poorer countries, reaching the intended beneficiaries can be difficult, as direct transfers are
often frustrated by rent-seeking intermediaries and because the beneficiaries are often barely
connected, if at all, with government and with financial institutions. Nevertheless, social
protection is increasingly seen as an essential component of an effective development strat-
egy that also features economic growth and basic service provision. As argued by Barrientos,
“the rationale, conceptual basis, design, and effectiveness” of related programs in developing
countries are much contested, although, mostly, their existence and necessity is not.
concepts and theories 171
Law defines, intermediates, and modulates transactions and connections between state
and citizen (as well as other actors falling in some respects under the authority of the state,
such as private sector and civil society). While the rule of law is widely perceived as an impor-
tant component of successful development, this is mostly understood to be so through law’s
constraining and ordering role vis-à-vis the state and in its role as guardian of the rights of
citizens and other actors within society. But in development law has other functions as well,
as documented by Kevin Davis and Mariana Prado (Chapter 12). They point out that as poor
countries grow more prosperous, with concern over rent-seeking and corruption displaced
by the need for effective regulation of powerful economic actors, new forms of legal and reg-
ulatory intervention become important. Their chapter, like that of Barrientos, is cross-
cutting. They ask whether “the relationship between law and development is causal,” in the
sense that specific legal reforms cause specific development outcomes, and whether particu-
lar types of legal institutions can be associated with particular modes of economic organiza-
tion or trajectories of economic development. These questions have major implications for
policy-makers. While analyzing such relatively recent concepts as the Right to Development,
they also focus on key limitations in the intellectual frameworks that have been dominant
through the turn of the twenty-first century.
Maivân Clech Lâm (Chapter 13) focuses on globally widespread populations that have
been systematically marginalized, economically and socially—those of indigenous peoples
whose lands were overtaken by invasion and colonization and who consider themselves dis-
tinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them.
Much of her chapter explains and details how their plight has been addressed internationally
(often with beneficial consequences in their own countries and regions). This was achieved
in large part through normative development in the setting of the United Nations, as part of
the very significant elaboration of new norms and rights that preceded and followed the
adoption of the cornerstone Covenants of Civil and Political Rights and on Economic and
Social and Cultural Rights of 1966. She narrates the significant imprint made in the develop-
ment domain by the over 370 million persons, comprising about 5,000 ethno-linguistic enti-
ties distributed through some ninety countries and all geographical regions, who are now
broadly recognized as constituting its indigenous peoples. Her chapter addresses their
attempt to turn stark opposition into difficult engagement.
Huguette Labelle (Chapter 14) analyzes corruption, a universal phenomenon with a nox-
ious impact on economic and social development. She provides the perspective of the admi-
rably dynamic and comparatively new international research and advocacy non-governmental
organization, Transparency International, which she has chaired for several years. Her chap-
ter draws deeply on the economically and socially distorting outcomes of corruption in coun-
tries where many are poor, exacerbating inequalities and tensions within society. The fight
against corruption does battle with the counter-intuitive reality that some of the economically
fastest-growing countries today are also among the most corrupt, where the phenomenon is
sometimes accepted as “enabling” productive activity in weak institutional environments. For
Ms. Labelle, the genesis of corruption and any economistic justification for it can never serve
as justification for it in light of its deleterious outcomes. This chapter is profitably read in con-
junction with that by Charles Cater (Chapter 23) on Transparency, the analysis of which flows
in complementary but different directions. The two chapters enrich each other.
172 state and society
References
Bealey, Frank and Allan G. Johnson. (1999). “State” in The Blackwell Dictionary of Political
Science: A user’s guide to its terms. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Calhoun, Craig (ed.) (2002a). “Society” in The Dictionary of the Social Sciences. New York:
Calhoun, Craig, (ed.) (2002b). “State” in The Dictionary of the Social Sciences. New York:
Frisby, David and Derek Sayer (1986). Society. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (2013). “Society” in Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford:
Oxford University Press. (<http://www.oed.com/, accessed 6 February 2013>).
Scott, John and Gordon Marshall. (2009). “Society” in A Dictionary of Sociology (3rd Edition),
chapter 10
grow th, i nclusion, a n d

h um a n satisfaction
albert berry
Introduction
Many economists have presumed that the main societal “good” to which the discipline can
contribute is economic growth. The necessary, albeit delayed, retreat from that presumption
has been helped along both by the recognition that other economic outcomes matter to
human welfare and by the claim by some students of the happiness literature that economic
growth does not, on average, raise human satisfaction. As well as naturally casting some
doubt on the desirability of growth per se, perhaps more importantly this latter claim under-
lines the importance of the search for (i) economic systems better capable than the current
ones of responding to existing human needs, and (ii) ways in which humankind can learn to
get more out of whatever the economy does produce.
In the context of existing market systems, it is generally accepted that societal welfare is
greater when economic growth is pro-poor and, more generally, when it is egalitarian. It is
also accepted that the availability and quality of employment matter greatly to people for the
direct satisfaction that employment provides, and that for most people a solid sense of inclu-
sion is important, whether mainly through their family, their community, or some other
group.1 Economic equality, social equality, and political equality are all likely contributors to a
sense of inclusion, and each may be important to welfare through other mechanisms as well.
This chapter considers some of the ways in which income growth, socio-economic equal-
ity, and healthy inclusion interact to determine levels of satisfaction and happiness in a soci-
ety. In so doing it makes three main points. First, the case that economic growth is by itself a
secure route to human happiness is relatively weak. Second, equality and inclusiveness are
obvious candidates as contributors to that happiness, making it therefore necessary to under-
stand how they may best be fostered and how they relate to the rate and pattern of economic
growth. Third, partly because people are influenced by the character of the society and econ-
omy within which they live, it is important that the economy and public policy foster the
better side of human nature and discourage the dark side.
174 albert berry
Background Ideas and Concepts
Over the last sixty years many countries have achieved good to very good growth rates,
such that average per capita income in the countries of what was formerly called the Third
World has risen about fourfold over that period, from about U.S.$580 (of year 2000) to
around $2,300—a rise heavily influenced by the strong performances of the two biggest
countries, China and India. In a number of countries, however, periods of economic
growth have been accompanied by widening economic inequality (China is the most noto-
rious recent case); the population-weighted average Gini coefficient for this same set of
nations rose markedly over 1980–2000, and many of them have been facing severe chal-
lenges on the employment front.
Much concern has also been expressed about the extent and trends of exclusion, margin-
ality, and socio-economic insecurity. Some of the links between economic growth and cer-
tain aspects of income (or consumption) equality are reasonably well understood, but those
between growth and more sociological and psychological phenomena, such as a sense of
satisfaction and inclusion/exclusion, are harder to nail down, in part because such concepts
are by nature somewhat subjective and in part because their links to economic processes and
economic growth have thus far received little in-depth analysis.
The literature based on “happiness” surveys now provides considerable evidence on how
absolute income, relative income, employment, age, and various personal and family circum-
stances affect people’s self-reported welfare. The literature on inclusion/exclusion is more var-
ied in focus and emphasis. Exclusion from public services or other benefits received by most
members of a society is objectively measurable and can be built into estimates of overall eco-
nomic inequality. Analysis that aims to identify the mechanisms leading to inclusion or exclu-
sion in a more general sense and to consider the direct psychological benefits and/or costs
that affect satisfaction/happiness2 is more difficult. “Psychological inclusion”—defined here
as the state of feeling part of a social group (as small as the nuclear family or a group of inti-
mate friends or as large as the nation or the world) in ways that are conducive to personal well-
being—matters differently across people, groups, and cultures. Psychological exclusion may
be active or passive, according to whether a person suffers aggressive exclusion (e.g. overt and
maliciously hurtful discrimination) or simply the absence of active inclusion. Historically, in
most cultures a key unit has been the extended family or clan. Larger social groups tend to
become more important as societies evolve, with the community important in some and the
country in others. Exclusion can be experienced at either the individual or the group level.
The collective character of much exclusion focuses attention on group or horizontal inequali-
ties. Inequality is causally tied in both directions to exclusion, whether the focus is at the group
level or the individual level. Group exclusion is strongly intergenerational since, even more
than family poverty, it involves multiple mechanisms of self-perpetuation.
One person’s inclusion in a group is often the other side of another’s exclusion. The overall
societal implications of groups capable of providing a sense of belonging thus depend on
whether and to what degree that sense is defined in reference to others who constitute the
out-group or even the enemy. Many groups compete in ways that engender a sense of inclu-
sion related to that competition; others do not compete, as for example in a neighborhood
whose members mutually support each other and provide a sense of inclusion independent
of their relationship to any other groups.
growth, inclusion, and human satisfaction 175
Inclusion or societal cohesion brings other benefits than the psychological boost from inter-
action and comradeship. Thus worker cohesion often raises group productivity; such “social
capital” may be a significant determinant of aggregate productivity in an economy (Hall and
Jones 1999; Isham, Kelly, and Ramaswamy 2002). Alternatively, association and interaction
with others help build social networks that may provide support when it is needed.3 On the
economic side, such networking may be essentially functional, creating a sort of intangible
personal or family capital that is parallel to a firm’s intangible capital in the form of goodwill
(whose economic value is reflected when it changes hands in the marketplace). Some mutual
support networks are horizontal, involving people of roughly the same socio-economic status
who may be best placed to help each other. Very low income families, however, are often pre-
cluded from participation in networks because they cannot reciprocate; at the limit their mem-
bers may have only each other to rely on for support in difficult times, since collective support
strategies are not feasible (Pahl 1984; Gonzalez de la Rocha 1986). All three conceptually dis-
tinct types of benefits may (and presumably frequently do) arise from the same associations.
Approaches to and scope for policy to promote social inclusion vary according to, among
other things, the weight societies place on psychological/sociological welfare. In France,
where the term “social exclusion” originated,4 it referred to a “rupture of the social bond” or
solidarity between the individual or group and the society. The European welfare state
eventually grew out of the concept, with the idea of mutual obligation between individuals
and the larger society. Many contemporary social protection policies can be seen as involv-
ing both a fulfillment of this sort of social contract by the government on behalf of the soci-
ety and an attempt to counteract and weaken the society’s cultural and institutional sources
of exclusion. They thus aim both to counteract such direct economic correlates of exclusion
as poverty and lack of access to social services (like health and education) and to lessen its
sociological and psychological costs (Abel and Lewis 2002). The mechanisms of social exclu-
sion (e.g. class and caste systems, ethnic divides) act as natural barriers to the effectiveness of
such social protection policies (Barry 2002).
In the now industrial countries, social policy to foster inclusion (or combat exclusion) has
often been associated with urbanization and the emergence of working-class interests (Dani
and de Haan 2008: 8). An important characteristic of the welfare state as it emerged after the
Second World War was the association of delivery of services with the extension of citizen-
ship and rights. Social homogeneity made a higher level of taxation palatable as a quid pro
quo for the social contract of the welfare state. The welfare crisis of the Great Depression was
a powerful factor in creating an awareness of the need for social protection.
The processes have been very different in the global South. Contextual factors include
colonialism, slavery, and ethnic exclusion. With the boundaries of many new countries not
defined in ethno-linguistic terms and many tribal and ethnic conflicts still unresolved, social
integration has been enormously challenging. Social policy has often been grafted onto still
weak institutions. Unions have played a different and smaller role and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) a bigger one, and global influences have been more important. The
special challenges confronting social policy in developing countries are exemplified by the
extremity of the caste system in India and the ethnic rivalries in many of the artificially cre-
ated African countries emerging from former colonial empires, and by the fact that in sev-
eral Latin American countries the indigenous majority group(s) has suffered severe
exclusion. In such settings social integration would be very challenging even if institutions
were strong and accountable.
176 albert berry
Empirical Relationships
Growth and Economic Equality

In the early days of development thinking, it was often held that the goals of growth and
equality were at odds with each other,5 and that in order to permit an adequate level of invest-
ment it was necessary to allow and foster the wealth of a few capitalists—the savers, innova-
tors, and inventors. This view may have had some validity at certain points in the history of
the now industrial countries, but it is now quite clear that inequality is not a generally neces-
sary condition for fast growth, which can occur with either low or high levels of inequality
and in a context either of rising inequality (as recently in India and, more dramatically, in
China) or falling inequality (Taiwan and Indonesia during various periods). Some policy
packages may achieve equality in ways that promote growth and others in ways that deter
growth. In technical economic terms, achieving growth with equity does not appear to be a
very difficult challenge. It is the exception rather than the norm in the real world for political
and institutional reasons:6 the pressures in favor of growth paths that favor the few, and the
sometimes ideological belief that only the rich can save and create jobs.
Income Level and Happiness

Surveys of people’s self-reported satisfaction or happiness provide a useful form of evidence
with which to analyze questions like the extent to which higher and better distributed income
fosters happiness and a sense of inclusion among the members of a society. Such surveys
provide pro-growth people with some grounds for optimism. All studies report a positive
cross-section relationship between absolute income and happiness; for example, in the U.S.
the share of respondents reporting that they are very happy rises from 16 percent for the bot-
tom income group to 44 percent for the top group, while the share who are not very happy
falls from 23 percent to 6 percent (Easterlin 2001: 468). For many people, having a job is a
requirement for personal fulfillment.7 Many other things matter as well.8 The analytic chal-
lenge is to sort out how the range of factors that contribute to human satisfaction interface
with and are affected by economic processes.9
One step involves the interpretation of another key finding: that the average level of satis-
faction in a country does not rise as much with over-time increases in per capita income as
does the point-of-time cross-section relationship—in fact it may not rise at all. Average
reported levels of well-being declined over 1972–98 in the U.S. and have been approximately
flat in Britain (Blanchflower and Oswald 2004: 1359). One plausible explanation for such con-
stancy is that relative income is very important to most people.10 Among economists, major
forerunners who have stressed its importance and that of conspicuous consumption are
Duesenberry (1949) and Veblen (1973), together with many sociologists and psychologists.11
Easterlin’s (1974) hypothesis that happiness is experienced in relation to expectations or aspi-
rations and that these are largely defined in reference to people and groups close to one and to
one’s own personal trajectory predicts no large systematic difference in average happiness
across countries with different income levels, other things held constant; it also implies that
economic growth may have no net benefits at either a country or a world level. The evidence
most relevant to the developing country context is the over-time data for those countries, but
its scarcity precludes any very general conclusions at this time. Among the optimists, Inglehart
et al. (2008: 264) report that “Data from representative national surveys carried out from 1981
to 2007 show that happiness rose in 45 out of 52 countries where substantial time series data
were available,” something they attribute to economic development, democratization, and
increasing social tolerance. Veenhoven (2010: 120) similarly concludes that the quality of life
has been rising significantly in a good number of countries, and attributes this partly to the fact
that “modern society provides a challenging environment that fits an innate human need for
self-actualization.”
Such optimists see a direct role for non-economic factors, though the changes in some of
those factors may depend on rising incomes. Easterlin and Sawangfa (2009) criticize these
and other studies for failing to take fully into account the lack of comparability across s urveys
from given countries. Their more restrictive set of criteria leaves just twelve developing
countries, and although in most of these there was at least some increase in average life
satisfaction, three of the fastest growing (China, Chile, and India), having among them
nearly half of the developing world’s population, recorded declines. Easterlin and Sawangfa’s
main contention, however, is that across these countries there is no correlation between
changes in per capita income and in life satisfaction. If true, this would leave open the possibil-
ity that the last half-century or so has seen an upward trend in life satisfaction in the develop-
ing countries (or a significant number of them), but that this has been due to things other than
growth of GDP per capita, for example falling poverty achieved through social policies,
rising economic security, better employment conditions, or a variety of non-economic
variables. This possibility underlines the need to better understand what other social and
economic factors may have been at work.
Inequality and Happiness

The happiness surveys provide no clear story on people’s feelings about inequality in their
society (Stewart and Samman, this volume). Cross-country analysis led Berg and Veenhoven
(2010) to the conclusion that living in an unequal society has if anything a small positive
effect on happiness, whereas within-country analyses for Latin America and China led
Graham and Felton (2006) and Knight and Gunatilaka (2011), respectively, to judge that
greater inequality has a modest negative impact. Other studies hint at factors that might
underlie a variety of relationships: people and groups no doubt vary in their aversion to or
tolerance of inequality according to their own experience, and to their perception of what is
fair and of whether inequality plays a useful role in society or is substantially the result of
corruption and waste. Analysis of this relationship is at a very early stage.
Inclusion and Happiness

The happiness literature throws some quantitative, albeit often indirect light on the role of
belonging as a source of satisfaction (e.g. the strongly negative impact of losing a spouse or
being unemployed). Psychologists are unambiguous in their view that group identity is cen-
tral to most people’s lives. Schoolyard bullying, the subject of a recent wave of attention,
exemplifies both the psychological costs of aggressive exclusion of individuals and the group
178 albert berry
membership needs that help to induce such behavior. In the case of group exclusion, a key
phenomenon is structural inequality—the attribution of an inferior status to a category of
people, especially severe when the stronger group also dominates state institutions. Such
inequality is reproduced through a wide range of mechanisms, often adding up to a vicious
circle. Ethnicity clearly plays a major role.12
Important to the role of economic structure in the various forms of inclusion/exclusion
are their links to economic inequality, as where poverty prevents a person or group from
accessing a public service supposedly available to everyone or to poor people in particular;
the more important these links, the more likely is it that raising the relative income of cur-
rently excluded groups will weaken the mechanisms and effects of that exclusion. Marquez
et al. (2007: 33–5) present systematic evidence (from Latinobarometer surveys13) that pov-
erty is seen by the populations of Latin America and the Caribbean as the main reason peo-
ple are discriminated against, with lack of education second, followed by being old and by
“lacking connections.” Experiment-based evidence points to the fact that trust is reduced
among people with widely varying levels of education (Marquez et al. 2007: 140). They con-
clude (2007: 71) that the labor market is one of the social loci where modern exclusionary
forces have heightened the impact of social exclusion.
Policy in a Broader Societal Perspective
It remains a matter for empirical analysis to what degree an economically egalitarian society
also fulfils the non-economic requirements for societal satisfaction, including the need for
inclusion or, alternatively, the extent to which social policy instruments are more effective in
achieving those social goals and possibly economic ones as well. Economics is involved in
several different ways in policies directed at broad societal goals; here we distinguish four
categories.
First are traditional economic policies relating to output variables and to primary income
distribution. Second is tax and transfer policy, usually directly redistributive in character
(at least in stated purpose), though as with any policy there may be effects on traditional eco-
nomic variables as well. The last few decades have seen a considerable expansion of initia-
tives within this area: countries with new non-contributory pension systems, expanding
public health systems, etc. The large size of the urban informal sector has led to a debate on
the economic effects of an extension or universalization of already existing social protection
systems.14 A third category of policies aims to attack the underlying socio-economic inequal-
ities that cause the observable inequalities in income, educational attainment, etc. Affirma-
tive action programs like ethnic quotas for education and public sector jobs, etc., fall into
this category.15 Finally there are the policies directed (whatever the instruments involved)
specifically at the social and psychological determinants of life satisfaction, including a sense
of inclusion: for example, reforms of educational curricula and teaching practices to empha-
size anti-racism and thus influence how people live together.
Policies to promote inclusiveness fall into the last two categories. Students of such policies
distinguish several steps, including fostering general recognition of there being a problem,
civic action to pressure and induce governments to act, and the establishment and clarification
of rights (e.g. judicial, access to public services) that are desirable or even essential preludes to
policy design and implementation. Deepening the recognition of structural inequality and
thereby softening societal attitudes helps to pave the way for change. This makes visibility of
gender and ethnic inequalities important, including such basic steps as local data collection to
help end the invisibility of socially excluded groups (Buviníc and Mazza 2008: 125). Partly
through such pressures, the role of ethnicity in equality has come to be increasingly recognized
in some Latin American countries (including Brazil). The Chinese government has started to
promote the concept of a harmonious society, building on or actively promoting traditional
values (Dani and de Haan 2008: 10).
Globalization and information technology have seen the emergence of global networks
and the internationalization of ideas, with much potential to accelerate normative changes.
In India, where progressive policies have been on the books for a long time with only limited
action taken, the government has since 2004 felt compelled to deliver more to the poorest
groups, partly through new schemes but also by introducing rights-based approaches pro-
moted by sustained civil society advocacy—as, for example, with the employment guarantee
scheme (Dani and de Haan 2008: 18). Sometimes the initiatives are generated by the groups
themselves, though to be sustained they usually need support at the national level. Though
laws and conventions are seldom sufficient conditions to achieve progress, they may be use-
ful or even necessary. The group aspect of discrimination suggests the need for a framework
based on collective rather than individual rights. Several Latin American countries have
adopted constitutional frameworks that recognize excluded groups as distinct groups within
the nation, sanctioning ethnic and cultural diversity. Failure of policies to be built on an
understanding of power and discrimination can of course lead to unexpected results (Dani
and de Haan 2008: 17).
Though naturally very resistant to change, structural inequality can be attacked through
a variety of internal and external factors, some planned, some accidental. Sometimes
transformation occurs through conflict and violence. Sometimes a softening of societal
attitudes helps to pave the way for change. Dani and de Haan (2008: 14) note that the tem-
porary emigration of millions of Pakistani and Indian workers to the Middle East has
allowed many landless people to escape feudal bondage. Historically, many forms of dis-
crimination have been eroded by a demand for labor strong enough to counteract the
pressures for discrimination and exclusion. Improving access to decent employment often
constitutes a mechanism to facilitate group identity and inclusion. This, together with the
income generated and the self-esteem implicit in being able to carry out some socially
valued activity, helps to explain why employment emerges as so important to so many peo-
ple. It also suggests that the great potential for reducing economics-based exclusion is lost
when, as is usually the case, countries do not have well-designed or -implemented employ-
ment strategies (Berry 2012).
Affirmative Action
Affirmative action may improve both economic equality and social inclusion in a variety of
social policy areas, such as education (various levels and different instruments like quotas
and conditional cash transfers), health and pensions, food distribution, input subsidies, and
the labor market (via quotas for government or other employers, special training, programs
to assist in the transition from school to the labor force, etc.).
180 albert berry
Affirmative action programs require especially careful design, efficient administration,

and good monitoring and evaluation. Sometimes the ongoing exclusion of the intended ben-
eficiaries makes them hard to reach, and usually the opposition of the excluders constitutes a
serious barrier. Effective policies often need to involve both the excluded group and the
excluding society. Exemplifying this in the area of health, Jenks (2003) argues that the reha-
bilitation and reintegration of individual patients suffering from leprosy and the society’s
education on this health issue are best done in such a way as to involve the same actors that
promoted exclusion, and thus create bridges across the divide separating the two groups.
When circumstances are particularly difficult it may be important to avoid aiming for the
unattainable and in the process generating a counterproductive response.16 Evaluation, and
the database it calls for, can be especially important either in cases where progress toward
equality is likely by nature to be slow—this makes it essential to know whether small
improvements are occurring—or in cases where it is unclear ex ante whether the design itself
is good, as might occur with some labor market policies, like high minimum wages in coun-
tries with large informal sectors. In such cases it is pivotal to have data not just on the average
access or income of an excluded group but also on the variance of that access or income
within the group, to guard against the danger that policy may favor a few winners at the
expense of a larger number who may even fare worse than before.
India exemplifies such challenges. In response to extreme social inequality, the country
has pursued various affirmative action programs. But even with a commitment from higher
levels of government, it is not easy to circumvent both the elites who make up the “excluders”
and the corrupt local officials who appropriate public funds when possible. Thus Jeffrey et al.
(2005: 2085) conclude that the rural elite use their superior wealth, connections, and social
status to ensure their sons’ privileged access to schooling and government employment, and
that the political rise of lower castes and the greater availability of educational opportunities,
though allowing a small group of Dalits to raise their social standing, has failed to alter the
broader historical relationships of exploitation. This study, however, lacks a sufficient time
dimension to provide a confident assessment of whether the affirmative action is having an
impact which, though gradual, might over time be significant.
In their more detailed analysis of eighty-nine West Bengal villages over 1978–98, Bardhan and
Mookherjee (2006: 303) test the hypothesis that local elites through their control of local gov-
ernment prevent the benefits of targeted credit, agricultural input kits, employment programs,
and fiscal grants from reaching their intended targets. They reject the hypothesis that higher
poverty, land inequality, and an overlap between low caste and poverty in a village were system-
atically associated with measurable adverse effects on the targeting of private goods to the poor,
though they did lead to lower employment generation out of allotted funds and to significantly
lower allocation of resources to the village as a whole. Bardhan and Mookherjee (2006: 324) sug-
gest that the intra-village targeting of credit and agricultural input kits occurs “in a context of
rich information shared within the community concerning relative entitlements and allotments
of different claimants.” For public goods, however, the scope for elite capture is greater and the
allocation of resources across villages, made by officials of higher-level governments (block, dis-
trict, and state), is more influenced by the lobbying power and negotiating skills of the village
representatives, which presumably depend on land and caste status.
Desai and Kulkarni’s study (2008) of affirmative action on education in India over 1983 to
1999–2000 highlights the nature of societal response. Over the course of its implementation.
higher-caste resentment against the program grew, culminating in widespread riots in 1990.
The government’s attempt to introduce quotas for “backward” castes in highly competitive
engineering and management schools saw the resentment flare up again, leading to increased
sabotage and to a public discourse rife with prejudice against steps that “give to the unde-
serving classes and take away from the deserving.” Professors reported problems in teaching
lower-caste children on scholarship who are ill prepared (because the village schools con-
tinue to discriminate against them). Meanwhile, Dalit and Adivasi spokespeople complained
that the policies were poorly implemented and hence had very little effect. Clearly, in cases
like this a deep understanding of the social dynamics involved is necessary to ascertain the
optimal route toward a reduction of injustice.
Affirmative Action on Labor

Overall employment strategies around the developing world are weak even when measured
against the standard labor market target variables—quality and quantity of employment, work-
ing conditions, etc.; it is thus no surprise that they have typically not been carefully designed, ana-
lyzed, or evaluated in terms of promoting greater equality or greater inclusion.17 But affirmative
action programs do exist; on the demand side they include ethnic or caste-based hiring quotas,
usually for public sector jobs, and guaranteed work schemes targeted to lower-income families.
By far the largest of these is India’s national program, with an estimated 52.5 million beneficiary
families in 2009–10 (Zepeda et al. 2013: 13). On the supply side there have been new policy devel-
opments, such as training programs for people with disabilities (e.g. an Inter-American Develop-
ment Bank-funded program in Mexico). Traineeships can sometimes improve labor market
insertion of youth, though it is important to avoid the error of believing that what is mainly a
labor demand problem can be resolved mainly by acting on the supply side.
As with other areas of affirmative action, having better data (and better analysis of it) is
important in order to underpin the need for policy, to help sort out what the policy should
be, and to provide the material for monitoring and evaluation. Labor market data on
excluded groups needs to be much improved; information is usually available only on gender
(Buviníc and Mazza 2008: 157).
Two tricky challenges warrant mention in this area. First, for employment guarantee
systems to work well, it is necessary to keep the wage low enough to avoid mis-targeting and
political corruption. Well-intentioned pressure to raise the wage runs the risk of undercutting
the economic logic of such programs—that only a relatively low wage will keep the needy
from being squeezed out. That risk is exemplified to some degree by the experience of India’s
famous Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme, which after pioneering guaranteed
work programs on a large scale from the mid-1970s, implemented a large wage increase in
1988 with negative effects on employment and the access of the poorest (Ravallion et al. 1993).
Second, pressing too strongly against discrimination in hiring can, depending on the set-
ting, discourage employment of disadvantaged groups, especially on the part of the micro-,
small, or medium enterprises (SMEs) that generate a considerable share of the paid jobs in
developing countries. In the industrial countries, governments and larger firms have usually
set the pace on the hiring of minority groups. Micro- and small enterprises are often ethnic
based, as well as living closer to the margin of profitability, so this is not one of their strengths.
Social programs aimed at equity and inclusion usually face serious dangers on the corrup-
tion front, in part because the direct political weight of the beneficiary groups is low. Mobili-
zation of those groups can help to counteract this problem, especially after a program has
been going on for a period and comes gradually to be seen by them as a right (which brings
182 albert berry
its own dangers). Civil society groups can also help. The potential of low-cost technology to
circumvent corrupt officials is exemplified by the current proposal to use direct transfer of
funds to the bank accounts of the beneficiaries of the Indian work guarantee program. Time
and experience will tell how successful such a reform may be; it is part of the continuous cat-
and-mouse game between the supporters of such programs and those who try to benefit
illicitly from them. It may even sometimes be necessary to recognize that the corrupt offi-
cials, as co-beneficiaries of a program, do provide support for it.
Using Aggregate Evidence to Gauge Progress and Success

The analysis needed to backstop good social policies (affirmative action and other) involves
not just the identification of the underlying problems that lead to exclusion and the monitor-
ing and evaluation of programs put into place, but also the monitoring of the broader trends
and patterns that reflect the severity of the exclusion and may therefore be used to measure
progress at an aggregate level.
Consider, for example, ethnic and gender inequality in Latin America. Despite a relatively
good database, too little analysis has been undertaken to quantify the degree of progress.
Hall et al. (2006: 21) note the remarkable growth in the political influence of indigenous peo-
ples, and the specially tailored health and education programs. There are data on the indige-
nous/non-indigenous gaps at specific points of time but too little analysis of trends over time
in those gaps (or in other relevant outcomes) and in what may underlie them.
The advance of women in Latin America is another complicated and somewhat ambigu-
ous story. Buviníc and Mazza (2008: 127) note that the situation of the average woman has
improved markedly in recent decades but that black, indigenous, and other socially excluded
women have been left behind; and that, more generally, the labor market gains of women
have not been commensurate with their rising educational level “because of persistent exclu-
sion from key occupations, formal sector employment, and better and higher quality jobs.”
Meanwhile, aggregate income data suggest a reasonably positive story. Over the 1990s,
together with a very rapid increase in female participation rates, there appears to have been
an increase in female relative earnings (among all workers, paid or not), suggesting a signifi-
cant increase in women’s share of urban income and hence of total income (Berry 2012: 26).
In Mexico, for example, that share of total (reported) urban income rose from about 19 per-
cent in 1989 to about 25 percent in 2002; in Venezuela the rise was more dramatic, from 24
percent in 1990 to 34 percent in 2003. Such figures do not capture economic insecurity, how-
ever, and the high proportion of women in the urban informal sector is cause for concern,
especially among the indigenous. Age discrimination is particularly relevant for women.
Keeping all of these patterns in mind at once is a major analytical challenge.
Improving the Social Efficiency

of Market Economies
Some policies to advance equality and inclusiveness are designed to work within an existing
society/economy, while others (some affirmative action programs, for example) aspire to
change the attitudes of those responsible for the exclusion, that is, to alter society itself.
Another approach is to tinker with those features of an economy’s functioning that are most
likely to negatively affect variables like inclusiveness.
Among the features deserving attention in this connection are:
1. taste formation through advertising designed to drive business profits, especially with
a focus on affording a sense of “exclusivity”;
2. greed as a desirable personal trait (at least to a point) on the grounds that it drives the
economy;
3. competition as a generally desirable feature of a society and an economy.
Each of these three features may have significant direct human welfare costs involving exclu-
sion (or lack of inclusion); this makes it particularly important to understand whether they
have important upsides in terms of contribution to economic growth, job creation, or other
economic “goods.”
Advertising can heighten unhappiness for people unable to acquire an advertised item or
a certain overall consumption level18 by encouraging comparison with others, as well as
inducing some to go into debt in a way that is ultimately damaging to them. But there is no
reason to believe that this sort of advertising adds to economic efficiency.
Personal greed has been defended as what drives entrepreneurs to provide a key input
necessary to economic growth and dynamism. Greed may be defined as the desire for more
than one needs, or an insatiable desire to accumulate wealth or other things of value, or a
desire to have something to which others also aspire. In the latter guise it is a form of inter-
personal competition. Adam Smith’s “person acting in his own interest” was not necessarily
greedy, but simply giving due weight to his own welfare. For markets to parlay individual
actions into societal welfare through the benefits of specialization and economies of scale
certainly does not require that their actions be motivated by greed; very plausibly, markets
work better when not so motivated.
Market-oriented societies are characterized by high levels of competition at many levels,
each with some negative and some positive effects on societal welfare. At the personal and
family level, people strive to outdo others (through conspicuous consumption or wealth,
purchasable status, etc.). This competition can take the form of a “zero sum game,” in the
sense that for one person to feel good (from “winning”) someone else must feel bad.19 Com-
petition among people for jobs can improve resource allocation and hence overall produc-
tion, as well as maximizing a form of personal freedom. But where many people strongly
prefer and wind up competing for the same job(s) for which few are needed, the competition
itself can extinguish friendships and contribute strongly to tension, uncertainty, and feelings
of inferiority, while not necessarily contributing to economic efficiency.
Conclusion
Equity and inclusiveness are logical goals of economic policy, both because they are likely to
contribute to human welfare and because there is considerable uncertainty as to the extent
and the mechanisms through which growth (the traditionally accepted route) advances that
welfare. Growth probably does have important positive effects when it occurs in conducive
societal structures; otherwise it may not. Doubts about the value of growth in and of itself
184 albert berry
flow both from the multidisciplinary evidence on the centrality of relative income and rela-
tive status to people’s satisfaction levels—with the implication that if average relative posi-
tion is unaffected by growth, then average satisfaction may not be much changed either—and
from the empirical evidence which, while it sometimes shows a positive trend in self-
reported happiness as growth occurs, remains open to the possibility that such correlation
may be due mainly to other changes occurring simultaneously (for example, in societal
structure).
Thus, while the evidence does not suggest giving up on growth as a source of benefits, it
does argue for a more cautious stance on that front and a better understanding of how econ-
omy and society can best interact for the common good. It is clearly necessary to unpackage
the concept of inclusiveness, drawing more on the nuances present in the psychology litera-
ture but not easily integrated into the sort of statistical analysis reviewed here.
Preference formation, with respect to both what one wants to consume and what makes
one happy, is endogenous to a society’s development. How much of the challenge of raising
human satisfaction could or should come from a deliberate effort by society (as opposed to
those always ongoing efforts of business, religions, philosophies, and other actors) to change
preference systems toward ones which make satisfaction easier to achieve?
At the practical level, exclusion and the economic inequality to which it contributes
are often so deeply ingrained in both the economy and the society that policy instru-
ments falling outside the normal economic tool kit (e.g. affirmative action) are likely to
be important to healthy and equitable development in both the economic and social
domains. Their c urrently early stage of development implies a major challenge over the
coming decades.
Notes
1. “Social exclusion” refers to the inability of a person or of the members of a group (e.g. an
ethnic group) to participate in the basic political, economic, and social functioning of the
society.
2. See, for example, Hills et al. (2002).
3. See Mauss (2011) for a classic treatment of reciprocity as a form of association.
4. A concept that many trace back to Rousseau (1762).
5. A prominent statement was Galenson and Leibenstein (1955).
6. Among many authors discussing this are Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) and Easterly
(2001).
7. An early discussion from the psychological literature is Jahoda (1981).
8. Point-of-time surveys typically find that 25 to 30 percent of variance in reported happi-
ness/satisfaction is associated with income. Industrial country analysis throws up some
intriguing looks at trade-offs between income and other sources of satisfaction. Blanch-
flower and Oswald (2004: 1373) report that in the U.S., on average it takes considerable
additional income ($100,000 per annum, according to their first-cut estimates) to com-
pensate for a life-changing event like being widowed or suffering a marriage break-up.
Compensating for unemployment takes $60,000 per year, and for being black, $30,000.
These large sums reflect both the significance of such personal conditions and the modest
impact on happiness of more income. It remains to be seen how similar are the patterns
in developing countries.
9. Presumably imposing some limit on the extent to which satisfaction levels are likely to
change in response to economic or other factors is a person-specific genetic proclivity to
a given level of satisfaction. De Neve et al. (2012) conclude that about 33 percent of the
variation in the baseline level of happiness is explained by genes. This finding, however,
leaves plenty of space for other determinants of happiness to play a role.
10. The life cycle pattern of happiness for individuals also fails to match the cross-section; as
income and economic circumstances improve there is typically little or no correspond-
ing advance in subjective well-being (Easterlin 2001: 469). Psychologists draw a distinc-
tion between “decision utility” (ex ante satisfaction associated with choice among several
alternatives) and “experienced utility” (ex post or realized satisfaction) (Kahneman and
Krueger 2006), whereas economists have tended to assume that these are the same.
11. Contrasting with the simple assumption that, economically speaking, “more” automati-
cally produces “happier” is the (perhaps extreme) view from the psychology side that
“The single most remarkable fact of human existence is how hard it is for human beings
to be happy” (Hayes et al. 1999: 1).
12. Gill (2012) studies the complex linkages between poverty and ethnicity. Ethnic values are
also seen to play an important role in the social exclusion and isolation of some people
within their own ethnic group.
13. Latinobarómetro is an annual public opinion survey of more than 400 million inhabit-
ants in 18 countries in Latin America. It measures attitudes toward democracy, trust in
institutions, and other topical issues.
14. See, for example, Levy (2008).
15. Policies in these different categories may overlap in many ways. Thus, effective function-
ing of redistributive policies like India’s work guarantee system may require attacking the
administrative corruption that prevents benefits from reaching the intended parties.
16. There may be “tipping points” in the growth of resistance, above which the negative
response multiplies quickly and becomes a major threat to success.
17. A point made by Buviníc and Mazza (2008: 157) in the context of Latin America.
18. See van Tuinen (2011) for a recent discussion. A classic treatment is Galbraith (1958). On
the impact of advertising on children, see Chernin (2008).
19. The American psychologist Madeline Levine (2006) details how, for example, tremendous
parental pressure to get into a good university leads to grief, self-loathing, cheating, and drug
use on the part of their children and, in her view, contributes powerfully to unhappiness.
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chapter 11
soci a l protection
armando barrientos
Introduction
Since the turn of the century, social protection has emerged as a key area of development
policy and practice. Large-scale social protection programs in middle-income developing
countries providing direct transfers to households in poverty make an important contribu-
tion to the reduction of global poverty and vulnerability. More recently, social protection
programs have begun to emerge in low-income countries. The expansion of social protec-
tion in the South has been described as a “quiet revolution” (Barrientos and Hulme 2008),
because for the most part it represents domestic policy responses to poverty and vulnerabil-
ity. Increasingly, social protection is perceived as an essential component of effective devel-
opment strategies, combining growth, basic service provision, and social protection. The
rationale, conceptual basis, design, and effectiveness of social protection in developing coun-
tries are contested. The main objective of this chapter is to throw light on the concepts and
practice of social protection in developing countries, with a view to assessing the role of
social protection in development.
Basic terminology is an issue and a necessary starting point. In developed countries and in
the work of the International Labour Organization (ILO), social protection comprises social
insurance, contributory programs covering life-course and work-related contingencies;
social assistance, consisting of tax-financed programs addressing poverty and vulnerability;
and employment programs whether “passive” or “active.” The importance of social protection
is well understood in European countries, especially as it constitutes the core of welfare states
which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the context of developing
countries, and in international development policy debates, social protection has come to
describe a range of programs and policies addressing poverty and vulnerability—social
assistance, in the terminology described above. In the chapter, the terms social protection
and social assistance will be used to refer to the broader and narrower definitions of social
protection respectively. In developing countries, social protection is generally underdevel-
oped. In some middle-income countries, especially in Latin America, social insurance insti-
tutions are in place but protect mainly formal workers. Social assistance and employment
social protection 189
programs were, until recently, residual or non-existent. The first decade of the twenty-first
century has ushered in broad agreement across developing countries on the importance of
social assistance. Policy activism is embedding this new understanding in appropriate poli-
cies and institutions. The chapter examines the growth of social assistance in the South, and
assesses its future evolution.
The political and economic conditions within which this policy activism has taken root
have ensured a focus on self-standing flagship programs, as opposed to institutions. The rea-
sons behind a program approach to social protection are complex and often country-specific.
They will be taken up in the text below. They include fiscal constraints, political opposition,
knowledge gaps and uncertainty, the time window of international aid, and the hubris of
silver bullets in international development policy. As a result, the focus of attention of the
analysis in the chapter will be on programs, including Mexico’s Oportunidades (originally
Progresa, renamed in 2002), Brazil’s Bolsa Escola/Familia, South Africa’s Child Support Grant,
Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program, India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee
Scheme, and China’s DiBao, to name a few. In the pioneer countries, a shift in policy and
practice from flagship programs to stable and more or less permanent institutions is under-
way. The shift towards further institutionalization of social assistance is welcomed and will
determine the future shape of social protection in the South.
Social assistance is not understood simply as a policy instrument compensating or miti-
gating poverty, but rather as part of a strategy to reduce and eventually eradicate poverty and
improve equity. To the extent that development signifies achieving productive, fair, and
democratic societies, social protection and social assistance have a primary role to play in
this project. Social protection supports economic inclusion and human capital investment
among low-income groups, key conditions for development. The important point, high-
lighted below, is that this is precisely the motivation behind the expansion of social assist-
ance in middle-income countries.
The next section will examine concepts and approaches to social protection in develop-
ment. The third section will focus on social protection programs, providing a classification
and a discussion of main features. The subsequent section identifies and assesses two of the
main challenges facing the extension of social protection in developing countries: imple-
mentation and financing. The final section will speculate on the future of social protection in
the South. The chapter aims to cover developments in all regions, but a stronger focus on
Latin America is occasionally unavoidable, reflecting the earlier growth of social protection,
and the depth of research available, in this region.
Concepts and Approaches
There is some uncertainty in international policy debates on the meaning and scope of social
protection in a developing country context. This section attempts to clear up this uncertainty. It
begins by spelling out an institutional approach to social protection. It then considers how social
protection is informed by broader development perspectives centered on risk, needs, and rights.
The discussion then returns to the scope of social protection in a development context.
190 armando barrientos
Social Protection as Institutions

In advanced industrial countries and in the work of the ILO, social protection is defined as
policies and programs concerned with the protection of basic living standards (ILO 2006).
Social protection has three main institutional components: social insurance, social assist-
ance, and employment protection and promotion.
Social insurance consists of contributory schemes providing protection against a range of
life-course and work-related contingencies. Social insurance is provided through a fund that
collects contributions from employees and employers and pays benefits when specified
contingencies materialize. Typically, social insurance funds include old age, service, and dis-
ability pensions; survivor benefits; and unemployment and sickness insurance. In developed
countries, pensions constitute the main component in social insurance. There is considera-
ble variation in institutional arrangements across countries and across contingencies. In
some countries, social insurance funds are employer- or occupation-based, while in other
countries a social insurance fund covers all workers, or even residents, and their households.
The focus of social insurance is the pooling of life-course and work-related risks through a
social insurance fund.
Social assistance consists of programs and policies ensuring minimum living stand-
ards, and consequently addressing the needs of groups facing poverty, vulnerability, and
exclusion. Social assistance is tax-financed. In most developed countries, social assist-
ance is built around income maintenance schemes providing means-tested transfers cov-
ering individuals’ poverty gaps. In developing countries, as will be discussed in more
detail below, there is wide variety in social assistance arrangements, but transfers are
often fixed in level and focused on households as opposed to individuals. In low-income
countries, social assistance reaches a fraction of the population in poverty and is often
supported by international aid.
Finally, labor market interventions fall into two types: “passive” interventions, which
set minimum standards of employment and protect workers’ rights, and “active” inter-
ventions, which aim to enhance employability through training and skills transfers, job
search and intermediation, remedial education, and employment subsidies. In develop-
ing countries, labor market interventions are restricted by fluid and informal labor
markets.
There are two important implications emerging from this institutional description of
social protection. The first is that comprehensive social protection systems would
require the presence of all three components. Most developing countries have some
form of social insurance institutions, but these cover at best a fraction of the labor force
in formal employment. Few developing countries have strong employment programs,
whether “passive” or “active.” Social assistance institutions were residual in developing
countries. The focus of recent growth in social protection has been on social assistance.
The second implication relates to the relative weight of the components and policy pri-
orities in social protection building in developing countries. Until the turn of the cen-
tury, and under the influence of the ILO, the focus was on social insurance. There are
good reasons to believe different approaches are needed in developing countries that
give a stronger priority to the other two components (Camargo 2004; Barrientos 2007;
Seekings 2008).
Social Protection and Development Perspectives

A proper understanding of social protection needs to go beyond an institutional approach
and consider underlying development foundations. There are competing views on this issue.
Alternative views of the role of social protection in development can be traced back to com-
peting development perspectives emphasizing the role of risk, needs, or rights (Munro
2008). A brief discussion on these perspectives could help clarify the linkages between social
protection and development.
Some define the main role of social protection as lifting the constraints to human and eco-
nomic development posed by social risk. In the late 1990s, the World Bank developed a Social
Risk Management approach to social protection, understood as policies that seek “to assist
individuals, households and communities in better managing income risks” (Holzmann and
Jorgensen 1999: 4). In policy terms, this approach identifies the main social risks faced by
households and then defines and implements a range of policies facilitating households’
management of their risk portfolio. The approach emphasized the role of vulnerability as a
factor in poverty persistence, and the role of safety nets as a means of reducing vulnerability.
Another approach grounds social protection within a rights-based development perspec-
tive. The ILO understands social protection as arising from human rights, specifically the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.1 A rights-based approach emphasizes an implied
obligation for states and international institutions.
A third approach locates social protection within institutions ensuring the satisfaction of
basic needs. The UN defines social protection as “a set of public and private policies and pro-
grams undertaken by societies in response to various contingencies to offset the absence or
substantial reduction of income from work; to provide assistance to families with children as
well as provide people with basic health care and housing” (United Nations 2000: 4). It is
underpinned by shared “fundamental values concerning acceptable levels and security of
access to income, livelihood, employment, health and education services, nutrition and shel-
ter” (United Nations 2000: 4). In essence, this approach envisages social protection as ensuring
the satisfaction of basic human needs as a component of human and economic development.
In international policy debates across the UN agencies, these three perspectives risk solid-
ifying into competing approaches. There are some implications at the operational level asso-
ciated with giving preference to one approach or another,2 but it should not be difficult to
spot the common ground in the three approaches. To an important extent they point to three
different dimensions of the same development challenge.
The Scope of Social Protection and Assistance

In practice, and beyond the discourse of UN agencies, the main dividing line is between two
approaches: one with a more limited focus on poverty and vulnerability, and the other with a
much broader remit overlapping development.
One approach to building social protection starts from established social policy frame-
works, tried and tested in developed countries and middle-income developing countries. Let
us call this the social policy/public finance approach. In terms of social assistance, it focuses
on policies and programs providing transfers to households facing poverty and vulnerability
as a means of overcoming their situation.
The other approach to building social protection starts from development policies and
concerns. It is referred to below as the development approach. There are many variants of
this approach, and wide areas of disagreement, but at its core it proposes attention to human
development, governance, the environment, and empowerment. It advocates integrated
development strategies advancing simultaneously on all these fronts, a proposal captured in
the notion of sustainable development. It does not differentiate social protection substan-
tively from these other areas of policy. The development approach looks beyond poverty as
its main objective and includes human development more generally, emphasizing empower-
ment and equality.
The development approach will consistently push social protection and assistance towards
a broader, more encompassing, policy framework (Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux 2007).
This is in contrast to the more focused scope proposed by the social policy/public finance
approach. Many areas of apparent confusion and controversy over the role and scope of
social protection in developing countries, and especially uncertainty over its boundaries,
can be traced back to the differences between the social policy/public finance approach and
the development approach.
The social policy/public finance approach has a lot to recommend it. There is a great deal
for us to learn from the experiences of developed countries as regards poverty reduction and
development. The crucial role of registration in enabling public assistance was well under-
stood in eighteenth-century England. The advantages and disadvantages of means testing
and targeting assistance to poor households were hotly discussed in the U.S. in the context of
its “War on Poverty” in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, conditions in developing
countries strongly recommend against transferring European approaches and institutions
slavishly to developing countries.
On the other hand, a development approach has much to contribute to enhancing social
assistance and social protection institutions in developing countries. In particular, anti-
poverty programs, social assistance included, need to be designed and implemented in ways
that synergize social and economic development. But there are limits to this strategy. In
developing countries the share of national income absorbed by low-income groups is very
small,3 and the additional income from program budgets is often a fraction of 1 percent of
national income. As a result, even large improvements in economic activity among house-
holds in poverty are unlikely to show up in economy-wide growth rates. The multipliers from
social protection transfers apply to a very small income base.
Keeping this in mind, the impact of social protection on economy-wide growth rates will
be greater in conditions where employment and economic inclusion are expanding. It can
also be greater in periods of crisis and recession if the economic situation of poor households
is given a higher priority.4 The multifaceted nature of the development approach, when
applied to social assistance, can result in a crippling loss of focus. Adding objectives and
instruments to social assistance and to social protection strategies could quickly encounter
diminishing returns. Well-designed social assistance programs can be effective in reducing
poverty, and in the process they could have an impact on disparities in access to basic serv-
ices, and could strengthen the productive capacity of groups in poverty. They are unlikely to
deliver economy-wide growth, gender empowerment, or structural change.
It is important to ensure that social protection and assistance are developmental, that is,
that they contribute to social and economic development, but in the understanding that
development is much bigger than social protection. Social protection will be more effective
if combined with policies delivering basic services and growth, it is not a substitute for these
(Barrientos 2012). Understanding the boundaries of social protection and assistance will be
essential to maintaining a clear focus on their contribution to development.
Social Assistance in Practice
There is considerable diversity in program design in developing countries, underlining the

domestic basis of emerging social protection policies. The main objective of this section is to
provide an overview of the main types of programs and then to discuss some features that
have received a great deal of attention in the literature.
Program Types
The vast majority of social assistance programs are designed around a direct transfer, in cash
or in kind, to participating households. Analytically, it will be useful to classify social assist-
ance programs into three main categories: pure income transfers; income transfers com-
bined with asset accumulation; and integrated poverty reduction programs.5
Pure income transfers include transfers in cash specifically targeted at households in
poverty. Some programs target all households satisfying the selection criteria, while oth-
ers target categories of individuals considered to be particularly vulnerable. An example of
the former is the Kalomo Pilot Social Transfer Scheme in Zambia, which provides direct
and regular transfers to the poorest 10 percent of households in designated districts.
Examples of categorical transfer programs include child or family allowances or social
pensions. South Africa’s social assistance is organized in the main through means-tested
categorical grants focused on older people, people with disabilities, children, and orphans
in poor households.
Income transfers combined with asset accumulation include programs providing transfers
in cash or in kind, which are combined with, or facilitate, the accumulation of productive
assets. The term “asset” is used here in its broadest sense, to include human, physical, and
financial assets. Linking direct transfers with interventions aimed at asset accumulation
underlines the fact that programs of this type aim to strengthen the productive capacity of
households in poverty. This category includes two families of programs now common in
developing countries. The first group includes programs that combine direct transfers with
interventions supporting household investment in human development, especially educa-
tion and health. Mexico’s Oportunidades or Brazil’s Bolsa Família are well-known examples
of this family of programs. The second group includes programs that combine direct trans-
fers with interventions supporting the protection and accumulation of physical assets.
Examples of this type of program include India’s National Employment Guarantee Scheme
(infrastructure or community assets) and Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (house-
hold and community assets). The Productive Safety Net Program combines transfers in cash
or in kind with agricultural extension activities for households with work capacity, and direct
support to households without work capacity. These programs require beneficiaries to sup-
ply work to create or protect household or community assets.
Integrated poverty reduction programs are an important innovation in social assistance,

combining a range of interventions focused on the poorest and addressing social exclusion.
BRAC’s Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction: Targeting the Ultra Poor provides an
integrated and sequential set of interventions strengthening the nutrition and health status
of the poorest households, as well as training in preparation for the transfer of productive
assets. Chile’s Chile Solidario is another influential example of a program that provides an
integrated set of interventions addressing a range of deficits responsible for keeping house-
holds in poverty.
The conceptual basis for this classification is provided by the underlying understanding of
poverty underpinning the programs. Pure transfers rely on an understanding of poverty as
largely to do with deficits in income or consumption. Transfers are expected to remedy these
deficits and thus reduce poverty. Income transfers combined with asset accumulation share
a broader understanding of poverty. They pay attention to deficits in income or consump-
tion but they also aim to address deficits in productive assets. Programs focused on human
development, like Mexico’s Oportunidades, understand the persistence of poverty as arising
from deficits in human capital. Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program is based on an
understanding of poverty and its persistence as arising from the asset depletion and destruc-
tion affecting food-insecure households faced with droughts or other shocks. Programs
included in this group adopt a multidimensional understanding of poverty, but focus on a
few dimensions. Integrated poverty reduction programs also share a multidimensional
understanding of poverty, but are distinguished by a wider set of dimensions covered, by
a strong focus on social exclusion, and by the fact that direct income transfers play only a
marginal role in the overall support provided to households in poverty.
Program Design Features

Here we examine some design features which distinguish social protection innovations in
developing countries, some of which have been discussed extensively in the literature.
Scale and Scope

New forms of social assistance in developing countries without exception target the poor
and poorest households. In most cases, this involves a mix of selection techniques. Progresa
used geographic targeting to identify communities in rural Mexico with the highest levels
of marginalization, then a proxy means test to rank households on several deficit indica-
tors, and finally community validation (Skoufias 2005). This is closely replicated in Hondu-
ras’ PRAF II (Programa de Asignación Familiar, or Family Allowance Program), except that
poverty incidence in marginalized communities is so high that it makes more sense to select
out the non-poor than to select in the poor, an affluence test. In Brazil, social assistance
transfers, like Bolsa Família and the Beneficio de Prestação Continuada, use a targeting mix
that involves a comparison of per capita household income with the national poverty line,
plus in the latter case a minimum age requirement of 65 years. India’s National Rural
Employment Guarantee relies on self-targeting by participants who are unemployed or
whose earnings are below the market rate. Assessments of the effectiveness of selection per-
formed on some of these programs suggest they are effective in reaching the poor and in
reducing leakages to the non-poor, but that their coverage of the poor is insufficient. This
is a generalized lesson from the literature on targeting (Ravallion 2007).
In addition to deficiencies in coverage arising from resource constraints or from opera-
tional deficiencies in the implementation of programs, it is useful to pay some attention to
the exclusion of some of the poor and poorest arising from program selection and design.
Programs that focus on strengthening enrolment and schooling select poor households with
children of school age in communities where schooling infrastructure is in place. This has
the effect of excluding poor households with children below school age, those without chil-
dren, and those in communities without schooling infrastructure. In some middle-income
countries, social assistance programs have expanded in scale so that they reach a majority of
households in poverty. Mexico’s Oportunidades and Brazil’s Bolsa Família reach around a
quarter of the population, while South Africa’s social assistance grants reach around one half
of all households. Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program reaches around 10 percent of all
households in the country.
Another fundamental break with old social assistance relates to the way in which new
forms of social assistance incorporate and operationalize an understanding of the multidi-
mensional nature of poverty, and particularly extreme poverty. New forms of social assist-
ance discussed in this chapter are increasingly designed as integrated interventions based
around income transfers. Progresa, for example, combined income transfers with interven-
tions on nutrition, schooling, and health; when scaled up to Oportunidades, additional serv-
ices included training, job search, youth inclusion, saving instruments, and micro-enterprise
development. This widening of the scope of the programs follows on from the recognition
that overcoming poverty requires integrated support on a number of dimensions, especially
in a context in which basic services and insurance programs exclude large numbers of the
poor and poorest households. Income transfers are unlikely to be sufficient on their own to
pull poor households out of poverty, even assuming their level could be raised significantly.
Chile’s Chile Solidario had the widest scope, focusing on seven dimensions of welfare and on
fifty-three minimum thresholds (Barrientos 2010).
Conditions
Some social assistance programs attach conditions to the continuation of transfer payments.
Public works and employment guarantee programs—Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Pro-
gram, for example—attach work conditions to participation in the program, in part as a
means to ensure self-selection among potential participants and also in order to improve
community infrastructure. Latin American human development conditional transfer pro-
grams aim to reduce the intergenerational persistence of poverty by supporting investment
in health and schooling. Mexico’s Progresa/Oportunidades, for example, requires that school-
age children be enrolled and attend for at least 85 percent of the time; that all household
members visit primary health care centres; and that mothers attend nutrition training ses-
sions. Failure to comply with these conditions can result in the suspension of transfers. More
broadly, these programs have adopted co-responsibilities that spell out the responsibilities
and standards of performance of the program agency on the one hand, and the conditions
imposed on participant households on the other. These are formally established at the time
households join the program.
Issues relating to these conditions have been discussed extensively in the literature.
First, there is a concern that conditions might in fact penalize households least able to
comply. Second, there is a concern that the effectiveness of conditions has not been fully
established, with the implication that conditions might in fact be unnecessary or even
counterproductive. Furthermore, even where conditions can be shown to be effective, it
would be necessary to establish that the gains from conditions outstrip the additional
administration and implementation costs. Third, there is a concern that compliance with
the conditions falls primarily on mothers, with no form of compensation available.
Fourth, and in view of the experience of developed countries with welfare reform, there is
a concern that conditions might be required not for program effectiveness, but to secure
political support from taxpayers.
In Latin America, the first concern, that conditions penalize those least able to comply,
has led some programs to use non-compliance with conditions as a means to trigger further
support for the participant households. This is the case in Brazil’s Bolsa Família. More
broadly, a distinction has been drawn between programs with “soft” and those with “hard”
conditions, which depends on how programs deal with non-compliance.
There is very little hard evidence on the separate effectiveness of conditions, but there is
evidence that programs with conditions achieve their objectives (Fiszbein and Schady
2009). Experimental approaches to testing for the effectiveness of conditions are unlikely
to meet ethics research protocols. Consequently, researchers have looked into the details
of program implementation to identify whether “natural experiments” could throw light
on this issue. The extension of the Bono de Desarrollo Humano in Ecuador, a human devel-
opment transfer program, is interesting because the program was advertised, to benefici-
ary households and the general public, as including conditions on schooling and health,
but in practice the government was not in a position to implement the conditions. A study
compared information on schooling responses from households who understood there
was a relevant condition in the program and households reporting having no knowledge
of conditions. It found that the belief that conditions were part of the program did influ-
ence positively those households’ schooling decisions (Schady and Araujo 2006). The
introduction of Mexico’s Progresa seems to provide another “natural experiment.” Com-
pliance with schooling conditions is monitored through a form that beneficiaries take to
school to be filled in, but for administrative reasons a group of beneficiaries were not
issued with the forms. A study compared the schooling responses of beneficiary house-
holds without forms or knowledge of conditions, and other groups of beneficiary
households. It found that knowledge of conditions seemed to have influenced schooling
decisions at the secondary school level (de Brauw and Hoddinott 2011). The studies sug-
gest conditions may matter, but it is hard to generalize from these highly specific settings.
At any rate, the effects are likely to be small: for example, in Mexico, school enrolment
rates in primary education were above 90 percent before the introduction of Progresa, so
that the effect of conditions could at best bind on the 10 percent of children not enrolled at
school. A point often missed in policy discussions is that it is the marginal, not the average,
effect of conditions that indicates their effectiveness.
Some researchers have pointed out that in many human development programs, mothers
are the direct recipients of the transfer and the persons primarily responsible for compliance
with the conditions (Molyneux 2006). In general, concerns over the extent of compliance
costs must be taken on board by program designers. It is also the case that conditions might
enforce some degree of coordination between program managers and other ministries—
health and education, for example—that could strengthen implementation effectiveness
(Cecchini and Madariaga 2011).
Time Windows and Exit Strategies

Another important feature of new social assistance relates to the time window for interven-
tions. This raises some interesting issues at a more fundamental level. Limited time windows
reflect a concern to avoid dependency. It is a feature of new social assistance programs that
they identify some “graduation” process for beneficiary households. Most programs include
a regular review of eligibility at regular intervals, for example every three years. Eligibility
conditions also provide “graduation” milestones such as children growing beyond school
age or the death of pension beneficiaries.
Most of the programs mentioned above aim to protect the poor from the harm done by
persistent poverty; but they also aim to strengthen their productive capacity by facilitating
investment in schooling, health, and nutrition, and to strengthen their agency. The optimal
time window might well be different for each of these functions. The protection role would
be best performed by permanent institutions that come into play whenever households fall
into poverty. The promotion role would be most effectively performed at specific points, for
example school age children, expectant mothers. It is hard to envisage a time window for
empowerment, though in practice it would be most effectively done with a mix of time-
specific interventions and rights. Time windows reflect in part that one or other of these
functions is dominant. Time windows are also one of the design features aimed at building
credibility around social assistance programs.
In developing countries, the design of time windows and “graduation” mechanisms
should take into account the nature, quality, and coordination of the institutions charged
with delivering public programs. Graduation from a program in a context in which supple-
mentary programs ensure “propulsion” away from poverty for beneficiary “graduates” will
be very different from graduation in a context where the end of income transfer dumps
beneficiary households straight back into precarious livelihoods. In the latter, graduation is
problematic. Without appropriate consideration given to follow-up interventions designed
to help graduating households avoid falling back into poverty, the success of social assist-
ance programs will be limited.
Impact
The gains from improving our knowledge of what works in reducing and preventing poverty
are large, and a strong focus on evaluation and research is a feature of recent social assistance
in developing countries. The impact evaluation results from some programs improve pov-
erty knowledge. The strength of evaluation processes associated with Progresa/Oportuni-
dades, for example, have become a “gold standard” for anti-poverty programs elsewhere. The
quality of impact evaluation is not uniform across programs and regions, and less is known
about the impact of smaller programs in lower-income countries.
There is significant variation in outcomes across programs and for individual programs
over time, but findings to date suggest large-scale social assistance programs are, on the
whole, having some success in meeting their objectives.6 The knowledge base is stronger on
human development programs, in part because human development outcomes, such as
school enrolment and attendance and health services utilization, have a more direct and
short-term impact. Intriguingly, evidence on the poverty reduction effects of social assist-
ance is less comprehensive. Because transfer levels are currently a fraction of what is required
to lift households out of poverty, the poverty impact of social assistance programs is stronger
on the poverty gap than on the poverty headcount.7 There is still more work to be done to
identify with greater precision the impact on current poverty of smaller programs in low-
income countries.
Challenges
The growth of social protection in developing countries has been remarkable, but important
challenges remain. The expansion of social protection has been slower in low-income coun-
tries than in middle-income countries. To some extent this is because of characteristic capac-
ity deficits in policy design, implementation, and financing, but it would be wrong to focus
solely on resource deficits as an explanation for the slow development of social protection in
low-income countries. Political factors are very important, especially given the significant
role of democratization in the expansion of social protection in countries like Brazil, South
Africa, and more generally Latin America. This section will focus on two main areas: imple-
mentation and finance, with low-income country constraints as a cross-cutting issue.
Implementation
The delivery of large-scale, and in some cases complex, multi-intervention programs makes
significant demands on the capacity of public agencies. Administrative competencies and
resources available to social assistance agencies are generally limited, especially in low-
income countries. Introducing conditional income transfer programs in countries with poor
delivery capacity is challenging.
To take one example, information systems are essential to achieving adequate coordina-
tion and delivery of social assistance. They perform several key functions: (i) matching par-
ticipants with their entitlements, avoiding any duplication or misdelivery of benefits and
transfers; (ii) enabling program officers to access the “social history” of participants, track-
ing any change in their socio-economic condition, and adjusting support accordingly; and
(iii) identifying potential needs and available provision geographically (including the loca-
tion of schools, surgeries, hospitals, municipal buildings, banks, or public offices able to
deliver cash transfers, public transport, roads, etc.). The system must have the capacity to
enable users to input and access information directly, thus enabling spaces for interaction
between program officers and beneficiaries and the fine-tuning and personalization of pro-
grams at the local level. Transparency and accountability are important, especially in
administrative processes dealing with appeals and representation. Brazil’s Bolsa Família
relies on a single information system, the Cadastro Unico, which contains up-to-date infor-
mation on every household considered for participation in social assistance and other pub-
lic programs. In effect, the information system is a coordination and management tool
supporting a decentralized implementation of the program. At the other end of the range,
Zambia’s Public Welfare Assistance Scheme has two welfare officers per district (one in 2005).
They are charged with delivering all social assistance services and programs in the district
in coordination with other agencies, and have to service a highly dispersed population. It is
not surprising that low-income countries make greater use of community implementation
of social assistance programs, but this often implies a mix of hand ledgers, personal contact,
and telephony (Garcia and Moore 2012). Less complex programs are a necessity in this
context.
The technology of delivering social assistance programs is advancing extremely fast, and
learning across countries and regions has been hugely productive. However, a one-sided
focus on technical fixes to deficits in capacity and resources, the holy grail of donor agencies,
is to be avoided. An important lesson from implementing social assistance programs is the
significant role of intermediation in ensuring the effectiveness of these programs. Technol-
ogy can raise the productivity of welfare officers, but cannot replace them.
Finance
How should developing countries finance an expansion of social assistance? Research on the
financing of the expansion of social protection and assistance in developing countries is lim-
ited. In part this is due to the dominance of the resource mobilization approach in interna-
tional policy debates. Resource mobilization approaches focus on finding “new money” to
support the expansion of social protection in developing countries, often in the form of addi-
tional aid flows. Resource mobilization is essential in low-income countries, but its domi-
nance in the context of social protection is unhelpful. The issue of financing social assistance
is not just to do with resources but also with incentives and legitimacy. In low-income coun-
tries, an aid-dependent expansion of social protection can turn out to be detrimental if it
disconnects elites from their responsibilities for poverty reduction, or if it is perceived by the
general public to be unsustainable and lacking in legitimacy. The expansion of the welfare
state in European countries in the second half of the twentieth century was based on corpo-
ratist consensus between unions, employers, and governments, supported through income
(payroll) taxation. This is a model that developing countries will find hard, if not impossible,
to emulate, for reasons that include high levels of informality, inequality, and the absence of
corporatist political processes. Developing countries need innovative ideas and approaches
on the financing of social protection, but the European experience highlights the crucial
linkages between taxation and politics.
Government revenues are fungible. The resources required for assistance programs are
often collected from a combination of different sources such as tax revenues, expenditure
switching, revenues from natural resources, debt cancellation, payroll taxes, and international
aid. In a dynamic context, the focus must be on the financing mix as opposed to individual
sources of finance. In the short term, an expansion of fiscal space and/or switching expendi-
ture from underperforming programs might be sufficient to provide the initial financing.
International aid has a role in helping developing countries, and especially low-income coun-
tries, overcome the high costs associated with introducing social assistance programs anew.
Investments in research, training, information systems, and financial delivery, to name a few,
are substantial at the start. Revenues from natural resources or from debt cancellation can
also help engineer an expanded fiscal space. The opportunities for expenditure switching are
significant in most developing countries. Research leading to the introduction of Chile’s Chile
Solidario, for example, established the existence of 143 public programs addressing the needs
of households in poverty, while Bangladesh has ninety-three separate anti-poverty programs.
In the medium and longer term, the resources needed to support social protection must be
generated domestically. The effectiveness and fairness of the tax system are paramount to the
longer-term sustainability of social protection. In most cases, a low tax/GDP ratio is associ-
ated with imperfect fiscal contracts. Civil society is often reluctant to pay taxes because gov-
ernments provide few services, a factor in the persistence of high levels of informality. Elites
able to draw large amounts of revenue from natural resources face fewer pressures to submit
to democratic processes.
The Future of Social Protection
The discussion in the previous sections supports the view that the future of social protection
in developing countries is unlikely to be found in existing European institutions, even less in
their past. This does not imply rejecting the objective of setting in place comprehensive social
protection institutions: rather, it is meant to emphasize the need for innovative thinking on
how to achieve this objective in developing countries.
Social assistance has been the main focus for the expansion in social protection in devel-
oping countries. This is the case even in countries with large-scale social insurance. What are
the implications for social protection systems in the South of this expansion of social
assistance?
In addressing this question it is important to distinguish between low- and middle-
income countries. In low-income countries, often with very limited social protection provi-
sion, the expansion of social assistance helps to focus government efforts on poverty
reduction and eradication. The growth of social assistance generates few trade-offs. Moreo-
ver, social assistance can have positive outcomes in other sectors. Replacing emergency
assistance with regular and reliable transfers to households in poverty, for example, could
generate additional demand for schooling and health care and other forms of asset accumu-
lation. In Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programs, evaluations suggest that groups of par-
ticipants for whom transfers came bundled with agricultural development interventions
showed the strongest gains in food security and asset protection (Gilligan, Hoddinott, and
Taffesse 2008). In low-income countries, the future involves linking social assistance with
“productivist” interventions, leading to improved productive capacity among participant
households. Trade-offs are more likely to emerge in contexts in which social assistance
expenditure risks crowding out service infrastructure investment. There are few gains in
diverting investment from schools and clinics to finance social assistance transfers. Social
protection expenditure is, in most developing countries, some way off reaching the scale for
these adverse trade-offs to be observed.
In middle-income countries, especially countries with large-scale social insurance, the
future course of social assistance and protection presents a different set of challenges. Latin
American countries, especially Mexico, provide a fertile ground in which to look at future
development. Prior to the growth of large-scale anti-poverty programs in the first decade of
this century, social protection systems in the region had been characterized as “truncated,”
in the sense that relatively generous social insurance schemes enjoying significant public
subsidies catered for workers in formal employment and their households, while a large sec-
tion of the population relying on informal employment had very limited access to social pro-
tection (Fiszbein 2005; Barrientos 2009). Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s policy-makers and
researchers could hold on to the view that industrialization would eventually eliminate
informality, liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s put paid to that assumption. Against this
background, there is growing consensus around the view that social protection systems in
the region have been strengthened by the growth of social assistance in the last decade. Social
assistance helps extend social protection coverage to sections of the population traditionally
excluded from social insurance institutions, and is effective in reducing extreme and persist-
ent poverty. It has the potential to improve human development and economic inclusion
among low-income groups. Social assistance absorbs a very small fraction of public reve-
nues, and there is every prospect that social assistance budgets will decrease in the future as
poverty declines. The growth in social assistance is a welcome development because it fills in
a component missing from social protection systems in the region. At the same time, the
growth of social assistance has not undermined truncated social protection systems in the
region, but has resulted instead in segmented or “hyphenated” social protection with two
separate components. This suggests a long-term cleavage.
How will this situation evolve in the future? Current research and policy discussions have
not led to a settled view on this issue. The emerging orthodoxy argues for a stronger integra-
tion of social insurance and social assistance, and an urgent upgrade of labor market policies
(CEPAL 2006; Levy 2008; Ferreira and Robalino 2010; Ribe, Robalino, and Walker 2010).
The conditions, and therefore prescriptions, for integrating well-developed and longstand-
ing social insurance institutions with emerging social assistance are hugely complex. Corpo-
ratist and State-led integrated social protection systems, as in South Korea and China
respectively, offer a different route, but require political conditions very different from those
observed in Latin America.
Notes
1. Article 25 states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the
health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing and medi-
cal care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unem-
ployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in
circumstances beyond his control. . . . Motherhood and childhood are entitled to spe-
cial care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the
same protection.”
2. A one-sided risk approach recommends a focus on transient as opposed to chronic pov-
erty, but the Social Risk Management Strategy and its more recent incarnations explicitly
acknowledge the need to address the latter. An imperfect rights perspective has been
taken to recommend “universal” policies “blind to socio-economic status,” but the ILO
has explicitly acknowledged the need to give priority to groups in poverty. A one-sided
needs perspective has highlighted trade-offs between supply-side service provision and
demand-side income transfers, but it has proved hard to determine the empirical signifi-
cance of the trade-offs.
3. In Bolivia in 2007, for example, the bottom quintile captured 2.6 percent of national
income.
4. This implies attaching a social weight to the welfare of poor households, compared to the
standard GDP measures lacking social weights.
5. Program information is available in the Social Assistance in Developing Countries Data-
base (Barrientos, Niño-Zarazúa, and Maitrot 2010). Version 5 can be accessed at <http://
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1672090>.
6. For a review of the impact across human development conditional transfer programs, see
Fiszbein and Schady (2009); for a discussion of non-contributory pensions, see Holz-
mann, Robalino, and Takayama (2009).
7. Evaluations of Progresa show a large reduction in the poverty gap, but the impact on
poverty incidence is small (Skoufias 2005).
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chapter 12
l aw, r egu l ation,

a n d dev el opm en t
kevin e. davis and mariana mota prado
Introduction
Ideas about the relationship between law and development play prominent roles in contem-
porary thinking about development, both among scholars and policy-makers. Social scien-
tists regularly try to unpack the mechanisms through which various aspects of law influence
individual behavior and promote desirable forms of social change. Meanwhile, development
practitioners have invested massively in legal reforms—sometimes known as “rule of law
reforms”—designed to promote development (Carothers 1998).
In this chapter we will only sketch the field in the broadest of strokes, restricting our atten-
tion to ideas that pertain to the post-colonial era. In most cases it seems safe to presume that
the end of colonialism marked a significant shift in the nature of the legal system and its role
in society.
We begin by offering a working definition of the concept of law. We then survey efforts to
understand the relationship between law and post-colonial development in the twentieth
century. This vast intellectual terrain encompasses many theoretical approaches, but we
focus only on: the enduring influence of the work of Max Weber; the law and development
movement that flourished in the United States in the 1960s; the voluminous scholarship
inspired by the new institutional economics (NIE); the varieties of capitalism project; the
human rights movement; and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). We
show that these approaches originated in very different intellectual communities and employ
different conceptions of development and of law.
In the following section we describe conceptual limitations associated with these divergent
ways of thinking about the relationship between law and development. We focus on four
dichotomies: legal versus non-legal, domestic versus international law, common law versus
civil law, and public versus private law. We then outline three sets of twenty-first-century ideas
that point toward ways of overcoming some of these conceptual limitations. We conclude by
indicating possible directions for future research.
law, regulation, and development 205
The Concept of Law
Studies of relationships between law and development use varying definitions of the term law.1
In this chapter, we define a legal system (i.e. a system of laws) as a system of norms—proposi-
tions that purport to guide action—administered, or at least endorsed, by state officials in a
particular society. A legal system will include norms that guide the behavior of both state offi-
cials and other actors. For example, property law will include both the norms that regulate the
use of parcels of land and the norms that regulate the selection of people to adjudicate property
disputes.2 Within a legal system, we use the term “legal institution” to refer both to legal norms
and to the organizations—which are themselves constituted by legal and non-legal norms—
that administer them. Functioning legal institutions are products of the interaction of official
legal norms (the law on the books), the legal officials who administer them, and the environ-
ment in which they operate (Kornhauser 2004). For example, understanding Peruvian prop-
erty law as part of a functioning legal system requires acknowledging that in some parts of the
country the law on the books indicates that land is owned by the State, yet some state officials
refrain from evicting squatters if they appear in sufficient numbers (De Soto 1989).
Important Intellectual Currents
Claims about relationships between law and development can differ significantly in terms of
their conceptions of development, the types of law that are most relevant to development, and
the causal connections between these two variables. In this section we survey sets of ideas that
have been especially influential since the beginning of the twenty-first century, outlining how
they vary along these dimensions. Most of the ideas presented in this section were initially
developed in the global North, based on experiences of Northern countries.
Max Weber
The shadow of Max Weber looms large in most contemporary thinking about the relation-
ship between law and development. Weber was not concerned with explaining the relation-
ship between law and development per se. Instead he was preoccupied with capitalist
economic development.
Weber’s view was that capitalism required a “formal” and “rational” legal system that
allowed disputes to be resolved based on systematized, previously established rules. Such a
legal system allows private actors to engage in trade and investment free from constraints
imposed by traditional rulers and with predictable consequences. Weber also asserted that a
hierarchical bureaucracy guided by instrumental values was the only realistic way of admin-
istering such a legal system in a large, complex society. Based primarily on the history of
Western European legal systems, he supported several key points by reference to Chinese,
Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Persian, and canon law.
In Weber’s theory, political, cultural, and economic factors can all interact to determine
whether any given society develops a formal rational legal system. For instance, he suggested
206 kevin e. davis and mariana mota prado
that forms of political rule that depend on tradition or charisma for legitimacy are incom-
patible with formal rationality.
There are several difficulties with interpreting Weber’s work as a theory of law and develop-
ment (Thomas 2008). First, it is not clear whether he made any claims about the necessary
conditions for capitalist development; he appears to have been more interested in explaining
historical outcomes than in deriving universal social laws. Citing the differences between
English and continental legal systems, he openly acknowledged that capitalism could flourish
under a diverse set of legal systems. Second, law plays a limited role in Weber’s theory. In fact,
his most famous contribution to social thought is the claim that adherence to a set of religion-
derived values, the Protestant ethic, was a critical factor in the initial rise of capitalism. Third,
Weber might object to equating capitalism with “development.” He would likely see the emer-
gence of capitalism and bureaucracy as causes for despair than celebration. Regardless of
Weber’s own views on the subject, however, many subsequent thinkers have identified a for-
mal rational legal system as a universally necessary condition for development.
Law and Development

Weber’s work had a particularly significant impact on the law and development movement
of the 1960s (Trubek 1972). This U.S.-based movement combined legal reform initiatives and
research projects sponsored by U.S. universities, foundations, and government agencies. The
movement assumed that legal reform plays an instrumental role in promoting development;
its initiatives focused on educating developing countries’ legal professionals as well as
reforming formal legal rules.
The law and development movement did not endure, and shortly after its inauguration it
was declared dead by two of its key figures, David Trubek and Marc Galanter. In a widely cited
paper (Trubek and Galanter 1974), they argued that the movement failed in part because of its
ethnocentric assumption that law played the same role in other countries that it was imagined
to play in the U.S. In fact, their experience showed that in many developing societies, legal
institutions—especially the kinds of elite institutions that received the most attention from the
law and development movement—were not the most important forms of social control. Instead
of using contract law, for instance, members of an ethnic group or kinship network can effec-
tively guarantee the credibility of agreements by using social pressures to resolve disputes
(Greif 2006). They also argued that when legal institutions were effective means of social con-
trol, they were prone to capture by powerful political interests. This meant that there was no
guarantee that legal institutions could help promote the interests of less-advantaged groups.
For example, the movement’s emphasis on a modernized legal profession risked increasing the
price of legal services and making legal decision making more formalistic, thus reducing the
ability of the less-well off to access justice. Trubek and Galanter’s despairing analysis continues
to resonate among skeptics of legal reform initiatives sponsored by Western actors.
New Institutional Economics (NIE)

The recent revival of interest in law and development can be largely traced to developments in
economics. In 1993 Douglass North won the Nobel Prize for a body of work suggesting that a
great deal of the variation in economic performance, across space and time, can be explained
by variations in institutions (see generally, North 1990). Although North’s best-known work
focused on the history of the U.S. and Western Europe, the influence of the “new institutional
economics” in development economics has been profound. Rather than attributing poor eco-
nomic performance to factors such as climate, endowments of minerals or arable land, or the
genetic make-up of the population, it is now standard to search for institutional causes and
solutions. Economists’ definitions of the term “institution” typically encompass legal institu-
tions. As a consequence, a great deal of research on the relationship between law and develop-
ment is now being conducted by economists rather than legal scholars.
Most new institutional economists adopt a neo-Weberian framework. Their hypothesis is
that legal systems composed primarily of previously established norms enforced impartially
and predictably by specialized officials—attributes often referred to compendiously as “the
rule of law”—are universally conducive to economic growth (or other desirable outcomes,
such as increases in literacy rates and life expectancy). Property rights and contracts are
regarded as especially important. Protection of property rights, for instance, is argued to be
necessary to increase incentives for investment and decrease incentives for inefficient com-
petition over scarce resources. Enforcement of contracts—especially contracts that transfer
interests in property—is seen as necessary to create markets that allow goods, services, and
credit to be allocated to people who value them most highly. So, for instance, Hernando De
Soto (1989) advocates giving squatters in Peru and elsewhere formal title to land to allow
them to share in the benefits of land markets.
Although the NIE may have been inspired initially by case studies of the North, its empiri-
cal studies now often include countries in the South. Cross-country studies generally find
that “institutions matter,” consistent with the theoretical predictions. There are, however,
important caveats. China is a particularly enigmatic case, a large country with weak indica-
tors of institutional quality and high rates of economic growth. Such studies also provide
limited support for claims that legal institutions generally, much less any particular legal
institutions, are significant. This is because they rarely attempt to isolate the influence of spe-
cific institutions. Finally, cross-country studies shed little light on within-country variations
in the role of institutions, such as how institutions affect people from different classes or eth-
nic groups, or in urban as opposed to rural areas. Within-country studies that incorporate
these factors often reveal that the roles of institutions are rather context-specific. In Ghana,
for example, where property rights in rural areas are governed by customary law, country-
level indicators of the “strength of property rights” over-simplify a complex reality in which
the strength of rights varies between urban and rural areas, from village to village, with the
political power of the competing claimants to land, and depending on whether one is con-
sidering the right to use or to alienate land (Pande and Udry 2005).
When it considers why legal institutions vary over time or across societies, NIE overlaps
with the discipline of political economy. This body of literature considers a wide range of
determinants of legal development. Some scholars focus on the lingering effects of coloniza-
tion, linking the quality of contemporary institutions to the extent to which the country was
either exploited (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012) or
permitted to develop indigenous legislative bodies and jurisprudence (Daniels, Trebilcock,
and Carson 2011) while colonized. Other scholars focus on the effects of resource endow-
ments, arguing that resources that lend themselves to concentrated ownership are likely to
generate economic and political inequality, along with a set of institutions designed to per-
petuate it (Sokoloff and Engerman 2000). Still others have examined the effects of ethnic
divisions (Easterly and Levine 1997; Chua 2000). One particularly notable set of papers
focuses on “legal origins,” meaning whether the legal system in question traces its origins
back to English common law or to a variant of Roman civil law (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes,
and Shleifer 2008). Societies with origins in English common law have been found to be
superior to those with French civil law origins along a number of dimensions, including pro-
tection of property rights and enforcement of contracts.
The NIE had considerable influence upon certain development agencies. A case in point is
the World Bank’s “Doing Business” project, which champions, among other things, the elim-
ination of regulatory obstacles to enforcing various sorts of contracts and securing property
rights (World Bank 2004). More generally, the World Bank as a whole tends to view the qual-
ity of a country’s institutions as a determinant of how effectively the country will use devel-
opment assistance, and devotes considerable efforts to compiling indicators of institutional
quality (see, for example, World Bank 2010).
Varieties of Capitalism
The “varieties of capitalism” approach was developed by scholars of comparative political econ-
omy, focused primarily on developed economies (Hall and Soskice 2001). Proponents classify
countries as either “liberal market economies” (e.g. the U.S.) or “coordinated market econo-
mies” (e.g. Germany). Although the framework has been applied primarily to OECD coun-
tries, Hall and Soskice (and others) argue that it can be applied to developing countries as well.
The varieties of capitalism literature offers a sophisticated theory of institutional change,
showing how institutions co-evolve with patterns of economic activity. Hall and Soskice
(2001) argue that the two ideal types of economies represent alternative ways of coordinating
interactions among firms, employees, investors, consumers, shareholders, etc. Those inter-
actions are shaped by local institutions and end up influencing, if not determining, macr-
oeconomic policies and the overall structure of the economy. The relevant “institutions”
include both rules enshrined in the formal legal system and informal rules such as shared
expectations of appropriate behavior shaped by common experiences. A key claim is that
nations will tend to develop complementary institutions, meaning institutions that increase
the returns from one another. For instance, Hall and Soskice posit that capital markets that
are relatively insensitive to current profitability complement long-term employment,
whereas more profit-sensitive capital markets complement fluid labor markets. Accordingly,
liberal market economies have tended to combine higher levels of stock market capitaliza-
tion with lower levels of employment protection, whereas coordinated market economies
have tended toward the opposite equilibrium.
Proponents of the varieties of capitalism approach claim that both ideal types of econo-
mies can lead to satisfactory long-run economic performance, as evidenced by the roughly
comparable performance of the U.S. and Germany. They do, however, suggest that differ-
ences in institutional structures lead to systematic differences in distribution of income and
employment. Institutions also determine firms’ capacity for engaging in specific types of
activities, including radical (as opposed to incremental) innovation.
This approach shares with the NIE the assumption that institutions determine economic
outcomes. A distinctive feature is the emphasis on institutional interdependencies, that is,
the idea that both the structure and performance of any set of legal institutions might be
shaped by the broader institutional context in which they operate. This implies that it is
impossible to foresee the consequences of adopting particular institutions, or whether those
institutions are optimal in any sense, without accounting for institutional interdependencies.
Human Rights and the Rule of Law

While the NIE and varieties of capitalism approaches are primarily concerned with laws
governing the conduct of private (i.e. non-state) actors, other approaches focus on laws that
regulate state action. The most prominent of these approaches connect development with
respect for human rights and the rule of law, either directly or indirectly, and focus on legal
mechanisms for achieving those objectives. In some cases, legal systems that manifest respect
for human rights or the rule of law are viewed not just as means to promote economic or
political development but also as ends in themselves. This non-instrumental understanding
of the role of law represents a significant departure from other approaches to law and
development.
The human rights movement originated in the work of activists seeking to rectify injus-
tices perpetrated or condoned by states or state-sponsored international organizations, in
both developed and developing countries. Activists have used human rights discourse to
challenge state actors on issues ranging from the provision of anti-HIV drugs in South
Africa, to the displacement of indigenous peoples in the course of constructing the Sardar
Sarovar dam in India (Hurwitz, Satterthwaite, and Ford 2009), to the detention, torture, and
murder of dissidents in Argentina (Sikkink 2011). Since the 1990s the idea that development
includes respect for human rights has become increasingly accepted among mainstream
development agencies (Uvin 2007). This idea is succinctly captured in Amartya Sen’s (1999)
influential concept of “development as freedom.”
The human rights approach argues that states have an obligation to “protect, respect, and
promote” a set of universal and inalienable rights, for both instrumental and symbolic rea-
sons. There is, however, significant disagreement about how to define the rights that qualify
as human rights, especially when it comes to social and economic rights. For instance, some
instruments refer to the concept of a “right to development,” defined as a right to a process of
development that will result in the realization of all human rights and freedoms. While some
proponents of the right to development interpret this as a collective right of a state, some
scholars have argued that such collective rights depend on the existence of individual rights
to development (Abi-Saab 1975). At stake in this debate is whether states can defend projects
that promote national economic development at the expense of certain individuals or com-
munities—a dam might be a case in point—in the name of the human right to development.
Under rights-based approaches, more than in any other theoretical framework, legal insti-
tutions play a key role in defining desired development outcomes. Human rights are typi-
cally set out in treaties or constitutions and defined by courts, both domestic and
international, in the course of litigation. The resulting concentration of power in lawyers and
courts may be in tension with democratic principles (Waldron 2006), although, as Sen (1999)
points out, this is less of a concern if the rights that merit legal protection are determined
through democratic processes. There are also reasons to doubt whether courts or other
human rights bodies are competent to resolve effectively the broad range of public policy
issues that implicate social and economic rights. Take, for instance, the right to health: in
Brazil and Colombia much of the health care budget is consumed by judicially-mandated
expenditures resulting from a massive volume of individual claims. This has undermined
the ability of policy-makers and health care professionals to plan how to best use available
resources (Yamin and Gloppen 2011).
Independent of litigation, human rights discourse is believed to be an effective way of
mobilizing groups to press for social change. For example, resistance to the Sardar Sarovar
dam involved not only litigation before the Indian courts but also protest marches and sit-
ins, letters sent to the World Bank, and testimony before the U.S. Congress (Narula 2008). In
this context, unmoored from the relative precision provided by legal documents and the
adjudication of specific cases, the definitions of human rights risk becoming unhelpfully
vague, capable of being reconciled with almost any outcome (Uvin 2007).
Rights-based approaches to development are closely related to approaches that emphasize
the rule of law. The definition of rule of law is highly disputed (Tamanaha 2004; Daniels and
Trebilcock 2008). Some adopt a thick conception that includes not only fundamental human
rights, but also all the guarantees that need to be in place for such human rights to be pro-
tected. Thus, rule of law would include independent judiciaries, non-corrupt bureaucracies,
and functional legislatures. In contrast, others have resisted the thick conception as it equates
rule of law with a particular (as opposed to universal) concept of justice. Instead, they pro-
pose a thin conception of the rule of law based on procedural rights that guarantee due proc-
ess, but nothing beyond that. Regardless of how it is defined, promotion of the rule of law can
be justified as either an end in itself or, as we have already seen with NIE scholars, as a means
to achieve other development objectives (Trubek and Santos 2008).
Many development interventions are explicitly designed to promote either human rights
or the rule of law. Unfortunately, the results to date have been disappointing (Jensen and
Heller 2003; Carothers 2006).
Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)

TWAIL is a movement that seeks a more equitable international legal regime. The first gen-
eration of TWAIL scholars claimed that the post-colonial international economic order was
characterized by systemic exploitation of Third World countries by Western nations and that
international law implicitly condoned this exploitative relationship under the guise of neu-
trality. The movement proposed institutional reforms to better attune international organi-
zations to the interests of developing countries and to reflect their numerical superiority,
such as majority rule in votes of international organizations (Bedjaoui 1979).
Since the 1990s, a second generation of TWAIL scholars has analyzed not only formal gov-
ernance structures in international law but also the relationships of power that determine
how such structures operate. In addition to being more interdisciplinary than the first gen-
eration, the second generation is more skeptical about the liberating potential for interna-
tional law.
TWAIL supporters have acknowledged the limitations of the movement, lamenting that:
it has made no impression on international law scholarship; it is mostly produced by schol-
ars located in the First World; and the second TWAIL generation has failed to present more
detailed proposals for reforms (Chimni 2011). Nevertheless, TWAIL’s focus on international
power dynamics offers a useful perspective on contemporary features of the international
legal order. One example is the argument that the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), signed in the Uruguay
Round of multilateral negotiations (from 1986 to 1993), has benefited developed countries—
which tend to produce patentable products such as pharmaceuticals—at the expense of the
developing countries.
Concepts versus Reality
Many of the approaches described above are based upon conceptual distinctions that are in
tension with reality. Most of them are premised upon at least four dichotomies: law versus
not law, public versus private law, common law versus civil law, and domestic versus interna-
tional law. These distinctions demarcate fields of scholarly inquiry and professional compe-
tence, and may thereby perform important organizational functions for legal scholars and
practitioners. However, for reasons we discuss below, they are of limited value in social-
scientific efforts to assess causal connections between law and development.
Legal and Non-legal

According to Trubek and Galanter (1974), the first law and development movement was
premised on the assumption that it was possible to reform the legal features of a society with-
out taking significant account of or changing its non-legal attributes. However, in many
developing societies state and non-state norms interact in a variety of complex ways. For
example, in post-colonial societies the colonial legal system may co-exist with customary
pre-colonial norms and institutional structures. Those customary norms can attract varying
degrees of enforcement by the state. Similarly, in virtually all societies certain industries tend
to create their own systems of norms and dispute resolution mechanisms, only some of
which are backed by the possibility of state enforcement (Moore 1973; Merry 1988).
This suggests that lawyers and legal scholars must take into account interactions between
legal and non-legal norms. For example, guaranteeing women’s property rights is regarded
as a strategy to increase economic efficiency, improve the family’s well-being, and empower
women. However, reforms designed to guarantee the benefits of private property to women
may generate tensions if customary systems and land management structures are not com-
patible with gender equality (Agarwal 1994).
The complex and sometimes unpredictable ways in which legal and non-legal norms
interact limits the potential for legal reforms to achieve development goals, leading some
scholars to question the entire law and development enterprise. In the context of gender
equality, for instance, recent empirical research shows that positive rule of law indices do
not correlate with the status of women in society. The correlation does exist in high-
income countries, but disappears in poor countries (Pistor, Haldar, and Amirapu 2009).
This suggests that the status of women in society is determined primarily by social norms,
which are only weakly affected by formal institutions in developing countries. Alterna-
tively, one may argue that state and non-state norms interact in such complex ways that it
is impossible to isolate the influence of either set of norms upon human behavior.
In either case, there is no value in analyzing state law in isolation from other normative
orders3 or promoting legal reforms independently of broader social change.
Public and Private Law

The distinction between public and private law is at the heart of many debates on law and
development. Public law is focused on regulation of state action, while private law is con-
cerned with the conduct of private (i.e. non-state) actors. Public law comes to the forefront
when development is defined as a set of fundamental human rights that need to be guaranteed
through constitutional provisions (Nussbaum 2011). In contrast, when new institutional
economists emphasize the importance of contracts and property rights to promote economic
development, they are focusing on private law as an engine of development.
Many developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have had or still have a
Developmental State (Evans 1995; Trubek 2005). The law that regulates the activities of
such a state has both public and private aspects. For instance, many developing coun-
tries have state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that can operate as private companies in the
market. In addition to (or instead of) profit, SOEs may pursue social and political goals
defined by their controlling shareholder, the government. While the legally defined gov-
ernance structures of these SOEs may formally resemble those of purely private compa-
nies, they will obviously have different ramifications, and will, or ought to be,
constructed accordingly (Ghai 1977). A similar blurring of the line between public and
private occurs in national development banks. Banking transactions are generally gov-
erned by private law but many of these banks are used to pursue industrial policy
through investments in sectors that the government considers strategic.
The public/private distinction is also challenged by proponents of the varieties of capital-
ism approach (Hall and Soskice 2001). They try to discredit the idea that governments are
able to design and implement institutional reforms without input or assistance from the pri-
vate sector.
Common Law and Civil Law

The distinction between common law and civil law jurisdictions has long been central to
comparative law scholarship, as has a particular set of sub-distinctions among civilian juris-
dictions based on European history. These distinctions have been reified in the develop-
ment context by the Legal Origins theory (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer 2008),
which casts doubt on the merits of legal institutions that come from the benighted French
civil law family.
These distinctions assume that most countries can be identified with a unique legal origin
and that there are fundamental differences between legal systems with different legal origins.
In many instances, however, these claims are demonstrably false. In Latin America, for
example, many countries combine European-inspired civil codes, with constitutions based
on the U.S. constitution, and corporate and commercial statutes based on a mixture of com-
mon law and civil law sources (Dam 2006).
Domestic and International Law

Most studies of law and development focus on how domestic laws affect local social and
economic outcomes. This is often distinguished from the work of international lawyers who
examine the effects on developing countries of bodies of public international law, such as the
law of the World Trade Organization or the International Monetary Fund, investment
treaties, or the international human rights regime.
The reality in many developing countries, however—especially small countries with
very open economies—is that social and economic outcomes are influenced by legal
norms that cannot be classified straightforwardly as either domestic or international.
For instance, domestic laws of large foreign states can exert extra-national influences
in these countries. For example, U.S. laws concerning immigration, narcotics control,
and firearms have dramatic effects on patterns of migration and criminality through-
out Latin America and the Caribbean. Similarly, when the U.S. sanctions firms for
paying bribes to foreign public officials, it increases the risk of investing in corrupt
countries.
The domestic/international dichotomy also fails to account for norms promulgated
by intergovernmental organizations or private standard-setting agencies that do not
qualify as binding international law. For example, the World Bank promulgates inter-
nal policies setting out social and environmental standards to be met by the projects it
supports. Those standards are adopted voluntarily by many private project finance
banks under the auspices of the Equator Principles. Given the volume of foreign
investment that is bound by the World Bank standards, they effectively serve as an
externally imposed code of social and environmental regulation for developing
countries.
Emerging Approaches
Most of the theoretical approaches we have discussed in the previous section were developed
in the global North to explain relationships between law and development in Northern soci-
eties. This is potentially troubling because experience has demonstrated that empirical and
normative assumptions that underpin those theories are not necessarily valid in other con-
texts (and in some cases they are not valid in the North either!). As a consequence, concep-
tual frameworks based on those assumptions may be less helpful than expected in the global
South.
Emerging theoretical frameworks are more mindful of these limitations and have paid
more attention to the experiences of developing countries. The most interesting of these the-
ories are open to potential interactions between institutions that span traditional conceptual
categories, for example legal and non-legal, public and private law, common and civil law,
domestic and international law. They also show increasing acceptance of the idea that both
legal systems and the societies in which they operate are complex and constantly evolving,
and so the relationships between law and development are likely to be variable and context-
specific.
Global Administrative Law (GAL)

The concept of GAL (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart 2005) overcomes many of the concep-
tual limitations identified above. Its proponents are concerned with exploring a “global
administrative space” in which a variety of actors engage in regulatory activities whose
effects transcend national borders. Those actors include:
…transnational private regulators, hybrid bodies such as public-private partnerships involv-
ing states or inter-state organizations, national public regulators whose actions have external
effects but may not be controlled by the central executive authority, informal inter-state bod-
ies with no treaty basis (including “coalitions of the willing”), and formal interstate institu-
tions (such as those of the United Nations) affecting third parties…(Kingsbury 2009a: 25)
This definition of the global administrative space unambiguously rejects sharp distinctions
between domestic and international law. Moreover, although GAL purports to focus on
“law,” it does not insist on a narrow state-based concept of law.4 Also significant is that the
project includes many case studies of the effects of GAL in developing countries (see, e.g.,
Kingsbury 2009b). The Regulatory State of the South Project (Dubash and Morgan 2012)
which seeks to explain how internationally harmonious policy prescriptions for the creation
of Independent Regulatory Agencies generated multiple variations in institutional design,
political dynamics and social and economic outcomes in developing countries.
On the other hand, GAL does not and cannot offer an overarching framework for analyz-
ing the relationship between law and development because it is limited to legal institutions
with significant transnational dimensions. In addition, much of the project is focused on the
norms that govern global administrative actors, which excludes purely domestic legal insti-
tutions and many areas of private law. For example, global administrative lawyers might be
interested in whether and how the World Bank’s views on topics ranging from environmen-
tal protection to insolvency law effectively regulate activity in developing countries. How-
ever, purely domestic efforts to regulate in those fields are beyond the scope of the project.
Moreover, GAL is more interested in the institutions that hold the World Bank accountable
for its actions than in the effects of those actions on development outcomes.
Adaptability Theories
Some contemporary scholars focus on processes through which interdependent institutions
adapt to changing circumstances. Drawing on the literature on varieties of capitalism, Mil-
haupt and Pistor (2008) argue that understanding how legal systems adapt to change is more
important than a static analysis of the law. They conclude that the demand for law depends
on affected constituencies’ ability to participate in lawmaking and law enforcement. Their
analysis is based primarily upon case studies of legal responses to corporate governance cri-
ses in six developed and middle-income countries, and mainly involves tracing different
methods of legal adaptation.
Similarly, in recent work Douglass North and his collaborators argue that institutional
change is a path-dependent process. Institutions, like technological development, can be
locked in a suboptimal equilibrium that is hard to change. Obstacles to change include
institutional interdependences and culture (North 2005). North, Wallis, and Weingast
(2009) examine the emergence of regimes that allow open access to political and economic
benefits and tend to foster economic and political development. They conclude that the
pre-conditions to the emergence of such open access regimes include: (i) rule of law for
elites; (ii) the creation of perpetually lived organizations; and (iii) consolidated control over
violence and the military. In their absence, attempts to promote the rule of law by trans-
planting legal institutions associated with markets and elections have failed (Weingast
2010). For instance, political leaders ranging from Carlos Menem of Argentina to Indira
Gandhi of India have undermined the potentially salutary effects of elections by compro-
mising judicial independence and thereby avoiding the rule of law.
On the one hand, focusing on processes of adaptation represents a promising reorienta-
tion of the field of law and development. This approach is sensitive to the complexity of inter-
actions between legal systems and societies and points away from the idea that institutional
designs are or should be static. On the other hand, these approaches threaten to dampen
dialogue between academics and policy-makers by suggesting that such processes are too
complex to permit intentional manipulation. This would cast a long shadow upon an aspira-
tion that has characterized law and development scholarship since its inception, namely, of
providing guidance for action.
Experimentalism
Most of the approaches discussed so far are based upon firmly held beliefs about causal
relationships between legal institutions and development outcomes. In contrast, experimen-
talists start from the premise that we know very little about such relationships, and they value
using experiments to untangle them. Rather than a theory of law and development, experi-
mentalism promises a theory about a process for generating theories of law and develop-
ment. So far, however, there have been few explicit efforts to experiment with legal
institutions in developing countries.
Political theorist Charles Sabel (2007) justifies experimentalism in the governance of
developing countries by pointing to evidence that the performance of institutions varies
according to the context. Even in countries with national-level institutions that are viewed as
dysfunctional, there are clusters of industries and some government branches that operate as
effectively and efficiently as their counterparts in the developed West. He argues, therefore,
that reformers should focus on what is already working in the specific context and attempt to
improve upon it.
For this, Sabel strongly favors a method inspired by the Toyota Production System. This
method involves ongoing monitoring of institutional performance, benchmarking against
peers, and deliberation about both the goals to be achieved and means of achieving them, all
in a non-hierarchical fashion with open participation.
In development economics, experimentalism is associated with another process: rand-
omized controlled trials (Banerjee and Duflo 2011). In such trials, subjects are randomly
assigned to either a group that is subjected to the intervention, the “treatment group,” or a
group that has not been subjected to the intervention, the “control group.” Different out-
comes between the treatment group and the control group are presumed to be caused by
the intervention.
One of the few examples of a randomized controlled trial of a legal intervention involved
police reform in the state of Rajasthan, India (Banerjee et al. 2012). The experiment consisted
of four different interventions to improve police performance and public perception of the
police. While some randomly selected police stations were subjected to one type of interven-
tion, others remained as the control group. The experiment showed that two mechanisms—
training and freezes on transfers of police staff—improved performance and perceptions of
the police. In contrast, the other two—placing community observers in police stations and
weekly duty rotations—showed no results. Scholars suggested that failed implementation
may explain the different result, as the latter depended on sustained cooperation of commu-
nities or local authorities, whereas the former did not.
Practical, legal, and ethical problems limit the scope for experimenting with legal
norms, especially those that apply directly to individuals. Advocates for randomized con-
trolled trials to evaluate legal reforms in developed countries argue that these problems
are not insurmountable (Abramowicz, Ayres, and Listokin 2011). They do not, however,
confront the potential challenges associated with running such experiments in developing
countries. Where is a government to find people with the expertise and integrity to design,
conduct, and interpret the results of these kinds of experiments in good faith? Do they
have legal authority to apply legal norms selectively? Is it ethical to experiment with the
welfare of people on the brink of subsistence? Without answers to these questions it is hard
to determine the extent to which experimentalism will help the field of law and develop-
ment move forward.
Conclusion: The Search for Meta-principles
For most of the post-war era, dominant approaches in law and development have involved
claims about how specific legal mechanisms invariably produce desirable development out-
comes. Emerging approaches take better account of the complexity and dynamism of rela-
tionships between law and development, especially as they are manifested in the Global
South. They acknowledge that legal systems are composed of many interdependent parts
that interact in complex ways across artificial divides between public or private, domestic or
international, common law or civil law, or legal or non-legal norms, in an endless process of
adaptation. Unfortunately, approaches that acknowledge these complexities struggle to
identify empirical regularities in the relationship between specific legal institutions and
development outcomes. Often the particularities of legal systems in developing countries are
fleshed out through careful case studies, which then resist generalizations. In contrast, regu-
larities in processes of institutional change may be generalizable. This may explain why an
intellectual quest for general principles of law and development has evolved into a search for
meta-principles.
So far no single approach offers a well-developed set of overarching concepts and causal
claims that can satisfactorily account for the varying relationships between law and develop-
ment in the Global South. And even if such a theoretical framework does emerge, translating
its insights into practice is likely to present a challenge. In the absence of overarching theo-
retical frameworks we expect the practice of law and development to remain focused on
analyses of the impact of legal reform in specific contexts. The most important scholarly
research is likely to be concerned with the methodologies for conducting such analyses.
Notes
1. Here we ignore definitions used in studies conducted for other purposes, such as philo-
sophical inquiries into whether people have a duty to obey the law or whether judges
have a duty to decide cases in accordance with the law.
2. This distinction corresponds to the legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart’s famous distinction
between primary rules and secondary rules (Hart 1994).
3. Some “legal pluralists” would define the concept of law to include any norms that indi-
viduals treat as guides to behavior, regardless of whether those norms are recognized by
state officials (Griffiths 1986). They view state law as just one of several kinds of legal
orders, which might be embedded simultaneously in any given social setting (Griffiths
1986; Merry 1988). By contrast, others argue that in trying to capture the multitude of
normative orders that influence social behavior the concept of “legal pluralism” is
deprived of any analytical force. Indeed, one of its early proponents later argued that the
concept of “legal pluralism” was a mistake and should be replaced with a concept such as
“normative order” or “mode of social control” (Griffiths 2005: 63–4).
4. Kingsbury (2009a) suggests that norms administered by extra-national actors qualify as
global administrative law so long as they generate a sense of obligation among their
subjects and there is agreement among the relevant officials that the norms come from a
source capable of generating legal rules.
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chapter 13
rooti ng ch a nge:
i n digen eit y a n d
dev el opm en t
maivân clech lâm
Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono

(The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness)1
Introduction
In their review of the history of development thought and practice at the United Nations,
Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, Dharam Ghai, and Frédéric Lapeyre link the approaches that
marked successive phases of that history to their corresponding contexts as constituted by,
first, the positions that dominant states du jour asserted on the subject and, second, the per-
spectives that influential civil society agents brought to the development table.2 Thus, even as
the ideological antagonism between East and West broadly split the world into opposing
camps at the end of the Second World War, the international reconstruction and develop-
ment activities undertaken in the 1940s and 1950s in the devastated heartland of Europe and
the ravaged territories of the South proceeded smoothly enough because both public and
private development actors of the period, East and West, generally subscribed to this cardi-
nal article of faith on the subject: development = industrialization = progress. Debates of the
time thus focused not on normative questions regarding the ultimate purpose of develop-
ment, but on technical issues having to do with, for example, what constitutes its better
engine: the public or private sector; or, what would accelerate it quickest: the importation of
manufactured goods, or the local production of their substitutes? Moreover, the question of
agency, that is, who should author development projects, was all but overlooked, as the
assumed answer was: the experts, of course.
Today, however, half a century later, a far broader set of state and non-state actors are
seized by the development syndrome—whether as agent, apologist, critic, beneficiary, or
222 maivân clech lâm
victim—significantly complicating the subject on all fronts: theory and practice, yes, but also
normativity and agency. This chapter narrates the young but already significant imprint
made in the development domain by a major stakeholder in its trajectory: the 370 + million
persons in the world, comprising about 5,000 ethno-linguistic entities distributed through
some ninety countries and all geographical regions, who are now broadly recognized as con-
stituting its indigenous peoples.3 As such, they figure among those shrinking human com-
munities that are not yet irreversibly wrenched from their native spaces, that is, not yet fully
“de-indigenized” by development or other circumstances. An influential 1987 UN study
describes indigenous peoples as follows:
Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity
with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider
themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or
parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to
preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their eth-
nic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own
cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems.4
While reliable demographic data for indigenous peoples are singularly difficult to obtain for
technical reasons like inaccessibility, as well as political ones like non-recognition in some
states, a rough estimate based on figures supplied by the UN and other parties close to the
subject provides the following profile of their geographical distribution: 259 million in Asia;
50 million in Africa; 45 million in Latin America; 5 million in North America; 1.25 million in
Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand; and the remaining 9.75 million in Europe, the Middle
East, and the Pacific Islands.5
The UN took stock of the circumstances of indigenous peoples in its 2009 State of the
World’s Indigenous Peoples.6 While the report describes conditions that vary significantly
from region to region, and indeed within regions, direct and indirect evidence of the con-
cerned peoples’ losses to the ever-advancing global economy abounds throughout. In Africa,
for example, governments had, as early as the 1980s, signed with private corporations and/or
northern governments more than 2,600 bilateral investment agreements that, constructed
to protect foreign interests, increasingly restricted the region’s public policy choices, con-
strained its environmental safeguards, undermined labor and human rights standards, and
up-ended locally-based livelihoods.7
The 1980s also saw the emergence of a global trend to liberalize mining codes in favor of
foreign mining companies. By 2003, 105 countries concentrated primarily in Asia and Latin
America had succumbed to the trend, despite the devastating, and typically also irreversible,
impacts of mining enterprises on local communities and ecologies.
In the Arctic and Pacific regions, where scarcer or less accessible terrestrial resources draw
fewer investors, it is climate change and sea-level rise that most confound indigenous liveli-
hoods long tied to hunting, herding, and fishing. Traditional animal sources of food, stressed
beyond sustainability by climate change, commercial exploitation, and polluted habitats, no
longer meet the needs of local communities.
Finally, where indigenous peoples formerly relied on small-scale, diversified, and sustain-
able cropping systems that were paired with hunting-gathering practices in adjacent forests,
agri-business is now able to dump, worldwide, cheap monoculturally produced staples that
undermine such systems and jeopardize the peoples’ long-term food security. Add in the
rooting change: indigeneity and development 223
clear-cut logging that fells forests, and the roads and dams that economies of scale require
even as they splice or submerge indigenous territories, and it becomes abundantly clear why
indigenous peoples so often oppose development.
The present chapter addresses their attempt to turn stark opposition into difficult engage-
ment. The first section traces the emergence of the indigenous voice in international circles.
The second identifies the foundational international law principles or norms that indigenous
groups regularly advance in various fora to support the specific collective rights that they
assert, including the right to approve development projects that affect them. The third
focuses on issues of normativity and agency to which, the author believes, indigenous com-
munities want and need agents of development to pay particular heed.
Emergence of the Indigenous Voice
Prelude
The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were a prelude, albeit a highly relevant one, to indigenous peo-
ples’ own later contestation of development practice. The early post-war conviction—that
development would deliver progress and reduce poverty—that animated the first fifteen
years or so of international development activities began to falter when, at the close of the
1950s, statistics streaming into the UN and elsewhere revealed that a shocking chasm had
been rapidly growing between the gross national products (GNPs) of the North and the
South since the founding of the world organization. While these figures spelled trouble for
the South, they also unnerved the capitalist West inasmuch as the socialist East could, and
did, make political hay out of them. As the 1960s dawned, then, Washington felt compelled
to act. It did so in 1961 by calling on the UN to launch a Development Decade aimed at reduc-
ing the GNP divide between North and South by, it proposed, coupling robust trade open-
ings for the North with enticing aid packages for the South.8
As it happened, this developmental biped was launched at about the same time that a
dynamic group of Southern economists gathered around the legendary figure of Raúl Prebisch,
the then Secretary-General of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA),
who was disseminating a trenchant critique of North—South, or rather centre–periphery, eco-
nomic relations that, among other things, depicted the Northern-hawked aid-and-trade pack-
age as yet another permutation of the dependency-inducing and poverty-sustaining structure
of those relations.9 This “dependency” critique so captivated the imagination of political and
intellectual circles in Third World countries in the ensuing decade that, as the 1970s dawned,
their governments joined forces in the General Assembly to issue a historic call for the UN to
establish a New International Economic Order (NIEO) dedicated to nothing less than the rec-
tification of the unjust economy of horizontal inequality that colonialism had riveted in place
over much of global space in the course of its virtual 500-year run.10 Vertical inequality, not as
extreme then as it is today, did not as such particularly figure on the NIEO agenda.
Western states, seeing in the NIEO a wrecking ball aimed not only at the economic legacy
of colonialism but potentially also at the neo-liberal edifice they had been assembling since
Bretton Woods to preserve their economic dominance in the South even as the latter transited
to political independence, moved quickly to abort the proposed order by counter-advancing

its very antithesis which, in time, came to be known as the Washington Consensus (WC). At
bottom, the WC imposed on an already aid-dependent South this formula for continuing to
receive aid: (i) participate in the free trade regime (which covers manufactured goods and,
increasingly, financial services, where the advantage lies with the North, but which largely
excludes agriculture, where the advantage might lie with the South); and (ii) undertake inter-
nal structural adjustments, that is, privatize. In an uncannily short period of time, the “tech-
nocratic” elites in the South, who by the 1980s had all but replaced the “ideological” first
generation of post-independence leaders, signed on to these neo-liberal prescriptions which
then all but sealed their orthodoxy in development circles through the remainder of the
twentieth century. Some ten years now into the new century, the social and ecological costs
of the neo-liberal regime are piling high, especially in the South, even as the regime’s hitherto
vaunted financial structures are also breeding havoc in the North.11
Interestingly, while the horizontal disparity spawned by colonialism was incorporated
into neo-liberalism, it is in fact vertical inequality that has become the new regime’s signa-
ture by-product. For many, however—and indigenous peoples figure disproportionately
among them—global neo-liberalism signals much more than inequality: it unleashes, as
anthropologists have amply recorded, the ravage of their communities.12 There matters might
have remained but for the efflorescence, beginning also in the 1970s, of rebellious ideas and
actions incubated in the world’s many civil societies that, unlike governments, see the shat-
tering of communities and locales up close.
Outraged at the devastation wrought by the world’s headlong rush to industrial and com-
mercial formations that the privileged few were seen as imposing on the vulnerable many, these
non-state actors, newly connected transnationally by the proletarianization of information
technology, spontaneously sprung up in “blessed unrest.”13 Unfamiliar, unpredictable, and un-
confinable, they metamorphosed into a force that neither states nor the global neo-liberal
establishment knew quite how to contain or engage.14 Improvising, these have been offering
responses ranging from confrontation through negotiation to co-optation. In this context, the
world conferences convened since the early 1970s to address issues raised by transnational civil
society may be seen as sites of negotiation writ large, the 1972 Stockholm World Conference on
the Human Environment qualifying perhaps as the event that launched the genre. Many others
followed: Copenhagen, Cairo, Mexico City, Nairobi, Vienna, Rio, Beijing, Seattle, Johannes-
burg, Durban, and so on. At some, as in Seattle, physical confrontation broke out; at most oth-
ers, state and non-state actors willy nilly interfaced, argued, debated, learned, unlearned,
co-opted, became co-opted, revised norms, re-tooled ideas, and modified practices. Betwixt
and between this ferment, the international indigenous movement was born, and is now grow-
ing up to centrally challenge neo-liberalism’s development orthodoxy.
Engagement (1971–2011)15
For indigenous peoples, the engendering transnational civil society event was, arguably, the
1971 conference organized in Barbados by the World Council of Churches’ (WCC) Program
to Combat Racism, which focused on the subject of ethnic strife in Latin America. Confer-
ence attendees, many of whom were anthropologists, drafted a Declaration of Barbados that
condemned what it termed the internal and external colonialism remaining in the region
which, it continued, could only be eliminated with the purposeful re-configuration of Latin
American states into multi-ethnic entities.
It so happened that the WCC was, and remains, a long-standing and influential member
of the dense community of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that Geneva harbors
alongside the several UN human rights bodies also sited there. Not surprisingly, then, in the
same year that the Barbados Declaration was issued, one such UN body, the Sub-Commis-
sion on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, successfully urged its
parent Commission on Human Rights to authorize a comprehensive study of the discrimi-
nation that indigenous peoples experience. The task was assigned to the Ecuadorean diplo-
mat José R. Martínez Cobo, who, expertly assisted by the Panamanian anthropologist César
A. Willemsen-Díaz, went on to produce a landmark study on the subject which contains the
now classic description of indigenous peoples quoted earlier.16
The WCC followed up its first Barbados conference with a second one in 1977 where indig-
enous representatives explicitly denounced the development projects that violated their
spaces and the assimilationist policies that states used to justify the violation. Later that year,
the first ever pan-NGO Conference on the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas also met, in
Geneva, with UN support. It issued a Declaration asking that indigenous peoples be recog-
nized as nations and subjects of international law. While the following year’s UN World Con-
ference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination did not comply with this call, it did
recognize the rights of indigenous peoples to, inter alia: (i) name themselves and express
their cultures; (ii) receive an official status; and (iii) maintain their traditional economies.
The General Assembly (GA) endorsed these principles later that year. Finally, in 1982, at the
sustained urging of civil society and also because early installments of the Cobo study sug-
gested as much, the GA requested the Commission on Human Rights to assemble a Working
Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP) to do two things: monitor and report on the situ-
ation of indigenous populations, and recommend standards for state/indigenous relations.
Coincidentally, another UN entity, the International Labour Office (ILO), was already at
work crafting a related set of standards to be encoded in an instrument designed to super-
sede the only treaty then extant on the subject of indigenous peoples: the ILO’s own 1957
Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (107).17 The successor Indigenous and Tribal Peo-
ples Convention (169), adopted in 1989, recites this reason for its genesis: 18
The General Conference of the International Labour Organization . . .
Considering that the developments which have taken place in international law since 1957, as
well as developments in the situation of indigenous and tribal peoples in all regions of the
world, have made it appropriate to adopt new international standards on the subject with a
view to removing the assimilationist orientation of the earlier standards, and
Recognizing the aspirations of these peoples to exercise control over their own institutions,
ways of life and economic development and to maintain and develop their identities, lan-
guages and religion, within the framework of the states in which they live . . . adopts . . .
The clear anti-assimilationist stance laid out above went on to also undergird the work of the
WGIP. A measure of rivalry ensued at this time between the ILO and the WGIP as to which
would produce the earlier and more impactful imprint in the field.19 As it turned out, the
more cumbersome tripartite ILO completed and adopted its new treaty in 1989. The WGIP,
composed of only five experts, took until 1994 to complete its admittedly more complex
Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The latter then languished in a states-
composed committee of the Human Rights Council for another decade before being finally
adopted by the GA in 2007 as the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
The GA, in the interim, has not stood still. Between 1982, when it called for the establish-
ment of the WGIP, and the present, the GA has undertaken, at the prompting of a host of
indigenous and non-indigenous groups and individuals (none more dedicated and resource-
ful than Greece’s Erica-Irene Daes, the long-time chair of the WGIP), an unprecedented
number of initiatives to assist indigenous peoples in their quest for empowerment at the
international level. These include: the 1985 establishment of a UN Voluntary Fund to support
indigenous participation in UN fora; the designation of 1993 as the International Year of the
World’s Indigenous People; the proclamation of 1995–2004 and again 2005–14 as the first
and second International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People; the 2000 creation of the
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII); and, most important, the 2007 adoption of
UNDRIP. More recently, the GA voted to convene a World Conference on Indigenous Peo-
ples (WCIP) for the year 2014.
Taking its cue from the GA’s adoption of UNDRIP, the Human Rights Council dismantled
the WGIP and replaced it with an Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
charged with studying, and advising the Council on, issues arising under UNDRIP. A Special
Rapporteur on the broader subject of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indi
genous peoples has been reporting to the Council since 2001. In the meantime the ILO,
armed now with two binding Conventions on the rights of indigenous peoples, enforces
their respective provisions vis-à-vis signatory countries, most of which are located in Latin
America. Reviewing these initiatives, a UN study concludes: “Along with the movements for
decolonization and human rights, as well as the women’s and environmental movements,
the indigenous movement has been one of the most active civil society interlocutors of the
United Nations since 1945.”20
Foundational Principles
UNDRIP provides an invaluable set of normative tools, or “weapons of the weak,” for indig-
enous peoples’ activism.21 A handful of key principles underpin its forty-six articles. Because
these norms figure in a non-binding Declaration rather than a binding Convention, their
potency derives less from their normative compulsion than from the high visibility (read
political capital) that the indigenous campaign has attracted worldwide in the last thirty
years. Key to that visibility was the participatory process that indigenous peoples managed
to extract from the ILO, UN human rights institutions, and UN headquarters. That ground-
breaking process is reviewed here as it bears directly on the issue of their agency, which per-
meates UNDRIP.
At the drafting of ILO Convention 169, which centrally concerned indigenous peoples,
their representatives found themselves in the anomalous position of being highly visible yet
conspicuously silent inasmuch as the president of the proceedings accepted interventions
only from the ILO’s own state, employer, and union constituents. Nevertheless, a strange
thing happened on the way to ILO 169. To begin with, unionists there clearly sympathized
with and openly sought out the indigenous observer contingent which, for its part, zealously
distributed position papers to the ILO members assembled. More creatively still, several
unions had simply absorbed indigenous activists into their ranks even before setting out for
Geneva, giving them free rein once they got there to voice indigenous, as opposed to strictly
syndicalist, perspectives. The new Convention, then, which the employer bloc largely
opposed, came into being because an “indigenized” worker bloc voted for it in concert with
enough states that were willing to jettison the old Convention’s assimilationist stance.
While indigenous activists had to borrow the identity of workers in the ILO, the WGIP
made it clear early on that it would advance, in its work, a genuine if still inchoate concept
of state/indigenous partnership that it would moreover model with a path-breaking proc-
ess for its own sessions. Thus, the WGIP dropped the usual UN credentialing requirement
for non-state participants and, amazingly, allowed virtually any would-be participant to
register, attend sessions, and offer testimony. In consequence, it regularly drew, during the
time that it elaborated the Draft Declaration, contingents of 500 or more indigenous
attendees to each of its annual sessions in Geneva. In turn, those contingents succeeded
beyond all expectation in powerfully, even transformatively, educating the experts
involved on the nature of the indigenous world and its needs. In contrast, one-tenth that
number of states’ delegates showed up at earlier WGIP sessions where, moreover, most
remained silent until the last years of the drafting process, when the genie of a daringly
imaginative state/indigenous partnership was already out of the bottle and, indeed, inflect-
ing UN practice.
In truth, no international forum has since matched the WGIP’s elevation of the indige-
nous voice, with the possible exception of the UN’s PFII which, perforce, was created to
project that voice. At the same time, few international fora since have been able to wholly
withstand indigenous peoples’ consistent demand that they honor the process launched in
the WGIP.
Turning now to the explicitly normative, as opposed to processual, gains that indigenous
peoples secured at the UN, these, by and large, are recorded in UNDRIP, an instrument that,
by its own terms, sets out “the minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of
the indigenous peoples of the world.”22 The analysis of the document offered here reviews not
the many rule-like provisions contained in UNDRIP, but the foundational principles that
animate them. Two of these have been mentioned: non-assimilation and state/indigenous
partnership. Five others now follow.
Self-determination
More than anything else, indigenous peoples’ insistence that the right of self-determination
be included in UNDRIP delayed its drafting and adoption. The right vests agency in indige-
nous peoples for virtually all that touches them, thereby commensurately constraining states’
agency in the matter. The right is set out in three articles:
Article 3. Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they
freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural
development.
Article 4. Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to self-determination, have the right
to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well
as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.
Article 5. Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political,
legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining their right to participate
fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State. . . .
As can be seen, Article 3 extends to indigenous peoples, verbatim, the right of self-determi-
nation consecrated in the common Articles 1 of the two 1966 International Human Rights
Covenants. Because this same right was first memorialized in the 1960 Declaration on the
Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples and Countries which went on to underwrite
Third World peoples’ bids for independence, states in Geneva resisted extending the right to
indigenous peoples lest, they said, it foment secessionist movements on their part. In
response, indigenous participants and their civil society allies variously countered: that it
would be discriminatory to carve indigenous peoples out of the generic “peoples” attached
to the right; that in any event indigenous peoples could not technically “secede” from a state
they had not freely joined; that they in fact sought to construct a novel partnership with
enclosing states; and that, in the end, room must be made, between annihilation and separa-
tion, for the good faith practice of, and experimentation in, partnership.
Given this impasse, states in New York adopted a two-pronged strategy to resolve it. Article 3
was retained but a new Article 4 was unilaterally placed by them to suggest that the “self-
determination” status contemplated is autonomy. Textually, however, Article 4 can also be read to
illustrate, rather than limit, self-determination’s outcomes. This was in fact the case with the origi-
nal 1960 enunciation of the right, which was interpreted to authorize a range of outcomes ranging
from incorporation into a state, through free association with it, to full independence.
In any event, it is the idea of partnership, more than anything else, that most indigenous
representatives invoke today when they assert their right of self-determination. Article 5
anticipates this when it states that indigenous peoples have the right to their distinctive insti-
tutions, alongside the right to participate in those of the state “if they so choose.”
Territoriality
UNDRIP devotes six articles to the subject of lands, territories, and resources (LTR), includ-
ing waters and coastal areas. As can be appreciated, the integrity of their LTR is key to the
cultural and physical survival of indigenous peoples. At the same time, it is this very complex
that infrastructural and extractive projects habitually threaten. Here, UNDRIP’s Article 26
unambiguously privileges the indigenous party:
1. Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they
have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.
2. Indigenous peoples have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territo-
ries and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or other tradi-
tional occupation or use, as well as those which they have otherwise acquired.
3. States shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands, territories and
resources. Such recognition shall be conducted with due respect to the customs, tradi-
tions and land tenure systems of the indigenous peoples concerned.
Additionally, UNDRIP recognizes indigenous peoples’ rights to return to their traditional
LTR, and to redress when return is impossible.
While the term “territoriality” does not figure in UNDRIP, it is used here to denote the
jurisdictional or state-like powers of exclusion, and of dominion over territory, that UNDRIP
places in indigenous hands.23 The only exemption made to this scheme is for the enclosing
state’s military activities. Even here, however, these are prohibited on indigenous territories
“unless justified by a relevant public interest or otherwise freely agreed with or requested by
the indigenous peoples concerned.”24 Overall, then, the territoriality that UNDRIP con-
structs for indigenous peoples is, as a UN study observes, akin to the right of “permanent
sovereignty over natural resources” that newly independent states asserted in the last cen-
tury to preserve their resource base from the confiscatory power of overreaching foreign
capital.25
Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC)

UNDRIP is the first international instrument to formalize the right of a sub-state community
to give or withhold consent for activities affecting it that issue from outside the community.
Looked at another way, the FPIC norm operationalizes the right of self-determination.
UNDRIP’s first mention of the right to FPIC states:
Article 10. Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories.
No relocation shall take place without the free, prior, and informed consent of the indigenous
peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible,
with the option of return. . . .
The norm figures in five other articles. The first four mandate, respectively, that states: (a)
offer redress for “cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken” without FPIC;
(b) also offer redress for LTR taken without FPIC; (c) obtain the FPIC of indigenous peoples
for legislative and administrative measures that affect them; (d) likewise obtain FPIC for the
storage/disposal of hazardous materials on indigenous LTR.26 The last mention of FPIC, in
Article 32, zeroes in on the subject of development:
1. Indigenous peoples have the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies
for the development or use of their lands or territories and other resources.
2. States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples con-
cerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free and
informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territo-
ries and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization
or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.
Clearly, difficult questions attend the application of the FPIC norm. For a start: how free is
free, how prior is prior, and how informed is informed? Anticipating these problems, in 2005
the UN’s PFII staff convened an exploratory workshop on the subject. The author proposed
there that: (a) “free” should mean without inducement or coercion of any kind, material or
political; (b) “prior” should mean before any activity begins that could manifestly influence
the decision to proceed or not to proceed with a proposed project; (c) “informed” should
mean, inter alia, that indigenous peoples will have access, on a par with the developer coun-
terpart, to the relevant knowledge base and domain of experts; and (d) “consent” should
mean the overwhelming approval of the community affected.
The author further pointed out that national and international institutions’ current prac-
tice of requiring that the developer file an environmental impact statement (EIS) before a
project can be authorized is wanting in at least one respect. A single stakeholder—the devel-
oper—controls the EIS process, as the agent that typically assembles the concerned docu-
ment, hires its authors, frames its questions, and deploys its often impossibly technical
language. Under the FPIC norm, the developer should also be required to dedicate a sum of
money, equal to what it spends on its EIS, to the affected community to enable it to commis-
sion its own EIS. Clearly, as in the judicial context, two briefs, better than one, expose the
complexities of a contested matter.
Intellectual Property
UNDRIP addresses this norm in a single article:
Article 31. Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their
cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. . . . And develop
their intellectual property over such. . . .
With this, UNDRIP simply references the domain (which the World Intellectual Property
Organization [WIPO] now calls “Traditional Knowledge, Traditional Cultural Expres-
sions, Genetic Resources, and Folklore”) over which indigenous peoples may assert intel-
lectual property rights (IPR), leaving their elaboration to specialized bodies like WIPO.
A clash of normativities, however, continues to stymie the latter’s effort to provide protec-
tion for indigenous peoples’ IPR. Simply put, the present world IPR regime remains
embedded in a Western paradigm that assigns intellectual value to identifiable moments,
and items, of individual creativity or originality. Indigenous peoples, on the contrary,
value traditional knowledge and cultural expressions for the very reason that they have
been held and reproduced collectively from time immemorial. The two paradigms could
not be more mutually alien. WIPO has been attempting to bridge this divide since 2001,
when it empanelled an Inter-Governmental Committee on Intellectual Property, Genetic
Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore to give it guidance. To date, that guidance
remains at the work-in-progress stage.
UNESCO, for its part, adopted its Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural
Heritage in 2003 and its Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of
Cultural Expressions in 2005, ahead of UNDRIP’s adoption, which may explain the said
Conventions’ insufficient attention to the specific interests of indigenous peoples. Overall,
however, UNESCO plays a pre-eminent role, particularly through its publications, in empha-
sizing the value of indigenous cultures to their bearers and to humanity in general. Addition-
ally, since 2002 it has run a Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems Program that places
indigenous persons with traditional knowledge in environmental management roles where
their knowledge may be applied and transmitted. Aware of indigenous participants’ strong
support, expressed at the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development, for “a
sustainable future rooted in the knowledge and worldviews of their Elders,” which stance
earned them the designation of “Major Group” entitled to an ongoing voice in the Rio proc-
ess, UNESCO engaged indigenous participants in two events leading up to Rio 20+: its
Planet Under Pressure conference in March 2012, and its UNESCO/ICSU Forum for Science,
Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development in June 2012. Notwithstanding the
combined initiatives of its agencies, the UN reports that the piracy of indigenous peoples’
intellectual property surges on unabated, generally in the form of raids on indigenous peo-
ples’ resources carried out by pharmaceutical, cosmetic, touristic, and other companies that
states fail to control.27
Cultural identity
As with “territoriality,” UNDRIP does not advance a norm of “cultural identity” as such but
amply fills out its content throughout the text.28 The norm underlies spelled-out rights to
membership in a cultural community, to tradition and custom, spirituality and religion, cer-
emonial artifacts and practices, transmission of legacies and language, and so on. In the end,
it is the collective cultural identity of indigenous peoples that enables them to exercise their
right of self-determination. That is, while the right of self-determination recognizes and
secures agency for indigenous peoples, it is the norm of cultural identity that safeguards their
ability to knowledgeably and meaningfully exercise that agency in common into the future.
This, because culture is, finally, nothing less than the historically derived complex of shared
knowledge, norms, symbols, behavior, and social ties on which every community, indige-
nous or not, relies to claim, modify, and reproduce its particular vision of selfhood and well-
being. The complex may be relatively thin in metropolitan communities shared by the rooted
and the transient; it is uniquely thick in indigenous communities attached to traditional
territories.
Rooting Change
The previous section reviewed the agency that international society now vests in indigenous
peoples over a range of subjects. This section discusses the deployment of that agency, and of
indigenous communities’ own normativities, constructed locally and now also transnation-
ally, in development and other contexts. That is, while indigenous communities remain
attached first and foremost to the distinctive normativities of their particular cultures, they
are also synthesizing, as a result of similar encounters with modernity, a shared set of norms
displayed in but not limited to UNDRIP that may be called “indigeneity.”29
Agency
Operationalizing the rights of self-determination and of FPIC in the development context
will undoubtedly prove daunting. For example, where proposed projects potentially affect
several communities and peoples in different ways, who is the rights holder? Two postulates
could offer a degree of initial guidance here, to be checked of course against the cumulative
wisdom of practice. The first, ethnographic in nature, recognizes that human beings today
live and participate in several interactive “grids” of belonging. Akhil Gupta’s comment on
“citizenship” in his work on identities makes the point:
Citizenship ought to be theorized as one of the multiple subject positions occupied by people
as members of diversely spatialized, partially overlapping or non-overlapping collectivities.
The structure of feeling that constitutes nationalisms needs to be set in the context of other
forms of imagining community, other means of endowing significance to space in the pro-
duction of location and “home.”30
The second postulate, normative in nature, asserts that any community or “grid” of belong-
ing, large or small, that is potentially impacted by a development project must have agency
over it commensurate with the anticipated degree of impact. In the case of indigenous com-
munities rooted to ancestral lands and ways, that impact will likely be substantial. For this
reason, UNDRIP makes the agency rights of self-determination and FPIC maximally avail-
able to them. This does not mean, however, that an indigenous community exercising that
agency will do so in isolation from all other communities or normativities, for, as the first
postulate indicates, even rooted indigenous peoples today navigate between several social
and ideological grids. Consequently, while they will likely foreground their community’s
own normativity in the situation, they will also inevitably be considering other normativi-
ties. The space where parallel normativities are considered and assessed, then, is also the
space where rooted change emerges.
Normativity
UNDRIP states that its standards are vital to the “survival, dignity and well-being” of indige-
nous peoples. Today, perhaps as a dividend of the UNDRIP campaign, some indigenous
communities have moved beyond survival issues to contest visions of “well-being,” an open-
ended term now happily replacing the unilinear rubric of “progress” in development par-
lance. In the process, a common indigenous normativity is coalescing. Its foundational
theme was sounded by President Evo Morales in 2007 on his first trip to the GA as Bolivia’s
head of state. He said, “We are opposed to development; we do not want to live better, we
only want to live well.” This vivir bien theme encapsulates a veritable domain of values, for
what President Morales did, in that moment, was to announce the fundamental divide that
separates the normativity of modernity from that of indigeneity. Admittedly oversimplifying
both, the first may be said to prize rationalism, individualism, competition, disaggregation,
accumulation, the mastery of nature, and the present generation. The second espouses
meaning, communalism, collaboration, connection, sufficiency, the stewardship of nature,
ancestors, and the unborn. The first excels at change, the second at sustainability. Clearly,
development thinking in the twenty-first century must mine both.
Practice
Drawing on a handful of recent examples, this section discusses a sample set of practices
that, in the author’s opinion, assist or hinder indigenous peoples’ reach for well-being.
Starting with the positive, indigenous peoples’ achievement, however fledgling still, of
agency in international fora outranks all their other gains. It gives them a potent two-way
advantage: the ability to influence decisions made supra-nationally that play out locally and,
conversely, the opportunity to bring supra-national influence to bear on lower-level deci-
sions. Either way, it strengthens their position vis-à-vis states.
It was indigenous agency exercised in the PFII that made the UN create an Inter-Agency
Support Group on Indigenous Issues to coordinate the organization’s several projects in aid
of indigenous well-being. Under the same impetus, the UN today also requires its agencies
to disaggregate the data they collect so as to highlight the particular circumstances of indig-
enous peoples. UNESCO has elevated the status of traditional knowledge from a local good
to a global one benefitting communities at both levels in a world re-awakened to the virtue of
sustainable economies. Significantly, a committee of the World Bank itself issued an Extrac-
tive Industries Review in 2003 that urged that body to end its funding of mining industries
given their destructive effect on local communities and the environment. Furthermore, the
Review urged the Bank to embrace the FPIC norm for projects impacting indigenous and
similarly situated peoples.
There is also evidence, albeit circumstantial, that international gains percolate down to
regional and national levels. Thus, because UNDRIP characterizes its standards as minimal,
the Organization of American States has been constrained by its indigenous interlocutors
from introducing lower standards into its own Draft Declaration of their rights. It is probably
not coincidental either that, during the four decades that the indigenous gestalt was coalesc-
ing trans-nationally, indigenous parties scored landmark victories against over-reaching
states on issues involving the former’s rights to self-determination and territoriality in inter-
national, regional, and national courts.31 While Bolivia alone has incorporated UNDRIP
wholesale into its national legislation, other Latin American countries’ executive and legisla-
tive branches have also been moved to respond, as never before, to the demands of their
indigenous communities, albeit with mixed motives and results.32
International indigenous agency has also stimulated indigenous peoples to organize them-
selves on a more ambitious scale. The Sami Council jointly formed by the Sami of Norway,
Sweden, Finland, and Russia is a case in point. Others include the several large transnational
assemblies of the last decades where indigenous peoples, reaching across a range of cultures,
formulated common norms, strategies, and demands.33 These efforts in turn attract a widen-
ing circle of allies so that a veritable network of indigenous and non-indigenous parties now
mounts weighty challenges to the orthodox development view that economic growth equals,
or must precede, well-being. Thus, Joseph E. Stiglitz has famously declared that growth is
unsustainable, adding that GNP and GDP, which obsessively search for it, “mis-measure” our
lives.34 He and other experts increasingly urge the use of additional indices of human devel
opment: human security,35 food security, capacity,36 democratic institutions,37 the “bottom
billion,”38 status of women, literacy, health, education, the state of infrastructural stock, and so
on. However, few development specialists yet tend to the foundational questions that com-
munities more harmed than helped by development continue to ask: What is the goal of devel-
opment? Who decides? Applying what norms? Indigenous peoples answer, grosso modo:
Well-being, not growth, should be its goal; we decide, if it affects us; and we do so guided by
our own values, which states must respect.
Because these responses fly in the face of established conceptions of the state, and of main-
stream development paradigms, they encounter serious resistance in the UN as elsewhere.
The UN, as is well-known, veers in different directions depending on which “UN” leads at
any given time or on any given topic: the member-states’, the Secretariat’s, the “Third UN” of
associated experts, or the latest UN of civil society agents. While the organization played
an extraordinarily supportive role in elevating the indigenous cause to the international sta-
tus that it now enjoys, the UN’s subsequent institutionalization of the indigenous agenda is
predictably subjecting it to the downside of success. Thus, the UNDG-issued UNDG Guide-
lines on Indigenous Peoples’ Issues states that, conforming with the UN’s desire to “main-
stream and integrate” indigenous concerns, UNDG advocates “a human rights based and
culturally sensitive approach to development.” As can be seen, UNDRIP’s powerful and con-
troversial discourse of collective self-determination and of FPIC is being transmuted here
into the tamer discourse of individual human rights and “development with identity.”
Likewise, the growth of UN mechanisms dedicated to indigenous matters may scatter,
rather than concentrate, indigenous peoples’ energy. Already, the PFII, the Expert Mecha-
nism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Special Rapporteur, notwithstanding their
important contributions, appear to be settling into the UN pattern of issuing studies and
reports rather than frontally challenging unacceptable state and corporate practices. Finally,
while as many as 1,500 indigenous persons attend the PFII’s yearly sessions, a strikingly small
contingent of indigenous individuals tends to show up again and again as spokespersons of
indigenous peoples in international fora, regardless of topic or task. The disjunction between
any such small contingent and the far-flung, highly diverse, and locally stressed communities
where the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples live raises serious issues of representative-
ness that will have to be addressed by indigenous peoples themselves.39
Conclusion
If, as indicated at the start of this chapter, development thought and practice evolve through
the countervailing, but also cross-fertilizing, pushes and pulls of public and private actors in
the field driven by their singular complexes of values and interests, then that evolution has
embarked on a new phase with the entry of indigenous peoples into the fray. As with previ-
ously marginalized groups like the colonized, and women, who also managed—relying on
an array of political alliances and normative maneuvers analogous to those described here
for indigenous peoples—to significantly bend to their advantage prior paradigms of agency
and normativity, indigenous peoples are taking their rightful place in national and interna-
tional discourses on development.
For real cross-fertilization to occur in those discourses, however, the grip of certain domi-
nant narratives of modernity will have to be loosened. First, there is the simplistic vaunting
of the market as the pre-eminent device for the exchange of goods and services, notwith-
standing Karl Polanyi’s long-standing warning that it also figures as the unraveler extraordi-
naire of social relationships.40
Second, there is the associated trope of the market as engine of flexibility and creativity
that, before 1989, sounded plausible in contrast to the Soviet Union’s centralized command
economy. Today, however, the combined power of the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO)—which commands not a mere
national space but a global one—is outdoing the Soviet planned economy in its ability to
homogenize space and suppress local agency.
Third, as the world searches for models of sustainability, the view that traditional knowledge
is pre-scientific needs to be replaced with the recognition that it in fact embodies a trove of
information painstakingly acquired through generations of observation and trial-and-error.
Fourth, the narrative of the rescue of the South (where most indigenous peoples live) from
purportedly self-inflicted disasters like poverty, internal displacements, and civil strife needs
to yield to a discourse of prevention that equally exposes Northern and Southern vectors of
human and ecological degradation, be these neo-liberal prescriptions, mega-projects, the
arms trade, or other culprits. Of course, a simplistic grand narrative of indigeneity would be
as misleading as the reigning modernist ones. Instead, a gentle rain of small narratives, sup-
ported by ethnographic-level accounts of well-being—how it is sought and found—might
provide welcome relief, and perhaps also insight.
Notes
1. This statement attributed to Hawai’i’s King Kamehameha III (1813–54) remains the prin-
ciple most invoked by kanaka maoli (indigenous Hawaiians) as they contest the ongoing
expansion of U.S. military bases, and hotel and housing complexes, in their formerly
independent country which the U.S. annexed in 1898.
2. Jolly et al. 2004.
3. See UN 2009: 1.
4. Cobo 1987, paragraph 379.
5. Some sources consulted include the UN PFII, IWGIA, and IFAD.
6. The data set out in this paragraph are culled from that report.
7. UN 2009: 17.
8. Toye and Toye (2004) have richly narrated the complex UN response to the new devel-
opmental focus on trade.
9. For an insider account of ECLA’s extraordinarily influential years, see Berthelot 2004:
168–232.
10. For an eloquent treatise promoting the NIEO at the time, see Bedjaoui 1979. But see Esco-
bar 1995 for a current critical perspective on the associated construct of “Third World.”
11. See Sundaram (2011) on the connection between the defective financial system and
development.
12. Anthropologists, long before economists, recognized this ravage. See Bodley 1988; Ferguson
and Whitehead 1992; Perry 1996; Bardhan and Ray 2008; Oliver-Smith 2010; Boggs 2011.
13. A term coined by the environmentalist writer Paul Hawken (see Hawken 2007).
14. See Alston 2005 on the NGO challenge of neo-liberal excesses on human rights
grounds.
15. For a fuller account of this engagement, see Lâm 2000.
16. Cobo 1987.
17. Its formal name is Convention Concerning the Protection and Integration of Indigenous
and Other Tribal and Semi-Tribal Populations in Independent Countries. However,
both it and the later Convention 169 are generally referred to in the abbreviated fashion
used in the text.
18. Rodríguez-Piñero’s account (2005) of the geneses of both Conventions presents far more
complex reasons.
19. Rodríguez-Piñero 2005.
20. UN 2009: 1. UN instruments and mechanisms dedicated to indigenous peoples, for
example, outstrip those devoted to minorities. See Lâm 2009.
21. A term and concept James Scott made justly indispensable (see Scott 2003).
22. Art. 43.

23. For a fuller account of the territoriality dimension, see Lâm 2004.
24. Art. 30.
25. Daes 2003.
26. Articles 11, 19, 28, 29.
27. Articles 68–77.
28. Primarily Articles 8, 9, 11–16, 31. UNESCO’s 1981 Declaration of San José uses the term
explicitly when it says that ethnocide “involves an extreme form of massive violation of
human rights and, in particular, the right of ethnic groups to respect for their cultural
identity” [emphasis added].
29. For an extended discussion of this concept, see Fabricant and Gustafson 2011.
30. Gupta 1992: 73.
31. See: Western Sahara Advisory Opinion (International Court of Justice, 1975); Mabo v.
Queensland (Australian High Court, 1993); Case of the Mayagna (Sumo) Community of
Awas Tingni v. Nicaragua (Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2001); Alexkor Lim-
ited v. the Rickersveld Community (South Africa, 2003); Sagong Bin Tasim v. Keajaan Neg-
eri Selangor (Malyasia, 2005); Serana v. Botswana (Botswana, 2006); Case 366 of 2008
(Supreme Court of Belize, 2010); and Case of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku v. Ecuador
(Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2012).
32. See the excellent articles on this in Fabricant and Gustafson 2011. But see also: Young
1995; Brysk 2000; Martin 2003; Engle 2010.
33. See, for example, the Declarations of Quito and Cochabamba, respectively.
34. Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi 2010.
35. MacFarlane and Foong Khong 2006.
36. Sen 1999.
37. Acemoglu and Robinson 2012.
38. Collier 2007.
39. See Shah 2010.
40. Polanyi 2001.
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perity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers.
Alston, Philip (ed.) (2005). Non-State Actors and Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bardhan, Pranab, and Isha Ray (2008). The Contested Commons: Conversations Between Econ-
omists and Anthropologists. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bedjaoui, Mohammed (1979). Pour un nouvel ordre économique. Paris: UNESCO.
Berthelot, Yves (ed.) (2004). Unity and Diversity in Development Ideas: Perspectives from the
UN Regional Commissions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bodley, John H. (1988). Victims of Progress. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing
Company.
Boggs, Stephen T. (2011). Globalization and Social Disorder. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris
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Relations in Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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ulations, vol. V. New York: United Nations.
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Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, July 13. (<http://
www1.umn.edu/humanrts/demo/IndigenousSovereigntyNaturalResources_Daes.pdf>).
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Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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and Indigeneity in a Plurinational State. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research
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States and Indigenous Warfare. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
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Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism,” Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 63–79.
Hawken, Paul (2007). Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being
and Why No One Saw It Coming. New York: Penguin.
Jolly, Richard, et al. (2004). UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice. United
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Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, Inc.
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and Territoriality,” Journal of International Affairs, 57(2) (Spring 2004): 129–50.
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Routledge.
chapter 14
cor ru ption
huguette labelle
Corruption is an insidious plague that has a wide range of corrosive effects on

societies. . . . This evil phenomenon is found in all countries—big and small, rich
and poor—but it is in the developing world that its effects are most destructive.
(Kofi Annan, Foreword to the United Nations Convention
Against Corruption, 2003)
Introduction
Whether perpetrated by governments, businesses or citizens, corruption is a major barrier

to development. When people in power at local, national, or international level abuse their
position for their own benefit, at the expense of the public good, the costs are high for society
at large, but particularly for society’s most vulnerable.
Corruption can happen in many different forms in any country, but whether poor people
suffer demands for petty bribes or the destruction of entire public services through embez-
zlement, the consequences for development are equally damaging.
In the past two decades, there has been growing recognition that corruption undermines
development efforts. It skews decisions about budgets and policies, it undermines the effective-
ness of policies to grow economies and help the poor, it denies citizens the right to participate in
the government of their country, and it diverts public resources into private hands. Most recently,
this problem has started to be seen as a social injustice, since it is the poor who most often find
themselves at the losing end of this corruption chain. They are not only denied access to public
resources but have to pay a higher proportion of their limited income when they make illegal
payments to access them. The poor also suffer further exclusion by losing voice and vote when
public institutions—the structures that are supposed to protect them—are corrupted.
Where corruption characterizes the rules of the game, the fault tends to lie in structural
weakness in public and private institutions exacerbated by a lack of political will to enforce
laws and implement necessary reforms. With the challenges ever more global, good gov-
ernance challenges cannot be treated by national governments in isolation. Looking at the
240 huguette labelle
various barriers to good governance allows a more sophisticated and nuanced view of cor-
ruption. No one initiative can by itself prevent corruption, deal with it when it happens, and
correct the gaps that allowed it.
The Evolution of Thinking about Corruption
Corruption is often thought of as an economic or “white collar” crime. That ignores the
greater implications of corruption, namely, the abuse of power at the expense of the many,
which perpetuates social injustice and the exploitation of the vulnerable—through denial of
health care, education, economic opportunity, and justice—and prevents the holding to
account of leaders for the theft of resources. A wider understanding of corruption can help
explain why decades of development efforts are not working for many of the world’s most
poor and vulnerable people.
Definitions
A simple yet widely accepted definition of corruption is “the abuse of entrusted power for
private gain,” entrusted power being the mechanism by which representative government
gains its legitimacy, as do other positions of power within modern society: the judiciary,
political parties, and corporations.
Early definitions of corruption, however, were confined to public sector corruption. Joseph
Nye, one of the first political scientists to address the issue directly, included bribery, nepo-
tism, and misappropriation in his definition: “Corruption is behavior which deviates from
the normal duties of a public role because of private . . . pecuniary or status gains” (Nye 1967).
Samuel P. Huntington also limited his definition of corruption to the “behavior of public offi-
cials which deviates from accepted norms in order to serve private ends” (Huntington 1968).
According to Huntington, some societies experience more corruption, especially societies at an
earlier stage in development. This was at a time when Rostow’s “stages of development” theory
was in vogue (Rostow 1960). According to Huntington’s analysis, corruption served a purpose
in these evolving societies: it was a by-product of modernization and a means to “surmounting
traditional laws or bureaucratic regulations which hamper economic expansion.”
While later research would expand the definition of corruption, there is still a strand
of thought that maintains the focus on the public sector, such as a recent academic
study explaining corruption as something that will happen in large public sectors: “an
incident where a bureaucrat (or an elected official) breaks a rule for private gain”
(Banarjee 2012).
However, corruption is not limited to government officials who hold out their hand for a
bribe. Doctors, businesspeople, parliamentarians, and any individual can demand illegal
payments for services and jobs that they are supposed to provide. And where there is
demand, there has to be a supply side. Surveys of businesspeople show that corruption can
also occur between private sector companies, with no public officials involved, such as when
suppliers compete within a multinational firm’s supply chain, or when cartels keep prices
artificially high (Transparency International 2011a).
corruption 241
One of the leading scholars in the field of corruption, Susan Rose-Ackerman, was one of
the first to focus on the relationship between business and government as a corruption
hotspot. She warned that firms bribe to win contracts, to avoid regulation and taxes, to
inflate the price they are paid for their services, or to justify delivery of lower quality (Rose-
Ackerman 1978).
The concept of “grand corruption” as a shared crime perpetrated by both officials and
businesses (the bribe taker and the bribe giver) was introduced and explained by George
Moody-Stuart, in a study that did much to break the taboo in business circles about discuss-
ing the problem (Moody-Stuart 1997).
Moody-Stuart elucidated the role of business in corruption by defining two kinds of
administrative corruption. While officials often demand to be paid for something that they
are ordinarily required to do by law (“according-to-rule” corruption), bribes are also paid to
obtain services the official is prohibited from providing (“against-the-rule” corruption)
(Moody-Stuart 1997), The bribe payers may include businesses and a wide range of actors
that form part of the exchange. Regardless of who pays, the results are the same: “According-
to-rule” corruption can be economically wasteful, but “against-the-rule” corruption can
cause death—when, for example, illegal payments are used to endorse sub-par safety stand-
ards in buildings, building sites, food, or medicines.
It is important to recognize that corruption can influence the very making of the rules.
This political corruption can include the manipulation of policies or abuse of procedures in
the allocation of resources and financing by political decision-makers who abuse their posi-
tion to sustain their power, status, and wealth (Amudsen 1999).
A pioneering thinker in corruption, Daniel Kaufmann of the Brookings Institution, and
formerly of the World Bank, has made the powerful and compelling claim that looks at a new
classification of corruption: “legal corruption.” Here, corruption is understood to involve
collusion and bargaining that may be legal in a country but that produce results harmful for
broader public welfare (Kaufmann and Vicente 2011). An example would be the powerful
role of lobbyists, which is legal in many countries, but which may result in skewed legislation
that is not in the public interest.
Manifestations
The notion of abuse of power allows many more examples of corruption to emerge, includ-
ing illegal surveillance, torture, and vote rigging (Alatas 1990).
Other clear manifestations of power abused, whether in the public or private sector,
include clientelism, nepotism, and patronage. A recent report has defined political patron-
age as “a vertical system of corruption that functions from top to bottom in all public
institutions,” warning that such a system is not limited to developing countries but also
exists in countries where “politicians, magistrates, and white-collar criminals form closed
corruption networks that are not systematic in nature” (Center for the Study of Democ-
racy 2010).
While some may argue that corruption in the form of favoritism or nepotism is human
nature, by now it is widely felt to be neither acceptable nor culturally excusable as a way of
doing business. While certain forms are more prevalent in some societies than others, it can
exist everywhere, causing equal damage to both finances and trust. It can be compounded by
years of neglect, as people who come to positions of power by these means use their position
to contribute to the exacerbation of the problem.
Few activities create greater temptations or offer more opportunities for corruption than
public procurement. The procurement of goods and services can represent between 15 and 30
percent of an entire national economy. Yet public procurement procedures often are com-
plex, making manipulation of the sums involved hard to detect. The estimated cost of cor-
ruption in public procurement ranges from 10 to 25 percent. Analysts say that in some cases
the lost money can amount to as much as 40–50 percent of the total contract (Transparency
International 2006).
Another area prone to risk is the natural resource sector. Dozens of developing countries
have seen their chances of economic prosperity undermined because of the lengths to which
leaders, officials, companies, and individuals will go to maintain their grip over the revenues
(also called “rents”) produced from oil, gas, mining, forests, and other extractive industries.
Another manifestation of corruption is the phenomenon known as stolen assets: the
money a corrupt leader takes out of a country and parks in fiscal havens or property around
the world. One study estimates that dictators have stolen between US$100 billion and 180
billion over the past decades (CCFD 2009). Since this study only looked at leaders, not their
families or associates, the actual figure may be much higher.
However, the study was a watershed because it marked the first attempt to calculate the
amounts stolen and highlight the complicity of Western banks and other companies in pro-
viding a safe haven for illicit monies.
Illicit flows can also include ill-gotten profits from tax evasion, organized crime, the illicit
trade of natural resources, and trafficking (of people, weapons, and drugs), aided by the brib-
ery of enforcement bodies, from customs officials to judges.
What does this mean for developing countries? Often, a massive loss of money that could
be invested in development. One study estimates that the forty-eight poorest countries lost
US$197 billion from 1990 to 2008 (GFI/UNDP 2011). Further analysis suggests that when
the estimated illicit outflows from the developing world to the leading financial centers
($500–$800 billion a year, according to Baker (2005)) are compared to the development aid
inflows to developing countries from donor governments ($50–$80 billion), it appears that
for every $1 received from the West, $10 are flowing back out of the developing countries.
Efforts to Quantify Impact

Corruption generally comprises illegal activities, which mainly come to light only through
scandal, investigation, or prosecution. It is thus difficult to assess absolute levels of corrup-
tion in countries or territories on the basis of hard empirical data, as the true figures are “off
the books.”
However, many efforts to take on the challenge of measuring the scale of corrupt acts, and
their wider cost, have aided a better understanding of and an opportunity to address the
impact of corruption.
A wave of efforts started in 1995 that analyzed the impact of corruption, and its con-
trol, on the economy, especially developing economies. The findings were significant:
some reported that increased corruption leads to reduced growth, others that it slowed
rates of poverty reduction (Mauro 1995). In 1998, an International Monetary Fund (IMF)
corruption 243
working paper based on two decades of income levels established the considerable
impact of corruption on income inequality (Gupta, Davoodi, and Alonso-Terme 1998).
This finding has been confirmed by a 2011 systematic review of evidence on corruption’s
negative impact on economic growth in low-income countries, highlighting indirect
consequences such as reduced investment, human capital, and public expenditure (Ugur
and Dasgupta 2011).
This makes it hard to support the argument that highly corrupt countries can sustain
strong economic growth. These studies based their measurement of corruption on the
amount of red tape, the efficiency of the judicial system, and various categories of political
stability for a cross-section of countries.
Econometric analysis also shows that governance and growth are correlated. Interpreta-
tion of growth rates from Latin America and the Caribbean shows that when growth takes
place without governance, the result is new forms of state capture, another abuse of power.
Forms of state capture such as undue influence on politics can explain why indicators show
rising perceptions of corruption in many developed countries. Countries such as Singapore,
Hong Kong, and South Korea have experienced rapid growth from a starting base of poor
governance. However, that growth was accompanied by specific anti-corruption measures
that were in many respects successful.
This research made it harder to ignore the economic costs governments would face if they
failed to tackle corruption. One study graded corruption on a scale of one to ten and found
that moving up one point on that scale could reduce foreign investment flows by 16 percent.
It went even further by positing that corruption’s impact on investment could be even greater
than the impact of raising taxes (Wei 1997).
Corruption has been estimated to cost the world economy at least one trillion dollars
annually (World Bank Institute 2004). While it is important to note that bribery is only one
form of corruption, quantification of this sort had a major impact on the public conscious-
ness and succinctly remade the economic case for greater international action.
Correlating corruption measurements with other indicators, the same World Bank
research said that controlling corruption would increase per capita income four times over: a
“400 percent governance dividend.” A later paper argued that poverty was closely correlated
to countries where governments have low levels of accountability, passing policies and budg-
ets without consultation or consequences (Moore 2006).
Because it is hard to measure corruption, it is also hard to measure the impact of fighting
it. Countries can be ranked, for example, based on how corrupt their public sector is per-
ceived to be, and global surveys can measure people’s experience of corruption and its impact
on their daily life. These surveys tend to consistently show two things: corruption, especially
in the shape of petty bribery, hits the poor hardest; and political parties are perceived to be
the most corrupt sector.
An Impediment to Development
Corruption limits the capacity of governments to govern, of development organizations to

aid development, and of people to live without being excluded from opportunities.
The negative drain that corruption exerts on development offers some explanation for the
below-average standard of living in countries that have valuable natural resources. In look-
ing at key indicators of human development and corruption, resource-rich countries such as
Equatorial Guinea and Angola fall toward the bottom of the list.1 Correlations between levels
of perceived corruption and human development substantiate this finding (Transparency
International 2008). While there are many other factors behind the persistence of income
inequality, poverty, social injustice, and political instability, understanding corruption can
help explain the barriers that have limited the success of decades of development efforts.
Impact on Human Development

Corruption deprives citizens of access to the basic goods and services they need to live:
health care, education, and water. It can also see them robbed of the right to land, and stuck
in unemployment without equal opportunity to build a better life.
Demands for illegal payments reduce access to services like education, denying people a
means to improve their social and economic standing, thus perpetuating the cycle of stag-
nated development. As corruption also reduces the quality of services, the impact on needy
households is equivalent to an insidious sort of double taxation. Survey work in Mexico sug-
gests that one-third of a poor family’s income is spent on bribes. Surveys in India have
reported that poor people have paid more than US$200 million in bribes annually to access
eleven “free” services, including police services, hospitals, schools, and unemployment ben-
efits (Transparency International India 2008).
Findings across the world show that corruption has undermined development advances.
The dangerous relationship between higher levels of reported corruption and reduced devel-
opment has been demonstrated in education, maternal health, and access to water (Trans-
parency International 2010). The results for improved access to drinking water are the most
striking. They suggest that when it comes to improving access to clean water, having a higher
level of per capita income has the same statistical effect as lowering the level of bribery. Simi-
larly, stronger anti-corruption legislation and rule of law have successfully reduced maternal
mortality rates. A correlation is also evident between higher literacy rates for a nation’s youth
and greater public access to information.
The impact of corruption on development has been substantiated by other studies. In
2005, Swedish researchers found that in Africa, between 30 and 76 percent of all funds other
than wages going to primary education are lost, warning that higher corruption is correlated
to children spending fewer years in school (Reinikka and Svensson 2005). Other researchers
said that an increase of one point in the index of corruption reduces school enrolment by
almost 5 percent and life expectancy by more than two years (Dreher and Herzfeld 2005).
Based on research from the Philippines, corruption affects health and education outcomes
by reducing test scores, lowering school rankings, and reducing satisfaction ratings (Azfar
and Gurgur 2005).
Corruption, whether in public services or other sectors, harms vulnerable groups most:
the poor, women, youth, and those without influence over institutions. Thanks to studies
highlighting the impact of corruption on women, it is increasingly recognized that gender
acts as a lens magnifying the impact of corruption, particularly when it comes to service
delivery. Corruption in the provision of basic services such as health care and education can
corruption 245
have disproportionate and negative consequences for women and girls (as greater users of
public services), exacerbating existing inequalities (Chene, Clench, and Fagan 2010).
As seen in the case of women, the cost of failed governance in public services can be the
misallocation of public resources, of which the brunt is also borne by those most dependent
on them. Paul Collier’s seminal work on poverty, The Bottom Billion, cites a study tracking
money intended for rural health clinics in Chad, which found that only 1 percent actually
reached its intended destination (Collier 2007).
These findings about governance breakdowns have important repercussions for develop-
ment organizations. Already in 2000, empirical research was pointing to a direct link
between the quality of governance in recipient countries and positive aid outcomes (Knack
2000).
Justice Denied and Impunity Tolerated

In the past, efforts to tackle corruption have often failed because of corruption in the justice
system. When there are factors that encourage the judiciary to take action contrary to the
public interest, it can be very difficult to create a strong disincentive to corrupt behavior:
politicians, businessmen and criminals can be encouraged to break the law, safe in the
knowledge that justice can be evaded. Conversely, if the judiciary lacks authority it may not
be able to serve its role as a check on government power. Many times, independent judges
who do their job well have been pushed aside, reassigned, or even fired (Buscaglia 2006).
It is important to recognize the marginalization that poor communities and individuals
experience when justice fails and their governments are not accountable. Corruption denies
access to the institutions that people need to protect their human rights: the police and the
courts. A Human Rights Watch report in Nigeria warned that citizens do not expect help
from the police: payments are often necessary to see an investigation completed. While sen-
ior officials embezzle budgets, underpaid traffic police set up roadblocks for the sole purpose
of extortion (Human Rights Watch 2010).
When the justice system is corrupt, people can be pushed off their land, denied employ-
ment, or abused and extorted by local officials or security forces without hope of redress. In
Cambodia, for example, land grabs occur because of the high incidence of failure by the local
courts to uphold laws regarding state land concessions, which have found their way into the
hands of the country’s political and economic elite (UN Cambodia Office of the High Com-
missioner for Human Rights 2007).
When police corruption occurs, it can extend to protecting, supporting, or turning a blind
eye to organized crime. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has warned that such
connivance can reach to the highest levels, pointing to evidence implicating senior police
officials in Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador.
In terms of development, the result of justice systems being weakened by corruption is
that people become disempowered, losing their ability to seek justice in courts or hold politi-
cians to account. This not only makes them further impoverished, but also sows the seeds of
conflict by dissolving any ties of loyalty between people and a state seemingly captured by
private interests. The World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report showed that countries
with better performance in terms of governance indicators are at lower risk of civil war by a
margin of 35–45 percent.
One explanation for this correlation is that corruption of state institutions that should act
as a check on executive power makes it easier to rule without citizens’ consent. Another
explanation is that a prolonged period of unaccountable rule is likely to build up social ten-
sion and exclusion, reducing loyalty to the state and making people more likely to resort to
violence to meet their ends.
This was demonstrated during the popular protests that took place in North Africa and
the Middle East in early 2011. Although there were many contributing factors to the “Arab
Spring,” corruption was a common denominator. Leaders in countries where economic
growth has not been accompanied by equitable distribution of resources, the development
of transparent public institutions, and the rule of law can find themselves faced with popular
anger and demands for greater accountability.
The Wealth of Natural Resources Denied

Instead of prosperity and development, resource-rich countries often show high levels
of poverty, illiteracy, and inequity, and a tendency towards political instability and vio-
lent conflict. This scenario, often called “the resource curse” or “the paradox of plenty,”
arises when business and political elites influence policies and manipulate the state
apparatus to maintain their advantageous position over the control of natural resources
(Bantekas 2005).
It is estimated that two-thirds of the world’s poor live in resource-rich countries. An IMF
study of thirty-one oil-exporting countries from 1992 to 2005 revealed that more oil rents
mean increased corruption and fewer political rights (Arezki and Brückner 2009). It does
not have to be that way.
This sort of activity is usually facilitated by bribes to officials, which weakens government
institutions and encourages those making ill-gotten gains from their control to hold onto
these by all means necessary: a complete capture of the state by private interests.
Few countries have seen the harmful impact of the “resource curse” more than Nigeria.
The role of massive foreign bribery in lining the pockets of the corrupt cannot be ignored.
Several U.S. companies have admitted paying Nigerian officials hundreds of millions in
bribes for engineering, procurement, construction, and exploitation contracts related to oil
and gas extraction (Transparency International 2011b).
Lack of Trust in the Political System

Citizens give their governments the power to act on their behalf, entrusting them with
the management of the public good. Many things can undermine this trust: the financ-
ing of political parties by powerful private entities, the capture of the state and the
pushback on regulation, leaders living in opulence while their citizens live on less than
two dollars a day.
Because it blocks attempts to carry out government policy—whether in the form of
stronger prosecution, more transparency, or higher taxes—state capture by private interests
is a fundamental barrier to development. As Hellmann and Kaufmann write, “state capture
has become not merely a symptom but also a fundamental cause of poor governance”
(Hellman and Kaufmann 2001).
corruption 247
Attempts at regulatory capture in any public sphere can result in inefficient public spend-
ing, overpriced public tenders, and a gnawing mistrust of politics among citizens. All of this
produces “social damage” for a country and its government.
“Social damage” is a newly emerging concept that seeks to estimate the cost of corporate
bribery of foreign officials to a country’s development (Olaya et al. 2010). In Costa Rica,
Alcatel-Lucent, the Franco-American communications company, agreed to pay US$10 mil-
lion to the Costa Rican state as a compensation for the “social damage” caused to Costa Rican
society after a scandal that involved US$2.5 million in bribes to win cell phone contracts. To
estimate social damage, Costa Rican authorities cited reduced investors’ confidence in the
national economy, damage to government financial management, and undermined credibil-
ity of politicians and political parties, illustrated by increased abstention rates in the 2006
elections.
Countries Left with Weakened Infrastructure

Several studies correlating public services with corruption indicators have demonstrated
the empirical argument: corruption significantly increases the cost and reduces the quality
of infrastructure services that are vital to any economic development (Collier and Hoeffler
2005). Studies have found, for example, that corruption negatively impacts the delivery of
electricity, raising the cost of both connecting to and operating a network (Dal Bo and
Rossi 2004).
The most debilitating infrastructural corruption problem occurs in the construction sec-
tor, which is naturally an area of big expenditure for a developing economy. It is difficult to
compare the costs and timeframes of large and often unique construction projects. This
makes it easier to hide and inflate additional expenditure. It is also a particularly technical
and fragmented industry, often involving contractors and sub-contractors, making the trac-
ing of payments and promulgation of standards more complex.
Research carried out in Nigeria by Human Rights Watch explains some of the corrup-
tion risks in large projects. Corrupt officials favor large construction processes over
basic public services, since the former offer greater opportunities for surreptitious mis-
use of funds. The report warns that half of large public investment projects are not com-
pleted, suggesting that many local officials have no interest in seeing projects completed,
since that would see the funding, and opportunities for graft, dry up (Human Rights
Watch 2007).
Chronic corruption can lead to under-investment in infrastructure due to the lack of
resources both domestic and foreign. Corruption is often marked by the flight of capital from
the country by domestic investors and an increased wariness by international investors to
invest in local projects. The perception that corruption is a part of doing business in a coun-
try can be a strong disincentive to foreign investment, especially when corruption has an
impact on that country’s politics and stability. In 2011, a World Bank report looked at the
impact of corruption and tax evasion in Malawi and Namibia. In both countries, corruption
and tax evasion amounted to more than 10 percent of the size of the national economy—
funds which normally would have entered national accounts for use in investments and
service delivery (Yikona et al. 2011).
Responding to Corruption
Governments can pursue greater economic development, but their capacity to implement
their policies depends upon the integrity of institutions. Strong checks and balances are
needed, as well as a general culture of transparency and accountability. The participation of
local government, judiciary, civil servants, citizens, and the business sector has to be an inte-
gral and constant feature of governance initiatives. Without these, the goal of cleaning up
government can be quickly diverted by interests other than the public good.
To determine where to improve governance, one has to analyze where the problems are. In
more than seventy countries, Transparency International has assessed the “National Integ-
rity System:” the key institutions (“pillars”) of good governance, such as the executive, legis-
lature, judiciary, private sector, civil society organizations, media, and anti-corruption
agencies.
The performance of institutions is critical to development. While most countries have
laws and related institutions, the problem remains the enforcement of those laws, which is
often a matter of political will and having the necessary measures and systems in place.
Judicial Reform
The impact of laws depends on a state’s ability to enforce them. This means developing coun-
tries must prioritize the building of integrity in their institutions, especially the judiciary. An
independent, impartial, professional, and well-resourced judiciary has been recognized as
being at the top of the agenda to ensure that there is no tolerance of perpetrators of corrup-
tion and other wrongs in our societies. Individual judges are also accountable for the manner
in which they discharge their responsibilities. Unfortunately, informality in legal systems
remains a fact of life in a number of countries, primarily at the lower court level, where
bureaucracy can make it faster to pay a bribe than to go through regular channels. The cost of
such a system is that it is harder for justice and the public interest to prevail.
At the heart of a system that protects the people, therefore, is a fair and open system for the
appointment, promotion, and removal of judges. Jurisdictions with a well-performing judi-
ciary tend to have transparent criteria for the selection and promotion of judges. In an
increasing number of jurisdictions, an independent judicial council is responsible for these
processes.
International standards such as the UN Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judici-
ary and the Commonwealth Latimer House Principles on the Three Branches of Government
concentrate on securing judicial independence by insulating judicial processes from exter-
nal influence.
Relying primarily on judiciaries, rather than the state, for implementation and enforce-
ment, the Bangalore Principles recognize the judiciaries’ wider role in promoting
accountability throughout society. The principles set out six core values that should guide
the exercise of judicial office: independence, impartiality, integrity, equality, propriety,
and competence and diligence. While not a binding international legal instrument, they
provide an excellent guidance document, and the UN has encouraged judiciaries to use
them as a model.
corruption 249
Collective Action
When the U.S. Congress took the historic step in 1977 of passing the Foreign Corrupt Prac-
tices Act, it was the first time any country had made it a crime to bribe foreign officials. It was
hoped that other industrialized countries would adopt the idea. It took another twenty years
before the idea took hold. Far from punishing foreign bribery, in the early 1990s the tax sys-
tem in fourteen member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) counted many facilitation payments as tax-deductible business
expenses.
Many businesses were themselves unhappy with this situation. In 1997, sixteen European
business leaders wrote an open letter calling on European governments to criminalize
international corruption and to end tax deductibility of bribes paid to officials abroad. As
Peter Eigen, founder and at the time chair of Transparency International, argued in 1997,
anti-corruption efforts also had to tackle those who offer bribes.
However, the only realistic way to address the problem of bribery in international busi-
ness and its impact on development is multilaterally. As most multinational companies came
from OECD countries, that body was best placed to tackle foreign bribery. In 1994 it set up a
working group on bribery, which over the next three years turned its initial recommenda-
tions into the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in Inter-
national Business. The convention was adopted on November 21, 1997 and signed a month
later by twenty-nine OECD member countries and five non-members. By 2012 the number
of signatories had risen to 39, including Brazil and Russia. Between them, the signatory
countries represent more than two-thirds of world exports. In addition, although not a for-
mal member, China has modified its domestic legislation to be in compliance with the global
convention.
The OECD has also worked to improve cooperation between tax authorities. Under the
2011 Multilateral Convention on Tax Information Exchange, countries agreed to share tax
information, which can be an effective tool in the fight against money laundering and the
loss of domestic revenues that could otherwise have been channeled towards development.
Another example of collective action in the fight against corruption is the UN Convention
against Corruption, which entered into force in 2005. The convention has been widely hailed
as a major breakthrough, establishing a comprehensive global framework for combating
corruption. It provides a global model for anti-corruption legislation and a framework for
mutual assistance and information exchange. This includes articles on criminalizing foreign
bribery, transparency in financial management, and public procurement reforms. Many
countries have used the treaty as a model for developing national anti-corruption strategies.
Regional collective action against corruption is also happening. The New Partnership for
Africa’s Development (NEPAD), created by African leaders in 2001 to address the challenges
(such as increasing poverty) facing the African continent, created the momentum which led
to the signing in 2003 of the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Cor-
ruption. This convention was expected to assist African leaders in living up to NEPAD’s
promises in terms of good governance.
In the wake of numerous corruption scandals in different parts of the Americas, the First
Summit of the Americas and the Organization of American States undertook the creation
of the first international convention aimed at combating corruption. The Inter-American
Convention Against Corruption, signed in 1996, deals with both domestic corruption and
foreign bribery by companies, while providing a framework for regional cooperation

through mutual law enforcement assistance, notably in extradition and investigations.
Individual countries are also working together across regions to redouble anti-corruption
efforts in voluntary agreements. In November 2010, the Seoul summit of the Group of 20
leading economies agreed to an ambitious anti-corruption action plan modeled in many
respects upon the UN convention. The action plan committed to the adoption and enforce-
ment of laws and other measures against international bribery, such as the criminalization of
foreign bribery. If the world’s leading economies take strong anti-corruption measures, there
will hopefully be a follow-the-leader effect, with other countries following suit.
Collective action can also take the form of voluntary initiatives. For example, the Global
Compact, a benchmark for corporate social responsibility created in 2000, added an anti-
corruption principle in 2004 that opened the way for cooperation with companies, govern-
ments, and civil society to improve the transparency, accountability, and integrity of the
private sector. Another example is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a simple
mechanism for systematic payments and revenue disclosure by both natural resources com-
panies and governments.
Oversight
Oversight institutions can be a first line of defense against corruption within an organiza-
tion, state, or company. They are a vital part of an integrity system’s checks and balances,
providing an independent assessment, thus promoting accountability and the opening of
institutions to scrutiny. In a country, they can take the form of an office of the ombudsman,
anti-corruption commission, or supreme auditor.
In a company or organization (like the World Bank, which provides US$43 billion of fund-
ing annually), they may be set up as an ethics office or independent auditing unit. They
respond to problems and allegations raised by individuals but also identify departments and
bodies vulnerable to corruption. In some instances, they may even provide training and con-
duct investigations to rectify the situation. For oversight bodies to work effectively, they need
to have full independence, be well-resourced, and publicly disclose their findings.
Integrity: A Defense against Public Sector Corruption

At the height of the first wave of anti-corruption literature, Susan Rose-Ackerman wrote that
combating corruption is not an end in itself but is part of the broader goal of creating more
effective, fair, and efficient government (Rose-Ackerman 1997). This view belongs to a general
school of thought that the goal of preventing corruption within the public service cannot be
achieved without promoting integrity, transparency, and accountability both among public
servants and among other pillars of society, whether within the public or private sector.
The more recent trends in building integrity involve increasing access to information and
putting in place mechanisms to flag problems early. At the time of writing, more than eighty
countries have put access to information laws in place. This includes making information on
budgets easily accessible to citizens, from central government right to the point of delivery.
Another recent trend is protection of whistleblowers, with new measures introduced in the
United States, South Korea, and several European countries in 2011.
corruption 251
Despite these gains in the name of transparency, for anti-corruption measures to run
throughout an organization there is also a need for political will and someone to set the tone
at the top. This means having a zero tolerance policy on corruption.
It also means setting out a broader agenda of reform. Successful governments have a mer-
it-based system for entry and promotion in the public service based on clear criteria and
open appointment procedures. Building integrity also involves adopting codes of conduct
and conflict of interest rules. Compliance (including training), enforcement, and sanction
mechanisms must be adopted concurrently.
Integrity must also extend from the national to the local level, where service delivery is
critical to ensure that everyone—not just the capital city—benefits from development.
Local spending usually goes to projects that are fundamental to daily life and develop-
ment: homes, water and sanitation systems, bridges, and roads. People must be able to see
project budgets and revenues, and compare them to make sure revenues and spending
match. Local authorities must make information available, and must make sure budgets
are disclosed on time.
Some of the greatest risks for private interests overriding the public good take place
around government spending on public contracts, often for public works and development
projects. Governments, companies, and civil society have a responsibility to ensure tender-
ing processes are characterized by integrity. Bidders and contractors alike must live by high
standards, of which the benchmark is transparency. They can also oblige that all departments
and local offices appoint independent oversight of major projects. In Mexico, for example,
social witnesses participated in over 120 public procurements in 2010, valued at approxi-
mately US$14 billion (Sheppard and Cantera 2012).
The Private Sector

Private sector integrity is particularly important given the ever-expanding list of business
activities that intersect with government. Whether the sector is transport, defense, land use,
energy, procurement, customs, or public works, governments and business are constantly
intersecting, frequently with huge sums of money at stake. When there is a risk that those
representing governments and companies in these interactions have their priorities con-
fused, the potential danger for the state is not only financial loss, but security, safety, and
trust in the system.
The regulatory initiatives at international level envisaging the supply side of corruption
described above have placed significant new obligations on business.
Indeed, more and more companies in all sectors are introducing codes of conduct,
anti-corruption programs, and compliance measures, and some are adopting disclosure
policies.
Governments are continuing to add to requirements for company transparency, with
new laws passed in the United States (part of the Dodd–Frank financial reform bill) and, at
the time of writing, being legislated in the European Union. This will create a situation
where companies listed on stock markets are legally obliged to disclose financial and tech-
nical information on a country-per-country basis, and in the extractive sector, on a project-
by-project basis.
Development Cooperation
Recipient countries and donors—bilateral donor agencies, multilateral organizations, foun-
dations, development NGOs, and others—must be on board to effectively fight corruption
in development.
Anti-corruption efforts became a more visible and official part of the development com-
munity’s agenda in 1996, when James Wolfensohn, then President of the World Bank,
addressed what he termed “the cancer of corruption.” The Bank has since taken steps to com-
bat corruption by taking a zero tolerance approach. It has debarred over 400 firms and indi-
viduals from its contracts since 1999. Its common debarment approach, adopted in 2010 with
other regional banks, is a major step forward.
The positive change at the World Bank has been mirrored elsewhere. Aid agreements
between the European Union and African, Caribbean, and Pacific aid recipients include spe-
cific clauses aimed at fighting corruption in the general conditions for all contracts financed
through the European Development Fund since 1990, with an agreement in 2000 that recog-
nized the importance of transparency.
Transparency in aid means making the information provided more comprehensive, com-
parable, timely, and accessible. This is a perfectly achievable goal and key requisite for deliv-
ering on broader aid effectiveness principles set out in Paris (2005), Accra (2008), and Busan
(2011). Aid transparency is happening thanks to political will on all sides that has been chan-
neled through the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Set up in 2008, the initiative is a
multi-stakeholder attempt to adopt a uniform and agreed standard for reporting aid flows.
Conclusion
The imperative for transparency in government is hardly new. In 350 bce, Aristotle suggested
in his Politics that “to protect the treasury from being defrauded, let all the money be issued
openly in front of the whole city and let copies of the accounts be deposited in various wards.”
However, it is over the last two decades that the value of transparency in public life has
become widely accepted, as has the fact that laws, and the institutions to enforce them, are
vital to protecting the public good from the temptation of those in power to cut corners or
engage in unethical behavior for personal gain. Only this can ensure that mistakes and mis-
deeds are prevented, and that corruption does not flourish with impunity.
Note
1. The two countries rank 172nd and 168th respectively out of 183 countries on Transparency
International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, and 136th and 148th on the Human Devel-
opment Index.
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econom ic s
The editors might have named Part 2 of this volume “sectors,” but chose instead the title “con-
cepts.” To be sure, the practice of development, indeed of policy in any country—rich or
poor—tends to be organized around “sectors” rather than fields of study. The academic liter-
ature, too, tends to gravitate around sectors, such as health, transport, banking, and security.
Nowhere is the dilemma between sector and concept more apparent than in the area of eco-
nomics, the focus of the chapters in this section.
Economics is a discipline. It is fundamentally about making choices—the allocation of
finite resources in land, labor, capital, and enterprise in production, and the allocation of
limited income and wealth in consumption. Thus the concept of opportunity cost—the
cost of the alternative forgone to the one chosen—is central to economic thinking and
practice. As such, economics offers a way of analyzing a wide range of issues in develop-
ment, including health, transportation, banking, and even security. For example, witness
the “greed and grievance” literature that attempted to distill the economic causes of civil
conflict from the non-economic causes (see Berdal and Malone (2000) and the even longer
standing literature on the economic causes of war). It is also true that the language of eco-
nomics has come to be the language of policy in every area. But the treatment of economic
“concepts” in development can be narrowed to the core themes covered by the chapters in
this section, for they go to the heart of making choices and of the economic elements of
development.
Throughout, and in keeping with the ethos of this book, we are mindful of the dis-
tinction between positive and normative economics, or what Gunnar Myrdal (1975: vii)
decried as the trend among “[M]odern establishment economists [who] have retained
the welfare theory from the earliest neo-classical authors, but have done their best to
conceal and forget its foundations upon a particular and now obsolete moral philoso-
phy.” Our premise is that development is multi-faceted, going beyond economic views
of well-being to include health, environment, security, and freedom. Also, paths to the
ultimate vision of development can vary over time and across countries. Thus the eco-
nomic concepts covered in this section are limited to questions of public finance (taxa-
tion and expenditure), economic growth and transformation, openness (trade and
finance), and entrepreneurship. Each of these might include non-economic elements;
indeed the chapter on entrepreneurship makes a persuasive case for the role that ideol-
ogy and sociology respectively have played in each. Other chapters in this volume would
not be complete without a significant economics-oriented treatment of the subject. It is
the balance between economics and non-economics that drives the apportionment of
chapters to sections.
Motivations for this Section
Three observations, no doubt all contestable, help motivate this section. The first is that
rising incomes are a necessary but not sufficient feature of successful development. There are
many examples, such as some natural resource-rich countries, that feature high average per
capita incomes but low levels of development on account of the unequal distribution of
wealth and the resultant low quality of social and political institutions. Instances of the
obverse, poor countries that might be highly developed, are rare either because the concept
of the noble savage is an idealized view of societies that might never have existed, or because
the resources necessary to sustain development will at some point no longer be available. So
the creation of wealth is a central part of the development process.
Second, the generation of economic wealth, in turn, is the result of the efficient alloca-
tion of limited resources among competing uses. Every man, woman, and child in every
country does this every day, but their decisions are the function of the institutional struc-
ture within which they occur, and the activities of entrepreneurs who create opportunities
for others. The most contested area in development is the question of who the entrepre-
neur is. There is simply no room for unequivocal statements about the role that govern-
ments and private sector agents should and should not play. Governments typically create
the environment in which private entrepreneurs might thrive, and are also entrepreneurs
themselves. There is no magic bullet about what the mix between these two might be and
where the dividing line lies.
Third, economics and ideas are intertwined. To provide two extreme examples, a decision
that foreign aid will be provided with absolutely no strings attached, as balance of payments
assistance only, is as ideologically driven as the decision by a funder to provide foreign aid for
specified purposes only. Similarly, using marginal analysis to determine who and how much to
tax and where to spend, even if this were accurately possible, represents a value judgment on the
part of someone—voters who elected such a government, or officials who create such a system.
All the chapters in this section demonstrate a tension between that which is technocrati-
cally “correct” and that which is feasible over time and space. One can fully accept the princi-
ple of subsidiarity and still find that the appropriate level at which taxes might be collected
and the proceeds spent, or foreign aid disbursed, varies because of circumstances. Local gov-
ernance structures might be closer to the action and thus possess more and better informa-
tion than their central counterparts, but they might also be more liable to undue influence by
elites and be more corrupt. In the realm of trade and finance, the exceptions to free flows in
each are widely known and have been for some time. Free trade is as much an economic con-
cept as is the infant industry argument against it; capital controls are as much part of the
pantheon of economic approaches to capital account regimes as are regimes that encourage
the unfettered movement of capital around the world. In all these cases, the cost to society of
doing X and not Y is a calculation grounded in economic approaches but whose final out-
come depends on the conditions at the time the decision is taken.
258 economics
Organization of this Section
This section starts with Richard M. Bird and Arindam Das-Gupta (Chapter 15) on the core
economic function of governments, taxation, and expenditure. “Public finance is not just
about money,” they state, and go on to describe trends in thinking about the role of govern-
ment and the types of institutions that are required for an effective public finance system.
Emphasis is placed on thinking around tax systems, the nature and scope of fiscal decentrali-
zation, and looking ahead, the challenge that globalization places on national tax bases and
the provision of global public goods.
Justin Yifu Lin and Célestin Monga (Chapter 16) describe three phases in thinking about
the structural change that accompanies economic development. Often driven by external
funders and actors, the first two waves stressed the need to remedy market failure and gov-
ernment failure, respectively. The authors argue that the current (third) wave of thinking is
more grounded in a reading of the economic history of developed countries and the experi-
ence of successful developing countries themselves. Not surprisingly, the result is more
eclecticism in the policy prescriptions on how to increase productivity and see complemen-
tarity rather than competition in state interventions and the activities of the private sector.
This is also the theme that emerges from José Antonio Ocampo (Chapter 17) on trade and
finance. In each case, the traditional neoclassical view about the desirability of openness
and the free international mobility of capital, goods, and services is tempered by history
and experience without, it appears, doing injustice to sound economic thinking and practice.
This is followed by Wim Naudé (Chapter 18) on a key driver of economic growth, entre-
preneurship. Although much remains to be examined empirically, and such work is difficult
to design and execute in this area, two broad conclusions emerge. First, there is a role for
governments to promote innovative entrepreneurship by reducing uncertainty and transac-
tion costs for entrepreneurs. Second, entrepreneurship not only influences development
outcomes (not always positively) but is in turn influenced by them. The section is rounded
off by Adekeye Adebajo (Chapter 19) who addresses how Raul Prebisch and Adebayo Adedeji
promoted the idea of regional integration. Both championed the idea of home-grown devel-
opment and had a lasting impact on how the United Nations’ Economic Commissions for
Latin America (ECLA) and for Africa (ECA) address the acute disadvantages of their respec-
tive continents.
The interconnectedness of development paths and actors, and the diversity of ways to
achieve a given end form central themes in this section, as in the rest of this volume. The con-
cept of economics in development is very much the result of interplay between the scientific
part of the discipline and its social part.
References
Myrdal, Gunnar (1975). Against the Stream, Critical Essays on Economics, New York: Vintage
Books.
Berdal, Mats, and David Malone (eds.) (2000). Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in
Civil Wars, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
chapter 15
pu blic fi na nce i n
dev el opi ng cou n tr ie s
richard m. bird and arindam das-gupta
Introduction
Public finance is not just about money. Its subject matter includes not only all aspects of
public sector finances but also the structure of the public sector and fiscal institutions as well
as the broad objectives and rationale for government activity. We focus here on how govern-
ments raise resources to finance spending, without regard to what spending is financed. Even
so, our scope is still substantial, not least because some analysis of the nature and efficiency
of public spending is needed for a proper understanding of financing sources.
Public finance policy results from a complex interaction between ideas, interests, and
institutions. The best public finance system for any country is one that reflects its economic
structure, its capacity to administer its public finances, its public service needs, and its access
to different sources of finance such as taxation, debt, or aid. The public finance system of any
country is both path-dependent and context-specific, reflecting the outcome of complex
social and political interactions between different groups in a specific institutional context
established by history and state administrative capacity. Influence does not flow only in one
direction, however, so how the public finance system operates may influence not only the
context but the nature and the outcomes of such interactions. Though long dominated by
economists, the study of public finance has important political and administrative dimen-
sions that have recently received increasingly close attention from historians and those con-
cerned with improving policy outcomes in developing countries.1
Development Taxation: Advice and Practice
Developing countries have heard many changing messages about development taxation.
Fifty years ago the academic ideal was a broad-based progressive personal income tax that
included capital gains and was integrated with corporate income tax to minimize the
260 richard m. bird and arindam das-gupta
economic distortions induced by taxation (Auerbach 2010). Unsurprisingly, the advice

offered to developing countries by foreign experts was to adopt such a tax. Indirect taxes
were seen as at best a necessary evil. Taxes on international trade (exports and imports), like
local and regional (sub-national) taxes, were generally neglected. Most advisers thought
higher tax–GDP ratios were needed to finance development expenditure. In some instances,
higher marginal tax rates were also suggested in order to further income redistribution.2
By the 1990s, however, a new development tax model had emerged (World Bank 1991). The
central element of this “broad base low rate” model was not a comprehensive progressive per-
sonal income tax but a VAT imposed at a single rate on a broad base. VAT took center stage
partly because the widespread move toward lower and more uniform import tariffs made it
the tax most likely to fill the resulting revenue vacuum in developing countries. Income taxes
continued to play an important role, but more emphasis was put on lower rates as having
fewer negative effects on economic efficiency and reducing incentives to evade or avoid taxes.
As in the earlier approach—though with equally little success—expert advisers usually dis-
couraged incentives and other concessions that reduced the tax base. Such traditional “sin”
excises as those on cigarettes, liquor, and petroleum products continued to be important, and
more emphasis was given to improving the use of the property tax by local governments and
to imposing user charges on such excludible public services as irrigation and power. As before,
little or no attention was paid to payroll taxes or to non-tax revenue sources. Developing
countries continued to be urged not only to “tax better” but to “tax more.”
In reality, however, few developing countries increased their tax–GDP ratios during the post-
war decades. Moreover, although developments in theoretical and empirical public finance dur-
ing this period generally supported a greater reliance on consumption taxes, the relative
importance of “direct” (income) taxes and “indirect” (consumption) taxes also hardly changed
in developing countries, despite the rise of the VAT (Martinez-Vazquez, Vulovic, and Liu 2011).3
Although the tax–GDP ratio in developing countries moved from around 11 percent in
the 1950s to 16–17 percent by the 1970s, Table 15.1 shows that it has subsequently hardly
changed despite the adoption of much more ambitious goals in the UN Millennium Project
(2005). Developed countries collect roughly twice as much in taxes as a percentage of GDP,
and the imbalance is even greater with respect to non-tax revenues if oil producers are omit-
ted. Strikingly, however, if oil producers are included in the developing country group, the
share of non-tax revenues actually exceeds that of tax revenue mainly because of oil revenues.
Other important “supply-side” determinants of revenue levels are per capita GDP and the
non-agricultural share of GDP. Tax levels also reflect such “demand-side” variables as the
Table 15.1 Tax levels: revenues as a percentage of GDP a

Country groups 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s b
Industrialized 30.1 33.7 35.5 33.4

Developing 16.2 17.3 17.0 17.0
Total c
19.8 21.6 22.6 21.8
Notes: (a) decade averages for countries for which data are available. (b) based on data for the early
part of the decade (c) including “transitional” post-Soviet countries not included in either of the two
previous groups.
Source: Bahl and Bird (2008b), calculated from IMF data.
public finance in developing countries 261
quality of governance, inequality, the extent of informality, and tax morale (Bird, Martinez-
Vazquez, and Torgler 2008).
Although taxes on international trade as a percentage of total taxes in developing countries
declined from about 32 percent in the 1970s to recent levels of only about 20 percent, the share of
domestic indirect taxes, mainly the value added tax (VAT), rose from 25 percent to 40 percent
(Table 15.2). Taxes on personal income (including social security taxes) remain unimportant
compared to corporation tax. In contrast, in developed countries personal income and social
security taxes, which contribute about 50 percent of total tax revenue, are much more important
than taxes on corporate profits. The mix of taxes employed varies across regions as well as coun-
tries, with VAT being particularly important not only in the (usually poorer) sub-Saharan Afri-
can countries but in the considerably better-off (though unequal) Latin American countries.
The “sea change” in tax thought and tax advice from the 1970s to the 1990s appears to have
had some effect. Not only did VAT become important in many developing countries but
income tax rates declined almost everywhere (Peter, Buttrick, and Duncan 2010). If the
advice was sound, developing countries might now perhaps be considered to be taxing “bet-
ter” in some respects. However, they are definitely not taxing more since the average tax–
GDP ratio has hardly moved during the past thirty years. Arguably, as Kaldor (1963) noted
long ago, this striking inertia in tax levels may reflect not so much the inherent difficulty of
raising the effective level of taxation as the equally persistent reality that it is hardly ever in
the interest of the political elite to do so.
Public Finance Principles and Institutions
Public finance encompasses much more than taxes, and the array of goods and services
that are publicly provided varies even more widely than taxes across countries, depend-
ing on such things as preferences and the level of development. Nonetheless, a century
Table 15.2 Tax structures: tax categories as percentage of total taxes a

Income tax 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000sb
Developing 29.6 28.6 27.6 28.3
Total 30.7 30.2 29.7 28.5
Indirect taxes
Developing 25.2 29.3 34.9 40.1
Totalc 25.3 28.9 34.2 39.0
Taxes on international trade
Developing 32.4 30.7 25.6 19
Totalc 25.2 23.8 18.2 14.1
For table notes and source, see Table 15.1.

of thought and practice around the world has produced three commonly accepted prin-
ciples of good public finance.4
First, using resources to finance public services should not result in a sacrifice of private
value higher than the value of the public service produced. In other words, the last unit of
resources transferred to the public sector—the Marginal Cost of Funds (MCF) for public
services (in terms of the private goods forgone)5—should just equal the marginal social
benefit from expenditure on public services. Over time, this rule is closely related to the
practical budgetary principle of maintaining aggregate fiscal discipline to ensure that gov-
ernment spending does not exceed the resources that citizens (who presumably benefit
from the expenditures) are willing to allocate to it through the political process. If fiscal dis-
cipline is not maintained, countries may run large and persistent budget deficits—deficits
that both reflect serious underlying problems and make those problems worse the longer
necessary corrective action is delayed.6 One of the most important changes in recent dec-
ades is that an increasing number of countries that have undergone such experiences have
tried to reduce the likelihood of future indiscipline by establishing fiscal institutions, such
as more comprehensive and transparent budgets, as well as specific fiscal rules, such as fis-
cal responsibility laws (Liu and Webb 2011), that restrain the level and nature of government
borrowing.
Second, to maximize national economic welfare, the benefits received from the last dollar
spent on each public service should be equal. While it is impossible to allocate budgetary
resources this precisely—both because we cannot actually measure well-being with such
precision and because it is not clear how meaningfully one can compare the benefits from
the last dollar spent on the army to those from the last dollar spent on health—the idea is
both clear and correct. Resources are scarce in developing countries, so wasting those
resources by spending them on something worth less than the opportunities forgone is a
dead loss. In practice, the best way we know to improve the allocation of public resources is
to measure and assess both public-sector performance and the economic cost of public serv-
ices as well and as transparently as possible. To reflect the economic values of resources used
and outputs produced, governments need to use accrual accounting (with due recognition
given to the use of capital goods), just as private-sector firms must do in most countries.
Unfortunately, most developing countries still have only cash-based government accounts
as well as very weak institutions for budgeting and financial and performance auditing.7
Institutions that promote transparency and accountability are as essential as good electoral
systems to strengthening the ultimate development outcomes associated with public
services.
Third, such institutions are equally essential to securing an acceptable level of opera-
tional effectiveness and efficiency. In principle, services provided should promote the
intended social outcomes (effectiveness) with as little leakage or waste as possible (effi-
ciency). Again, however, few developing countries have such institutions in place.
Although agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank have devoted considerable effort
to providing technical assistance in developing such institutions in some countries, not
all that much success is yet evident. Moreover, developing a practical definition of public-
sector waste—an issue that is as important with respect to the need for public finance as
energy conservation is to the need for energy—does not as yet form part of the policy
agenda anywhere.
Some Issues in Development Finance
Although to some extent the second wave of development tax thinking mentioned earlier
led many countries to adopt tax regimes that were economically more sensible in important
ways, one consequence of the shift of attention to consumption taxes was that less attention
was paid to the issue of equity. This neglect was justified partly because of the evidence that
few countries did much redistribution through taxation (Chu, Davoodi, and Gupta 2000)
and partly because many believed it was more efficient and effective to deal with redistribu-
tion on the spending side of the budget. As always, however, both expert advice and prac-
tice varied widely in both time and space, so the few issues discussed here do not tell the
whole story.8
VAT
Although value added tax (VAT) was widely adopted, not all the VAT design principles advo-
cated (Ebrill et al. 2001) were widely followed. Most VATs do have a broad base encompass-
ing sales of both goods and services (with some exclusions) between businesses as well as
retail sales. However, few are levied at a single rate above a threshold that excludes small
business, and not all fall only on consumption (that is, provide full tax credits for capital
goods purchases and, for cross-border transactions, zero rating of exports). The tendency to
impose low thresholds is surprising, since not only is the administrative cost of securing rev-
enue from small taxpayers much higher per dollar but there is also strong evidence that tax
compliance costs are highly regressively distributed and have the strongest impact on small
businesses.9 There is still much to be learned about the design and effects of VAT in develop-
ing countries (Bird and Gendron 2007).
Income Taxes
Most countries lowered income tax rates. However, personal income taxes, though limited
in scope, continue to provide the most progressive element in most tax systems. Most coun-
tries provide exemptions for saving and other presumably good things, and tax different
income sources, especially types of capital income, at different rates. Such “schedular” taxa-
tion, as it is called, results in horizontally inequitable treatment of taxpayers, but it can be
administratively more effective and may have a sound economic rationale (Bird and Zolt
2011). A more difficult question remains the appropriate treatment of corporate profits, espe-
cially in countries with significant informal sectors and growing cross-border income flows.
Earmarking
Earmarking taxes to finance particular activities, though almost universally condemned by
tax experts, is widespread. Properly designed and implemented earmarked taxes may some-
times be justified as benefit taxes that act as a kind of collective user charge—gasoline taxes,
for instance—gathering revenue from those who use a public service in order to fund its
development. In this case, the benefits from the spending may perhaps be considered by the
beneficiaries to be worth at least the taxes they have to pay. However, most earmarking serves
no such allocative function (Bird and Jun 2007). Non-benefit-related earmarking is some-
times justified as establishing a link between taxes and public service spending, thus pre-
sumably improving tax morale (for example, an education tax was added to central taxes in
India to fund education). Although increasing morale is a good idea, such false connections
may end up increasing rather than reducing the distortionary effect of public finance policy.
Much the same can be said even when a “good” tax—one intended to ensure that buyers of
particular products take their full social costs into consideration—is earmarked to a related
“good” expenditure. An example is a “green” tax, like one on carbon-based fuel, linked, say,
to incentives to use wind instead of coal for power generation. It is difficult to calculate the
“right” level of either such taxes or such expenditures. Tying together two complex decisions
by funding one from the other is unlikely to make either budgetary decisions or policy out-
comes better.
Tax Evasion
Tax evasion looms large in developing countries, with negative consequences for economic
efficiency and equity. Evasion causes effective tax rates to differ on different activities, result-
ing in resource misallocation and equity violations. Business risks increase. Administrative
responses to evasion, such as requiring detailed record keeping or enhanced tax investiga-
tion activity, raise taxpayer compliance costs and efficiency losses. Agriculture, small busi-
ness, and the informal sector are always hard to tax properly and constitute a much larger
share of the potential tax base in developing countries (Alm, Martinez-Vazquez, and Wal-
lace 2004). One approach to this problem is simply to exclude very small activities from taxes
by imposing a high threshold. In the case of VAT, since those below the threshold (or unreg-
istered) do not receive input credits, those outside the system are in effect indirectly taxed. A
more explicit approach is to impose a simplified, usually presumptive, tax regime linking tax
liability to some business characteristic more readily observed than income, sales, or work
hours (such as location, assets, or profession). However, there is little evidence either that
most such systems are well designed in terms of relevant factors (such as business margins
and administrative and compliance costs) or that their effects on revenue, efficiency, and
distributional goals are desirable.
It is not always easy to distinguish tax evasion (illegal activity) from tax avoidance (legal
ways to reduce taxes, for example by splitting income or structuring transactions to produce
more favorable tax results). Tax avoidance is more important with respect to wealthy fami-
lies and formal sector firms, particularly those with cross-border transactions. The battle to
close tax loopholes and the continuous need to patrol the borderline of legality means that
even the poorest countries often need at least some of their “best and brightest” public offi-
cials in the tax department. Nonetheless, the key elements in countering tax evasion are sim-
ple: good tax design, a capable tax administration, a supportive legal system, and at least a
modicum of trust between the state and its citizens. Good tax design includes collecting nec-
essary information through withholding and in other ways, as well as the appropriate design
of thresholds, penalty systems, and, where appropriate, presumptive features. A capable tax
administration is needed to utilize information effectively and to take appropriate action. If

taxpayers fail to comply, administrative controls and penalties come into play. If taxes are
simply not paid, actions need to be taken to intercept income streams or confiscate assets as
necessary. Especially critical though often lacking is audit capacity, which requires skilled
(and scarce) staff resources. Finally, for even the best administration to be effective, it needs
to be supported by a sound legal system and to operate in an environment that does not
require it to face outright opposition from all its actual and potential “clients.”
Tax Administration
In the end, controlling tax evasion depends on sound tax administration. As economic real-
ity changes with development, so must tax administration.10 In recent years, the most dra-
matic changes have been in the use of information technology (IT), not only in automating
most tax records and procedures but in becoming the main interface between taxpayers and
the tax administration. Increasingly, countries are moving to web-based systems of filing
and payment, and making more use of IT’s capacity to develop and apply risk-based audit
systems that enable them to concentrate scarce administrative resources on those taxpayers
and activities most likely to cause difficulties, and to strengthen internal control systems to
ensure that tax officials behave properly in their relations with taxpayers.11 Other elements of
“smart” tax administration include an emphasis on establishing good working relations with
both the immediate “clients”—that is, the businesses that actually collect and remit most
taxes—and with the ultimate client, the public in general, as well as with others engaged in
similar activities both within the country—for example, separate customs departments or
state pension funds or sub-national tax authorities that deal with many of the same clients—
and tax departments at the other end of cross-border transactions. Some countries have uni-
fied all their revenue collecting departments; some have converted their tax departments
into independent revenue authorities (generally to permit greater managerial flexibility and
to delink salaries from those of the general civil service); yet others have, without going so far
as to revert to the “tax farming” of early modern Europe, outsourced some functions to the
private sector to various degrees. When examined closely, tax administration at the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century is a surprisingly dynamic and innovative industry and
remains a challenging and important task for developing countries.
Non-tax Revenues
Every country collects revenue from sources other than taxation: indeed, in some, notably
oil-producing countries, non-tax revenues may exceed tax revenues. However, surprisingly
little effort has been made to think most non-tax revenue issues through systematically.
Some points are obvious. For example, when government is a monopolistic provider (of
assets, use rights, or services) and consumption is voluntary, in principle prices should be set
to cause as little efficiency loss as possible, with each revenue source being exploited to the
point at which its MCF equals that of every other source (given overall revenue require-
ments). Examples include the sale or lease of mining rights, forest exploitation, and airwave
spectrum as well as seignorage. Since government is the sole supplier of the monetary base in
most countries, it reaps revenue—seignorage—from doing so (Buiter 2007) and may, in
principle, even impose an inflation tax (a tax on holders of money) up to the point at which
the MCF of doing so is equal to that of other revenue sources. Although one may not wish to
emphasize this particular point to governments that are already, in most cases, finding it all
too difficult to maintain aggregate fiscal (and monetary) discipline, the general rule about
exploiting monopoly pricing powers as a revenue source through the auctioning off “rights”
to resources in as competitive a market framework as possible needs more attention than it
has usually received in developing countries.
Countries rich in natural resources whose governments need not rely on taxation are some-
times said to suffer from a “natural resource curse,” in the sense that ownership of revenue
sources makes governments less accountable to citizens, leading to poor governance institu-
tions (Collier 2007). In principle, however, resources can be a blessing rather than a curse, if use
rights to resources are properly priced both in terms of their initial allocation—as by auction-
ing use rights rather than allocating them to friends (or those who pay the largest bribes)—and
proper public-sector pricing rules are applied as resources are exploited. Of course, even if the
MCF of natural resource earnings (taking into account their effect on weakening governance
institutions) could be properly calculated, it is difficult to imagine that rational politicians
would ever prefer to tax citizens directly rather than tax resource revenues.
In practice, often the most immediate public finance issue facing resource-rich countries
is not how much to exploit their advantages—they tend to figure this out fairly well—but
rather how to use the revenue once they have it: for example, whether to use it all for current
expenditure—sometimes for current subsidies (to fuel, for instance), sometimes, more sen-
sibly, for asset (including human capital) creation—or to put some of it aside (that is, invest
it abroad) for the “rainy days” that reliance on volatile resource prices often entail.12
Whether commercial exploitation of natural resources, both renewable (such as from for-
ests) and non-renewable (oil), is undertaken by the public or private sector, it is important to
capture economic rents from resource exploitation for public purposes. Reliance on corpo-
ration taxes and royalties may not do this, with royalties in particular being economically
inefficient. Developing countries have in recent decades adopted a variety of methods to
capture resource rents such as special “windfall” taxes linked to excess profits or production,
equity participation by the host government, improved assessment of multinational profits
(by curbing transfer pricing abuses), and attempting to encourage local value added by
imposing export taxes on unprocessed natural resources. Of the different methods of cap-
turing resource rents, auctioning of exploitation rights, cash flow taxes with full loss offsets,
and government equity participation are, in the absence of environmental externalities, least
inefficient in economic terms, and the first two can, in principle, ensure that all economic
rents are captured by the government (Boadway and Flatters 1993). In practice, however,
since it is hard to achieve theoretically ideal auctions and cash flow taxes, and equity partici-
pation at best permits partial capture of economic rents, production royalties, export taxes,
and leases for exploitation rights are widely used, with efficiency and fuller rent capture being
traded for more certain revenue.
Debt Finance
Most governments finance some spending by borrowing, which may make good sense when
the funds are used for investments that generate returns sufficient to cover the costs of
borrowing.13 The main costs of debt finance are “crowding out” private investment and the
fact that the interest burden of debt pre-empts resources for public services. Excessive debt
finance can all too quickly become unsustainable and lead to excessive inflation when bor-
rowing is domestic (ultimately financed by central bank monetary emission) and, when the
resources have been borrowed from foreign lenders, even to the equivalent of government
bankruptcy. Defaults in such cases often need bailout support from international institu-
tions that require the imposition of austerity programs in exchange. The consequent adverse
impact on a country’s income and consumption standards is often attributed proximately to
the foreign demands but ultimately results from the original excessive recourse to debt
finance.
International bailouts of heavily indebted countries are always difficult not only to arrange
but to assess, owing to the need to balance the costs of imposed austerity on citizens of
affected countries against the costs to the world as a whole arising from the increased moral
hazard of future bailouts if the consequences of fiscally irresponsible behavior are unduly
softened. There are far too many unknowns in this area for anyone to be able to assess with
any confidence the appropriate MCF of debt finance, which is one reason why countries
should have recourse to such finance only with care and within strict limits.
Fiscal Decentralization
Fiscal decentralization has in recent years become a concern in many developing countries.
In economic terms, the most important benefit from decentralization is the increased effi-
ciency (and consequent welfare gain) that comes from moving governance closer to the peo-
ple. Some have gone further and argued that fiscal decentralization may improve welfare not
only directly but also by contributing to economic development, revenue mobilization,
innovation in public service delivery, accountability of elected officials, local government
capacity development, and grassroots participation in governance.
To attain such benefits from decentralization, sub-national governments ideally must
have the power to control their employees and local residents must have the power to control
their governments (normally through elections). Moreover, there must be sufficiently accu-
rate information to enable voters to evaluate the fiscal decisions of their local governments as
well as sufficient incentive and interest for them to exercise their power responsibly. Unfor-
tunately, in many developing countries few if any of these conditions are satisfied. In fact the
sub-national tax share in total taxes in developing countries is less than half the share in
industrialized countries and has hardly changed in the last thirty years (Bahl and Bird
2008a). Most subnational spending in developing countries is financed through transfers,
and the few taxes that sub-national governments have are often costly and difficult to
administer.
This is consistent with the traditional theory of fiscal federalism, which prescribes a very
limited tax base for subnational governments. The only good local taxes are said to be those
that are easy to administer locally, are imposed solely (or mainly) on local residents, and do
not raise problems of harmonization or competition between subnational—local or
regional—governments or between subnational and national governments. The only major
r evenue source that passes these stringent tests is usually the property tax, with perhaps a
secondary role for taxes on vehicles and user charges and fees.
There are good reasons why central governments are often reluctant to give much tax dis-
cretion to local governments. They may fear losing macroeconomic control. Fiscal decen-
tralization may shift resources from central governments that have higher rates of capital
spending to regional and local governments that spend relatively more on consumption
goods and services, thus harming national growth. Decentralization may shift the composi-
tion of public capital investments away from national priorities. Moreover, if fiscal decen-
tralization takes the path of increasing reliance on own source revenues, then local
governments with greater fiscal capacity—such as large cities in which there is both a larger
tax base that is easier to reach and a better chance of developing the administrative capacity
to collect taxes—gain most, and regional inequality is likely to increase. Revenue decentrali-
zation may also increase administrative and compliance costs.
Nonetheless, recent reappraisals of fiscal decentralization make a strong case for increas-
ing local tax autonomy (Weingast 2009). Local residents are likely to hold officials more
accountable if local public services are financed to a significant extent not from central gov-
ernment transfers but from locally imposed taxes and charges that they (local residents)
must pay. Local taxes should both be visible to local voters and large enough to impose a
noticeable burden (one that cannot be easily exported to non-residents). Reliance on own-
source taxes also has the important advantage of imposing fiscal discipline on sub-national
governments. Requiring local governments to finance a greater share of financing from
own revenue sources drives up the tax price of public services and hence tends to reduce
upward pressure on sub-national government expenditures. In contrast, heavy reliance on
intergovernmental transfers—the common situation in most developing countries—has
the opposite effect of expanding local demand for increased public services (financed
largely by others) unless care is devoted to ensuring that transfers have no effects at the
spending margin. Unless local governments have sufficient freedom to alter the level and
composition of their revenues, neither local autonomy nor local accountability is likely to
be achieved.14
Some Open Questions
The Choice of Revenue Instruments

Tax experts now understand fairly well the efficiency aspects of taxation even in the far from
optimal—second-best and third-best—worlds in which real policy operates. However,
though sometimes technically brilliant, little of this work has had much impact on practical
policy design, in part because as yet only preliminary efforts have been made to incorporate
limitations on administrative capacity into the analysis. Applied tax policy practitioners,
such as those from the IMF and the World Bank, necessarily continue to rely to a considera-
ble extent on more pragmatic “expert practice” rules to guide policy. Unfortunately, some
such practices are based more on authority than on evidence for support. Moreover, even
when both theory and empirical evidence support recommendations—as, for example, for
relatively high VAT thresholds (Keen and Mintz 2004) and very limited use of tax incentives
(Klemm and Van Parys 2012)—such advice is often ignored.
Other examples are not hard to find. For instance, the use of selective consumption taxes
on presumed “luxury” goods as a means of indirectly taxing the rich in an effort to increase
progressivity has long been suggested (Musgrave 1969). However, not all such goods are
consumed by the rich, and even to the extent they are, the final incidence of such taxes need
not fall entirely on the rich, so whether such taxes do much to increase progressivity is open
to question.15 Much the same can be said about such other common features of indirect
taxes as exempting or subjecting to lower rates such basics as food and fuel: studies have
shown that concessions to fuel are generally highly regressive, while most of the benefit
from concessions to food also accrues to the non-poor. Sometimes it may still seem sensible
to provide relief in this distortionary (inefficient) and relatively ineffective way rather than
not at all, but such delicate trade-offs between equity and economic and administrative effi-
ciency are almost invariably necessarily made more on the basis of judgment than hard evi-
dence. Although user charges and taxes on negative externalities (like carbon taxes) may be
both more attractive in efficiency terms and even have distributionally attractive effects to
some extent, little careful country-specific research has been done either on the economics
of such sources or on why countries at all levels of development have been so reluctant to
utilize them.
Globalization and National Tax Bases

With countries increasingly engaging in cross-border economic relations, the expansion of
what may be called the global fiscal commons—potentially taxable entities or transactions
with some characteristics involving more than one jurisdiction—gives rise to both risks and
opportunities. The global fiscal commons in this sense includes multinational business,
“footloose” industries, cross-border portfolio investors, FDI investors, and mobile skilled
workers or professionals as well as those engaged in illicit activities such as the drug trade.
There are no universally accepted norms for sharing property rights in the fiscal commons
between countries (Bird and Mintz 2003). In practice, the main ways in which tax access to
property rights are currently shared are through a network of bilateral income tax treaties,
most of which are patterned on OECD or UN model treaties (Das-Gupta 2012). National tax
base erosion in the commons occurs when the combination of tax treaties and particular tax
policies in countries other than “legitimate” source or residence countries—tax havens—al-
lows cross-border flows to move out of the legitimate tax base. Led by the OECD (1998),
coordinated international action against tax havens and international administrative coor-
dination against cross-border tax evasion have become important features of international
taxation. However, economic assessment of the impact of these developments on, for exam-
ple, international economic efficiency or developing country tax bases is still limited.16
A persistent feature of international taxation is the continuing taxation of cross-border
income and trade flows by origin countries—on “entitlement” or simple “possession”
grounds—even though widely accepted tax principles advocate destination taxes. Origin-
based taxation (for example, through source withholding taxes) is not only administratively
simpler for countries facing capacity limitations, but may be one way to limit international
tax base erosion. An important question is therefore whether, and under what circumstances,
it may make sense for countries, individually and jointly, to tax more on an origin (source)
than on a destination (residence) basis. Although tax experts have long argued that the desti-
nation basis is economically superior from the perspective of the world as a whole, there are
no conclusive arguments or evidence demonstrating that this is the best possible outcome
for all, let alone for developing countries either individually or as a group. Further explora-
tion of this fundamental question about how best to deal with the fiscal reality of the global
fiscal commons in the absence of any encompassing international governance structure
remains a high priority issue. Immediate resolution seems unlikely, however, since it is far
from clear that it is possible (let alone fruitful) to discuss the “global” efficiency or equity of
the international fiscal system when there is no international fiscal system.
Global Taxes
Nonetheless, the recent financial crisis has led to a revival of interest in the possible desirabil-
ity of taxes on financial activity (particularly international financial activity) or on financial
institutions, with major reports from organizations, national governments, and NGOs play-
ing a prominent role in this debate.17 As yet, however, little is really known about how such
taxes might work in situations where both national and international financial regulatory
systems are in flux and where countries have been unable to work out how to tax financial
sector activities even within their domestic VAT systems (Boadway and Keen 2003).
Such global tax proposals include, besides taxes on currency transactions or financial
institutions, taxes on carbon emissions, multinational profits, and even airline tickets. With
improvements in information technology and more sophisticated global financial institu-
tions, such taxes may now be feasible (Schmidt and Bhushan 2011), but little is known about
their effectiveness and economic impact. Tobin (1978) originally proposed setting an inter-
nationally coordinated (low) rate with collection and use of tax revenue by the levying coun-
try; his focus was on the policy impact of the tax itself and not on the revenue from the tax.
Other proposals see such taxes as a means of enhancing financial resources for global public
goods, including environmental protection, poverty alleviation, and health programs,
through new or existing multilateral institutions. The more extreme proposals even suggest
tax collection by a (nonexistent) global taxing authority. The prospect that a sufficient
number of countries will agree to such a global tax seems limited, particularly if collection is
to be by a global tax authority.
A more multilateral approach has been taken with respect to the international aspects of
indirect taxation. With World Trade Organization (WTO) coordination, taxes on interna-
tional trade in goods and also to a limited extent on certain services have been gradually
reduced worldwide, leading to greatly increased international trade. Unfortunately, since
border taxes on trade were easily collected even by weak fiscal administrations, they were an
especially important revenue source for poor countries and the evidence is that some coun-
tries have proved unable to replace trade tax revenues from other sources (Baunsgaard and
Keen 2010). The only answer for such countries may be again to impose higher taxes on
cross-border trade in one way or another. As Stiglitz (2010) suggests, in some circumstances
it may even be efficient as well as effective for them to do so. In practice, however, no one has
yet worked out the details of a feasible and desirable strategy to restore the lost fiscal base of
poor countries without forgoing most benefits of trade liberalization.
Is Advice Useful?
One lesson has clearly been learned over the last fifty years: “no one size fits all” with respect
to public finance in developing countries. Revenue analysis and prescription needs to be tai-
lored to fit the specific circumstances of each country, taking into account such critical fac-
tors as the interaction between taxes and other public policies (including transfers and the
regulatory framework), the number of tiers of government and the institutions shaping
intergovernmental relations, and the extent of globalization. Close attention also needs to be
paid to the specific reform environment and process. The quality of administration and level
of development are key considerations, as is the extent of political support for reform and
local ownership of reform by such key stakeholders as fiscal professionals (accountants,
economists, and lawyers), elites, taxpayers more generally, and, not least, critical third par-
ties involved in the taxing process such as banks.
Despite these cautions, some broad public finance lessons have emerged from past
experience:
• Fiscal indiscipline as manifested in persistent and large budget deficits (or surpluses)
has large economic growth costs.
• To avoid this outcome, good institutions for both the revenue and spending sides of
the public sector are crucial.
• Good revenue structures for developing countries tend to include a broad-based indi-
rect tax, typically VAT, supplemented by selective excises, income taxes on corpora-
tions and individuals, and some non-tax revenues from areas where the public sector
has monopoly power. Tax concessions on the one hand and high rates on the other are
to be avoided. Recourse to debt finance should be limited to the extent possible.
• Decentralization and local governments still tend to be neglected. Enhancing local
government revenue capacity so that a greater share of local spending is financed by
own revenue may have efficiency and accountability benefits.
• No country can develop its public finance system without taking into account the
increasingly important international dimension of public policy.
In the long term, sustained efforts focused on building institutional policy development and
implementation capacity, both within and outside government, and collecting and analyz-
ing information to assess the impact of fiscal reforms appear to be the best—perhaps the
only—way countries can develop sustainable fiscal systems. History tells us that this process
takes time and much effort, and that each country must find and follow its own path to suc-
cess within the evolving international setting.
Notes
1. Tilly (1990) was particularly influential in this respect in leading scholars interested in
political economy aspects to focus more on fiscal questions, as in the studies included in
Brautigam, Fjeldstad, and Moore (2007) and Martin, Mehrotra, and Prasad (2009).
2. A more detailed appraisal of tax thought and practice in developing countries over the
last fifty years may be found in Bird (2011).
3. Direct taxes include social security taxes, which are much more important in developed
than in developing countries; indirect taxes include excises, which, like customs duties,
generally declined in relative importance in all countries.
4. An introduction is in Das-Gupta (2010); for the basic theory, see Slemrod and Yitzhaki
(2001) and for the practitioner’s perspective, see Schiavo-Campo and Tommasi (1999)
and Diamond (2006).
5. For full discussion of this concept, see Dahlby (2008).
6. The less common practice of running large and persistent budget surpluses—found
sometimes in natural resource-rich countries—is also mistaken in the sense that the
public sector is pre-empting national resources without providing any compensating
value. Although channeling resources from variable sources like mining revenues into a
stabilization fund to smooth public spending over time often makes sense, the discipline
required to do so seems to be as hard to achieve as to maintain aggregate fiscal discipline
in general.
7. For discussion, see Athukorala and Reid (2003). It is essential to keep a close eye on the
flow of cash through the public sector to reduce peculation, but the best way to do so is
not to revert to cash accounting but to establish a single treasury account to which all
revenue flows and from which all expenditure comes.
8. For useful reviews of the relation between tax theory, tax advice, and practice from dif-
ferent perspectives over the years, see Goode (1993), Barbone et al. (1999), Stewart and
Jogarajan (2004), and Bahl and Bird (2008b). On the whole, an early conclusion about
the relationship between theory, empirical evidence, and policy advice still holds: “Since
the scientific validation of reform proposals is beyond anyone’s reach, all that remains is
a cheerful pragmatism grounded only on a mixture of professional commitment and
ethical judgment” (Toye 1989: 198–9).
9. Counterbalancing these arguments, the higher the threshold the greater the differentia-
tion between those in the VAT net and those outside it: the result may be increased risk
(and ease) of evasion.
10. For discussion, see Bird and Casanegra de Jantscher (1992), Das-Gupta (2002), and Has-
seldine (2011).
11. Historically, controlling corruption associated with taxation has always been a central
concern of governments (Webber and Wildavsky 1986). However, reliable estimates of
the revenue effects or economic costs of corruption are hard to find, and other than such
broad prescriptions as simplifying the tax system, reducing the administrative discretion
of officials, and increasing independent monitoring, many aspects of how to reduce the
corruption-proneness of revenue systems remain poorly understood.
12. Few countries manage such issues as well as Singapore, which (despite its lack of any
natural resource base) has had fiscal surpluses in most years since its inception, and has
carefully balanced its use of these surpluses between asset creation and general and con-
ditional current transfers to citizens.
13. A recent trend in the provision of public services is through outsourcing debt to some
form of “public–private partnerships” such as private finance initiatives (PFI). The idea
is to add to resources for public services while transferring fiscal expenditure risk to a
private partner which recovers its costs by charging users for the service (which means
that services financed through a PFI must be excludible). Unfortunately, such arrange-
ments have sometimes been used to hide what is really public-sector borrowing (since
the public sector bears the risks) or to enrich favored investors rather than to serve the
public interest. All too often, such arrangements are as difficult to structure properly
from the perspective of risk-bearing as to understand from an accountability perspective
(Ménard 2011).
14. A potential danger in permitting local governments even limited freedom to tax is that
they may not utilize fully all the revenue sources open to them for fear of fiscal competi-
tion or adverse political consequences, thus allowing the level and quality of public serv-
ices to deteriorate—the infamous “race to the bottom.” As Bird and Smart (2002) show,
however, this problem can largely be obviated by the proper design of intergovernmental
transfers. For further discussion of transfer policy, see Boadway and Shah (2009).
15. On the weak case for taxing luxuries, see Cnossen (2012). Indeed, cosmetics and similar
“small luxuries” may even may be considered “aspirational goods” for the poor, to the
point that (as in the Philippines) taxing such items may itself be regressive.
16. For a sample of the large literature discussing international taxation, see Lodin (2002),
Muten (2002), and McLure (2006).
17. See Gurría (2009), International Monetary Fund (2010), European Commission (2010),
and Schmidt and Bhushan (2011).
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chapter 16
th e evolv i ng pa r a digms
of struct u r a l ch a nge
justin yifu lin and célestin monga
Introduction
In Molière’s celebrated play The Bourgeois Gentleman, the climactic joke occurs when Mr
Jourdain, the main character, realizes that he has “been speaking prose all [his] life, and
didn’t even know it!” Macroeconomists may have reached a similar point in their pursuit of
growth and poverty reduction recipes: regardless of their stated objectives and areas of spe-
cialization, they may have been just searching for the blueprint of structural change without
knowing it. Suffice it to observe the evolution of the discipline since it emerged as a specific
intellectual entity in the mid-twentieth century: whether they have been studying the role of
monetary and fiscal policies, the nature and importance of markets and states, or the appro-
priateness of the regulatory framework and other institutions, researchers and policy mak-
ers are mainly trying to decipher the “mystery of growth” (Helpman 2004)—the economic
dynamics that eventually transform the economic landscape and the deep nature of societies
and nations.
Their quest has not been a smooth endeavor. The strategic focus of their work has often
shifted from long-run to short-run issues. Classical economists such as Adam Smith, Alfred
Marshall, and Allyn Young attempted to identify the ingredients required to ignite and sus-
tain growth. But after the Second World War, the discipline moved to the study of business
cycles and remained there through most of the 1970s. With the notable exception of the
pioneering work of Robert Solow, for much of the twentieth century macroeconomists
tended to study business cycles issues that characterized the post-war period. As they tried
to better understand stabilization policies—monetary and fiscal measures to avoid disrup-
tive and costly inflation—few resources were devoted to the analysis of the long-run deter-
minants of growth. While there has been renewed interest in growth research in recent
decades, the economic literature has not focused on making clear the linkages between
growth and economic transformation. As a result, the impressive advances in methodology
have not led to a consensus on the policies that allow some economies to evolve from low-
to high-income status.
278 justin yifu lin and célestin monga
Structural change occurs in all countries, not just “developing” ones. But initial research
about it was limited to high-income countries, for good reasons: with the advent of the
Industrial Revolution and the economic takeoff of some countries in the Western hemi-
sphere, the magnitude of transformation in Britain, the United States, France, or Germany
was such that it was indeed fascinating to uncover the mechanics at work there. Research on
that topic was also taking place in Japan, most notably with the work of economists such as
Kaname Akamatsu. The economic trajectories of lower-income countries of Asia, Latin
America, and Africa became the subject of systematic analysis only in the 1940s and 1950s,
when development thinking emerged as a particular branch of economics.
It was then clear that modern economic development is a process of continuous change in
economic structure. Successful countries also exhibited profound structural changes. This
was subsequently confirmed by empirical evidence in the work of pioneers such as Simon
Kuznets, Hollis Chenery, and Moses Syrquin. In fact, virtually no country evolved from a
low- to a high-income status without simultaneously transforming its economy from agrar-
ian or resource-based towards an industry- or services-based economy. Therefore, the main
intellectual challenge for economics was (and remains) to understand why so few countries
have managed to engineer such structural transformation.
The economic notion of “structures”1 has evolved over the decades to cover both macro
and micro issues, and to hold different meanings. In the 1940s, a first wave of researchers
working on low-income countries conceived development to be an interrelated set of long-
run processes. Their focus was therefore on structural change in production structure and
on economy-wide phenomena such as agricultural transformation, industrialization, urban-
ization, and “modernization.” Leading that group, Kuznets (1966) studied the genesis and
patterns of evolution of modern economic growth in high-income countries and approached
structural analysis mainly through the lens of sectoral changes—that is, the evolution over
time of the relative contributions of agriculture, industry, and services to gross domestic
product (Syrquin 1988).
A second wave of development thinking dominated policy making in low-income coun-
tries in the 1980s and 1990s, and tackled structural analysis indirectly. Like Mr Jourdain in
Molière’s play, economists in that group approached structural change almost inadvertently,
through broad examination of the general functioning of economies, their markets, institu-
tions, mechanisms for allocating resources, regulatory and incentives systems, etc. The pro-
ponents of the “structural” adjustment programs implemented in many developing countries
viewed the restoration of external and domestic balances as an essential precondition for
launching the process of economic transformation and change.
A third and more recent wave of the development literature has sought to refine structural
analysis and bring back on the agenda some of the specific issues of the process of economic
transformation: a rethinking of the distribution of roles between the government and the
private sector; the strategic selection of competitive industries according to the comparative
advantage of developing countries; the determinants of the dynamics of sectoral contribu-
tions to growth; the evolution of the capital intensity of sectors over time—within and across
countries; the factors that help or hinder the reallocation of resources from low- to high-
productivity sectors and the policy environment that facilitates such changes; the processes
that allow economies to move up the value chain; the various ways of organizing and foster-
ing the adaptation and adoption of new technologies in poor countries; the determinants of
a country’s ability to create employment; and the institutional arrangements that are
the evolving paradigms of structural change 279
ecessary to support structural transformation, especially in the context of low-income

n
countries where infrastructure, skills, and long-term financing are scarce.
The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: The next section reviews the initial
focus of early economic structuralists on market failures and highlights their sometimes dis-
appointing results. The following section explains how the second wave came to dominate
policy discussions in developing countries, but also failed to generate sustained and inclu-
sive growth. The final section introduces the third and latest wave of analysis on structural
change, which draws lessons and inspiration from all previous intellectual currents. It
stresses the notion that underdevelopment should no longer be viewed as a lack of some
indispensable factor (human capital, physical capital, financing, administrative capacity,
governance, etc.) but as the reflection of development strategies that were not centered on
comparative advantage of the existing endowment structure.
First Wave: The Focus on Market Failures
Early development economists2 borrowed the notion of “structures” from other social scien-
tists in the 1940s. They used it to design a first set of theories for growth and prosperity. Their
focus was on market failures, which they identified as fundamental constraints to structural
change in developing countries. They advocated state-led industrialization and inward-
looking policies to achieve the modernization of poor countries. We refer to that early
approach as “Development Economics 1.0.”
While numerous variants of early economic structuralism3 can be traced to a very diverse
body of work that spans over a century (from Karl Marx, David Ricardo, and John Maynard
Keynes to Michal Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Richard Nelson, and Sidney Winter), the funda-
mental assumption of all its various schools of thought is that “an economy’s institutions and
distributional relationships across its productive sectors and social groups play essential
roles in determining macro behavior” (Taylor 2004: 1). They initially put forth the proposi-
tion that the world economy was composed of two poles (a homogeneous and diversified
“center” facing a heterogeneous and specialized “periphery”) with fundamentally different
production structures.
They identified economic activities of a very different nature that existed side by side in
the “periphery” (developing countries), with an export sector of relatively high productivity
of labor, and a subsistence agricultural sector of very low productivity. They hypothesized
that poor economies had to specialize in the production of a few commodities whose exploi-
tation could not generate any forward or backward linkages. They conjectured that poor
economies were trapped into an external disequilibrium and could occupy only a marginal
space on the international scene (especially given the long-term trend of declining terms of
trade). As a result, they argued, these peripheral economies would not undergo the kind of
transformation process that leads to modernization and prosperity.
Early structuralists also argued that because of structural rigidities and coordination
problems in developing country markets, the modern heavy industries were unable to
develop spontaneously there. They suggested that the virtuous circle of development
depended essentially on the interaction between economies of scale at the level of individual
firms and the size of the market. Specifically, they assumed that modern methods of produc-
tion can be made more productive than traditional ones only if the market is large enough
for their productivity edge to compensate for the necessity of paying higher wages. Yet the
size of the market itself depended on the extent to which these modern techniques were
adopted. Therefore, if the modernization process could be started on a very large scale, then
the process of economic development would be self-reinforcing and self-sustaining. If not,
countries would be trapped in poverty indefinitely (Rosenstein-Rodan 1943).
The focus on economic structures across all the currents of structuralism was always in
sharp contrast to the initial neoclassical thinking, which assumed the existence of rational
actors in perfectly competitive markets and emphasized only the need for well-functioning
markets and institutions. As Gibson observes, “For orthodox economists, why the advanced
countries were rich and the developing economies were poor depended only upon the
amount of capital per unit of labor and subsequent labor productivity. Both could increase
their income per capita by the same means, and relatively independently. The world as a
whole would be better off with free trade with both poles pursuing their own comparative
advantage.” (Gibson 2003: 55). In other words, early structural economics aimed at building
a theoretical framework for thinking about development with stronger ethical foundations
and more realistic assumptions, some of which were subsequently acknowledged by neo-
classical economists.4
The distinguishing feature of their framework was the notion that macroeconomics must
relate to the institutional structure of an economy and the perceived behavioral patterns of
households and firms, and that economics must be constructed directly in terms of aggre-
gates such as household consumption, business investment, total exports, etc., not from
optimizing decisions made by individual “agents,” These features stood in sharp contrast to
the basic assumption of neoclassical economics—the mainstream interpretation of Adam
Smith—that businesses and consumers act rationally to maximize in one case their own
profits, and in the other case their own welfare. As Chenery later observed, “The structuralist
approach attempts to identify specific rigidities, lags, and other characteristics of the struc-
ture of developing economies that affect economic adjustments and the choice of develop-
ment policy2” (1975: 310). Initially, there was no formal modeling, but the so-called dual
economy and two-gap models gradually came to express the different internal structures in
low- and high-income countries. In reaction to strong challenges and criticism from neo-
classical economists, later generations of structuralists improved the initial theoretical
framework—and branded themselves “neo-structuralists” in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Why didn’t early structuralists express their views more systematically in formal models?
Some of them were skeptical of econometrics for the reason that classical statistical theory
tends to impose stringent requirements on data—especially good time series—that were not
always available in many developing countries. Moreover, early structuralists wanted to
explain complex economic phenomena, which could not be captured realistically using
models with one, two, or very few variables in so-called “reduced form.” Another possible
explanation offered by Krugman, Cooper, and Srinivasan (1995) is that their theories rested
critically on the assumption of economies of scale, which virtually nobody at the time knew
how to put into formal models. The essential theoretical problem they faced was that of mar-
ket structure. For nearly a century (at least until the mid-1970s), economists only really knew
how to model formally perfectly competitive economies, those in which firms take prices as
given rather than actively trying to affect them. There was a standard theory of the behavior
of an individual monopolist who faced no comparably-sized competitors, but there was no

general theory of how oligopolists (firms that have substantial market power but also face
large rivals) would set prices and output. Moreover, there was no general approach to mode-
ling the aggregate behavior of a whole economy largely peopled by oligopolistic rather than
perfectly competitive industries. Only since the mid-1970s have economists overcome such
methodological barriers, and in a number of fields: international trade, economic growth,
and, finally, development. But the limited use of formal models certainly helped invalidate
the work of many pioneers of development thinking.5
There was broad agreement within the various groups of early structuralist economists on
the diagnostic that market failures were the main problem of developing countries. How-
ever, there was divergence as to what specific policies to implement in order to break out of
the trap and start the virtuous cycle. Rosenstein-Rodan seemed to indicate that a “Big Push”
(large and coordinated government investment program) was the solution. Others such as
Hirschman (1958) suggested instead an “unbalanced” approach to growth, that is, the pro-
motion of key economic sectors with strong linkages, and subsequent correction of the dise-
quilibrium generated in other sectors by these investments. Still, many developing country
governments regarded economic growth as their direct and prime responsibility. Eventually,
many influential multilateral institutions such as the World Bank adopted structuralist eco-
nomic thinking in their approach to development.
While some developing countries that adopted policies from the early structuralists man-
aged to launch their industrialization programs and build human capital, the results were
generally disappointing. Instead of undergoing the kind of structural changes described by
Kuznets and converging to the developed countries’ income levels, most developing coun-
tries stagnated or even witnessed a deterioration of their income gap with developed coun-
tries. In many developing countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South
Asia, well-intended government interventions failed in the 1960s and 1970s when import
substitution and protection were essential features of the development strategy. The main
reason was the pervasive involvement of the state in activities that were far from their coun-
try’s comparative advantage.
Many former socialist and developing countries could not achieve structural transforma-
tion because they gave priority to the development of capital-intensive heavy industry in the
1950s, when capital in their economies was scarce. In order to implement a development
strategy that defies its comparative advantage, a developing-country government has to pro-
tect numerous non-viable enterprises; however, because these governments usually have
limited tax-collection capacities, such large-scale protection and subsidies could not be sus-
tained with their limited fiscal resources. The government had to resort to administrative
measures—granting the non-viable enterprises in prioritized industries a market monopoly,
suppressing interest rates, over-valuing domestic currency, and controlling prices for raw
materials—to reduce the costs of investment and operation of the non-viable enterprises.
Such intervention caused widespread shortages in funds, foreign exchange, and raw materi-
als. The government had to allocate resources directly to these enterprises through adminis-
trative channels, including national planning in the socialist countries and credit rationing,
investment, and entry licensing in non-socialist developing countries (Lin 2009).
As government-led economic development strategies, based on the early structuralist
teachings, failed in many countries, neoclassical economics appeared to triumph and to
influence development thinking. Not surprisingly, its focus was on government failures.
Second Wave: The Focus

on Government Failures
The failure of the first wave of early structuralist economics to achieve its stated aim of elimi-
nating the income gap between poor and rich countries led to the return of neoclassical
orthodoxy in development thinking in the 1970s and 1980s. In the aftermath of the first oil
shock and a radical questioning of Keynesian economics, a group of development experts—
mainly within the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—redefined the recipe
for sustained growth and structural changes in poor countries as a two-pronged strategy
involving macroeconomic stabilization and structural adjustment policies. That new frame-
work, which came to be known as the Washington Consensus, represented the second wave
of development thinking—“Development Economics 2.0.” While it underwent some varia-
tions, it became the blueprint for economic transformation in many developing countries.
Unfortunately, its results were also disappointing.
Development Economics 2.0: The Reinvention of Orthodoxy

The rationale for the change in the development paradigm was based on a neoclassical inter-
pretation of the economic trajectories of most poor countries that attempted state-led indus-
trialization strategies and the “dirigist dogma” (Lal 1985) advocated by the structuralists.
That story of the failure of these previous experiences focused on government failures. It
went something like this: in the early 1960s, most of the newly independent countries bene-
fited from a rapid rise in the value of their exports, which led to an increase in their foreign
exchange and government revenues. That surge in income stimulated ambitious public poli-
cies aimed at increasing both investment and consumption. The poor state of infrastructure
and the large social needs of the population (especially in the areas of education and health)
who had suffered centuries of slavery and colonization often justified these policies.
However, investments were over-sized and ill-designed. Fueled by the nationalistic dream
of the new political leaders, some big projects and programs dominated government plans—
often conceived on the model of the Soviet Gosplan, regardless of the ideological background
of the ruling elites. These projects and programs also generated large current expenditures,
as they required a large number of civil servants with salary levels often equivalent to ten
times the average income per capita, or high levels of operation and maintenance spending.
Furthermore, for ideological, political, and sometimes economic reasons, and also for rea-
sons of pure greed, some countries opted for the nationalization of substantial segments of
the production apparatus. They were encouraged along this direction by the ease with which
they could obtain foreign loans (owing to abundant international liquidity).
By the 1970s, many private American, European, and Japanese banks had at their disposal
important deposits from members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC) cartel—so-called “petrodollars.” Acting under the assumption that countries can-
not go bankrupt, these banks made risky loans that were used to finance mega investment
projects with little or no economic rationale, or imports of luxury goods, or were simply mis-
used to fund personal bank accounts overseas. Yet by the early 1980s the situation had
changed considerably. OPEC had become less effective as a cartel, which drove oil prices
down and substantially reduced petrodollars held as deposits in Western banks. Also, the
United States, the world’s dominant economy, was pursuing fiscal policy centered on large
tax cuts and a big buildup in military spending. The combination of these two factors (the
limited availability of petrodollars on the international lending market and the need for
funds to finance the large U.S. fiscal deficit) drove interest rates upward. To make matters
worse, the world economy faced a major recession in the early 1980s after the Iranian Revo-
lution and the ensuing oil crisis, and commodity prices on which developing countries relied
for foreign exchange fell to historic lows. Confronted with the rapid increase of interest rates
on their variable-rate loan repayments, these countries were on the verge of default on their
external debt. Since the loans they obtained in the 1970s were used to pay for politically moti-
vated projects or expensive luxury goods—not productive investments—only one option
was left to them: turn to multilateral financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF
for help.
In macroeconomic terms, the evolution of developing countries was summarized as fol-
lows: after independence, many of them quickly experienced a persisting imbalance between
aggregate domestic demand and aggregate supply, and this was reflected in a worsening of
their external payments and an increase in inflation. In certain cases, the main explanation
was the importance of external factors such as an increase in foreign interest rates or an exog-
enous deterioration in terms of trade. But in most cases, the so-called demand–supply
imbalance could be traced to the inappropriate government policies that expanded domestic
demand (consumption, investment) too rapidly relative to the productive capacity of the
national economy.
That diagnostic rested on the contention that state-sponsored development strategies
necessarily give rise to incorrect relative prices in poor economies and distort incentives.
The logical conclusion was therefore to correct the mistaken policy recommendations from
the past by bringing back the fundamental precepts of the free market economy. That led
to the reinvention of the neoclassical orthodoxy.
Fighting the “Global Apartheid”

The focus on government failures by mainstream development economists led to the design
and implementation of a policy framework known as structural adjustment programs
(SAPs). They emerged from the Bretton Woods institutions and centered on the elimination
of macroeconomic imbalances of developing countries as a required passage towards sus-
tainable growth and structural change. SAPs thus combined two overlapping objectives:
(1) stabilization, defined as the reduction of national expenditure to bring it in line with
national output or income; this implied adopting policies that lower the rate of infla-
tion, reduce the current account deficit, restore external competitiveness, and limit
the loss of international reserves; and
(2) structural adjustment, defined as an increase in national income and output through
a more efficient use of resources. This basically meant implementing policies to
increase the productive capacity of the national economy and to improve the effi-
ciency with which the country’s resources were utilized. Macroeconomic success
was to be achieved when the economy reached domestic balance (loosely defined as
full employment without a large distortion in economic policies) and external bal-
ance (a sustainable position of the current account balance).
The new policy framework relied on a belief in the virtues of market economy, the impor-
tance of macroeconomic discipline, and the need for all economies to open up to trade and
foreign direct investment. These basic ideas also constitute the foundations of what William-
son (1990) called “the Washington Consensus.” Even though this particular term was coined
only to describe the set of ideas that “most people in Washington believed Latin America
(not all countries) ought to be undertaking as of 1989 (not all the time),” (Williamson 2002)
it became the new blueprint for all poor countries to follow in their quest for growth and
structural transformation. The fact that Williamson went on to become one of the most
influential Regional Chief Economists at the World Bank reinforced that view. To be sure,
the policies proposed under SAPs and the Washington Consensus framework were quite
similar and presented by their leading proponent as a vehicle to break the intellectual “global
apartheid” facing developing countries:
These are ideas that had long been regarded as orthodox so far as OECD countries are con-
cerned, but there used to be a sort of global apartheid which claimed that developing countries
came from a different universe which enabled them to benefit from: inflation (so as to reap the
inflation tax and boost investment); a leading role for the state in initiating industrialization;
and import substitution. The Washington Consensus said that this era of apartheid was over.
(Williamson 2002)
Williamson subsequently listed the ten reforms around which economic transformation and
structural change should be organized. His comments deserve to be quoted extensively:
(1) Fiscal Discipline. This was in the context of a region where almost all the countries
had run large deficits that led to balance of payments crises and high inflation that
hit mainly the poor because the rich could park their money abroad.
(2) Reordering Public Expenditure Priorities. This suggested switching expenditure in a
pro-poor way, from things like indiscriminate subsidies to basic health and
education.
(3) Tax Reform. Constructing a tax system that would combine a broad tax base with
moderate marginal tax rates.
(4) Liberalizing Interest Rates. In retrospect I wish I had formulated this in a broader way
as financial liberalization, and stressed that views differed on how fast it should be
achieved.
(5) A Competitive Exchange Rate. I fear I indulged in wishful thinking in asserting that
there was a consensus in favor of ensuring that the exchange rate would be competi-
tive, which implies an intermediate regime; in fact Washington was already begin-
ning to subscribe to the two-corner doctrine.
(6) Trade Liberalization. I stated that there was a difference of view about how fast trade
should be liberalized.
(7) Liberalization of Inward Foreign Direct Investment. I specifically did not include com-
prehensive capital account liberalization, because that did not command a consen-
sus in Washington.
(8) Privatization. This was the one area in which what originated as a neoliberal idea
had won broad acceptance. We have since been made very conscious that it matters
a lot how privatization is done: it can be a highly corrupt process that transfers
assets to a privileged elite for a fraction of their true value, but the evidence is that it
brings benefits when done properly.
(9) Deregulation. This focused specifically on easing barriers to entry and exit, not on
abolishing regulations designed for safety or environmental reasons.
(10) Property Rights. This was primarily about providing the informal sector with the
ability to gain property rights at acceptable cost. (Williamson 2002)
Some dissenting voices argued that the Washington Consensus was theoretically flawed
(Stiglitz 1998; Hoff and Stiglitz 2001). Others noted that its policy prescriptions did not
include crucial elements for growth and structural change such as human capital or insti-
tutions, and that there was a need for an “augmented” version of the Washington Consen-
sus (Rodrik 2006). Empirical studies have shown that in terms of sustained growth and
structural transformation, their results were at best controversial (Easterly, Loayza, and
Montiel 1996).
Third Wave: Explaining the

Mystery of Change
The disappointing results of several decades of development economics have led to a soul-
searching exercise among researchers, many of whom are still looking for something that
might be missing in or even wrong with poor countries. In their desperate quest for answers,
they have identified a long list of often contradictory factors to make that case. The list
includes the apparent inability of poor countries to solve their structural deficit in capital or
to attract sufficient foreign aid for the required “Big Push” (Sachs 2005); their excessive and
wasted foreign aid that may have profoundly distorted policy incentives in poor countries
(Easterly 2006; Moyo 2009); the general geography of poor countries, many of which are
landlocked; their high level of ethnic fractionalization, which they see as an unshakable
source of tensions that slow economic performance; or their prevailing cultural practices,
which some found unsuited for sustained economic performance. Many such arguments
were made several decades ago to explain the pervasive poverty in Asia, and even to predict
why countries such as Japan, Korea, or China might never be capable of overcoming their
poverty traps.6 History has not been kind to such deterministic approaches to economic
development.
Many important intellectual initiatives have been launched in recent decades to reassess
development theories, policies, and practices (Meier and Stiglitz 2001; World Bank 2005;
Commission on Growth 2008). The temptation has been strong for proponents of the various
schools of thought to stick to their initial theories and defend the validity of their analysis, to
turn the focus on the inconsistencies of competing theories, or even to blame the poor imple-
mentation records of their “good” policy recommendations by failing developing countries.
Early structuralists (even those using more rigorous analytical frameworks of analysis) and
Keynesians have tended to stress the persistent market failures that prevent developing coun-
tries breaking out of their low-level equilibrium (Taylor 1983, 1991, 1992, 2004) while neoclas-
sical economists have pointed to the pervasive government failures that maintain a bad
business environment and ineffective policy frameworks in countries in need of investment
(Krueger 2004; Hubbard and Duggan 2009). A third wave of development thinking is cur-
rently underway, which builds on both early structuralists and neoclassical economists.
Drawing lessons from history and economic analysis, it aims to reconcile insights from previ-
ous brands of development knowledge and to provide policy-makers in all low-income coun-
tries with a practical framework for identifying sectors and industries that are consistent with
their comparative advantage, and facilitating the process of structural change.
Revisiting the Analytics of Economic Transformation

The third wave of development thinking aims to return to the true meaning and dynamics of
structural transformation. Its theoretical foundations can be found in a large corpus of inter-
related themes that includes: the economics of information; the economics of ideas and dif-
fusion of knowledge; the problem of agglomeration; and (perhaps most important) the
problems of coordination and externalities.
Stiglitz, who pioneered the economics of information, explained in his Nobel lecture how
his encounter of developing country issues forced him to reassess his own views:
My first visits to the developing world in 1967, and a more extensive stay in Kenya in 1969,
made an indelible impression on me. Models of perfect markets, as badly flawed as they
might seem for Europe or America, seemed truly inappropriate for these countries. But
while many of the key assumptions that went into the competitive equilibrium model
seemed not to fit these economies well, the ones that attracted my attention was [sic] the
imperfection of information, the absence of markets, and the pervasiveness and persistence
of seeming dysfunctional institutions. (Stiglitz 2001: 473)
It was not just the discrepancies between the standard neoclassical competitive model and
its predictions that were being questioned. The model was not robust—even slight depar-
tures from the underlying assumption of perfect information had major analytical and pol-
icy consequences. In many areas of public policy (such as education and wage determination),
the notion that had underlain much of traditional competitive equilibrium analysis—that
markets had to clear—was simply not true if information was imperfect.
For centuries, the most dominant idea in mainstream economics, which provided both
the rationale for the reliance on free markets and the belief that issues of distribution can be
separated from issues of efficiency, was that competitive economies lead, as if by an invisible
hand, to a (Pareto) efficient allocation of resources, and that every Pareto efficient resource
allocation can be achieved through a competitive mechanism—provided only that the
appropriate lump sum redistributions are undertaken. That big idea, still the fundamental
theorem of welfare economics, also allowed economists the freedom to push for reforms
which increase efficiency, regardless of their seeming impact on distribution. As Stiglitz
noted, “the economics of information showed that neither of these results was, in general,
true.” Moreover, asymmetries of information have been shown to be related to absent or
imperfect markets. They help explain why markets for used cars as famously shown by
Akerlof (1970), or for credit or for labor tend to work imperfectly. Information imperfections
are pervasive in the economy and neither sustained economic growth nor structural change
is possible without a reliable mechanism to address them (Greenwald and Stiglitz 1986). The
fact that when there are asymmetries of information, markets are not, in general, constrained
Pareto efficient implies there is a potentially important role for government (Stiglitz 1997).
That insight also opens up an avenue to discuss the economics of ideas and diffusion of
knowledge, which is typically considered a particular form of information. Many of the
issues that are central to the economics of information and to the process of structural
transformation—such as the problems of appropriability, the fixed costs associated with invest-
ments in research that give rise to imperfections in competition, and the public good nature of
information—also point to the crucial role of the government in economic development.
“Nations are poor because their citizens do not have access to the ideas that are used in industrial
nations to generate economic value,” Romer observed (1993a: 543). Developing countries remain
trapped in poverty because households and firms there have not been able either to invent new
ways of making better goods and services or to copy and use new industrial and technological
tools available elsewhere to improve their productivity levels. “In a world with physical limits, it
is discoveries of big ideas, together with the discovery of millions of little ideas, that make per-
sistent economic growth possible. Ideas are the instructions that let us combine limited physical
resources and arrangements that are ever more valuable” (Romer 1993b: 64).
Another theoretical justification for the role that governments must play to foster sustained
growth and structural transformation is found in the economics of agglomeration. Since the
puzzling observation made by Balassa (1966) on the rise of the intra-industry trade in Europe
in the 1950s that each country produced only part of the range of potential products within
each industry, importing those goods it did not produce (because specialization in narrower
ranges of machinery and intermediate products permits the exploitation of economies of
scale through the lengthening of production runs), new trade theorists have highlighted the
fact that unexhausted economies of scale at the firm level necessarily imply imperfect compe-
tition. They have shown that increasing returns have been a powerful force shaping the world
economy, and developed general equilibrium models of imperfect competition that confirm
Marshall’s trinity of reasons for industry localization: knowledge spillovers, labor market
pooling, and specialized suppliers.7 For developing countries that must rely on trade as their
main source of growth in an increasingly globalized world, the policy implications of these
theoretical analyses are clear: it is essential that their governments be willing and capable of
solving the coordination and externalities issues that prevent agglomeration of firms and
activities from taking place (Rodrik 2007; Harrison and Rodriguez-Clare 2010).
An influential perspective based on non-linearities is the Growth Diagnostics approach
suggested by Hausmann, Rodrik, and Velasco (2008). It is motivated by the inability of gov-
ernments to reform everything and thus the need to prioritize reforms, which is done
through the information revealed by shadow prices. It recognizes the central role of struc-
tural change in economic development and argues that in each country there are “binding
constraints” on growth, implying that failure in one dimension prevents growth even if the
others are all satisfactory. Through time and across countries those binding constraint can
vary. Identifying them is the prerequisite to successful policy making.
While it is a good systematic approach to consider the government’s policy interventions
in a distorted second-best world, in practice, the binding constraints are related to the new
industries that the country is attempting to develop, and the approach argues that choices of
new industries should depend on a self-discovery process by individual firms. Hence the
identification of binding constraints is more an “art” than a “science.” Moreover, the propo-
nents of the growth diagnostics oppose the use of comparative advantage as a basic reference
in the identification of new industries (Rodrik 2004). The industries that governments select
through this process are likely to have the same characteristics as those targeted by the struc-
turalist approach and are not viable in a competitive market. More distortions to the market,
similar to those introduced by the import-substitution strategy, may be created as a result.
A related but somewhat different framework that explicitly recognizes the importance of
structural change and suggests policies to facilitate that change is the product-space method
proposed by Hidalgo et al. (2007) and Hidalgo and Hausmann (2009). It posits that eco-
nomic progress occurs because countries upgrade what they produce. In doing so, they move
from their current products to other, usually more sophisticated, related products. The more
closely related the product lines, the easier it is for countries to make progress. Relatedness is
associated with the similarity in the inputs required by a certain activity, including every-
thing from particular skills and institutional and infrastructural requirements to technologi-
cal similarity and the like. So the product-space metaphor refers to how this process of
moving from one product to another works in the real world.
New Structural Economics

Within the third wave, the New Structural Economics (NSE) approach to development (Lin
and Monga 2011; Lin 2012; Monga 2012) points to the fact that almost all previous waves of
development thinking on structural change have been conceived on the basis of a required list
of ingredients considered indispensable for sustained growth and structural change. Eco-
nomic failure has thus been analyzed as a lack of some factor or variable. Development eco-
nomics in the past often focused on what developing countries did not have and could not do
well: early structuralists and other proponents of “Development 1.0” theories focused on mar-
ket failures and the lack of capital of poor countries, and doubted that the “periphery” could
compete successfully with the “center.” As a result, they advocated inward-looking policies
that eventually failed to foster convergence. In reaction, neoclassical economists and propo-
nents of “Development 2.0” identified another list of missing elements which they thought
were absolutely necessary for sustained growth to be ignited (macro stabilization, sound
money, free markets, good governance, well-functioning delivery systems for projects).
While economic development certainly necessitates some minimal conditions (social
peace and stability, and a relatively well-functioning state), the NSE contends that a radically
different mindset must be adopted by development economists and policy-makers in poor
countries. Consistent with the intellectual posture of philosophical pragmatism, it argues that
structural change and economic development can take place anywhere—including in poor,
landlocked countries with no natural resources, limited physical and human capital, and sub-
optimal governance—provided that a realistic strategy that makes the best use of the country’s
unique set of assets at that given time be implemented. It therefore advocates an approach to
structural change based not on the long list of missing ingredients for a first-best development
scenario (good business environment, good governance, adequate domestic capacity, etc.)
but on what any poor country has at a given moment (that is, its endowments) and what it can
do well (that is, comparative advantage). As part of this process, the government should play
an active role in helping the private sector scale up what the country can do well now.
Economic development is indeed a process of sustained increase in per capita income,

which requires a continuous upgrading of industries and technology from labor (resource)-
intensive industries to more capital-intensive industries (otherwise, per capita income will
stagnate, as predicted by Solow’s neoclassical growth model). It is a gradual process from the
lower to the higher end of the spectrum, and countries can move to many intermediate lev-
els. Developing countries have the advantage of backwardness and a whole spectrum of
industries with different levels of capital intensity available to them. Because the industrial
structure in an economy is endogenous to its relative abundance of labor, capital, and natural
resources, the speed of industrial upgrading and development depends on the speed of its
upgrading of factor endowments as well as the required corresponding improvement of
“soft” infrastructures (institutions) and “hard” infrastructures (physical capital).
At each particular level of development, the production structure will be different, as will
each type of infrastructure. The upgrading is an innovation and unavoidably risky. Success-
ful upgrading requires that the firms in the economy overcome issues of limited information
regarding which industries are viable. Successful upgrading often requires related invest-
ments by other firms (Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny 1989), and required changes in soft and
hard infrastructures. And, in addition, valuable information externalities arise from knowl-
edge of pioneer firms’ success and failure. Therefore, in addition to playing a proactive role in
the improvements of soft and hard infrastructures, the government in a developing country
can also adopt an industrial policy to assist firms in a market economy to overcome the above
issues (Rodrik 2004; Lin 2009).
The practical implementation framework associated with the NSE suggests that policy-
makers identify tradable industries that have performed well in growing countries with similar
resources and skills, and with a per capita income about double their own. If domestic private
firms in these sectors are already present, policy-makers should identify and remove con-
straints on those firms’ technological upgrading or on entry by other firms. In industries where
no domestic firms are present, policy-makers should aim to attract foreign direct investment
from the countries being emulated or organize programs for incubating new firms.
The government should also pay attention to the development by private enterprises of
new and competitive products, and support the scaling up of successful private-sector inno-
vations in new industries. In countries with a poor business environment, special economic
zones or industrial parks can facilitate firm entry, foreign direct investment, and the forma-
tion of industrial clusters. Finally, the government might help pioneering firms in the new
industries by offering tax incentives for a limited period, co-financing investments, or pro-
viding access to land or foreign exchange.
Conclusion
This chapter has identified and chronicled three broad waves of development thinking on
the important issue of structural change, which is central to sustained growth, job creation,
and poverty reduction. Successful countries have almost always undergone structural
change, while unsuccessful ones have not. For developing countries the challenge has always
been to design and implement economic policies geared towards a careful analysis of the
changing patterns of industrial structure and technology diffusion, to appropriately select

and foster the development of industries in which private firms can strive because they are in
the country’s comparative advantage.
Early development thinkers who took up the challenge of devising economic strategies for
low-income countries in the 1940s through the 1960s identified market failures as the main
obstacles to prosperity. They faced some big questions, which are still on the agenda of devel-
opment thinking today: What mysterious processes are at play in countries that are able to
break out of the poverty trap and gradually change the fundamental nature of their econo-
mies? What policies and institutions facilitate the dynamics of sectoral transformation?
Within agriculture, services, or industry, how does the process of moving into higher quality
goods and services happen? How do economies move up the value chain? What determines
a country’s ability to create good jobs? What is the appropriate role for governments and
markets in the growth and structural transformation dynamics? Their choice of inward-
looking strategies generally failed to deliver results.
The second wave of development experts that dominated policy making in the 1980s and
1990s turned to government failures as the main cause of failure. Consistent with neoclassi-
cal principles, they advocated free market policies for all low-income countries, with some
subsequent variations (human capital institutions). While it advocated macroeconomic sta-
bilization and “structural” adjustment policies, that second wave neglected the deeper issues
of structural transformation, which implies a strategic selection of industries that can ignite
long-term changes in a country’s endowment structure and production capabilities. The
results of these policies were also disappointing.
There has been a robust debate on the intellectual legacy of all these earlier waves of eco-
nomic thinking on structural change. Disagreements over the pertinence of its main assump-
tions, frameworks of analysis, and policy recommendations are likely to continue for a long
time. But a set of stylized facts have emerged from empirical observation, which makes it a
legitimate and useful approach to economic development and economic thinking. Ocampo
et al. (2009) provide a comprehensive exposition of these stylized facts. Two of them stand
out: (i) The lack of economic convergence (neither absolute nor relative) among countries in
the past two centuries appears to contrast with the bold predictions of orthodox models of
growth. That also invalidates the notion that all countries may eventually reach similar
income levels by pursuing similar policy frameworks, regardless of their initial economic
structure. (ii) International factors play a crucial role in the overall growth dynamics of the
developing world—much more so than in high-income countries. This finding, too, weak-
ens the traditional neoclassical emphasis on domestic policies and institutions as the pri-
mary determinants of economic performance.
Drawing lessons from history and economic analysis, the third wave of development think-
ing has sought to put structural analysis and comparative advantage centerstage. It suggests
new ways in which all developing countries—regardless of their natural resources, location,
or amount of capital—can break into global industrial markets and find their own niche, or
organize their economies to take advantage of the opportunities being vacated by middle-
income countries that are forced out of their niche because of rising wages, rising productivity
levels, and the need for industrial upgrading. Unlike previous theories of economic develop-
ment, the new wave does not focus on the list of missing ingredients. Instead, it provides a
blueprint for making the most of the existing assets and endowment structure of any country.
As such, it offers a ray of hope to all low-income countries that can organize themselves to
seize the unprecedented economic opportunities created by a multi-polar world.
Notes
1. The concept of “economic structure” refers to “the composition of production activities, the
associated patterns of specialization in international trade, the technological capabilities of
the economy, including the educational level of the labor force, the structure of ownership
of factors of production, the nature and development of basic state institutions, and the
degree of development and constraints under which certain markets operate (the absence
of certain segments of the financial market or the presence of a large underemployed labor
force, for example).” (Ocampo et al. 2009: 7).
2. The long list of these early development economists includes Rosenstein-Rodan (1943);
Singer (1950); Lewis (1954); Nurkse (1956); Myrdal (1957); and Prebisch (1959); Chenery and
Bruno (1962); and Furtado (1964).
3. Dutt and Ros (2003) provide a comprehensive review of the main and often overlapping
currents of early economic structuralism. They suggest that the first phase, which occurred
from 1945 to the mid-1950s, was launched by Rosenstein-Rodan, Lewis, and Nurkse. A sec-
ond sub-group extended from roughly the mid-1950s to the late 1960s and was dominated
by contributions from Myrdal, Hirschman, Chenery and Bruno, and Furtado. A third sub-
group, called “neo-structuralism” or “late structuralism,” emerged in the early 1980s to
respond to criticism from neoclassical economists and to modify and enrich development
economics with lessons drawn from economic analysis and the actual experience of poor
countries. It is represented by contributions from Taylor (1983, 1991); Ocampo and Taylor
(1998); and Ocampo et al. (2009).
4. Game theory has shown, for instance, that individuals tend to value fairness and are very
often more generous than the rational agent model would predict. See Henrich et al. (2001).
With such developments in neoclassical economics, Taylor (1992) suggested that modern
neo-classicism is little more than an effort to co-opt and integrate in their knowledge corpus
the accurate observations initially made by structuralists.
5. Taylor objects to Krugman’s assertion that early economic structuralism disappeared from
the mainstream’s view because it was insufficiently formalized. He argues that the old devel-
opment literature lost impact because it had two ideological drawbacks: first, while it was
rich with diagnoses of development problems, it offered little policy advice. Balanced and
unbalanced growth, relative backwardness, circular flows, cumulative processes, and so on
were “intriguing metaphors but didn’t help much with practical decisions. Planning models
and cost–benefit analysis proved to be more of academic interest than managerial worth”
(Taylor 2004: 362). Second, the early development economists placed limitless faith in the
capacity of the state to intervene in the economic system.
6. Even future Nobel Prize winner Gunnar Myrdal suggested in his book Asian Drama (1968)
that the region’s economic future was bleak. He believed that traditional power structures
were likely to persist and that unless there was change, the chances of economic takeoff were
slim. He found the governments in the region too “soft” (he used the term the “soft state”)
and unable to enforce the discipline that was needed to implement their development plans.
He even concluded that authoritarian regimes, rather than democracy, might be the best
system for achieving structural transformation.
7. For a quick intellectual history of the importance of increasing returns in economics and
a review of progress on theoretical analysis, see Krugman (2008).
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chapter 17
tr a de a n d fi na nce i n
dev el opm en t thi n k i ng
josé antonio ocampo
Introduction
Trade and finance have always figured at the center of development debates. However, there
have been significant divergences among schools of development thought as to the role of
the global system versus national policies in determining development success, and between
those who defend the virtues of markets versus those who consider that development is
intrinsically tied to some forms of state intervention. This chapter summarizes these contro-
versies as they have evolved since the Second World War. It follows a historical sequence and
takes a look not only at the development debates as such but also at the evolving global eco-
nomic order in which they took place and initiatives aimed at redesigning the rules for the
global economy. It uses as a point of reference the concept of two globalization processes:
a first that covers the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth
century,1 which had collapsed when our story starts, and a second that began in the 1960s
and 1970s and continues until the present.
The chapter is divided into three sections. The first looks at the early post-war decades,
during which the global economy started to be reconstituted after the collapse of the “first
globalization” and in terms of development there was a rise of what I will call the “indus-
trialization consensus.” The second section considers the succeeding phase, which was
characterized by the rise of the newly-industrialized countries (NICs) as exporters of
manufactures and the reconstruction of a dynamic but volatile international financial sys-
tem that would end up in the first boom–bust cycle that would engulf part of the develop-
ing world. This period also encompasses the two oil shocks of the 1970s and the heated
controversies around a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The third section
focuses on the consolidation of a “second globalization” and the spread of market liberali-
zation. In this regard, I will use the term “Washington consensus,” though recognizing
that it refers to the broad agenda of market reforms rather than the initial Decalogue pro-
posed by Williamson (1990).
296 josé antonio ocampo
The Old Division of Labor and the

“Industrialization Consensus”
The point of departure for our analysis is the collapse of the “first globalization.” This process
started during the First World War, which inflicted permanent damage on the gold standard
and left permanent scars on Western Europe and, particular, on the country that was at
center of that globalization, Great Britain. The death sentence came, however, with the Great
Depression, which had strong effects on the alternative emerging global center, the United
States, and would bring with it the collapse of the global financial system and the multilateral
trading order.
An element of continuity between the old order and the one that emerged after the Second
World War was an international trading system in which the developing world was essen-
tially specialized in primary goods destined for the industrial center, with the terms of trade
between commodities and manufactures constituting an essential relative price linking the
two parts of the system. In any case, as a result of the collapse of the world trading system
during the 1930s (and in part since the Second World War), many developing countries
turned inward, in a sense forced by the circumstances rather than by true policy choice.
However, as these inward-looking processes unfolded, their benefits provided an alternative
engine of growth—industrialization became an increasingly conscious development strat-
egy. Such a strategy had some features in common with the phenomenon of late industriali-
zation analyzed by Gerschenkron (1962), in particular the increasing levels of state
intervention. Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe were the most successful cases
of these “late-late” industrialization drives, as well as of the new ideas on the relation between
industrialization and development.
The early post-war debates were dominated by an academic and policy debate on the dis-
advantages for developing countries of the existing international division of labor. They led
to what can be called the “industrialization consensus”: industrialization was seen as the
road to economic development, in the triple sense of being the mechanism of transmitting
technological progress, generating external economies that accelerated economic growth,
and absorbing the rural but increasingly also urban surplus labor (underemployment). As
there were few export opportunities aside from commodity exports, that meant continuing
looking inwards and erecting protection barriers.
The major issues raised were, therefore, how to manage the external economies associ-
ated with industrial development, building the modern infrastructure that was necessary
to further it, and financing the investments associated with industrialization, infrastructure
and the related urbanization process. This was the background for one of the most interesting
controversies of classical development economics. One side, best represented by Rosenstein-
Rodan (1943), claimed that the external economies (backward and forward linkages, in
Hirschman’s terminology) and the system-wide scale economies that they generated required
a “big (investment) push.” The alternative view, best exposed by Hirschman (1958), claimed
that such balanced growth was impossible, due to both its financing requirements and the
limited capacity of the states that were called to undertake such a strategy. In this alternative
view, successful development could only be solved in a sequential way and through a series
of imbalances.
trade and finance in development thinking 297
The basic advantage of industrialization was the capacity to adopt technology that had
already been developed in the industrial world and to benefit from the “unlimited supplies of
labor” that characterized developing countries, to use the terminology then advanced by
Lewis (1954). These advantages were perhaps less evident than was recognized at the time.
Successful technological catching up was actually a more active process than initially fore-
seen, as it required adaptation, learning, and developing the capacity to innovate—areas that
would later be emphasized by Lall (2001), among others. The unlimited supplies of labor
could only be produced by the destruction of pre-capitalist rural structures, which generated
social problems of their own. Industrialization and the associated infrastructure and urbani-
zation process also had high investment requirements and some industrial projects had
uncertain returns in protected domestic markets.
This was all made more difficult by the scarcity of international financing, which was
largely limited to official flows. The World Bank was the only agent in the still incipient sys-
tem of multilateral development financing, joined later by the regional development banks,
with the Inter-American being the first in 1959. It was complemented by official development
assistance and trade financing, including, in the latter case, that provided by the export—
import banks from industrial countries. At the domestic level, this meant expanding the role
of the state, which took the main responsibility for infrastructure development, played a sig-
nificant role in the creation of domestic financial institutions, and in several countries took a
role as investor in “strategic” industrial sectors. Attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) in
manufacturing was also part of the strategy, notably in Latin America, but it was frequently
accompanied by rejection of old forms of FDI in natural resources and infrastructure.
The industrialization consensus was grounded in the empirical observation that develop-
ment was associated with significant changes in economic structures in which industrial
production took a leading role. Many economists contributed to corroborate this stylized
fact, notably the first World Bank Chief Economist, Hollis Chenery (1979), Furthermore,
Chenery et al. (1986) asserted that all (or at least most) successful manufacturing exporters
had experienced a previous phase of import substitution. This was even more forcefully
argued later on by Chang (2003), who claimed that this was also behind historical success
stories even in the industrial world. However, this view was also subject to criticism, as it
implied a violation of the classical principles of comparative advantage, a criticism that was
voiced by more orthodox economists, with Viner (1952) as an important example.
The industrialization consensus was also grounded in ideological visions—much as the
Washington Consensus would later be. These ideologies were very attractive in a world in
which markets had been discredited by the Great Depression and planning was seen as an
instrument of successful economic performance, and in a world in which decolonization
was taking root at the political level and industrialization was seen as a sign of greater eco-
nomic autonomy and thus as a complement to political independence. But it was subject
to ideological attacks from both right and left: the former for leading to the misallocation
of resources, and the latter for generating new forms of external dependence. This led to
the strange alliance between orthodox economics and neo-Marxists that, according to
Hirschman (1981), was behind the decline of classical development economics.
The special disadvantages associated with commodity dependence were emphasized by
Prebisch (1950) and Singer (1950), and had two different dimensions. The first was the
claim that the world economy was a hierarchical system—a “center–periphery” system.
This implied that, unless the asymmetries of such a system were addressed, world
inequalities would be maintained or even become more acute. An essential point was the
low income-elasticity of demand for raw materials (particularly agricultural goods), which
created limited opportunities for developing countries, unless they industrialized. Indus-
trialization also offered, as indicated, better opportunities for technological change, and
thus for income growth. It was mixed with the second, related issue that specialization in
primary goods subjected developing countries to the sharp cyclical swings of commodity
prices, and possibly to a long-term downward trend of these prices vis-à-vis those of
manufactures.
Although the case for overcoming the deficiencies of the existing division of labor was
based on all of these arguments, the major focus of criticism by orthodox economists was the
so-called Prebisch–Singer (terms of trade) hypothesis. Interestingly, its validity was revived
in the 1980s by two World Bank economists, Grilli and Yang (1988), leading to a copious
recent literature that actually confirmed that the terms of trade of non-oil commodities dete-
riorated through most of the twentieth century, though not necessarily as a secular trend,
that the trend was uneven across commodity groups (stronger for tropical agriculture fol-
lowed by non-tropical agriculture, less clear for metals and not valid for oil), and that this
trend had been preceded by an improvement in relative commodity prices in the nineteenth
early twentieth centuries, and followed by a strong upswing in the early twenty-first century
(see Ocampo and Parra 2010; Erten and Ocampo 2012).
On the policy front, the major push for industrialization came from both the United
Nations and the World Bank, which at least until the 1970s was clearly in favor of industriali-
zation, as reflected in the views of its first Chief Economist. It was also reflected in the early
post-war negotiations of an international trading system that led to the 1948 Havana Charter
that created the International Trade Organization (ITO) and gave significant room for indus-
trialization policies as well as commodity price agreements (Toye and Toye 2004: ch. 1). The
U.S. Congress only approved one part of this treaty, the General Agreements on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), which had been agreed in 1947, but the industrialization consensus would
underline the negotiations that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. In turn, the issue of com-
modity price volatility eventually led to a proliferation of agreements that tried to regulate
the world supply and demand of individual commodities, usually involving cooperation
between producers and consumers. This trend became particularly strong when commodity
prices collapsed in the mid-1950s. In this regard, there were ample precedents from the early
part of the twentieth century (Rowe 1965) as well as Keynes’ view that the post-war economic
order should include a commodity buffer stock.
Emerging Export Opportunities, the Fight

for a New International Division of Labor,
and the Recreation of Global Finance
The recreation of world trade in the early post-war decades largely took place among indus-
trial economies—and, in particular, among Western European countries. Thus, it largely left
aside the developing world. However, opportunities to export low-skilled manufactures
from developing countries started to spring up in the 1960s. The most direct effect of these
new opportunities was the spread of export promotion policies, which took strong roots in
the first generation of Asian tigers but also in other parts of the developing world. This was
accompanied by economic integration among developing countries following two entirely
different models: explicit policy decisions to launch integration processes, the best example
being Latin America, and a more market-oriented process which resulted from growing
trade in parts and components among export-oriented economies. The latter became part of
the so-called “flying geese” model of East Asia, in which older export sectors were succes-
sively displaced from Japan to first and then successively to a second and third generation of
NICs, as the older generations of export-oriented economies moved up to export goods with
a higher technological content.
From early on, it became clear that the more export-oriented economies tended to grow
faster (see Chenery et al. 1986). As we will see below, the interpretation of this pattern would
become a subject of significant debate, which centered about the reasons for the success of
East Asia. A central policy issue in this regard was the possible role that protection had
in hindering export development—its “anti-export bias”—rather than as potential comple-
ments. In fact, a few countries aside, export success was not associated during this period
with the dismantling of protectionist policies. Rather, a new layer of interventionist trade
policies aimed at promoting exports was added to a system of protection that was at best only
gradually dismantled, thus generating “mixed” trade regimes which involved both import
substitution and export promotion. Indeed, in several cases, the domestic market helped the
process of mastering and adapting technology, and also provided the base upon which firms
gradually generated market information and built a reputation that allowed them to success-
fully break into established international production and marketing channels. This possible
complementarity between protection and export promotion was formalized by Krugman
(1990: ch. 12) as “import substitution as export promotion.”
The gradual entry of developing countries into manufacturing exports may be seen as a
modification of the center–periphery model, in which mature manufacturing activities
from the center were gradually displaced to the periphery (or, perhaps better, peripheries),
as part of a broader process of technological transfer. However, the basic structure of the
international trading system continued to be “center–periphery” in character. The “prod-
uct cycle” literature of the 1960s analyzed some of the features of this transfer (e.g. Vernon
1966). As developing countries were unevenly prepared to enter the new stage of develop-
ment—due to diverse prior industrialization experiences among other reasons—this
process led to a growing divergence among developing countries.2 A related literature
showed that technology gaps generate income differentials among countries (e.g. Krug-
man 1990: ch. 9). As technological change continued to be concentrated in the industrial
countries, this also reinforced existing international income disparities and the role of
transnational enterprises from the industrial centers as major engines of technological
transfer and export growth in the developing world. Indeed, one of the characteristics that
took shape during this period was the increasing reorientation of FDI toward export
activities.
The gradual transformation of the center–periphery system of international trade did
nothing to moderate the call for global trading rules aimed at changing the international
division of labor. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD),
created in 1964, and under the initial leadership of Prebisch, took a leading role in calling
for a new world trading system. This was followed by the more radicalized negotiations
for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) that were launched by the United
Nations in 1974 but collapsed in Cancun, Mexico, in 1981. The most significant gain was
the acceptance of the principle of “special and differential treatment” in trade relations,
although its concrete manifestation, the Generalized System of Preferences, remained
limited in its scope.3
Overall, however, the world trading system did not evolve in the direction of the
UNCTAD agenda, which included the reduction of tariff escalation according to the degree
of processing of raw materials and of high tariff (peaks) for labor-intensive manufactures in
which developing countries had a growing comparative advantage, as well as international
cooperation to regulate commodity markets. GATT, which had mainly been a mechanism
to liberalize trade among developed countries, did little to benefit developing countries,
aside from accepting the principle of special and differential treatment and allowing these
countries to make very limited commitments to reduce protection. Rather, agriculture was
excluded from GATT in the mid-1950s, textiles became subject to a series of quantitative
restrictions that evolved into the multi-fiber agreement, and successful new industrial pow-
ers (including Japan but also some successful NICs) were penalized by major developed
countries (notably the U.S.) with a new protectionist tool ironically called “voluntary export
restraints.”
In the area of commodities, the spread of international agreements in the 1960s started to
come under significant strain early on, and UNCTAD’s call for a common commodity
fund—which echoed Keynes’ proposals during the war years—was essentially ignored. The
major development in the commodity area was the increasing nationalization of oil by devel-
oping countries, the creation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
in 1960, the gradual expansion of its membership, and the flexing of its muscles during the
two major oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. However, as an exporters’ cartel, OPEC also repre-
sented the abandonment of global cooperation among exporting and importing countries to
manage commodity markets, and its capacity to control oil markets was significantly weak-
ened in the 1980s and 1990s.
The expansion of world trade and the new opportunities created to diversify the exports of
the more successful developing countries, has coincided since the 1960s with the reconstruc-
tion of the global financial system around the so called “Eurodollar market.” As did it prede-
cessor prior to the 1930s, this global financial system has even stronger “center–periphery”
features—a concept that is indeed frequently used today by orthodox economists to refer to
the global financial system. Some developing countries started to tap this market at an early
stage but their full incorporation only took place from the mid-1970s and was associated
with the recycling of petrodollars. As the market was born and remained unregulated, it
soon led to a boom–bust cycle, which had devastating effects in the 1980s on Latin America
and some other parts of the developing world. This was, of course, a repetition of a long his-
tory of financial instability, which had been illustrated in the classic analyses of Kindleberger
(see Kindleberger and Aliber 2005) and more recently by Reinhart and Rogoff (2009), among
others. Interestingly, rather than drawing on the lessons learned in the area of domestic
finance during the Great Depression, which led to stronger regulation, the rise of global
finance led to pressure to liberalize domestic finance, with results that would become evident
in the frequency of financial crises in the subsequent decades.
The Second Globalization and the

Liberalization Paradigm
Global Trends
The events of the 1960s and 1970s were the prelude to a deepening of global economic inte-
gration and the “second globalization.” In the area of trade, the main manifestation was the
increase in elasticity of world trade to world GDP.4 This reflected, in turn, other phenomena,
notably the fragmentation of value chains, which provided new export opportunities to
developing countries. FDI in export activities and subcontracting by major global firms,
which had started in the previous period, now became widespread. FDI also started to pene-
trate the service markets of developing countries, to the extent that policies in these coun-
tries allowed. The rapid expansion and diversification of global trade was combined, in turn,
with a boom in global finance, which left its legacy in a myriad of financial crises. Two of
those crises affected large parts of the developing world: the Latin American debt crisis of the
1980s and the succession of Asian, Russian, and Latin American crises of 1997–2003. In con-
trast, other crises had stronger repercussions in the industrial world, including the European
monetary crisis of 1992, and the global financial crisis of 2007–8.
At the conceptual level, the major manifestation was the collapse of the industrialization
consensus and the rise of a market reform agenda which came to be identified under the
rubric of the “Washington consensus.” Trade and domestic and external financial liberaliza-
tion were some of the key elements of the new agenda, as part of a broader rolling back of the
State. At the international level, the collapse of the NIEO negotiations was followed by a shift
in global development debates from the United Nations to the World Bank, whose condi-
tionality—often combined with IMF conditionality—was essential to spreading the new
paradigm, although its application was quite diverse across the developing world.
In terms of international policy, the previous fights of developing countries to redefine
the international division of labor and commodity markets were buried, and the major
institutional innovations were the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in
1995 and the proliferation of free trade agreements. The long Uruguay Round of trade
negotiations that led to the WTO extended the disciplines of global trade rules to devel-
oping countries—particularly to middle-income countries—and expanded the scope of
trade agreements to include services and intellectual property rights. Agriculture was
brought back into the discipline of WTO, but allowing for high levels of protection and
subsidies by industrial countries. During the first WTO ministerial in Singapore in 1986,
developed countries proposed to further expand the disciplines of the Organization to
include trade facilitation, government procurement, investment rules and competition
rules—which thus became branded as the “Singapore issues.” With the exception of the
first, they were eventually withdrawn from WTO negotiations during the now more than
decade-long Doha Round of trade negotiations, but were included with vengeance in
several Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The result was doubly paradoxical: multilateral
rules were strengthened by WTO as the multilateral trading system was fragmented by FTAs,
and the negotiating power of developing countries was weakened by the fragmented
character of negotiations of FTAs with major industrial countries (Economic Partner-

ship Agreements in the case of the European Union). A leading author has thus charac-
terized FTAs as the “termites” of the world trading system (Bhagwati 2008).
In the area of finance, although the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created
in 1974 to establish minimum standards of banking regulation and supervision, its scope
remained rather limited, as well as did the scope of similar organizations in other areas of
finance. So, global finance remained essentially unregulated until the eruption of the global
financial crisis of 2007–8 led the Group of 20 to create the Financial Stability Board. Although
the frequency of national financial crises led to the belief that prudential regulation and
supervision had to be strengthened, this also came with a significant lag, both in the devel-
oping and the developed world.
Trade Liberalization
Behind the controversies surrounding trade liberalization lay two interlinked debates. The
first related to a concept of “efficiency” as the key to economic policy. Orthodox economists
understood it as static efficiency, which implied a significant change from the focus on accel-
erating the transformation of production structures that was behind the industrialization
consensus and the heterodox interpretations of development success—and which may be
termed “dynamic efficiency.” The second debate was associated with state intervention. In
this regard, the liberalization paradigm called for “neutral incentives,” which essentially
implied dismantling trade interventions. In contrast, the alternative view gave a central role
to active industrial (or, more broadly, production sector) policies as well as well-developed
national innovation systems. In terms of their implication for trade policies under the new
concept, the two alternative paradigms could be summarized as the “orthodox” versus
“structuralist” export-oriented strategies.
The first achieved full centrality in debates with contributions from Krueger (1978) and
Bhagwati (1982), based on a large-scale study by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic
Research. This study highlighted the inefficiencies associated with trade intervention poli-
cies, their anti-export bias and therefore the role of trade liberalization as an instrument for
enhancing efficiency and exploiting the opportunities provided by international trade. It
also emphasized that interventionist trade policies encouraged rent-seeking by domestic
firms looking to be shielded from competition. These views were mainstreamed into the pol-
icies of the World Bank, where Krueger served as Chief Economist from 1982 to 1986.
Simultaneously, a booming cross-country econometric literature started to show that
developing countries with higher trade openness tended to grow faster. It was never clear,
however, what the connection was between the static efficiency achieved by trade liberaliza-
tion and the dynamic effect of faster economic growth. Rodriguez and Rodrik (2001) pro-
vided a devastating critique of that literature, indicating that there was no clear association
between trade policies and growth. Similar conclusions were presented in my own contribu-
tions to this debate, which were part of an UNCTAD report (UNCTAD 1992).
World Bank policies led to heated debates, which highlighted their mixed success. Most of
Latin America and Africa continued to perform poorly through the 1990s, and only picked
up in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but partly as a result of booming commod-
ity prices. In turn, Central and Eastern European countries collapsed in different degrees
during their own (broader) liberalization processes of the 1990s, again followed by recovery
in the 2000s. In many of these cases, trade liberalization led to de-industrialization in
variable degrees. This is in open contrast to the successful Asian stories (some of them going
back to the 1960s), where export-led growth reinforced the industrialization process.
Controversies surrounding East Asian success were heated. Japanese dissatisfaction with
the World Bank interpretations of such success was behind its willingness to finance the
study The East Asian Miracle (World Bank 1993). But this study hardly solved the contro-
versy, as it argued that the active state interventions by East Asian countries actually resulted
in more or less “neutral incentives,” which the study interpreted as the reasons for their suc-
cess. This is in sharp contrast to the alternative views of Amsden (1989 and 2001) and Wade
(2003), among others, who emphasized the interventionist character of East Asian policies
and their focus on structural change and the technological upgrading of exports.
A more nuanced World Bank view of the links between trade liberalization of develop-
ment was provided in its own evaluation of the 1990s reform programs (World Bank 2005:
ch. 5), in which it argued that trade was an element of all successful processes, but that trade
by itself was no guarantee of success. For that it was necessary that trade policies be part of a
broader development strategy, which should include an appropriate macroeconomic policy,
guaranteeing in particular a competitive and stable real exchange rate, trade institutions that
helped local producers meet international quality standards, and investments in human cap-
ital, physical infrastructure and institutional development. It also pointed out that in some
successful experiences, such as those of China and Mauritius, export promotion clearly pre-
ceded import liberalization. The Growth Report of the Commission on Growth and Develop-
ment (2008) provided an even more nuanced view as, aside from reiterating the role of
investments in human capital and infrastructure, it underscored the need to use the exchange
and interest rates with explicit development objectives, and thus to be very cautious of capi-
tal account liberalization. Both studies underscored the crucial role that exchange rate poli-
cies play in the success of the trade strategies, an issue that permeates other controversies, as
we will see below.
The structuralist interpretations of the success stories emphasized the capacity of a given
strategy to facilitate the technological upgrading of exports and domestic production generally
(see, for example, Akyüz 2003 and Ocampo et al. 2009). These interpretations were grounded
in a more careful look at industrialization and manufacturing experiences in the developing
world (see, for example, the contributions to Helleiner 1994 and 1995). Coming from new trade
theory, Grossman and Helpman (1995), among others, had also pointed out that not all sectors
had the same capacity to induce technological change. In this line of thought, Hausmann et al.
(2007) argued that that the “quality” of exports—which could be understood as its technologi-
cal content—was the factor that induced faster economic growth, not trade openness per se.
So, active industrial (and, more generally, production sector) policies, focused on increasing
the technological contents of production, may be a necessary ingredient in a successful export-
led strategy (see Rodrik 2007, and contributions to Cimoli et al. 2009).
In the more nuanced mainstream contributions, there is also a positive view of “horizon-
tal” production sector policies—those with no sectorial bias—particularly those aimed at
promoting technological innovation. These policies are suboptimal according to the struc-
turalist paradigm, as sectors have different capacities to induce technological change and
growth. In turn, a major criticism from the orthodox camp is that selective (or “vertical”)
policies involve “picking winners,” a rather risky strategy and one that creates opportunities
for rent-seeking. A compromise solution suggested by the “new (or, more appropriately,
neo-classical) structural economics” of Justin Lin (2012) is that there are stages of compara-
tive advantage associated with the resources economies accumulate as they develop (an idea
that goes back to Balassa 1989), and thus that the problem of what sectors to promote is
solved by looking at countries that are immediately ahead in the development ladder.
It can also be argued that developing new activities does involve risks of failure, but that
such strategy is the essence of success stories even of individual private sector firms. Further-
more, it is a learning process in which “winners” are created rather than chosen a priori. This
is in fact an idea that can be drawn from the (now old) “new trade literature” pioneered by
Krugman (1990), in which comparative advantages are essentially created. In any case, active
production sector strategies do have additional institutional requirements that must be built
up, again through a learning process. Perhaps because of these special institutional require-
ments, some economists, such as Rodrik, visualize exchange rate undervaluation as a substi-
tute for industrial policies, as it also generates a bias in favor of tradable sectors. However, it
is an imperfect substitute, as it is not a selective strategy and, if practiced by large economies,
it generates global imbalances.
A final remark could be added in relation to the role of natural resources, which continue
to be the major source of exports in many poor countries and have again become more
important for several middle-income countries over the past decade of high commodity
prices. In this regard, the work by Sachs and Warner (1995) is widely regarded as the best
attempt to show the disadvantages in terms of inducing growth of an excessive reliance on
these exports. Again, however, the essential element of success with natural resource inten-
sive export strategies is the capacity to increase the technological content of exports, to
exploit the linkages between natural resources with other sectors, and to diversify away from
them in the long term, all of which seem to be at the center of the success stories of some
developed countries (Blomström and Kokko 2007).
Financial Liberalization
Financial liberalization generated its own successes and failures. The prior regime came to
be pejoratively labeled financial “repression” and was characterized by highly regulated
domestic finance, particularly of interest rates and credit allocation, by the role played by
state-owned banks in several countries, and by the management of the balance of payments
through foreign exchange and capital controls. The financial liberalization that followed was
more diverse across the developing world than trade liberalization, as several countries
maintained commercial and development state-owned banks, and capital account regula-
tions of different character.
Financial liberalization was successful in several countries in inducing an expansion of
private credit as a proportion of GDP and of stock market capitalization in several develop-
ing countries—and more the former than the latter. The development of long-term credit
and financial inclusion remained, however, overriding concerns. To reduce the dependence
on external funding, the development of domestic bond markets became an important area
of policy work, particularly after the Asian crisis, but success was more commonly associ-
ated with the growth of government rather than corporate bond markets. New paradigms
were also developed to expand access to finance through microcredit and other means.
The major failure of liberalization was the sequence of financial crises, generated by the
dual effect of strongly procyclical capital flows to developing countries and weak domestic
financial regulation. Financial crises indeed became a frequent phenomenon, in sharp con-
trast with the era of financial repression. This was associated with both domestic and exter-
nal financial liberalization, and led on many occasions to a “twin crisis” (simultaneous
domestic financial and balance of payments crises). Analyzing the experience of the Southern
Cone countries of Latin America, which were among the first liberalizers, Diaz-Alejandro
(1985) said it all in the title of one of his best known papers: “Good-bye financial repression,
hello financial crash.” An early idea, also drawn from the Southern Cone experience, was
that the liberalization process should be sequential, with trade liberalization preceding
financial liberalization (Edwards 1984), but this was generally ignored in the following dec-
ades. Despite some efforts to re-regulate finance—an area in which several developing coun-
tries led the way, generally after their own financial crises—the risks of financial liberalization
became a recurrent theme (see, for example, the contributions to Ocampo and Stiglitz 2008).
A landmark in this debate was, undoubtedly, the IMF paper by Prasad et al. (2003), which
recognized the high risks associated with financial liberalization, which in a sense swamped
the potential benefits that such liberalization could have on growth.
The most important issue is the interaction between liberalized financial sectors and mac-
roeconomic dynamics, which leads to boom–bust cycles. This phenomenon was central to
the Keynesian revolution and was developed with particular brilliance by Minsky (1982). As
already mentioned, confirmation of this pattern has been provided by Kindleberger and
Aliber (2005) and Reinhart and Rogoff (2009), among others. The essence of the story is the
tendency of private agents to alternate through the business cycle between “risk appetite”
(or, rather, underestimation of risks) and “flight to quality” (risk aversion). In turn, opinions
and expectations of different agents feed back into each other, generating an alternation of
contagion of optimism and of pessimism. Asymmetries of information typical of financial
markets tend to accentuate these trends.
Boom–bust cycles are stronger for those agents that are considered riskier by financial
markets, who experience easier availability of finance during booms followed by credit
rationing and/or high costs of financing during crises. This is the situation faced by small
enterprises and lower-income households even in mature industrial markets. It is also the
situation of emerging and developing countries during crises (including currently periph-
eral Europe). One way of understanding this phenomenon is that financial integration by
developing countries into global financial markets is a segmented integration (Frenkel
2008), such as integration into a market that is segmented by risk categories. As a result,
emerging economies experience boom–bust cycles independently of macroeconomic fun-
damentals (Calvo and Talvi 2008). Indeed, countries that are considered “successful” are
inevitably brought into the boom, but this can lead to the accumulation of vulnerabilities
that may lead to them to crises (Ffrench-Davis 2001).
Volatility is reflected in the behavior of risk spreads as well as in the availability and matu-
rity of financing. All of them have procyclical effects. Risks tend to be more pronounced in
developing countries due the proliferation of maturity and currency mismatches in private
sector balance sheets. All forms of financing tend to be procyclical, but this pattern is sharper
for short-term financing, which thus tends to be particularly risky (Rodrik and Velasco
2000). A recent diagnosis by the IMF (2011: ch. 4) indicates that the volatility of capital flows
has increased over time and is sharper for emerging than for advanced economies. Bank and
other capital flows are more volatile, followed by portfolio debt flows, but FDI volatility has
increased and is now similar than that for portfolio debt flows.
Intense short-term movement, such as those produced after the August 1998 Russian
moratoria and the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, are particularly traumatic.
However, in practice the most difficult phenomena to manage in macroeconomic terms are
medium-term cycles. Developing countries have experienced three such cycles since the
1970s and are in the midst of a fourth one: a boom in the second half of the 1970s followed by
collapse in the 1980s; the boom in 1990–7 (shortly interrupted by the December 1994 Mexi-
can crisis) followed by the sequence of emerging market crisis that started in East Asia in
mid-1997; a new boom between 2003 and mid-2008 followed by the global effects of the col-
lapse of Lehman Brothers; and a new boom since mid-2009 (shortly interrupted by the dif-
ferent episodes surrounding the euro crisis).
Historical evidence seems to indicate that the strength of the policies adopted by advanced
economies to stabilize financial markets is critical for the length of the downward phase of
the cycle. So, the massive interventions after the collapse of Lehman Brothers were critical
for the return to more normal financial conditions in the developing world in a relatively
short time period (about a year). The same is true of massive support to Mexico after its
December 1994 crisis (a few months). In contrast, weak and delayed action after the August
1982 Mexican moratoria and the first stages of the East Asian crisis in 1997 lead to protracted
crises in emerging markets (eight and six years, respectively).
Another factor that has mitigated the strength and length of crises is the reduced external
vulnerability of developing countries after the Asian crisis generated by the combination of
massive self-insurance through foreign reserve accumulation and the development of
domestic bond markets. Both led to a sharp reduction in risk spreads between 2004 and
2007. Although this may be understood as reduced market segmentation, the fact that its
counterpart is massive self-insurance indicates that market segmentation is still a feature of
global finance, but one that can be mitigated with prudential policies.
As indicated, the major problems generated by boom–bust cycles are associated with pro-
cyclical private sector spending and induced vulnerabilities in balance sheets. However, the
major complication is that this may reduce the space for traditional countercyclical macr-
oeconomic policies, as attempts to cool down the economy during booms with increased
interest rates would lead to additional capital inflows that would counteract the effect of
monetary policy on private demand and may increase currency mismatches in portfolios.
Given this constraint, the key to appropriate countercyclical management is the expanded
availability of policy instruments to manage the domestic effects of external boom–bust
cycles. This is particularly so when we understand that macroeconomic stability goes beyond
price stability and includes real and financial stability—that is, avoiding sharp business cycles
and domestic financial crises. So, it requires the integrated use of three broad sets of policies
to smooth the business cycle: fiscal policies; monetary and exchange rate policies (which are
highly interlinked in the developing world), and macroprudential policies5 (Ocampo 2008;
Ocampo et al. 2009: chs. 5–6).
In this regard, an issue that links trade and finance is the relation between capital account
volatility and exchange rate management. Some degree of exchange rate flexibility may be essen-
tial for macroeconomic management. However, it may also lead to exchange rate volatility
and misalignment, both of which have significant adverse effects on trade. There is also no
clear evidence that market forces that would tend to correct such misalignment. Hence the
search for intermediate options between the extremes of fixed and totally flexible exchange
rates (Williamson 2000). Managed flexibility seems to have become the preferred option to
manage this challenge in the emerging world, with capital account management as a com-
plement in some cases.
Emerging Issues
At the global level, two trends are now reshaping global trade and finance. The first is the rise
of emerging powers, a result of success of some of them in navigating through the second
globalization. The most significant trend in terms of both trade and international investment
is the rise of China, which in terms of its global effects overshadows that of all the other
emerging economies. The second is the global financial crisis, which first led to the collapse
and later to the reduced dynamism of world trade.
The net effect is that the most important opportunities are associated now with South–
South trade, which largely means trading with China. Its major positive effect has been ris-
ing commodity prices (World Bank 2009; Erten and Ocampo 2012). Its major negative
feature is that the emerging China-centered trading system is highly center–periphery in the
very old sense of the term: other developing countries mainly export primary goods (some
of these exports being supported by Chinese investments) and import an increasingly
diverse set of manufactured goods from the emerging industrial powerhouse. This has
noticeably brought back old debates on the disadvantage of this emerging feature of South–
South trade that some claim is reinforcing the de-industrialization process in other parts of
the developing world (see, in relation to Latin America, Gallagher and Porzecanski 2010). In
turn, as a result of the lack of dynamism of international trade, domestic markets have again
begun to look like an attractive opportunity, not least in China. This may give rise to protec-
tionist trends. Although such trends have not been widespread so far, they may become an
increasing threat if the recovery of the industrial world continues to drag and that of China
weakens.
These emerging trends are bringing back old debates on the links between trade, finance,
and development. They will continue to shape intellectual controversies in the years to come.
Notes
1. This concept does not ignore that there were global economic processes that precede the
globalization of the late nineteenth century, but correctly differentiates the older proc-
esses from the two contemporary globalizations by the degree of integration of commod-
ity and financial markets that was possible since the late nineteenth century given
advances in transportation and communications.
2. Using historical data collected by Angus Maddison (see Groningen Growth and Develop-
ment Centre’s Total Economy Database (<www.conference-board.org/data/economydata-
base/>), it is possibly to estimate that the standard deviation of per capita GDP growth of
developing countries increased from 1.9 percent in 1950–7 to 3.5 percent in 1973–80 and has
stabilized around that level since. In contrast, a similar statistic for developed countries
actually fell in the early post-war period and has stabilized around 1 percent since the mid-
1950s.
3. See a detailed analysis of the UNCTAD conferences and the North–South negotiations in
Toye and Toye (2004, chs. 9 and 10).
4. Using data from the United Nations Statistical Division, the elasticity of real world exports
to world GDP (at market prices) increased from 1.4 in 1970–86 to 2.4 in 1986–2007.
5. Capital management techniques, if we use the terminology of Epstein, Grabel, and Jomo
(2003).
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chapter 18
en tr epr en eu r ship a n d
econom ic dev el opm en t
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Introduction
Adam Smith, founding father of modern economics, “detested business men” (Lewis 1988:
35). Development scholars and development economists in particular have, if not detested
business men or entrepreneurs, (benignly) neglected them. Following Leff (1979: 51), many
development scholars took the position that “entrepreneurship is no longer a problem” or a
“relevant constraint on the pace of development” in developing countries. Entrepreneurship
scholars, on the other hand, have been more concerned with the who, why, and how of entre-
preneurship rather than with the impact of entrepreneurship on development or developing
countries (Shane 1997; Bruton, Ahlstrom, and Obloj 2008), a state of affairs described as a
“scholarly disconnect” (Audretsch, Grilo, and Thurik 2007).
Why does this matter? First, it is widely believed that entrepreneurship is beneficial for
economic growth and development. Second, entrepreneurship has been remarkably resur-
gent over the past three decades in countries that have achieved substantial poverty reduc-
tion, such as China. Third, donors and international development agencies have turned to
entrepreneurship to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of aid.
However, the theoretical and empirical cases for understanding the role of entrepreneur-
ship are not yet solid. Evidence on whether entrepreneurship matters for economic growth is
not straightforward; how entrepreneurship has been promoted and how it contributed to
development in countries like China and the East Asian Tigers is still a matter of contention;
and whether and why private-sector development initiatives may be effective is not well
understood.
Closer scrutiny of the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development
is therefore needed. In order to stimulate the development–entrepreneurship discourse, it
may be necessary first to attempt to formalize or reconcile the role of entrepreneurship in the
“grand ideas” of development economics, and to consider how this resonates with available
evidence and what it means for policy.
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There are at least three “grand ideas” in development economics. The first is that develop-
ment requires a structural transformation of what, how, and where production and con-
sumption take place: from low value-added, low productivity, and rural-based activities to
higher value-added, more productive activities in services and manufacturing located in cit-
ies. The second idea is that development is a multidimensional concept that requires more
than just the eradication of income poverty. The third is that market failures are prevalent
and that the state has an important coordinating and regulatory role to play in development.
All of these grand ideas are currently at the forefront of thought in development, and
much of what development scholars are occupying themselves with, either directly or indi-
rectly, falls within the scope of these ideas.
This chapter provides an overview of thinking on the intersection of development and
entrepreneurship. It addresses the theoretical insights from the intersection of entrepreneur-
ship and development studies, the empirical evidence on the relationship between entrepre-
neurship and development, and the fresh insights on entrepreneurship policy for development
that have emerged from recent advances in this area.
Theoretical Perspectives
Concept, Definitions, Evolution, and Relevance

for Development
The evolution in scholarly views of entrepreneurship is reflected in the categories of behavio-
ral, occupational, and synthesis definitions.
Schumpeter (1950, 1961) famously defined the entrepreneur as the coordinator of produc-
tion and agent of change (“creative destruction”). As such, the “Schumpeterian” entrepre-
neur is above all an innovator. Scholars who share this view do not consider entrepreneurship
to be very important in the earlier stages of economic development; they see the contribu-
tion of entrepreneurship as much more important in later stages of development, where eco-
nomic growth is driven by knowledge and competition. In earlier stages of development,
entrepreneurship plays a much less pronounced role because growth is largely driven by
factor accumulation (Ács and Naudé 2012).
Other behavioral definitions allow for a more substantial role for entrepreneurship in
developing countries. Kirzner (1973) views the entrepreneur as someone who facilitates
adjustment to change by spotting opportunities for profitable arbitrage (and “disequilib-
rium” situations in the market). This view has resonated among scholars who emphasize the
opportunity-grabbing-for-profit nature of entrepreneurship (Shane and Venkataraman
2000), particularly in developing countries where market disequilibria may be common.
Behavioral definitions also stress the risk-taking dimension of entrepreneurship. Kanbur
(1979: 773) described the entrepreneur as one who “manages the production function” by
paying workers wages (which are more certain than profits) and shouldering the risks and
uncertainties of production. Such definitions are seen as very relevant for developing coun-
try contexts characterized by high risk and uncertainty. The predominance of small firms in
developing countries—most entrepreneurship studies in developing countries are concerned
entrepreneurship and economic development 313
with small and medium enterprises (SMEs)—has been postulated to be a symptom of

economy-wide uncertainty, where the probability of success is small (Wiggins 1995).
Policy implications follow from these views—for instance, that government policy for
promoting entrepreneurship should reduce uncertainty and transaction costs. Policy, how-
ever, is only a proximate cause for risk and uncertainty, and in recent years development
scholars have recognized “institutions” (the “rules of the game”) as the ultimate determinant
of development. Institutions affect not only the supply but, perhaps even more important,
the allocation of entrepreneurship. According to Baumol (1990: 895), entrepreneurial ability
can be allocated towards productive, unproductive, or even destructive activities. He defines
entrepreneurs as “persons who are ingenious and creative in finding ways that add to their
own wealth, power, and prestige.” Underdevelopment is due not to an insufficient supply of
entrepreneurs, but to institutional weaknesses that result in a “lack of profit opportunities
tied to activities that yield economic growth” (Coyne and Leeson 2004: 236).
In economic theory, entrepreneurship has been modeled as an occupational choice
between self-employment and wage-employment (see Lucas 1978; Evans and Jovanovic 1989;
Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny 1991). Hence someone will become an entrepreneur if profits
and the non-pecuniary benefits from self-employment exceed wage income plus additional
wage-employment benefits. Entrepreneurship is thus often synonymous with self-employ-
ment. Because self-employment is often not by choice but by necessity, a distinction is often
made between necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs, as, for instance, in the Global Entre-
preneurship Monitor (GEM) (see Reynolds et al. 2005).
A synthesis definition combines behavioral and occupational views, and relates entrepre-
neurship to the three big ideas in development economics, as discussed in the introduction.
As such, this definition to an extent reflects some of the evolution in the scholarly thinking
about entrepreneurship, understood as the resource, process, and state of being through and
in which individuals utilize positive opportunities in the market by creating and growing
new business firms.
As a resource, entrepreneurship has the instrumental value that it is accorded in econom-
ics; as a process it accords to the attention given in management studies on the start-up,
growth, and exit of firms; and as a state of being it recognizes that entrepreneurship is not
limited to being instrumental, but is often valued in and of itself (as will be explained in
greater detail below).
This definition emphasizes the process value of entrepreneurship and describes entrepre-
neurial opportunities in a broader sense than is usual in the literature. For instance, Shane
and Venkataraman (2000) define an “opportunity” as when goods can be sold at a profit.
From a development perspective this is inadequate, because it implies that utility from entre-
preneurship depends only on monetary gains. “Opportunities” should include situations
when persons can create new firms that will further the kind of lives they desire.
The use of the adjective “positive” in relation to opportunities reflects a subjective
assessment that, while entrepreneurial ability may be allocated to destructive activities (as
in Baumol 1990), it should not be defined as entrepreneurship if it detracts from either
individual or societal welfare.
Whereas initially, scholars viewed entrepreneurship as being restricted to innovation and
business creation, the view has expanded towards one where entrepreneurship is seen more
appropriately as a social phenomenon that reflects the broader institutional characteristics
of a society. Entrepreneurship is concerned not only with business success, as measured by
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profits, but also with subjective welfare and non-economic well-being. Entrepreneurship is a
catalyst for structural change and institutional evolution.
The following sub-sections consider the contribution that entrepreneurship can make to
illuminating the three “big ideas” in development economics.
Structural Economic Transformation and Entrepreneurship

One of the seminal contributions to development economics has been dual economy mod-
els, inspired by Lewis (1954), utilized to explain the structural transformation of underdevel-
oped economies. The Lewis-model distinction between a traditional and modern sector can
be expanded with the micro-foundations of optimizing households, firms, and labor market
matching. One can also distinguish between mature and start-up entrepreneurs, between
large firms and small firms, and between necessity- and opportunity-driven entrepreneur-
ship. In this model the transformation from a low-income, traditional economy to a modern
economy involves significant changes to production methods, a process of change where
entrepreneurs play essential roles, including providing innovative intermediate inputs, per-
mitting specialization, and raising productivity and employment.
This model builds on earlier work of Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1991); Peretto (1999);
Rada (2007). In Rada (2007), entrepreneurs “trigger” an investment in the modern sector
once they have perceived profitable opportunities and facilitated the re-allocation of pro-
duction factors from the traditional to the modern sector. Peretto (1999) provided a modified
endogenous growth model that implied that long-run structural transformation depends on
the degree to which an economy can make a transition from a growth path driven by capital
accumulation (the “Solow economy”) to a growth path driven by knowledge accumulation
(the “innovation-driven economy”).
In structural change, entrepreneurial ability has been accorded centerstage. Murphy,
Shleifer, and Vishny (1991) provided a model that described firm size and the growth of the
economy as a function of entrepreneurial ability. Nelson and Pack (1999) assign a key role to
the “effectiveness of entrepreneurial ability,” which they see as a vital determinant of the rate
of assimilation of technology (1999: 420)—as in Michelacci (2003), where entrepreneurial
ability is vital for research and development (R&D). In Nelson and Pack (1999), a “rapid”
expansion of skilled labor can be absorbed only if entrepreneurial ability is high, and without
entrepreneurial ability the returns to physical and human capital are low.
The process of structural change as facilitated by high-ability entrepreneurs leads firms to
adopt more complex production methods and produce more complex and specialized inter-
mediate inputs. As a result, the technological intensity of a country’s economic structure
increases (Ciccone and Matsuyama 1996). These structural changes have interesting impli-
cations for the development of entrepreneurship itself, so that entrepreneurship may itself be
endogenous in the development process.
Ciccone and Matsuyama (1996) explain this in a model where they make a distinction
between consumer goods and intermediate goods. If a particular economy produces a lim-
ited range of intermediate goods, they show that the final (consumer) goods sector will use
“primitive” production methods and will have little demand for sophisticated, new inputs.
This will lead to lower incentives for potential entrepreneurs to start up new firms. The eco
nomy can get stuck in such an underdevelopment trap, with primitive production in its (small)
modern sector. They also point out that in such an “underdevelopment trap” there might be
a case for assistance to new start-ups, since these can provide both pecuniary and techno-
logical externalities. If they start producing new intermediate goods, these will induce end
producers to demand more, in turn improving the incentives for other entrepreneurs to start
up firms in response to greater demand and the example provided by the application of new
technology. In this model, start-ups face positive costs that include R&D activities in bring-
ing a new good to the market.
That entrepreneurs create a positive externality by bringing new goods to the market, and
in the process showcase new technology, has been extended by Hausmann and Rodrik
(2003), who point out that entrepreneurs provide not only these technological externalities
(by bringing new goods to market), but pecuniary externalities (by providing information
on the profitability of new activities). Entrepreneurs fulfill a “cost-discovery” function in
making sunk costs in a new activity that ex ante may or may not be profitable, but that will
provide information ex post on such profitability to other entrepreneurs—information often
lacking in developing countries.
Finally, an aspect of duality that is particularly pertinent to the debate on entrepreneur-
ship in development is that between the formal and informal sector (Maloney 2004). De
Paula and Scheinkman (2007) find that informal firms are often a form of “evasive” entrepre-
neurship in order to evade taxes or regulations, or to engage in illegal trade. They also find
that they are less efficient, less able to obtain finance, and more likely to be dominated by
entrepreneurs of low ability. Thus the informal sector is much like the traditional or subsist-
ence sector in typical dual economy models, and growth may be enhanced by encouraging
entrepreneurs of high ability to “migrate” to the formal sector.
Multi-dimensional Development and Entrepreneurship

The entrepreneurship literature generally takes a restricted view of development. Most
empirical studies on the relationship between entrepreneurship and development have simi-
larly been limited to GDP, productivity, and employment growth as proxies for develop-
ment—and not multidimensional development (van Praag and Versloot 2007; Ács, Desai,
and Hessels 2008). Yet entrepreneurship can also contribute to multidimensional well-being
by demonstrating what people can achieve through their capabilities. This notion of human
development—or human flourishing—has been pioneered by Sen (2000), Nussbaum (2000),
and others.
This capabilities approach can inform both theoretical thinking on and measurement of
entrepreneurship. It views entrepreneurship as a human functioning1 that can be valued as an
end in itself, not just as a means to other ends. It can enrich human capabilities if people’s
complementary capabilities are expanded so that they can choose not to be entrepreneurs.
An important implication is that the demand for entrepreneurs is not a derived demand as in
the instrumentalist view (as in, e.g., Casson et al. 2006). Individual level data from the Glo-
bal Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) show evidence of an inverse U-shape relationship
between entrepreneurship and national happiness. Opportunity-motivated entrepreneur-
ship may contribute to a nation’s happiness, but only up to a point. Not everybody should
become an entrepreneur, and the happiness of a nation cannot be indefinitely increased by
increasing the number of entrepreneurs.
316 wim naudé
Although the literature on whether entrepreneurship matters for multidimensional devel-

opment is scant, there has been more research on the subjective well-being (or job satisfac-
tion) of entrepreneurs (mostly measured as the self-employed). The evidence so far suggests
that entrepreneurs experience higher levels of job satisfaction than employees (Benz and
Frey 2004; Blanchflower 2004; Andersson 2008). They have also been found to be healthier
and less prone to negative feelings and depression, and to experience flow and “procedural
utility” (Block and Koellinger 2009).
Market Failures, the State, and Entrepreneurship

The third “grand idea” in development economics concerns market and state failures. In the
aftermath of the Second World War, when development economics was founded, the belief
was that market failures were important to understand underdevelopment. During the
1980s, the government was seen as similarly subject to failure, under a set of principles for
market-oriented reform described as the “Washington Consensus.” The implicit assumption
was that the supply of entrepreneurship would be forthcoming once the constraints imposed
by state interference were loosened. After the global financial crises of 2008 and 2009, in
which market liberalization and “Washington Consensus”-type policies were found to be
complicit, the regulatory role of the state has been revived.
One role of the state that has received more attention is in industrial policy (Szirmai,
Naudé, and Alcorta 2013; see also Di Miao, this volume). Here, old models of import-protection
and state-owned enterprises have given way to policies that rely more on the private sector
and entrepreneurship, but with government still playing an important role to address market
failures in the entrepreneurial start-up and growth process. For example, some have argued
that entrepreneurial entry may be sub-optimal due to the externalities that may justify “self-
discovery” through supporting innovation by SMEs and new firm start-ups—for example,
by reducing regulations and requirements or providing subsidized credit (Hausmann and
Rodrik 2003).
In contrast, others have argued for taxing (regulating) entrepreneurship because it may
cast negative externalities. De Meza and Webb (1987) make the case that credit market
imperfections may lead to “overinvestment” when banks cannot accurately judge entrepre-
neurial ability. Because banks cannot observe any entrepreneur’s ability ex ante, interest rates
on start-up capital will reflect average entrepreneurial ability. If the proportion of entrepre-
neurs of low ability increases, it will result in higher borrowing costs, which impose a nega-
tive externality on entrepreneurs of high ability, who will consequently borrow and invest
less. The entry of entrepreneurs with low ability might also hinder development because
such entrepreneurs may have less productive workers, who will earn reduced wages as a
result, and in turn reduce the opportunity costs of self-employment, thereby causing the
entry of even more low-ability entrepreneurs (Ghatak, Morelli, and Sjöström 2007: 2).
There is thus a clear case for the state to play a role in addressing the market failures that
plague entrepreneurial start-up and innovation activities (Ács and Naudé 2012). More
research is needed to clarify this role, given the fact that many countries simultaneously
exhibit different stages in different sectors.
The how of state support for entrepreneurship is also essential. For instance, private-sector
development policies have tended to shy away from targeting entrepreneurs in specific
s ectors or industries for fear of distorting markets, and for fear of government failure—
especially fearing the potential for such selective support to encourage rent-seeking and cor-
ruption. The design of entrepreneurship policies is therefore a delicate art, and one that
needs rigorous evidence.
Empirical Evidence
Macro-level Relationship
Three important databases describe the entrepreneurial activity of countries: the Interna-
tional Labour Organization (ILO) measures self-employment, the Global Entrepreneurship
Monitor (GEM) measures start-up rates of new firms, and the World Bank measures the reg-
istration of new firms. It is worth noting that these databases are concerned with formal as
opposed to informal firms (for a comparison of these databases, see Desai 2010).
Studies using these databases have uncovered two sets of results. First, there is a lack of
clear empirical evidence of whether entrepreneurship drives economic growth, productiv-
ity, or employment. Studies find a mixed bag of results. Second, there seems to be a U-shaped
relationship between entrepreneurship and a country’s level of economic development, as
measured by GDP per capita.
The U-shaped relationship implies a higher rate of entrepreneurial activity in low-income
countries than in middle-income countries (Wennekers et al. 2005). This result may reflect
that entrepreneurs in developing countries are less innovative and tend to be proportionately
more “necessity”-motivated (Ács, Desai, and Hessels 2008; Gollin 2008). Higher levels of
GDP may therefore be associated with more “innovative” forms of entrepreneurship.
Another implication is that causality may run not only from entrepreneurship to develop-
ment, but also from development to entrepreneurship.
In conclusion, macro-level empirical work has been concerned with how entrepreneur-
ship influences economic measures of development, such as GDP, productivity, and employ-
ment. Very few studies have considered non-monetary or subjective measures.
Micro-level Relationship
Most micro-level studies focus on the why and how of entrepreneurship, not its impact on
development. Nevertheless, studies on productivity, innovativeness, growth, and female
entrepreneurs provide insights on whether and how entrepreneurship matters for develop-
ment. One lesson is that innovative entrepreneurship matters most for development.
Van Praag and Versloot (2007) consider the literature on the impact of entrepreneurship on
employment, innovation, and productivity growth. They find that although the quality and effi-
ciency of their innovation is higher, entrepreneurs do not spend more on R&D than their coun-
terparts, and their contribution to productivity growth is low. The majority of entrepreneurs
would earn higher incomes as wage employees, and while entrepreneurs create more jobs than
non-entrepreneurs, the quality of the jobs they create is lower. Hence not all entrepreneurs drive
development, and not all entrepreneurs are innovative (Stam and Wennberg 2009).
As these findings refer to the impact of the average entrepreneur, they perhaps suggest
that focusing on the average entrepreneur may not be the best policy stance. It may be better
318 wim naudé
to focus on the small subset of innovative entrepreneurs who do make a difference. Studies
find that innovative firms, particularly in high-tech sectors, have on average higher levels of
productivity, tend to enjoy higher employment growth, and cause positive spillovers for
other firms (Stam and Wennberg 2009). A study of manufacturing firms in Brazil, with
the focus on a panel, found that firms who engaged in technological innovation experi-
enced higher growth in employment, net revenue, labor productivity, and market share
(Kannebley et al. 2010).
Female entrepreneurs in developing countries have attracted greater attention in recent
years, given the key role of women in development and the still widespread discrimination
they face. Evidence to date suggests that there are several reasons for the observed differ-
ences in entrepreneurial behavior between women and men. For instance, women entrepre-
neurs’ businesses tend to be smaller and to provide less employment growth than those
owned by men. Women’s businesses also tend to be less profitable than, and generate lower
sales turnover than, those owned by men, even in same industry comparisons (Minniti and
Naudé 2010).
These differences in entrepreneurial propensity and performance between men and
women reflect disadvantages and discrimination in education and the labor market. It has
been argued that labor market discrimination against women leads to a self-selection of the
most highly talented women into labor markets. As a result, less talented women will opt for
self-employment, a characteristic reflected in their enterprises’ lower survival and growth
rates. Furthermore, many women may not have sufficient confidence in their ability to start a
firm (Langowitz and Minniti 2007). Yueh (2009) discusses the case of women entrepreneurs
in China and supports the idea that lack of self-confidence is a significant constraint hinder-
ing women’s entrepreneurial entry in developing countries.
As a result they also lack access to credit and face higher start-up costs. Horrell and
Krishnan (2007) report that female-headed households often lack assets or incomes, and
that this constrains their ability to diversify their economic activities. In this regard a large
number of studies have found that access to micro-credit has improved women’s decision-
making autonomy, and general household welfare and consumption.
In conclusion, although much has been learned about the obstacles faced by female entre-
preneurs, much less is known about how the level of aggregate activity influences women’s
decisions about entrepreneurship, and even less about how the latter contribute to develop-
ment. The lack of a systematic approach and data have prevented, so far, the formulation of a
comprehensive and robust theory of female entrepreneurship and development. A solid
understanding of how the distinctive characteristics of female entrepreneurship are
accounted by existing models of growth would be very desirable for both science and policy.
Enhancing the Developmental Impact
Given the “grand ideas” in development economics, the main policy considerations for
enhancing the developmental impact of entrepreneurship are to improve the quality and
allocation of entrepreneurial ability, and reduce the need for necessity entrepreneurship.
Both considerations require better quality and quantity of research and data generation.
Improving the quality of entrepreneurial ability means not only improving the skills and
education of entrepreneurs—their “human capital”—but focusing on the innovative abili-
ties of entrepreneurs. Indeed, the discussion in this chapter implies that it is innovative entre-
preneurship that is most desirable for growth. Innovation policy ought therefore to be a
central focus of entrepreneurship promotion in developing countries, as it is in advanced
economies. Entrepreneurs in developing countries often have a much greater propensity for
innovation than is recognized in the literature or by policy-makers.
Stimulation of innovation has not been paramount in most development agencies or
donors’ private-sector development programs, nor in national entrepreneurship support
programs. The only innovation-relevant aspects of such support programs have been their
concern to improve the general business environment, a prerequisite for innovation, and to
argue for patent protection—and to a lesser extent basic research. Such policies tend to be
more concerned with improving static and allocative efficiency than dynamic efficiency,
which is more important for job creation and growth.
Taking aim at improving dynamic market efficiency through raising innovation, and aim-
ing to limit necessity entrepreneurship, may have implications for policy that run counter to
many current policies. For instance, many aim to improve static and allocation efficiencies in
markets through increasing competition. However, this misses the fact that with underde-
veloped financial markets in developing countries, raising competition may not improve
dynamic efficiency. In the absence of financial markets, firms can only finance innovation
through profits; if too much competition erodes their profits, it will also erode their innova-
tive activities. Reducing the need for necessity entrepreneurship may also imply policies to
encourage job creation and provide social security, policies not popularly associated with an
entrepreneurial economy.
Promoting innovative entrepreneurship in developing countries runs into further diffi-
culties in that there is a broad lack of sufficient impact evaluations2 with which to judge
what works and what does not. Lopez-Acevedo and Tinajero (2010: 2) mention that most
existing evaluations typically do not consider biases due to unobserved firm heterogeneity
or self-selection. Evaluations of entrepreneurship policy tend to be qualitative rather than
quantitative, and cannot keep track of continual changes in programs over time. Many
“impact” studies also do not attempt to attribute impacts or outcomes to interventions,
while a lack of reliable SME data makes evaluation and cross-country comparisons of pro-
grams difficult.
There is thus a need for much more rigorous empirical evidence as to what works and
why, with respect to entrepreneurship policies. In the near future, most poor people will
reside in so-called fragile states where an understandable lack of rigorous micro-level
studies of firms and entrepreneurs limits the contribution of aid and other policies towards
private sector development in conflict or post-conflict countries (Brück, Naudé, and
Verwimp 2011).
One should be cautious of an undue reliance on randomized field experiments as the
sole approach to inform appropriate policy formulation for entrepreneurship develop-
ment (see also Deaton 2009). What is needed is interdisciplinary approaches combining
insights from randomized field experiments with anthropological fieldwork, and with the
political economy of development. Such approaches offer promise for further evolution of
the scientific field demarcated by the intersection of development economics and
entrepreneurship.
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Conclusion
Reconsidering entrepreneurship’s role in development leads to three novel realizations. First,

it provides fresh perspectives on three of the “grand ideas” in development economics;
second, entrepreneurship influences development outcomes positively as well as negatively;
and third, entrepreneurship is in turn significantly determined by the dynamics of development.
Entrepreneurship is therefore a valid and important subject of study for development
scholars, and development is a worthwhile subject of study for entrepreneurship and man-
agement scholars. The growing availability of more and better data from emerging and
developing economies, the increasing adoption of rigorous evaluation methods in policy
assessments, and the likelihood and desirability of closer collaboration across disciplines are
all boding well for the intersection of development and entrepreneurship.
Notes
1. The term functionings is central in the capabilities approach, and refers to valuable activi-
ties and states that make up people’s well-being (Alkire 2005: 1) and includes “working,
resting, being literate, being healthy, being part of a community, being respected” (Robeyns
2003: 6).
2. Impact evaluation (or attribution analysis) is “a with versus without analysis: what hap-
pened with the programme (a factual record) compared to what would have happened in
the absence of the programme (which requires a counterfactual, either implicit or explicit)”
(White 2013: 3).
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chapter 19
t wo proph ets of
r egiona l i n tegr ation:
pr ebisch a n d a dedej i
adekeye adebajo
Introduction
Raùl Prebisch and Adebayo Adedeji are regarded as the contemporary intellectual fathers of
regional integration in Latin America and Africa.1 Even though their ideas did not translate
into practice, they were important institution-builders. I focus on the impact of the ideas of
Argentina’s Raùl Prebisch (1950–63) and Nigeria’s Adebayo Adedeji (1975–91) on the United
Nations (UN) Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA)—which became the Eco-
nomic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in 1984—and the UN
Economic for Africa (ECA) respectively. This chapter is thus not concerned with providing a
history of the intellectual evolution of the ECLA and ECA, but rather with assessing the
impact of two powerful individuals in promoting ideas on economic development and
regional integration within these two institutions during their tenure in office. The chapter
places their role, vision, and impact in historical context, highlighting the role that individu-
als with vision and forceful personalities can play in driving institutions to adopt ideas, but
demonstrating the institutional, regional, and external constraints on the implementation of
these ideas which still rely on the decisions and vested interests of powerful national govern-
ments and other important actors. The essay will further assess the personal, intellectual,
and professional background and influences that shaped the development of both men into
crusading prophets.
Raùl Prebisch and Adebayo Adedeji were trained as economists, taught at universities in
their respective countries, and occupied important economic positions in the national gov-
ernments of Argentina and Nigeria. Both were prodigies who were propelled into promi-
nence and achieved professional success at an early age. They helped to restructure national
economies after cataclysmic events (the Great Depression of the 1930s; and the Nigerian civil
war of 1967–70). Prebisch and Adedeji were head-hunted to lead the UN Economic Com-
mission for Latin America and the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Both contributed
324 adekeye adebajo
to important policy debates on unequal terms of trade between the industrialized North and
the global South; as well as national and regional self-sufficiency and people-led d
evelopment.
Both surrounded themselves with bright young economists from their regions to promote
their ideas.
Both Prebisch and Adedeji also opposed the neoclassical policies propounded for their
respective regions by the Western-dominated World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF). Both men faced incredible political odds in their policy battles which were
opposed by powerful Western governments. The two Bretton Woods institutions would
eventually change course on some of their economic orthodoxies in Latin America and
Africa and heed the warnings of Prebisch and Adedeji, but often after much socio-economic
damage had already been done. Both men rejected neoclassical economic theories and were
often erroneously depicted by critics as “dangerous radicals.” They were, in fact, pragmatists
who opposed Marxist economic policies (Adedeji 2004a: 253; Pollock 2006: 13–14). Prebisch
and Adedeji both accepted the role of the market economy and an activist state in promoting
economic development and integration. Both enjoyed the trust of powerful actors on their
respective continents, and used skilfull political manoeuvring within international institu-
tions to promote their goals. Both were, however, ultimately frustrated in their efforts to
unite Latin America and Africa, as national, regional, and/or external constraints largely
obstructed the implementation of their ideas.
Prebisch and the Building of Latin America
Raùl Prebisch was born in the Argentinian province of Tucumán in 1901 to a German immi-
grant father and a local Argentine mother. He studied economics at the University of Buenos
Aires and taught political economy at the university before serving as Undersecretary of
Finance and Agriculture. He later advised the country’s ministers of finance and agriculture,
thus gaining influence among powerful political actors. At the age of thirty-four, Prebisch
became the first Director of Argentina’s Central Bank, having been one of the architects of its
creation. He served a conservative military-backed Argentine oligarchy which later became
discredited. Prebisch’s world view, at this time, was heavily influenced by European econo-
mists, particularly John Maynard Keynes. (Rosenthal 2004: 181). Following a military coup
in 1943, he was eventually dismissed (apparently for his pro-Allies views during the Second
World War, and his stout defense of the central bank’s autonomy) and ostracized by the
regime. Almost like an intellectual Che Guevara whose legendary motorcycle travels across
Latin America transformed him into the world’s most famous guerrilla leader, Prebisch
spent six years in the wilderness traveling rather more comfortably than his famous
compatriot across Latin America as a banking consultant while teaching economics at the
University of Buenos Aires.
The ECLA and the “Structuralist” School

Prebisch eventually found succor in the Chilean capital of Santiago where he served as the
UN Economic Commission for Latin America’s Executive Secretary from 1950 to 1963,
two prophets of regional integration: prebisch and adedeji 325
aving joined the organization in 1949 as its research director. The United States (U.S.) had
h
been determined to shut down the ECLA—which it regarded as an unwelcome rival to the
Washington-based Organisation of American States’ (OAS) Economic and Social Council—
by 1951, after only three years of the organization’s existence. Prebisch mobilized political
support across Latin America for its governments to take ownership of the body and to stare
down the U.S. juggernaut. His ECLA produced country studies of such high quality and use-
fulness that Prebisch successfully convinced regional governments (strongly supported
especially by Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala, and Cuba) to embarrass Washington into
keeping the organization alive. The U.S. eventually conceded that Prebisch represented for
many Latin American governments an “unusually able champion of their economic views”
(Quoted in Dosman 2008: 262).
Before joining the ECLA, Prebisch had achieved regional and UN prominence through an
influential document The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems
(Prebisch 1950) which was presented at the newly-established UN Economic Commission for
Latin America’s Havana session in 1949. Due to opposition by the U.S. and other Western states
(though France would become a key supporter of the ECLA), this document carried the name
of the author: a rare exception within the workings of the UN. Prebisch rejected neoclassical
international trade theories that argued that such trade benefited all countries due to the com-
parative advantage that each enjoyed, and was unconvinced that these interactions would
eventually reduce the income gap between rich and poor countries (Rosenthal 2004: 169;
181–3). As Prebisch noted: “The forced march of the first countries in the Industrial Revolution
has created an economic firmament with a sun composed of the developed countries of the
center around which the peripheral countries rotate in their disorganized orbits” (Dosman
2008: 276). He urged Latin American countries toward revisionism by overturning the interna-
tional division of labor in which the Northern “center” exported manufactured goods to devel-
oping countries, the price of which continued to increase, while the Southern “periphery”
exported agricultural goods and minerals to the North, the price of which continued to decline.
These ideas represented Prebisch’s main theoretical contribution and were adopted in
emerging departments of development economics across Latin America. They also came to
be known as the “Prebisch–Singer” thesis on the terms of trade between developing and
industrialized countries. (Hans Singer was a German-born British economist working with
the UN, who provided the historical price data used by Prebisch to reach the conclusions in
his 1949 presentation.) According to this view, long-run trends suggested that prices of pri-
mary products continued to deteriorate relative to manufactured goods, forcing countries in
the periphery to export even more raw materials to import the equivalent industrial prod-
ucts. This thesis also noted the differential effect of the global economic cycle on the center
and the periphery. During economic upswings, the terms of trade generally move in favor of
primary products, while during downturns, they swing against raw materials to a greater
degree, resulting in a long-run deterioration of the periphery’s terms of trade, with down-
swings also lasting longer than upswings. These factors are explained by the differential
behavior of prices, profits, and wages in the center and periphery during economic cycles.
During economic upswings, wages and prices increase greatly in the center, but hardly rise
in the periphery which has surplus labor. During a downturn, the decrease in wages and
prices in the center is constrained by trade unions and the oligopolistic structure of industry.
The periphery in contrast suffers substantial reductions in prices and wages, lacking strong
trade unions (Kay 2006: 200–2).
326 adekeye adebajo
Under Prebisch’s leadership, the ECLA sought to refine the core–periphery model. This
concept consistently argued that the global economy was divided into an industrial center
and agrarian periphery, with the core possessing a homogenous structure of similar levels of
productivity in diverse sectors, and the periphery having a heterogeneity based on different
levels of technology. Led by “Don Raùl”—as Prebisch was fondly known by his admirers—
ECLA “structuralists” proposed a strategy based on import-substitution industrialization
(ISI), employing protectionist measures of high tariffs on manufacturing imports and a tax
on primary exports to encourage the creation of a larger industrial sector based first on the
domestic market and then on exports. Prebisch also advocated stronger trade unions in the
primary export sector to increase wages, defend prices, and push against protectionist meas-
ures in the industrialized countries (Kay 2006: 202–3). His thoroughly-researched two-
yearly Economic Surveys sought to push Latin American governments to break the vicious
cycle of low productivity, low income, and low savings by increasing industrialization
through restructuring domestic imports and production (Dosman 2008: 263).
Prebisch’s credibility was boosted by the fact that his ideas—widely embraced by govern-
ments in the region—were based on actual practice as head of his country’s central bank, and
not just on theories devised in an ivory tower. The ruinous effect of the Great Depression of
the 1930s on Argentina and other Latin American economies was a particularly formative
experience, as Prebisch had until then been an orthodox neoclassical economist. His approach
was to find “historical moments” in order to use new ideas to transform institutions into
movements for structural change (Pollock 2006: 14). He believed fervently in the role of the
state in social engineering as well as national planning to promote development and industri-
alization. By 1954, in the still-born International Cooperation for a Latin American Develop-
ment Policy, Prebisch was calling for greater international credit for the region’s development
involving an annual $1 billion for development financing to accelerate industrialization; the
creation of a regional development bank; greater taxation and agrarian reform; and the stabi-
lization of commodity exports. A surly United States—the obvious paymaster of these ideas—
rejected them out of hand (Rosenthal 2004: 176; Dosman 2008: 291–4).
At the UN ECLA, Prebisch—working eighteen-hour days—assembled a young team of
dynamic, ideologically-diverse Latin American economists (several recruited from the
World Bank and the IMF) to help build their own continent. By 1953, the ECLA had 130 full-
time staff. Prebisch provided inspirational leadership in championing the gospel of the Latin
American “structuralist” school of development. Structuralism represented one of the earli-
est efforts to develop a theory of development and underdevelopment. Prebisch (particularly
after 1960) also questioned whether growth would necessarily result in improved income
distribution, and called for greater external savings to support regional development.
(Rosenthal 2004: 184, 191). The increasing number of National Planning Offices throughout
Latin America at least demonstrated that the ECLA’s ideas were being taken up by national
governments, even if their implementation did not always match the ambitions of their
initiator.
Regional Integration and Global Development

At the request of regional governments, Prebisch helped Central American countries to
establish a Regime of Integration Industries which would consist of regulated monopolies
among the five countries of Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica.
This effort at regional integration, however, failed as a result of opposition from the public
sector as well as U.S. hostility. Nevertheless, a General Treaty was signed between the five
countries in 1960 to achieve generalized trade liberalization, and eventually a customs union,
and a secretariat was established in Guatemala City. The seeds of regional integration in
Latin America had been sown (Rosenthal 2004: 185–6).
In his second term as ECLA Executive Secretary between 1956 and 1963, Prebisch focused
on trying to create a Latin American Common Market, an idea given impetus by the crea-
tion of the Jean Monnet-led European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, and the
European Economic Community (EEC) six years later. Prebisch had often complained that
Latin America’s twenty states operated in “water-tight compartments,” and from 1956, he
prepared a Preliminary Study of Inter-American Trade. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay,
and Paraguay were the most enthusiastic supporters of this integration agenda. The ECLA
co-sponsored a meeting of Experts on Iron and Steel in Brazil in 1956, with large private
sector interest. Regional trade was a derisory 7 percent at this time, and consisted of
$350 million worth of largely agricultural products. Prebisch thus preached specialization
based on regional planning as a way of industrializing, benefiting from the economies of
scale of a larger market, and eliminating protectionism in regional trade and perennial
trade deficits. He also sought to provide a better livelihood for Latin America’s rural masses
in an era of economic stagnation (Dosman 2008: 321–45).
The ECLA strove to promote its regional integration agenda through four key strategies:
establishing a system of multilateral payments; developing an inventory of existing indus-
tries; creating a regional market in manufactured goods; and stabilizing traditional markets
in intra-regional trade. Prebisch’s efforts ultimately ran into opposition from Washington as
well as from two American-dominated institutions: the IMF and the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The U.S. was particularly concerned that a common market not
reduce foreign trade or create domestic monopolies. Prebisch had consistently insisted that
the Latin American Common Market would be open to trade, and noted that the EEC had
been granted exceptions by GATT for its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and continu-
ing privileged access in trade relations with its former European colonies (enshrined in the
Yaoundé Convention of 1963). However, no such special treatment was to be granted to Latin
America by patronizing American officials, some of whom argued that the region’s citizens
should not get ideas above their station by trying to manufacture cars or aeroplanes, as Preb-
isch was urging. At the ECLA summit in Panama City in 1959, Washington ensured the rejec-
tion of the Latin American Common Market, and a watered-down free-trade area was
eventually agreed by Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Ecuador in February
1960. As a final act of humiliation, the U.S. peevishly excluded Prebisch from the creation
of a new Inter-American Development Bank which the Argentine technocrat had earlier
championed and which Washington had rejected at the time (Dosman 2008: 321–45).
After leaving the ECLA in 1963, Prebisch served for two years as Director-General of the
UN’s Santiago-based Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES)
which he had also played a key role in creating. Between 1964 and 1969, Prebish then became
the founding Secretary-General of the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Develop-
ment (UNCTAD). He had thus broadened his vision from national to regional integration
before championing the interests of developing countries at the global level in a four-decade
career of committed public service. At UNCTAD, Prebisch continued to champion ideas
328 adekeye adebajo
developed over several decades about a rich Northern center dominating international trade
to the detriment of a poorer Southern periphery. He called for a fairer global trading system to
help developing countries industrialize through the adoption of tariff preferences by rich
countries as part of his 1970s advocacy for a “New International Economic Order (NIEO).”
Prebisch also championed increased South–South trade and focused more attention on the
responsibilities of developing countries in promoting internal reforms and exporting manu-
factured goods rather than becoming too dependent on external assistance. His one success at
UNCTAD was negotiating a general system of preferences in which rich countries provided
tariff-free access to the developing world. But in the end, Prebisch tired of the UN bureauc-
racy as well as the frustrations of a political body sometimes derided by its critics as standing
for: “Under No Conditions Take Any Decisions.” He resigned as head of UNCTAD in 1969.
Legend and Legacy

Prebisch’s intellectual impact was evidenced by the fact that the ECLA—and later ECLAC—
has consistently pursued five constant credos throughout more than six decades of existence:
acting as a think-tank to policy-makers based on rigorous, empirical research; adopting a
“holistic, integrated and multidisciplinary” approach to development; analysing develop-
ment issues from a specifically Latin American (and later also Caribbean) perspective based
on the region’s lived experiences; recognising that the international context often determines
domestic structures, providing structural and institutional impediments to development;
and maintaining a concern for social justice issues such as poverty alleviation and an equita-
ble distribution of income (Rosenthal 2004: 180).
Though Prebisch has often been criticized for promoting impractical “socialist” ideas, the
concept of countries building up protectionist walls to industrialize was one historically
championed by eminent figures such as Alexander Hamilton, the U.S. Treasury Secretary
from 1789 to 1795, and the German economist Friedrich List (1789–1846). Prebisch was con-
sistently anti-communist and promoted the role of the private sector throughout his career.
Nevertheless, he was under constant surveillance by the United States Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) (Dosman 2008: 5). Prebisch was, however, not just an economic technocrat,
but politically astute. He was careful not to antagonize the powerful U.S., realizing the indis-
pensability of the regional colossus to the success of his trade initiatives in Latin America.
Prebisch had an American official, Louis Swenson (his effective deputy), brief the U.S.
embassy in Santiago regularly; he maintained a small office in Washington, DC; he visited
the American capital often; and he sought to cultivate good contacts at the U.S. Treasury, the
Federal Reserve, and the State Department.
Prebisch also never rejected the idea of international trade, nor did he ever advocate the
delinking of the global South from the international system, an idea championed by depend-
encia prophets like the German-American, Andre Gunder Frank, and the Egyptian, Samir
Amin. He thus preached reform rather than revolution. For Prebisch, international trade
and foreign capital were essential to Latin America’s industrialization efforts (Kay 2006:
202). His success at the ECLA, though, may have contained the seeds of its own failure. Hav-
ing sold structuralism as a theory for economic development, these ideas failed to translate
into success in the real world of practice, leading to regional governments losing faith in the
gospel of “Don Raùl.”
By the 1960s and 1970s, military caudillos—often allied to the U.S.—proliferated in the
region, and the World Bank’s influence grew over Latin American economies. By the 1980s,
a serious debt crisis and hyperinflation led to the introduction of adjustment programs
backed by the Bretton Woods institutions. The post-Prebisch ECLA was unable to adapt its
ideas effectively to these changes. Forced to abandon its holistic framework and to focus
increasingly on short-term crisis management, its previous policy prescriptions lost credi-
bility (Rosenthal 2004: 170–8). Prebisch was frank about the failures of his import-
substitution strategies, though blaming these setbacks on ineffective implementation by
incompetent governments in Latin America in contrast to the success of similar strategies
promoted by more able governments in parts of Asia such as South Korea where interna-
tionally competitive export firms had been built. The ECLA has never regained its impres-
sive influence over economic thinking in Latin America and the UN since the halcyon days
of the Prebisch commission which remains the organization’s “golden age” of influence
(Emmerij and Rosenthal 2009). In the last years of his life, Prebisch was a scathing critique
of the neo-liberal ideas of Reaganism and Thatcherism (Prebisch 1986: 16). By this time, his
ideas had been largely neglected even on his own continent. Biographers had also ignored
Prebisch’s incredible career, until Canadian scholar Edgar Dosman’s elegant and definitive
work in 2008 (Dosman 2008).
Prebisch helped to transform ideas on international trade and the international division
of labor, and influenced both dependency and world systems theories. While he was heavily
criticized for his views on unequal terms of trade, the idea of international trade distributing
its rewards unevenly between primary products and manufacturers still remains alive today
(Kay 2006: 202). But the increasing success of countries such as China, Brazil, India, Singa-
pore, and South Korea in joining the ranks of the international nouveaux riches even as West-
ern powers stagnated following the global financial crisis of 2008–9, rendered Prebisch’s
binary North–South divide somewhat anachronistic. By 2012, China had become the world’s
second largest economy after the U.S. and the new “workshop of the world,” while Brazil had
overtaken Britain to become the world’s sixth largest economy. The creation of a Group of
Twenty (G-20) major economies by 2009 involving more Southern representation, was
another clear sign of the changing dynamics of the global economy. Prebisch died at the age
of eighty-five in Santiago in April 1986. Cristóbal Kay described him as “the most influential
Latin American development economist and probably its most eminent” (Kay 2006: 199);
The Economist dubbed him “Latin America’s Keynes”; while one of his successors as ECLA
Executive Secretary between 1988 and 1997, Gert Rosenthal, noted about Prebisch’s stint at
the organization that: “It would be difficult to find another administrative unit in the UN
that had such a decisive impact on so many member countries” (Rosenthal 2004: 170).
Adebayo Adedeji and the

Integration of Africa
Our second prophet, Nigerian scholar-administrator, Adebayo Adedeji, grew up in the small
southwestern Nigerian town of Ijebu-Ode under British colonial rule. This experience would
leave a fierce anti-colonial mark on Adedeji in his later professional exploits. His middle-
330 adekeye adebajo
class parents were farmers who worked on a cocoa and kolanut plantation and left him in the
care of his disciplinarian grandmother “Mama Eleja”: an enterprising, shrewd, and deter-
mined fish-seller and indomitable matriarch. The precocious Adebayo was an outstanding
student who responded well to his grandmother’s constant prodding. His father was also an
important influence on the young boy, encouraging his son to study hard. Adebayo’s father
also made his son work on his farm during school holidays, stressing to the young boy the
importance of the “dignity of labor” (Sanmi-Ajiki 2000).
After completing his primary and secondary education in Nigeria, Adedeji studied eco-
nomics and public administration at the universities of Leicester, Harvard, and London,
eventually obtaining a doctorate in economics. He returned to Nigeria in 1958—two years
before the country’s independence from British rule—to take up a senior post in the Western
region’s Ministry of Economic Planning. Here, he put in long hours and was widely recog-
nized as a rising star. In 1963, Adedeji—who had always described himself as a “reluctant
civil servant”—left government service to take up an academic post at Nigeria’s University of
Ile-Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University). Four years later, he had become a full Professor
of Economics and Public Administration at the age of thirty-six. He transformed the univer-
sity’s Institute of Administration into an effective training ground for both Nigerian and
African public servants (Sanmi-Ajiki 2000: 110–22).
Regional Integration and Development

In 1971 at the age of forty, Adedeji was appointed Nigeria’s Minister of Economic Reconstruc-
tion and Development by the military regime of General Yakubu Gowon. He would help
oversee the country’s difficult post-war rebuilding efforts. Nigeria’s civil war of 1967–70 had
resulted in one million deaths and led to much destruction of the country’s infrastructure,
particularly in the secessionist Eastern region. The discovery of large oil fields propelled
Nigeria into the ranks of the world’s largest oil exporters. Along with other cabinet colleagues
and powerful mandarins, Adedeji crafted and implemented a five-year national develop-
ment plan (1970–4) that called for rapid industrialization and resulted in the building of dual
carriageways, flyovers, and electricity pylons across the country.
Adedeji is widely regarded as “the Father of ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West
African States).” He had outlined a vision for regional integration in West Africa in an aca-
demic article published in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 1970 which identified six
priority areas for subregional integration: building a regional road network; creating a
regional airline; establishing regional infrastructure to facilitate trade and investment; facili-
tating the free movement of people, goods, and services; establishing a clearing and pay-
ments union; and abolishing foreign exchange controls (Adedeji 1970: 213–31). Adedeji then
turned theory into practice by 1975. While serving as Nigeria’s Minister of Economic Recon-
struction and Development, Adedeji convinced sixteen West African leaders to establish
ECOWAS following tireless “shuttle diplomacy” across the subregion between 1972 and 1975
(Adedeji 2004b: 21–49). He has since consistently argued that regional integration must be
seen as an instrument for national survival and socio-economic transformation (Asante
1991; Adedeji 1993; Onimode and Synge 1995; Onimode et al. 2004; Cline-Cole 2006).
In 1975, Adedeji became Executive Secretary of the Addis Ababa-based Economic Com-
mission for Africa. The ECA (which had over 1,500 staff in 2012) had been established in 1958
to tackle issues of economic integration; industrialization; transportation; commodity price

stabilization; human capacity development; social aspects and financing of development;
and improving statistical data and research in Africa (Adedeji 2004a: 234). Adedeji’s sixteen-
year tenure became the organization’s longest and most dynamic: he converted the ECA into
a Pan-African platform to continue his efforts to promote economic integration, leading to
the creation of the Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern African States (PTA) in
1981 (which later became the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa [COMESA]
in 1993); and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) in 1983. (Adedeji,
2009: 373–98). Adedeji, who, like Prebisch, frequently worked eighteen-hour days, collabo-
rated closely with successive Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Secretaries-General in
Addis Ababa, and became a confidant and economic adviser to many African leaders whom
he addressed at annual continental summits.
Similar to Prebisch’s ideas, the foundation of Adedeji’s intellectual beliefs was based on
his analysis that Africa could not achieve economic development as long as it did not
develop national self-reliance to transform radically the continent’s inherited colonial pro-
duction structures which had been built on the export of raw materials. He thus advocated
an Africa-centered development paradigm with massive socio-economic transformation
preceding and accompanying economic development and growth. Adedeji often focused
on the need for Africa to rediscover a sense of cultural self-confidence in order to overcome
its psychological dependence on its former European colonial masters. He criticized the
discipline of development economics as focusing excessively on economic growth rather
than human development, and noted that its ideas were based on the experiences of indus-
trialized countries, and thus not applicable to the African context. He condemned the
obsession of the “two-gap model” (which observed that the lack of domestic savings or
import purchasing capacity restrict foreign investment and development), arguing instead
that foreign capital and foreign aid reinforced Africa’s socio-economic dependence and
helped to create the continent’s debt burden. These ideas which were controversial at the
time have since become more mainstream. Adedeji was also critical of African economists
who championed what he regarded as the blind imitation of inappropriate Western models
(Adedeji 2004a: 253–6). The context for his analysis was one in which Africa had experi-
enced shortfalls and negative growth in agricultural output and commodity exports
between 1960 and 1975. He thus surmised that the continent’s embrace of orthodox eco-
nomic theories had resulted in declining growth rates, a lack of diversification, and negligi-
ble self-reliance (Adedeji 2004a: 257–8).
Battling the Bretton Woods Institutions

Adedeji established a reputation as a pragmatic economist more interested in solving prob-
lems than being constrained by ideological strait-jackets. His most bruising intellectual bat-
tles were with the World Bank and the IMF. He led the ECA to develop a “Revised Framework
of Principles for the Implementation of the New International Economic Order” in 1976.
This provided the theoretical foundation for the subsequent Monrovia Strategy of 1979, the
Lagos Plan of Action (LPA), and the Final Act of Lagos (FAL), both of 1980. The focus of
these reports—produced with teams of African economists at the ECA and in consultation
with African policy-makers—reflected Adedeji’s core intellectual concern with the concepts
332 adekeye adebajo
of “economic decolonization” and “self-reliance.” Like Prebisch, he firmly believed that eco-
nomic growth must be accompanied by social justice and equity (Adedeji 2004a: 258–9).
The ECA’s Revised Framework of 1976 called for more African expertise on how to pro-
mote socio-economic development, and a move away from orthodox prescriptions on the
efficacy of international trade as an engine for growth and social change. Like Prebisch,
Adedeji argued against African countries continuing to export one or two primary products
and importing consumer goods, as this increased the continent’s external dependence. Both
Prebisch and Adedeji also shared a passion for national planning as well as for a more effec-
tive and developmental state which could allocate resources more rationally. Adedeji criti-
cized Africa’s failure to prioritize indigenous factor inputs, its overreliance on foreign
exchange from exports for these inputs, and the lack of participation of Africa’s masses in
production and consumption processes.
The ECA’s 1976 Revised Framework advocated more self-reliance; accelerating internal
processes of growth and diversification; and eradicating unemployment and mass poverty to
achieve a more equitable distribution of income. Self-sustainment was meant to bring about
processes of development in which different components would mutually support each
other, become linked to internalizing demand and supply processes, and generating its own
internal dynamic. Domestic, subregional, and regional markets would replace foreign mar-
kets at the core of this approach. The four pillars of development under this framework were
thus: self-reliance; self-sustainment; the democratization of the development process; and
more equitable distribution of the benefits of development. “Developmental regionalism”
was thus to be combined with “developmental nationalism” (Adedeji 2004a).
Led by Adedeji’s ECA, the Revised Framework was incorporated into the Monrovia Strat-
egy in 1979 with input from African development and planning ministers. The “Lagos Plan
of Action for the Economic Development of Africa 1980–2000” was then adopted a year
later by African heads of state. Both documents stressed many of the same points as the
Revised Framework and sought to flesh out the intra-sectoral and inter-sectoral linkages
needed to develop Africa’s agricultural and industrial sectors, as well as the need to involve
Africa’s evolving subregional bodies in development plans. The LPA identified seven strate-
gic sectors for Africa’s development: food and agriculture; industry; natural resources;
human resources; transport and communications; trade and finance; and energy. The end-
goal would be an African Common Market resulting in an African Economic Community
(AEC) (Adedeji 2004a). Eleven years later, in 1991, African leaders agreed in Abuja, Nigeria
to establish an African Common Market by 2023.
The World Bank’s report Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for
Action was published in 1981, a year after the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA). African finance
ministers had curiously asked the Bank to prepare the report despite their leaders having
endorsed the LPA. Adedeji described the World Bank document as the “anti-thesis” of his
own plan, since its emphasis was on the external market and on continuing Africa’s export-
oriented trade, with agricultural export being perceived as the engine for Africa’s economic
development. Where Adedeji stressed regional interdependence, the Bank emphasized glo-
bal interdependence. The Agenda blamed Africa’s trade and exchange-rate policies for the
continent’s weak incentives for exports and did not place the same emphasis as Adedeji on
the deteriorating external environment in which commodity markets had collapsed (World
Bank 1981). Though African heads of state at the OAU rejected the Bank’s Agenda, and
insisted on implementing the Lagos Plan of Action, this process revealed the continent’s
powerlessness. African governments had agreed the first ever “home-grown” continental
development plan in 1980, but then called on the main funders of the World Bank to aban-
don their own blueprint in favor of an African strategy. The failure of external donors to do
so inevitably led to the demise of the LPA.
Adedeji used the ECA to launch the most sustained assault on the Structural Adjustment
Programs (SAPs) implemented from the 1980s by the World Bank and the IMF. African gov-
ernments had accumulated massive debts following the oil crises and economic recession of
the 1970s and early 1980s, forcing thirty-five countries to accept the tough conditions set by
these institutions in order to obtain loans. These conditions usually involved deep cuts in
social spending. Adedeji ridiculed the Bretton Woods institutions for their desperation to
claim success stories from SAPs despite all evidence to the contrary. He noted that despite
the implementations of the SAPs from 1980, Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) had, by
1988, declined from 2.7 to 1.8 percent; investment ratios had fallen from 20.6 to 17.1 percent;
budget deficits had increased from 6.5 to 7.5 percent of GDP; and the ratio of debt service to
export earnings had risen from 17.5 to 23.4 percent (Adedeji 2004a: 276). He scathingly criti-
cized the World Bank for asking questions about the neglect of the institutional dimensions
of development and the importance of domestic long-term visions and external factors only
after its policies had failed. These policies caused widespread economic hardship across
Africa (Adedeji 2004a: 256–7), as the continent once again became a giant laboratory for
Western-born socio-economic experiments.
Adedeji coined the widely-used term “the lost decade” to describe Africa’s rapid decline in
the 1980s as GDP per capita fell by 2.6 percent annually, the continent’s share of world output
and trade stood at 1 percent, and armed conflicts proliferated. He argued against what he
regarded as the Bretton Woods institutions’ approach of “growth without development” and
export-led integration of African states into the world economy on massively unequal terms.
He stressed instead the need for Africa to use its own resources to promote greater intra-
African growth, prioritizing agriculture (Asante 1991).
Adedeji led the development by the ECA of Africa’s Alternative Framework to Structuaral
Adjustment Programs for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP) of
1989 which was the first comprehensive alternative to the SAPs and which all members of the
UN General Assembly except the U.S. endorsed. The framework called for policy action in
four key areas: strengthening and diversifying productive capacity; improving levels and
distribution of income; radically changing patterns of expenditure; and creating appropriate
institutional frameworks to support the adjustment of African economies in transformative
ways (African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-
Economic Recovery and Transformation 1989). The framework further sought to end the
dichotomy between short-term crisis management through adjustment programs, and long-
term development goals. Consistent with the Lagos Plan of Action of 1980, the plan advo-
cated a revision of the structure of production and demand, and urged African governments
to focus on a radical refocusing on domestic development and optimal use of indigenous
factor inputs (Adedeji 2004a: 284–5).
This effort was different from the Lagos Plan of Action, in that rather than being solely a
“home-grown” African plan, it sought international consensus and support, even including
the World Bank and the IMF on an international advisory board. A critical lesson had thus
been learnt: it was not enough to win the battle of ideas, Africa also had to have the power
and resources to implement these ideas.
334 adekeye adebajo
This time, the World Bank responded more constructively. Three months after the AAF-
SAP was published, the Bank produced the 1989 report Sub-Saharan Africa—From Crisis to
Sustainable Growth: A Long Term Perspective Study which sought synergy with the Afrcan
Alternative Framework. Adedeji would later describe the World Bank report as “a major
contribution to the emergence of common ground in laying the basis for concerted action in
forging a brighter future for Africa” (Adedeji 2004a: 285). Though there were still some areas
of disagreement between the ECA and the Bank, the latter was now modest enough to admit
that it may have been wrong in some of its assumption about SAPs and did not have all the
answers to Africa’s development challenges. Despite the publication of this report, however,
the operational and lending arms of the Bank and IMF still continued the implementation of
the SAPs as they had before without properly considering its social costs (particularly on
Africa’s health and education sectors), and without properly consulting African govern-
ments and other continental actors (Adedeji 2004a).
Adedeji: An African Cassandra?

Adedeji also led efforts to craft the African Charter for Popular Participation in Develop-
ment and Transformation of 1990 (Adedeji 2009). Similar to Prebisch in his region, Adedeji
often challenged what he regarded as Africa’s “mindless imitation” of Western development
models, and pushed instead for a human-centered view of development and integration
which involved the full participation of Africa’s 800 million citizens. S. K. B. Asante, the
renowned Ghanaian political economist who wrote a book on Adedeji’s development strate-
gies in 1991, described him as an “African Cassandra”: a visionary prophet who saw the future
clearly, but whose prophesies often went unheeded until it was too late (Asante 1991). In the
end, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund reversed the large cuts in educa-
tion and health spending that had decimated Africa’s socio-economic sector in the 1980s and
1990s. Debt relief also became fashionable over a decade after Adedeji had warned about the
unsustainability of Africa’s $250 billion external debt in the 1980s.
Critics have, however, noted that Adedeji’s Lagos Plan of Action lacked a practical mecha-
nism for achieving its objectives, as well as a time-table and a detailed assessment of the costs
for implementing these ideas. The LPA also failed to provide quantitative linkages between
sectors and sub-sectors (Browne and Cummings 1984: 23). Adedeji’s calls for self-reliance
were criticized as vague and impractical; and some critics regarded as foolhardy efforts to
delink Africa from the global economy. The LPA also had African critics. During a Council
for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) conference
with the ECA in 1982, several authors castigated the plan for being quiet or ambiguous on
such issues as: communal versus private ownership of land; the need to define how to priori-
tize agricultural and industrial exports; and the role of foreign investment in development.
African scholars further criticized the LPA as having been naïve about state agricultural poli-
cies in Africa, for ignoring the class dimensions of governing regimes on the continent, and
for assuming that African leaders were interested in promoting the welfare of their own citi-
zens (Browne and Cummings 1984: 213–15). Other critics like the Financial Times dismissed
Adedeji’s ideas as “statist” (Adedeji 2004a: 287). These criticisms partly reflected the fact that
the LPA was a political consensus document adopted by all of Africa’s leaders. While the plan
was accepted by the OAU, it was, however, ultimately left to gather dust on the shelves of
African development ministries, as the continent lacked the resources to pay for its
implementation.
Describing Adedeji’s tenure at the ECA, Kenyan scholar, Gilbert Khadiagala, argued that
his leadership “did not entirely transform the institution into an autonomous source on
African ideas on development.” Khadiagala further noted that divergent national practices
and Africa’s declining international leverage ultimately led instead to the widespread adop-
tion of the World Bank’s SAPs (Khadiagala 2010: 379). Even in terms of regional integration—
the idea with which Adedeji is most closely associated—bodies like ECOWAS, COMESA,
and ECCAS have failed to achieve their integration goals, and less than 10 percent of Afri-
ca’s trade was still conducted among its own countries in 2012. Adedeji himself conceded in
2004 that “no effective integration has taken place in ECOWAS,” and argued that politics
and not economics would ultimately determine the success of regional integration efforts
in Africa (Adedeji 2004b: 36, 46–7). Like Prebisch in his region, a frustrated Adedeji later
lamented the inability of African governments to match their rhetoric with reality (Adedeji
2004a: 252). African leaders provided political support to Adedeji’s development ideas,
but often lacked the domestic discipline to implement them, and more importantly, the
external technical and financial resources advocated by the plans were not provided by
foreign donors.
After retiring from the ECA in 1991, Adedeji continued his regional integration efforts in
Africa: he served on a committee to review the ECOWAS treaty in 1992; he was on another
body to transform the OAU into the African Union (AU) in 2002; and in 2007, he chaired the
committee which audited the five-year integration efforts of the African Union. The Decem-
ber 2007 Audit of the AU called for an acceleration of regional integration on the continent,
and made concrete recommendations for strengthening the AU and Africa’s sub-regional
bodies (African Union 2007). The report further advocated strengthening national mecha-
nisms to accelerate economic integration; incorporating decisions of regional bodies into
national institutions; adhering to the AU decision to recognize only eight Regional Eco-
nomic Communities (RECs); focusing the RECs on activities to create an African Common
Market and African Economic Community by 2028; and strengthening the AU’s internal
mechanisms for more effective coordination and harmonization of the RECs. (African
Union 2007). Adedeji retired from public service as chair of the African Peer Review Mecha-
nism (APRM) in 2010 after five decades of committed service to his continent.
Concluding Reflections
While Adedeji was widely regarded as the intellectual “Father of African Integration,” Prebi-
sch was the intellectual “Father of Latin American Integration.” Both men challenged West-
ern-dominated conventional wisdom and won the support of their respective regions
through their courageous policy battles with more powerful adversaries. They emerged as
historic figures, but, in the end, were tragic prophets whose visions for regional integration
and development went largely unfulfilled. Regional integration in Latin America and Africa
were concerned with promoting economic development in countries with largely illiterate
populations, weak infrastructure, and poor governance. Both regions lacked the requisite
336 adekeye adebajo
technical skills, with less than 10 percent of their trade being intra-regional, and with both
continents lacking powerful external political and financial backing.
The Cold War’s proxy wars also negatively affected both Latin America and Africa, creat-
ing difficult political environments in which to promote economic integration and develop-
ment. While the perennial shadow of U.S. neo-imperialism hung over Latin America, that of
European neo-colonialism cast a shadow over Africa. The Soviet Union also sought to exploit
divisions on both continents and to recruit local allies to its own ideological camp. Both
Prebisch and Adedeji, however, had a keen political understanding of what regional govern-
ments would support, and championed the idea of “home-grown” development and self-
reliance theories built on the specific experiences of Latin America and Africa, as well as on
regional ownership of development ideas. Even the most corrupt and venal governments in
both regions saw the importance of the ideas being championed by both men. Prebisch and
Adedeji consistently sought private sector participation in their regional initiatives. Both
acted as public intellectuals who often wrote their own speeches and sought to appeal directly
above the heads of government to audiences in universities, think tanks, the private sector
and other fora, employing impressive communication skills to explain complicated eco-
nomic ideas. Both turned the ECLA and the ECA into intellectual think tanks acting as secu-
lar monks in monasteries in which disciples were encouraged to dream up heretical plans to
transform the global economic system in ways that addressed the acute disadvantages of
their respective continents. If both prophets ultimately failed to achieve their goals, it was a
heroic failure born not of lack of ambition or application, but of power.
Prebisch and Adedeji headed powerful international organizations—the ECLA and the
ECA—through which they sought to promote their ideas. Prebisch appears to have enjoyed
greater international influence than Adedeji, operating as he was at a time when develop-
ment ideas were at the top of the agenda for the “global South.” Both traveled the length and
breadth of their respective continents to try to understand the problems of regional integra-
tion and development through lived experiences. Both insisted on excellence and hard work
from their bureaucrats and enjoyed generating new ideas. Prebisch and Adedeji, however,
realized that they had to relate such concepts to practical action and muster political support
to implement their visions. Both acted as technocrats operating behind the scenes in power-
ful bureaucracies. Both shared an aversion to the operation of blind market forces, and
regarded politics as inseparable from economics. Both regarded regional integration as a
means to promote peace and socio-economic development. Both were far-sighted visionar-
ies who often saw the future more clearly than the leaders they sought to advise. In the end,
however, both prophets failed to fulfill their visions: Prebisch’s dream of a Latin American
Common Market remains unrealized; while Adedeji never saw his aspiration of an African
Common Market fulfilled. Prebisch and Adedeji both turned out to be visionary Cassan-
dras: their prophesies—on improved terms of trade between North and South; and for health
and education cuts by the Bretton Woods institutions to be reversed—often turned out to be
correct, but went unheeded until it was too late.
Note
1. I thank Liam Halligan, James Jonah, Khabele Matlosa, Eloho Otobo, and Gilbert Khadia-
gala for further useful comments.
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pe ace a n d secu r it y
Contemporary notions of development have their immediate antecedents in the post-Second

World War era, often featuring an emphasis on avoiding the mistakes of the post-First World
War peace arrangements, widely seen to have sown the seeds of renewed war twenty years
later. Economically crippling reparations schemes were not only avoided, but their political
and social costs in the 1920s and 1930 were recognized through Washington’s Marshall Plan
as of 1948 (and equivalent programs in Japan) to help reconstruct the economies of van-
quished powers. These countries were encouraged over a fifteen-year period to adopt politi-
cal structures and strategies that saw Germany, together with France, emerging as the core of
the new European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1950, and later the European Eco-
nomic Community (EEC) in 1957. A demilitarized Japan focused on economic prosperity,
with considerable foreign encouragement and assistance. They succeeded admirably in rein-
venting their economies and societies along completely new lines. Indeed, over the ensuing
four decades they provided their citizens with greater economic and social development
than did a number of the victorious Second World War powers.
The Cold War years, from roughly 1948 to 1989 (symbolized by the fall of the Berlin wall
that year), were marked by near universal preoccupation in the industrialized world (and to
some extent in the developing world) with the possibility of potentially nuclear super-power
military confrontation opposing the Western powers with those of the Soviet Bloc. While
many other inter-state conflicts erupted during this era, they often involved an element of
shadow-boxing by the two great powers through local proxies, as in Indo-China, Central
America, and some regions of Africa. Internal security was seen mostly as a matter for indi-
vidual states to manage, albeit in conformity with emerging human rights and other norms,
behind the shield of sovereignty.
The terms “peace” and “security” are so often conjoined in discourse, for example, in Arti-
cle one of the UN Charter, that they are too readily conflated. But they are, in fact, quite dif-
ferent. Peace, descended from the Latin pax refers to periods of stability free of internal (and
subsequently cross-border) disorders. Immanuel Kant in 1795 argued, however, that “the
state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state (status naturalis); the
natural state is one of war. This does not always mean open hostilities, but at least an unceas-
ing threat of war” (Kant 1795).1 On the other hand, writing on the years bracketed by the
Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the Napoleonic wars (1803–15), Emma Rothschild suggests
that “. . . security was seen throughout the period as a condition of both individuals and of
states. Its most consistent sense—and the sense most suggestive for modern international
340 peace and security
politics was indeed of a condition, or an objective, that constituted a relationship between

individuals and states or societies” (Rothschild 1995: 61). More contemporary conceptions
of security include the notion from Arnold Wolfers that “security after all is nothing but
the absence of the evil of insecurity, a negative value so to speak” (Wolfers 1962: 153). Johan
Galtung suggests less cryptically that “peace also has two sides: absence of personal violence,
and absence of structural violence. We shall refer to them as negative peace and positive
peace respectively. For brevity the formulations ‘absence of violence’ and ‘social justice’ may
be preferred” (Galtung 1969).
With the end of the Cold War (in many ways signaled, at least in retrospect, by the ulti-
mately successful efforts of the five permanent Members of the UN Security Council in 1987
to bring about a peaceful conclusion to the murderous Iran-Iraq war of 1980–8), joint efforts
to end the so-called “regional conflicts” that constituted the wreckage of the Cold War were
mostly successful, for example, in Cambodia, El Salvador, and Mozambique. But inter-state
conflicts were soon displaced on the international agenda by the emergence of new wars that
were essentially internal in nature (essentially, because they often still spilled in, from, or out
into neighboring countries, resulting in regional conflict formations). The root causes of
these wars were much disputed—as was whether even examining their purported root
causes was useful. A very sizeable new literature studying them arose, including important
contributions, themselves of course disputed. Whether these civil wars resulted from loota-
ble spoils, empowering rebel movements, or from horizontal inequalities within societies
aggravated by kleptocratic and otherwise injurious governments, is less hotly debated today
than it was ten years ago. Scholars and practitioners now recognize that economic opportu-
nities and political grievances interact in different ways according to a variety of local cir-
cumstances (Doyle and Sambanis 2010; Berdal and Malone 2000). One striking survey of
scholarship on the topic suggested important distinctions between structural and mobiliz-
ing causes of conflict (Gardner 2002). Among the former, countries engaged in a difficult,
often hotly contested, political transition at a time when their economies were decelerating
sharply seemed most at risk (Gardner 2002: 23–4).
International strategies to head off civil wars and also to promote economic development
today are more intrusive in their prescriptions than they would have been thirty years ago.
While misrule—perhaps better defined as malgovernance—continues to afflict many coun-
tries, international interveners are much franker in decrying resource looting, gross political
manipulation, and serious human rights abuses than they used to be. The expectation that
those individuals and groups in control of the state will actually serve citizen interests is
stronger, if often observed in the breach. Nowhere has this been clearer of late than in the
Middle East, roiled by the Arab Spring initiated in late 2010 by events in Tunisia. Interna-
tional peace (in Syria), internal security (in Libya after Gadhafi) and economic stability (in
Egypt) are all currently under threat from contestation against, and sometimes collapse of,
authoritarian, incompetent governance.
Building on the preoccupation evident at the United Nations and also within many devel-
opment institutions with the prevention of conflict as of the early 1990s, Michael Barnett
suggests that “…in order for states to be at peace with their neighbors they must be at peace
with themselves” (Barnett 1995: 80). There was only a short leap from such ideas to the
emerging concept of human security, and its substantive developmental and rights-based
content, advocated in the UN’s 1994 Human Development Report:
The concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory
from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global
security from the threat of nuclear holocaust. . . . Human security can be said to have two
main aspects. It means, first, safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repres-
sion. And second, it means protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of
daily life—whether in homes, in jobs or in communities. (UNDP 1994: 22–3)
But such generous conceptions risked courting confusion. Roland Paris argues that:
human security is like “sustainable development”—everyone is for it, but few people have
a clear idea of what it means. Existing definitions of human security tend to be extraordi-
narily expansive and vague, encompassing everything from physical security to psycho-
logical well-being, which provides policy-makers with little guidance in the prioritization
of competing policy goals and academics little sense of what, exactly, is to be studied.
(Paris 2001: 88)
Gilbert M. Khadiagala and Dimpho Motsamai (Chapter 20) launch this section with their
examination of the political economy of intrastate conflicts, probing the socio-economic and
political drivers of conflicts in modern territorial states. They focus on the intersection of
resource scarcities, distributional inequities, and political marginalization in causing
intrastate conflicts, and on how various actors and constituencies mobilize grievances and
discontent to propel and sustain conflicts. They identify a scholarly consensus that institu-
tions are important in the mediation and mitigation of intrastate conflicts. Further, they
establish the centrality of socio-economic inequities, weak governance structures, and the
availability of opportunities for groups to contest their grievances. They also advance a wealth
of ideas to reverse civil wars and help rebuild states and societies emerging from conflicts.
Mats Berdal (Chapter 21) addressing peacebuilding and development (a field of policy
making and analysis that has occupied significant international bandwidth since the early
1990s), recalls Robert McNamara, then U.S. Defence Secretary in 1966, focusing on the con-
nection between “security and development” in international affairs, and on the “irrefutable
relationship between violence and economic backwardness.” Others challenge this view.
These include Marxists who have sometimes emphasized the conflict-generating effects of
developmental processes and the centrality of violence as a compelling source of historical
change, and historical sociologists who have highlighted the role of organized violence in the
process of State-formation. The chapter looks at peacebuilding as an activity that has come to
involve a major role for development and considers the geo-political and normative back-
ground to the rise and implementation of the concept of “post-conflict peacebuilding.” The
chapter then identifies the practical and operational challenges posed by the involvement of
development actors in new, politically sensitive, roles; the transformative effects of war on
the socio-economic and political fabric of societies; and key policy priorities of donors and
International Financial Institutions’ (IFIs) in post-war settings. Finally, it discusses the
impact of peacebuilding on development.
Keith Krause (Chapter 22) discusses the gulf between the twin discourses of “security”
and “development,” noting that ideas about and practices of these two concepts have
evolved in disconnected institutional, scholarly, and non-governmental forums. Recent
attempts to re-think the “security–development” nexus have encountered resistance and
misunderstanding on both sides of the divide. He traces the shifting understandings of the
link between insecurity and development, and contextualizes recent debates about the
342 peace and security
“ securitization” of development assistance; presents an overview of the scope, scale, and dis-
tribution of armed violence in conflict and non-conflict (including criminal) contexts; and
reviews some of the programmatic responses within the development community to deal
with insecurity related to conflict, crime, and violence.
Charles Cater (Chapter 23) highlights current policies aimed at mitigating the resource
curse in developing countries, particularly with respect to corruption and conflict. He argues
that policy making often reflects conventional assumptions about the nature of the problem:
that the traditional financial opacity of the extractive industries enables illicit appropriation
of resource rents, with transparency correspondingly being seen as the solution, whether
through regulation, commodity tracking, or resource interdiction. Policy making has also
been influenced by political and economic interests of states, international organizations,
and transnational corporations. Available evidence suggests that increased economic trans-
parency may well translate into enhanced political accountability in developing countries.
But the mixed track record of transparency-based policies suggests complementary
approaches are required to escape the resource curse.
Pablo de Greiff (Chapter 24) notes transitional justice is relevant because the most serious
offenses subject to international prosecution nowadays often occur at the intersection of eco-
nomic predation and war crimes. Indeed, some of the most grievous crimes of recent decades,
enabled by seizure of economically tradable resources, have been enforced through intimidation
involving gross violations of human rights. Governments are no longer simply held accountable
for the worst crimes, they are also held accountable, more implicitly than explicitly, for their com-
mission in the service of the basest of motives. Given the huge strides in the development of inter-
national criminal justice since 1993, when the UN Security Council created the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the worst forms of economic predation, particu-
larly when conjoined with other crimes, may well become subject to international justice.
De Greiff examines why development actors should be concerned about the legacy of
human rights violations, and how transitional justice measures support positive develop-
ment outcomes. He argues that the “Arab spring,” in which claims for economic opportunity,
political freedoms, and justice have been raised on a par, provides an opportunity to focus on
the connections between transitional justice and development. Ever since development
ceased to be thought of merely in terms of economic growth and started incorporating con-
cerns about institutions, governance and the rule of law, the chasm between the two related
sets of thinkers has been breaking down, to the advantage of both. The author first provides a
sketch of the notion of transitional justice; then outlines the impact on development of a fail-
ure to address the legacies of the past, concentrating on their weakening of agency and the
depletion of civic trust or social capital; and focuses on the contribution transitional justice
can make to the rule of law, a notion that has played an important role in recent development
thinking through norm-affirmation.
Note
1. Immanuel Kant argued not only that republics—as opposed to more autocratically ruled
polities—would not fight against one another, but that they were also more likely to be
internally peaceful, with echoes in the contemporary “democratic peace” school of aca-
demic inquiry, advanced (see Doyle 1983).
References
Barnett, Michael (1995, Winter). “The New United Nations Politics of Peace: From Juridical
Sovereignty to Empirical Sovereignty,” Global Governance, 1(1): 79–97.
Berdal, Mats R., and David M. Malone (2000). Greed & Grievance: Economic Agendas in
Civil Wars. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Michael W. Doyle (1983). “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.” Philosophy and Public
Affairs, 12(3): 205–35.
Doyle, Michael W., and Nicholas Sambanis (2010). Making War and Building Peace: United
Nations Peace Operations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Galtung, Johan (1969). “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research, 6(3):
167–91.
Gardner, Anne-Marie (2002). “Diagnosing Conflict: What Do We Know?” in Fen Osler
Hampson and David M. Malone (eds.), From Reaction to Conflict Prevention: Opportuni-
ties for the UN System. Boulder, CO and London, UK: Lynne Rienner, 15–40.
Kant, Immanuel (1795). “Section II: Containing the Definitive Articles for Perpetual Peace
among States,” in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. (<http://www.constitution.org/
kant/perpeace.htm>).
Paris, Roland (2001). “Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?” International Security,
26(2): 87–102.
Rothschild, Emma (1995). “What is Security?” Daedelus, 124(3): 53–97.
Wolfers, Arnold (1962). Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins Press.
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1994. New York: Oxford University Press.
chapter 20
th e politica l econom y of
i n tr astate con flicts
gilbert m. khadiagala and dimpho motsamai
Introduction
Studies have identified resource scarcities, distributional imbalances, and political margin-
alization as some of the grievances that cause intrastate conflicts. In the same vein, most
analyses stress the significance of institutions in the attenuation, mediation, and mitigation
of these grievances. Centuries since Aristotle recognized that “extremes of wealth and pov-
erty are the main sources of evil” (Politics, Book VI: 122), consensus has converged about the
imperative of economic drivers of intrastate conflicts, particularly questions of access, allo-
cation, and distribution of resources. Given that these questions are mediated primarily
through modern territorial states, an understanding of states and their institutional founda-
tions is vital to the appreciation of the sources and causes of intrastate conflicts. Most ana-
lysts have focused on the multiple obstacles that confront developing countries as they strive
to create institutions to promote order and preempt civil strife. The literature on intrastate
conflicts spans over five decades, from the traditional modernization literature of the 1960s
to the debates on weak and fragile states in the 1980s and 1990s and the more recent concep-
tualizations that relate civil wars to natural resource abundance.
This chapter addresses the political economy of intrastate conflicts in developing coun-
tries since the 1960s. In our view, the core thread that permeates these theories is the persist-
ence of socio-economic inequities, weak governance structures, and the availability of
opportunities for groups to contest and mobilize their grievances. In highlighting the struc-
tures of grievances that animate intrastate conflicts, we are also interested in the prescrip-
tions different theorists have advanced for managing these conflicts. The chapter opens with
an overview of the literature on modernization and how it articulated questions around the
sources of civil wars; this literature is instructive because it informed subsequent discussions
about the links between state formation and civil strife. Second, the chapter examines debates
in the 1980s and 1990s about the nature and character of Third World states. In focusing on
the lack of internal coherence, these studies highlighted the history of state formation as a
variable in understanding the causes of civil conflicts. Third, we discuss the diverse literature
that has emerged since the late 1990s that discusses the rise of new wars, the role of natural
346 gilbert m. khadiagala and dimpho motsamai
resources in conflict causation, and the significance of horizontal inequalities in compre-

hending intrastate conflicts. A brief discussion of political transformations in the Sahel and
North Africa will illustrate the continuity between old ideas about intrastate conflicts and
new conflict trajectories. The conclusion addresses lessons from the study with regard to
institutional innovations and the vital role of collaborative efforts between regional and
international actors in helping states to prevent conflicts and mitigate their recurrence.
Formative Debates of the 1960s:

Modernization and Intrastate Strife
In the 1960s, modernization theories expressed widespread skepticism about the ability of
developing states to maintain social and political order because of the absence of sturdy
institutions to deal with the overwhelming demands produced by rapid social change.
Steeped in the structural-functionalist paradigm, these studies viewed modernization as a
disintegrative process that transformed traditional societies without providing capable
alternative institutions to handle the emerging social and political strains. The result, as
Pye (1963) suggested in the case of Burma, were tremendous social dislocations that led to
political instability:
People in transitional societies can take almost nothing for granted; they are plagued on all
sides by uncertainty and every kind of unpredictable behavior. In their erratically changing
world, every relationship rests upon uncertain foundations and may seem to contain unlim-
ited potential for good and evil. People are never sure what they should get from any relation-
ship, so they are never sure whether they are getting what they should. (Pye 1963: 54–5)
Apter and Huntington attributed intrastate strife in the new nations to the “normative disin-
tegration” of traditional structures and the increasing social uncertainties that led to violence
(Apter 1965; Huntington 1965). To most modernization theorists, the imbalances and soci-
etal unevenness that modernization unleashed upset societal equilibrium to the detriment
of social order. In a pessimistic vein, modernization theorists proposed that the expansion of
political participation in states riven by the fissures of ethnicity, regionalism, and religion
would ignite intrastate conflicts. For this reason, Huntington suggested that in the formative
stages of political development, developing countries required “institutionalization” to pre-
vent the instabilities occasioned by modernization. Thus in his famous essay on political
development and decay, he observed that “rapid increases in mobilization and participation,
the principal political aspect of modernization, undermine political institutions. Rapid
modernization, in brief, produces not political development, but political decay” (Hunting-
ton 1965: 386).
Similarly, some scholars saw modernization as the cause of rising expectations that
induced revolutions born of rising frustration; from this perspective, new nations were sus-
ceptible to instabilities because they were confronted by resource scarcities and lacked the
capacity to meet the escalating demands for goods and services. Olson (1963: 529–52) stated
that rapid economic growth created marginalized classes who were often prone to revolu-
tionary impulses. The idea of the revolution of rising expectations was linked to that of
the political economy of intrastate conflicts 347
r elative deprivation, which claimed that as collective economic expectations rose faster than
the ability of states to meet them, a gap arose between expectations and achievements that
produced intolerable political stress. In a prominent essay, Davies (1962: 5–19) argued that
revolutions were motivated by frustrations stemming from an economic gap between indi-
vidual aspirations and actual economic status; thus, individuals’ widespread discontent with
their social situation triggered conflict, especially where modernization fueled “a revolution
of rising expectations” (Davies 1962: 6–8). Gurr (1970) broadened the assumptions of rela-
tive deprivation in generating popular rebellions, especially where mass discontent forced
people to translate their grievances into political action. In the 1960s and 1970s, Gurr studied
a wide spectrum of internal wars and insurgencies in the Congo, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan,
and Sudan (Gurr 1968: 27–48, 1972: 1104–24; Gurr and Duvall 1973: 135–69).
Modernization perspectives contributed to the debates on the causes of intrastate con-
flicts by demonstrating the intersection between political and economic variables in intensi-
fying the dilemmas of state and nation building, economic development, and constitutional
development in developing states. Viewing these countries through the optic of advanced
Western societies, these theories considered intrastate conflicts as transitional problems on
the road to functional institutions that would balance order and prosperity. Moreover, these
theories assumed that the processes of nation building would ultimately remove some of the
drivers of conflict such as ethnic and communal identities (Kesselman 1973: 139–54;
Ake 1974: 576–91; Welsh 1993: 44).
At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s, theories of modernization furnished
credence to Western policy interventions that sought to preempt the encroachment of the
Soviet Union and its allies into developing countries. These theories justified a wide range of
foreign aid policies that promoted the building of strong political institutions that would
manage the political dislocations produced by modernization. O’Brien (1972: 139–54) cap-
tured the links between American domestic politics in the 1960s and the scholarly prescrip-
tions for authoritarian regimes abroad. He noted that the preoccupation of American
political scientists with problems of political order at home and abroad was reflected in their
singular support for authoritarian regimes that could maintain stable political institutions.
Thus, the emergence of Western-supported military and one-party regimes such as those of
Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Suharto in Indonesia, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile dove-
tailed with the prescriptions of modernization theorists. By the same token, the Soviet sup-
port to its client states enabled them to withstand the challenges of state and nation building
that they faced.
From Quasi-states to Collapsed and

Failed Ftates, 1980s–90s
By the early 1980s, there were doubts about whether the policy prescriptions by moderniza-
tion theories for strong institutions in developing countries had ameliorated the condition
that caused internal conflicts. Continued political conflicts combined with global economic
pressures seemed to undermine the ability of post-colonial states to enhance stability. These
circumstances led to renewed interest in the nature and character of post-colonial states as a
way to deepen insights into the sources of intrastate strife. Specifically, the new literature
focused on the origins of states, their geographical and organizational reach, and conflicts
surrounding state formation.
In the early 1980s, Jackson and Rosberg probed the causes of intrastate conflicts in post-
colonial African states (1982: 1–24, 1984: 177–98). Seeking answers to the perennial political
instability in Africa, they concluded (1982: 1) that most governments exercised “only tenuous
control over the people, organizations, and activities within their territorial jurisdictions,”
and “had ceased to be ‘states’ in the empirical sense”—that is, “their central governments lost
control of important areas in their jurisdiction during struggles with rival political
organizations.”
Jackson (1991) further suggested the notion of quasi-states to understand the rebellions
and insurgencies that bedeviled state and nation building processes in Africa and beyond. At
the heart of the formulation of quasi-states was the distinction between empirical and juridi-
cal sovereignty: empirical sovereignty referred to the relative ability of the state apparatus to
control its people and territory, while juridical sovereignty denoted states that had interna-
tional recognition but lacked effective control over national territories. As creatures of colo-
nial partition, quasi-states were characterized by weak, ineffective, and unstable political
institutions; equally vital, since they did not exercise effective jurisdiction over their territo-
ries, quasi-states experienced challenges to their rule from opposition claimants. This notion
explained the civil wars that raged across the developing world in the 1980s, and in the 1990s,
Eastern European scholars employed the concept of quasi-states to study the weak states that
rose from the ashes of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Rywkin 2006: 23–6).
Ayoob (1984: 42–51) deployed the idea of quasi-states to study the security problems fac-
ing Third World states. In distinguishing between the external orientations of security in
Western countries versus the internal orientation in Third World contexts, Ayoob claimed
that the latter faced security threats that emanated largely from their national boundaries;
hence, because of inadequate capacities to manage communal, ethnic, regional, and religious
diversities, Third World states were prone to intrastate conflicts. Apart from the lack of
administrative capacity for effective statehood, Ayoob postulated uneven economic devel-
opment as one of the key factors leading to the absence of social and political consensus that
fueled internal threats (Ayoob 1984: 46). Along the same lines, Buzan (1985) viewed the prev-
alence of intrastate tensions as a general phenomenon of what he described as “societal inse-
curities” that afflicted peoples and states in the Third World. Lacking the essential variables
of “sociopolitical cohesiveness,” Third World states were weakened by the lack of political
legitimacy and limited economic resources. To cope with these problems, Buzan pointed out
that “building stronger states is virtually the only way in which the vicious circle of unstable
states and an unstable security environment can be broken.”
Drawing from the basic assumptions identified in the quasi-states and weak state litera-
ture, theorists of state collapse sought to broaden the descriptive variables; as Zartman
(1995: 1) noted,
State collapse is a deeper phenomenon than mere rebellion, coup, or riot. It refers to a situa-
tion where the structure, authority (legitimate power), law, and political order has fallen apart
and must be reconstituted in some form, old or new. On the other hand, it is not necessarily
anarchy. Nor is it simply a byproduct of the rise of ethnic nationalism: it is the collapse of old
orders, notably the state that brings about the retreat to ethnic nationalism as the residual,
viable identity.
State collapse was a conceptual tool that tried to explain the large number of states facing
civil turmoil from Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia, the Pacific,
Latin America, and the Caribbean. In most of these states, collapse denoted the combination
of governmental collapse, economic devastation, and societal fragmentation (Langford 1999:
64–5; Osaghae 2007: 691–9).
The popularity of state collapse yielded subsequent studies on state failure, articulated pri-
marily by Rotberg and his colleagues (Rotberg 2002: 127–41, 2004). For Rotberg (2004: 5),
the defining characteristic of a failed state is internal armed conflicts: “Failed states are tense,
deeply conflicted, dangerous, and contested bitterly by warring factions which may consist
of insurgencies, criminal gangs, militias, or other groups.” In making a distinction between
collapsed and failed states, Rotberg noted that there was a continuum in terms of stateness
from the extremes of weak states, failing states, failed states, to state collapse (Widner 1995:
129–53; Rotberg 2004; Brooks 2005: 1159–96; Kraxberger 2007: 1057–8). This continuum has
contributed to the proliferation of policy indices that map levels of state vulnerability and
failure, including the Fund for Peace Failed States Index and the German Development Insti-
tute and United Nations Development Programme (DIE/UNDP)’s Measuring Fragility
(Fund for Peace 2005/6; DIE/UNDP 2009).
Development finance institutions such as the World Bank, African Development Bank
(AfDB), and Asian Development Bank (ADB) have also identified different stages of fragility
in their intervention repertoires in post-conflict states. In helping to tailor their engage-
ments, development institutions have distinguished four main levels of fragility: marked
deterioration; active conflict, prolonged political crisis, or impasse; post-conflict or political
transition; and gradual improvement. These distinctions allow development institutions to
help break the cycle of volatility by providing tangible assistance at different stages of fragil-
ity (Kraxberger 2007: 1059; DIE/UNDP 2009).
In the African context, theories of predatory rule reinforced studies of weak states. Preda-
tory rule is characterized by personality rule that depends on coercion, material induce-
ments, and dependence on patronage for political preservation. Elites extract immediate
rents and transfers rather than providing incentives for economic growth leading to the
plunder of the national economy through graft, corruption, and extortion (Ake 1996; Holsti
2000). According to Bates (2008: 6–7), predation to leads to disorder: “When thinking about
the origins of political disorder in Africa, I can find no way of analyzing insurrection without
starting with the behavior of governments. The conditions that led to the breakdown of order
in Africa include the authoritarian nature of its states and their ruler’s penchant for preda-
tion. By rendering their people insecure, they provoked insurgencies.” Predatory theory is
consistent with the findings by Herbst (2000) and Englebert (2002, 2009) who have argued
that post-colonial African states lacked legitimacy because they were not products of legiti-
mate social contracts; as a result, rulers consolidated power through patrimonial practices
that enhance personal power at the expense of public institutions.
The literature on state collapse, state failure, and state fragility has occupied concep-
tual hegemony in the political economy of intrastate conflicts since the 1980s. Its policy
prescriptions were also vital in the intervention strategies by international financial
institutions (IFIs) to reverse the conditions of collapse (François and Sud 2006: 141–60).
In Africa particularly, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
crafted and implemented structural adjustment policies (SAPs) to respond to the inter-
minable economic crises faced by weak African states. In exchange for economic
a ssistance, the IFIs compelled African states to undertake reforms such as privatization
and deregulation that sought to roll back the state from the economy. As Mkandawire
(2002: 15) has noted, one of the objectives of SAPs was to diminish the state, which was
seen as the key problem to development: “African states which in the 1960s and 1970s
had been hailed as the instruments par excellence for modernization were now seen as
the incarnation of all the forces of retrograde tradition and underdevelopment.” While
donor-driven policies attempted to create a balance between states and markets that
would reverse the economic crises, critics charged that they further weakened the capac-
ity of African states and impoverished the majority (Lubeck 1992: 519–40; Kelsall 1995:
297–309; Kayizzi-Mugerwa 1998: 219–25).
New Political Economy Approaches

since the late 1990s
Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the international security umbrella that
sustained weak states, there have been many studies that have tried to find explanations for
the escalation of civil wars, particularly in Africa, the Balkans, and the Pacific (Reilly 2000:
263–73, 2004: 479–93). These theories operate within the conceptual rubric of weak state-
hood and the consequences of state fragmentation; they build on previous theories of weak
and collapsed states while also enriching economic explanations for civil war causation. In
most of these theories, the broad political economy causes of intrastate strife remain
anchored in resource inequities, social exclusion and alienation, power asymmetries, and
state fragility. In addition, there is consensus that in most developing nations, the old domi-
nant fault-lines of ethnicity, regionalism, and class are coinciding with new conflicts around
resources to heighten violence. Three schools—the new wars, the greed and grievances, and
the horizontal inequalities literature—have dominated analyses of intrastate conflicts since
the late 1990s.
New Wars
Broadly characterized as “criminal, depoliticized, private, and predatory” (Kalyvas 2001:
100), new wars attracted the attention of scholars for several reasons. First, in the post-Cold
War period, intrastate conflicts outnumbered inter-state wars. Second, the duration of the
new wars was much longer than that of previous wars: on average, the duration of intrastate
conflicts outstripped that of international wars (Fearon and Laitin 2003: 75). Finally, the new
wars exacted a heavy toll on civilians and communities. In summarizing the distinctive fea-
tures of the new wars, Kaldor (2001: 6) contended that they were different “in terms of their
goals, the methods of warfare, and how are they are financed.”
Unlike previous wars that were fought on the basis of political ideologies, new wars are
marked by ethnic and religious mobilization. Closely linked to ethnic mobilization is the
phenomenon of autochthony, whereby groups use violence to lay exclusive claims to terri-
tory and the dispossession of “foreigners” in their midst (Fearon 2004: 394–15; Boas 2009).
The autochthony scholarship questions the role of localized identity narratives in the refor-
mulation of national identities and ethnography of conflict. Autochthony claims have char-
acterized political violence in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and
Côte d’Ivoire. In the latter case, the civil war that engulfed the country from the late 1990s
stemmed from the disenfranchisement of northern migrants by southerners through an
exclusionary campaign of “Ivoirité.” The civil war was sparked by the introduction of a new
identity card system that discriminated against northern migrants (Marshall-Fratani 2006:
29–43). In the Great Lakes region, autochthony claims drove the 1994 Rwandan genocide
and have been mobilized by local populations in the north and south Kivu provinces of East-
ern Congo against the Banyamulenge, who are regarded as of Rwandese origin (Jackson
2006: 95–123).
The new wars literature also builds on the assumptions of state failure except that it places
centrality on global forces that underpin failed states. Thus most scholars claim that the neo-
liberal economic forces produced by globalization have eroded state capacity and authority
and, in turn, created a vacuum that is filled by criminal networks (Shaw 2000: 171–92;
Duffield 2001; Jung 2003; Münkler 2005). As Kaldor (2001: 70) has remarked, “the processes
known as globalization are breaking up the socio-economic divisions that defined the pat-
terns of politics which characterized the modern period. . . . The failure of the state is accom-
panied by a growing privatization of violence . . . the new wars are characterized by a
multiplicity of types of fighting units both public and private, state and non-state, or some
kind of mixture.”
Another major assumption of the new wars literature is the impact on livelihoods. Most
of the writings highlight the social, material, and human impact of conflicts, particularly
the patterns of human victimization and human displacement (Newman 2004: 177; Franco
2011). In addition to the forcible targeting of civilians, new wars are characterized by wan-
ton and extreme violence; as Snow (1996: ix) argues: “In places like Bosnia, Somalia, Libe-
ria, and Rwanda, the armed forces never seemed to fight one another; instead what passed
for ‘military action’ was the more or less systematic murder and terrorizing of civilian pop-
ulations.” Kaldor (2001: 100) also showed that “at the beginning of the twentieth century,
85–90 percent of casualties in war were military. In World War II, approximately half of all
casualties were civilian. By the late 1990s, the proportions of a hundred years ago have been
almost exactly reversed, so that nowadays approximately 80 percent of all casualties in wars
are civilian.”
Despite attempts to carve out a distinctive analytical terrain for civil war causation, the
new wars literature has been criticized by scholars who assert that the claims for novelty are
exaggerated (Berdal 2003: 477–502; Newman 2004: 173–89; Franco 2011; Mundy 2011:
279–94). Berdal (2003: 480) criticized what he termed the “totalizing pretensions” of the
assumptions of the new wars because of the vagueness in the definitions of core concepts
such as globalization. He noted that “much of the writings on the so-called New Wars of the
1990s typically proceed from a loose understanding of globalization as ‘the widening and
deepening of economic, political, social and cultural interdependence and interconnected-
ness’” (Berdal 2003: 480). Newman (2004: 179) has also charged that what passes for new
wars is not new: “all of the factors that characterize the new wars have been present, to vary-
ing degrees, throughout the last 100 years. The actors, the objectives, spatial context, human
impact, political economy and social structure of conflict have not changed to the extent
argued in the new wars literature.”
Greed versus Grievances Debates

This literature puts the emphasis on economic agendas in the causation of civil conflicts,
including poverty and inequalities. Some of the literature on grievances claimed that African
conflicts had increasingly become apolitical as politics, ideology, and ethnicity were replaced
chiefly by economic interests. Keen (1998: 11) sparked the debate by noting that “war is not
simply a breakdown in a particular system, but a way of creating an alternative system of
profit, power, and even protection.” Although conceding that most post-Cold War conflicts
were driven by economic agendas, Keen emphasized that some conflicts that often started
with political motivations “mutated into conflicts in which short-term economic benefits are
paramount” (1998: 12).
Collier and his colleagues at the World Bank’s Development Research Group made major
contributions to the debate on greed versus grievances (Collier 1999, 2000; Collier and Hoef-
fler 2002a, 2002b). Their primary assumptions were that while group grievances can be
traced back through history, they are not a good predictor of conflicts; instead, economic
agendas are important and economic opportunities are far more likely than social or group
grievances to cause wars. Using statistical data of civil wars since 1965, Collier and Hoeffler
(2000a: 26) found “little evidence for grievances as a determinant of conflict. Neither ine-
quality nor political oppression increases the risk of conflict.” Furthermore, in comparative
studies of civil wars in resource-rich countries—Angola, Colombia, Cambodia, and Sierra
Leone—Collier and Hoeffler concluded that the narrative of grievances was important in
maintaining a sense of group cohesion, but the core motivation was greed fueled by the exist-
ence of resources. In later writings, Collier and colleagues offered a modified version of the
primacy of greed, focusing more on the opportunities for organized violence and how access
to financing (including natural resources and diaspora remittances) increases the chances of
rebellion (Collier and Hoeffler 2000a: 14).
The greed versus grievances debates inspired subsequent studies that focused not just on
Africa but on wide-ranging conflicts in Bougainville, Cambodia, Nepal, Kosovo, Sri Lanka,
and Burma (Berdal and Malone 2000; Ballentine and Sherman 2003). These studies were
enriched by empirical work that concentrated on the characteristic of natural resources,
their geographical location, and typologies of conflict. Le Billon (2001a: 561–84) and Ross
(2003: 47–70, 2004a: 337–56, 2004b: 35–67), for instance, focused on links between natural
resources and separatist conflicts. Le Billon (2001a: 561–84) proposed that secessionist wars
were more prevalent where a resource is physically concentrated, appropriated by the local
population, and demanding foreign investment. But if the resource is not geographically
concentrated and does not require foreign investment, local populations would support
local warlords instead of fighting for secession. In a study of conflict diamonds in Angola, Le
Billon (2001b: 55–80) revealed how alluvial diamonds facilitated civil wars by making it eas-
ier for rebels to have access to them. Advancing on these arguments, Ross (2003: 47–70)
emphasized that the role played by any natural resource depends largely on its lootability, the
ease with which a resource can be extracted; obstructability, the extent to which authorities
can block the transportation of a given resource; and legality, the extent to which a resource
can be legally sold on the international market.
Research and policy analyses since the late 1990s have produced important findings on
the political economy of contemporary armed conflicts and highlighted avenues for
improved policy intervention by international, regional, and local actors. As Berdal’s chapter
(in this volume) reveals, the new knowledge on intrastate conflicts has influenced the design
of intervention mechanisms aimed at conflict prevention, peacemaking and peacebuilding.
Most of these policies also pay attention to post-conflict reconstruction, including disarma-
ment, demobilization, and reintegration; economic recovery; and service delivery. Given the
appreciation of the links between natural resources and conflict, post-conflict reconstruc-
tion efforts have incorporated components of management of natural resources to build the
capacities of states and communities (Schnabel 2002: 7–30). In addition, African countries
that have recently discovered natural resources have shown increasing interest in learning
international best practices about managing these resources to prevent future conflicts.
New Horizontal Inequalities Perspectives

Some critics of the greed and grievances theories have proposed the return to conceptions of
intrastate strife that privilege the role of horizontal inequalities. Instructive to this research is
the resurrection of the pioneering work on relative deprivation by Gurr (1970) and Davies
(1962) that argued that economic inequalities increased the risk of internal conflicts (Gurr
2000; Langer 2005: 25–44; Stewart 2008; Cederman, Weidman, and Gleditsch 2011: 478–95).
Linking grievances and conflict, relative deprivation theory continues to lend powerful
insights into how differences among politically relevant ethnic groups spark widespread vio-
lence. In this vein, Stewart (2008) has contrasted vertical (individual-level) inequalities with
horizontal inequalities which denote political, economic, and social distinctions among cul-
turally defined groups. Noting the centrality of horizontal inequalities in conflict causation,
she has argued that “the majority of internal conflicts are organized group conflicts—they
are neither exclusively nor primarily a matter of individuals committing acts of violence
against others. What is most often involved is group mobilization of people with particular
shared identities or goals to attack others in the name of the group” (Stewart 2008: 11).
Other scholars have expanded on the notion of horizontal inequalities to understand how
conflicting claims to scarce resources, notably power and wealth, lead to ethnic conflicts. In
an empirical comparison of economic horizontal inequalities around the world, Cederman,
Weidman, and Gleditsch (2011: 478) assert that “some of the most intractable and damaging
conflicts afflicting the Sudan or the former Yugoslavia are to a large extent about political
and economic injustices. It is very unlikely that such conflicts can ever be understood, let
alone durably solved, without taking seriously the claims of marginalized communities.”
Likewise, Langer (2005: 25–44) has stressed the role of horizontal inequalities in the erup-
tion of civil war in Côte d’Ivoire. Although Côte d’Ivoire had a long legacy of severe horizon-
tal inequalities between the north and south, violent group mobilization occurred in the
face of the deterioration of the economy in the 1980s and the democratization pressures of
the 1990s.
Sustainable conflict prevention mechanisms for managing horizontal inequalities are
both short- and long-term; the dilemma is often how to sequence and balance such policies.
Long-term measures include fostering economic growth alongside distributive policies that
target marginalized communities. But long-term policies require peace and stability in the
short term, forcing difficult choices by political elites in violence-prone societies. Constitu-
tional reforms, including power-sharing agreements and electoral reforms, have become the
standard prescriptions for countries seeking inclusive governments that accommodate
aggrieved constituencies while also laying the political foundations for stability. In Africa,
for instance, power sharing arrangements have become a popular mechanism of dealing
with post-electoral violence that derives, for the most part, from horizontal inequalities. In
cases such as Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Zanzibar, power sharing arrangements have compelled
elite coalescence around constitutional reforms that would check the dangers of state failure
(Mehler 2009: 2–10; Matlosa, Khadiagala, and Shale 2010; LeVan 2011: 1–35).
Mapping Future Sources of Conflicts
To stimulate strategic thinking about future insecurity trends and trajectories, some recent
studies have used modeling methodologies based on events data to identify factors that cause
insecurity. These models or projections include (among many others) the Millennium
Project’s State of the Future Index (SOFI); the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Global Trends 2030; and the Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger developed by the Center
for International Development and Conflict Management, which ranks states on future
risks. These forecasts suggest that future vulnerabilities to civil conflict will hinge on the
capacity of states to mitigate the pressures of increased globalization; the intersections of cli-
mate change, migration, and security; competing and conflicting energy, food, and water
security concerns; and the overlapping challenges of weak governance, maintenance of the
rule of law, and economic fragmentation.
Future conflicts are increasingly going to draw from the current conflicts whereby spillo-
vers from intrastate conflicts engulf regional neighborhoods. Conflict spillovers are not new,
as demonstrated by the regional insecurity dilemmas caused by state implosion in Africa’s
Great Lakes region since the early 1990s. Spillover conflicts are nonetheless growing in geo-
graphical zones where weak states are incapable of controlling border areas and where there
is an escalation of new insurgencies, rebel movements, and terrorist and criminal organiza-
tions. Previously used to depict the insecurities occasioned by state collapse in Afghanistan
and the Horn of Africa, the concepts of “ungoverned” and “ungovernable” spaces now refer
to the new arc of instability in the Sahel, a strategic region that straddles North and sub-
Saharan Africa with long-standing trade and migration routes. The core countries—Chad,
Mali, Mauritania, and Niger—have tenuous control over their vast territories. Furthermore,
the Sahel borders countries such as Algeria, Sudan, and Nigeria with serious internal prob-
lems that often spill over in the neighborhood (Cline 2007: 889–99; Lohmann 2011).
In the post-colonial period, the failure by governments in Mali and Niger to address the
long-standing grievances of the minority Tuaregs sparked rebellions against political and
economic marginalization. The discovery of important natural resources such as uranium in
the Tuareg regions magnified the stakes between central governments and the rebel move-
ments. Over the years, Tuareg separatism coexisted alongside a combustible mix of drug and
gun smuggling, human trafficking, and Islamic vigilantism. In the 1990s, the Algerian civil
war worsened the instability in the Sahel after a minority of Islamists, who had been deprived
of election victory, regrouped in terror networks across Algeria’s border with Mauritania and
Niger. Initially organized in 1998 as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC),
the former Algerian Islamist insurgents regrouped in 2007 under the label of Al-Qaeda in
the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). With links to Afghanistan, northern Nigeria, and the Horn of
Africa, AQIM sought an Islamic safe haven in the Sahel-Sahara, emerging as a major terror-
ist group in the region (Mann 2012a).
The aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring gave new impetus to Tuareg separatism after former
Tuareg fighters in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan army overran the weak government struc-
tures in northern Mali. Taking advantage of political and military disarray in the central
government in Bamako, in March 2012 the loose alliance of Tuareg separatists and AQIM
fighters declared an independent state of Azawad. Although denying attempts to annex ter-
ritory belonging to neighboring countries, Mauritania and Niger watched the insurrection
with trepidation because they have large populations of Tuaregs within their borders. The
collapse of the initial alliance between Tuareg separatists and AQIM in northern Mali
sparked a new war that forced thousands of refugees to flee to neighboring countries. The
humanitarian crisis occurred against the backdrop of deteriorating economic, social, and
environmental conditions in a region that is prone to perennial droughts and famine (Mann
2012b).
Managing the specter of un-governability in the Sahel recalls the post-Cold War coales-
cence of regional and international intervention efforts to check the disruptions caused by
state failures in Africa and the Balkans. Through the Economic Community of West Africa
(ECOWAS), regional actors have contemplated an intervention force supported by the
United Nations that would help reclaim northern Mali. Mali’s neighbors recognize the enor-
mous consequences of the regional destabilization wrought by the Tuareg uprising, but the
dilemma is whether they can mobilize sufficient regional and international resources to
check Mali’s fragmentation. Previous experiences of external efforts to prevent state failure
reveal that a durable solution will need to be crafted through a combination of military pres-
sure and political compromise among the parties to the conflict.
The change in regimes in North Africa and the Middle East through popular uprisings has
also driven political forecasts that seek generalization that can inform future assessments of
civil and political convulsions. Grasping these trends stems from the fact that the momen-
tous political events in North Africa caught most observers by surprise, and therefore les-
sons from these events can produce a set of useful generalizations for predicting future
intrastate wars (Hewitt 2012: 4–18). Equally germane, it is significant to determine whether
these changes are going to result in democratic consolidation or state fragmentation across
the region. Gurr, Hewitt, and Wilkenfeld (2012) have developed a set of hypotheses with
regard to the drivers of regime collapse, including: (i) the nature of the regime: regimes with
a mix of democratic and autocratic features such as Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen are more
unstable than governments that are either consistently democratic or autocratic; (ii) regional
diffusion effects: armed conflict and massive protests such as in Tunisia increased conflict
risks in neighboring countries; (iii) urban youth grievances and broadened civil society:
marginalized youth has been an important revolutionary constituency in spearheading the
uprisings alongside other civil society groups that arose in the confines of autocratic struc-
tures; and (iv) autocratic fatigue: the longer leaders such as Hosni Mubarak and Muammar
Gaddafi stay in power, the more likely they will be challenged and ousted (Gurr, Hewitt, and
Wilkenfeld 2012: 1).
Forecasts for future stability in the region revolve around whether there is a transition
from autocracy to democracy. Frantz (2012: 19) has proposed that democratic consolidation
seems more likely in Tunisia and Egypt, countries that had a mixture of democratic and
autocratic systems prior to the uprisings, than in Libya, which was a pure autocracy. With
respect to the links between democratization and economic growth, Koubi (2012: 26) has
forecast that higher economic growth will occur only once the elites initiate far-reaching
reforms that introduce checks and balances, create economic institutions, and enshrine
secure property rights.
The analyses that seek to comprehend political trends in North Africa and the Middle East
do not depart substantially from prior comparative knowledge about the causes and conse-
quences of intrastate wars. Instead, by borrowing from the rich tradition of how socio-eco-
nomic grievances are transformed into revolutionary impulses, they reveal the continuities
that have marked the study of intrastate conflicts. Thus, as Gurr, Hewitt, and Wilkenfeld
(2012: 1) argue, pro-democracy protests against autocratic rulers are the “latest manifestation
of a historically familiar but also rare phenomenon.” They have included, among others, food
riots in eighteenth-century Europe, the decolonization process after the end of the Second
World War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
Conclusion
The dominant theories of development and international relations since the 1960s have con-
tributed to an appreciation of the causes and sources of intrastate conflicts. This has been
possible in part because the basic assumption of these theories is the centrality of the mod-
ern territorial state as the organizer of order, prosperity, and dignity. By the same logic, states
can be sources of insecurity, misery, and poverty. A good starting point for understanding
why intrastate conflicts occur is, therefore, to probe the nature of post-colonial states and
whether they furnished the conditions for improving livelihoods and meeting security
needs. The nation and state building objectives of the 1960s in the developing world sought
to lend some coherence to states that existed only in name. This is why the structural func-
tionalists were pessimistic about the ability of the post-colonial state to extend its political
authority and overcome the demands from society. The civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s con-
firmed this pessimism, but except for Bangladesh, most of these wars did not lead to wide-
spread state disintegration in the developing world.
The post-modernization theories of weak states recognized the continuing dangers posed
by economic inequities, authoritarian leadership, and ethnic nationalism to the construction
of states that would better prevent civil conflicts. Jackson’s (1991) delineation of quasi-states was
accurate in revealing the international actors and forces that sustained the majority of weak
states; this depiction was also relevant in the aftermath of the Cold War, when most of these
states faced the biggest challenges to their internal cohesion. The intrastate conflicts of the
1990s were essentially the implosion of quasi-states in the developing world and the brittle
Soviet and Yugoslav states. The civil wars of the 1990s also resonated with Huntington’s earlier
injunction (1965) about the dangers of popular mobilization on the basis of weak institutionali-
zation. The emergence of competitive politics in the 1990s compounded the internal pressures
on weak states, leading to the disintegration of state institutions and the emergence of warlord
politics. These conflicts also had an economic dimension as regime challengers took advantage
of weak internal controls to garner valuable resources in contesting their grievances.
Innovative research on conflicts such as those in Sudan, Angola, Sierra Leone, and
Cambodia are part of the broad consensus that underscores the need to address the
political economy of conflict in improving conflict analysis and policy responses. These
studies have contributed to the advancement of knowledge about the centrality of insti-
tutional regeneration along social, economic, and political lines, and to greater atten-
tion to conflict mediation and reconciliation. Since the 1990s there has been a relative
decline in intrastate conflicts across the developing world, attributable largely to crea-
tive efforts by feuding parties to find negotiated settlements and the sustained engage-
ment of international actors in these conflicts. The once-raging intrastate conflicts in
Angola, the Balkans, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Indonesia, Liberia, and Mozambique have
dissipated as parties have latched onto alternative institutional mechanisms for co-exist-
ence and amity. In other cases, some of the long-running secessionist conflicts in Ethio-
pia and Sudan have been resolved through the creation of new states; in turn, the new
states have had to find their own institutional feet to preempt the beginning of new intr-
astate conflicts.
But even as most of these conflicts have ended, the conditions that reproduce weak states
(and potentially lead to state failure) have not gone away. In this respect, the “insecurity
dilemma” that characterizes most developing states endures, underlining the importance of
building effective but accountable and participatory states in managing political change. In
most of these states, the sources of intrastate conflicts have remained fairly constant: poverty,
underdevelopment, youth alienation, growing class differentiation, and ethno-regional
cleavages. Adding to these grievances are the new demands around competitive political
process that often exacerbate the management of diversity in the circumstances of horizon-
tal inequities and weak state institutions. Much of the current literature on early warning,
democratic inclusion, and the management of socioeconomic strains is relevant in high-
lighting the fragilities that propel intrastate conflicts.
International efforts to manage intrastate conflicts remain relevant, particularly where
multiple international agencies work with regional organizations to mobilize resources
toward conflict prevention and post-conflict transitions to mitigate the recurrence of con-
flicts. The necessity for collaborative engagement stems from the conviction that no single
organization has a monopoly of knowledge on dealing with the challenges of intrastate con-
flicts. Moreover, in countries facing numerous vulnerabilities, collaborative interventions
and coordination of energies often foster more effective approaches to promote reforms,
revitalize institutional capacities, and rebuild legitimacy.
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chapter 21
pe acebu ildi ng a n d
dev el opm en t
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Introduction
In May 1966 Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense, traveled to Montreal to speak to a
group of American newspaper editors.1 McNamara’s “Montreal speech,” an unexpected and
unexpectedly impassioned presentation by one of the principal architects of America’s mili-
tary escalation in Vietnam, caused a major stir. Making only a passing reference to the war in
southeast Asia, McNamara focused his remarks on what he saw as the all-important connec-
tion between “security and development” in international affairs, and on the “irrefutable
relationship between violence and economic backwardness” (McNamara 1966). Arguing
that security had for too long been identified with “exclusively military phenomena,” the
future president of the World Bank emphasized that without development, security would
forever remain an elusive goal. There was, he insisted, a direct and positive correlation
between development, political stability, and peace.
The Montreal speech is of interest to historians primarily because of the early evidence it
provides of McNamara’s growing doubts about the wisdom of America’s deepening involve-
ment in Vietnam. To be sure, in terms of substantive content there was nothing very new in
his address, nor did it identify “peacebuilding” as a distinctive concept or concrete set of
activities in post-war situations. This use of the term is a product of the post-Cold War era.
And yet the address, the reactions it elicited, and the wider philosophical issues to which it
spoke, if only implicitly, are not without relevance to contemporary debates about develop-
ment and peacebuilding. Ideas, concepts, and controversies all have their pre-history, and
those surrounding the relationship between economic development and peacebuilding are
no exception. In positing a positive, linear connection between development and peace,
McNamara’s views can be seen as fitting into a long tradition of thought on the subject, from
Isaiah’s vision of nations beating their swords into ploughshares2 to the optimism of nine-
teenth-century liberals and positivists who saw in the “Great Transition” from pre-industrial
to industrial society a process that would eliminate the traditional functions of war, gradu-
ally turning it into an anachronism.
peacebuilding and development 363
Others, by contrast, have challenged the view that the relationship between development
and peace is quite so benign and straightforward. These include Marxists of various hues who,
though sharing with nineteenth-century liberals a belief in the inevitability of progress, have
emphasized the conflict-generating effects of developmental processes and the centrality of
violence as a compelling source of historical change. They include historical sociologists
whose writings have highlighted the pivotal role of organized violence in the process of State
formation, as well as political scientists like Samuel Huntington, who in Political Order in
Changing Societies directly challenged McNamara’s claim regarding the “certain connection
between economic stagnation and the incidence of violence” (McNamara 1966). To Hunting-
ton the problem was not modernity per se but the process of modernization leading to it, with
“economic development itself ” often “a highly destabilizing process” (Huntington 1968: 49).
The present chapter is primarily concerned with the experience and history of thought
covering the relationship between peacebuilding and development after the Cold War. There
are sound empirical and logical reasons, as well as more narrowly practical ones, for restrict-
ing the focus to this period. That said, earlier debates on peace and development remain
important for the simple reason that they posed and engaged with fundamental questions
that have not gone away:
• What is the precise relationship between the process of development, political order,
and stability?
• What happens when wants, aspirations, and expectations outpace developmental
gains, and who benefits and who loses by development?
• Does the intuitively appealing view that war always and everywhere “reverses develop-
ment” (World Bank 2003: 84) require qualification in light of historical and contempo-
rary experience?
• Are there inherent limits, imposed by forces of history, culture, and politics, to exter-
nally driven processes of social engineering and post-conflict reconstruction?
Structure and Focus of Chapter

The subject of “development and peacebuilding” remains a broad and amorphous one, much
like the voluminous and diverse body of literature it has generated. Inevitably, choices need
to be made about approach and focus. The chapter proceeds in three parts.
The first looks at the post-Cold War rise of peacebuilding as an activity that envisaged, and
has come to involve, a major role for development and development actors. It considers the
geo-political and normative background to the rise, and traces the initial efforts to opera-
tionalize the concept of “post-conflict peacebuilding” from its original conception in An
Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali) in 1992 through to “Obstacles to Peacebuilding,” an article
by Alvaro de Soto and Graciana del Castillo published in 1994 that helped frame the early
debate about peacebuilding and development.
The second part of the chapter identifies three broad, necessarily overlapping, sets of issues
around which thinking and debate about development and its relationship to peacebuilding
have revolved since the early 1990s. The first of these was central to the concerns expressed by
de Soto and del Castillo in 1994: the practical and operational challenges posed by the
364 mats berdal
involvement of development actors in new, politically sensitive roles and tasks—involvement

that has raised complex questions about the sequencing, coordination, and funding of devel-
opment and peacebuilding activities within politically fragile post-war environments. The sec-
ond set of issues concerns the transformative effects of war on the socio-economic and political
fabric of societies, and the resulting challenges—both practical and conceptual—that the dis-
tinctive political economies of post-war settings have posed for development actors wedded to
“traditional,” typically technocratic and apolitical, modes of engagement. The third and, at one
level, most fundamental set of issues concerns the key policy priorities of donors and interna-
tional financial institutions (IFIs) in post-war settings, and has centered on the debate over the
so-called “Washington Consensus” advice and its appropriateness to post-war societies.
The final part of the chapter builds directly on the previous discussion and is concerned
not just with the contribution of development to peacebuilding but also, conversely, with the
impact of peacebuilding on development. It is a subject linked to the growing recognition of
the importance of local context, to debates about “top-down” versus “bottom-up” peace-
building, and to a greater appreciation of some of the negative externalities of donor policies
and peacebuilding interventions.
The Post-Cold War Growth in Peacebuilding
There are two reasons, closely connected, for concentrating discussion of development and
peacebuilding on the post-Cold War period.
First, it is only with the end of the Cold War that “post-conflict peacebuilding” comes to
be identified as a discrete set of activities undertaken by external actors with the express aim
of consolidating peace and laying the ground for “sustainable development” in countries
ravaged by war. The end of the Cold War was significant to this development in two respects.
On the one hand, it removed the global, ideologically driven competition for influence
between East and West as the dominant prism through which different forms of armed con-
flict in the international system had long been viewed. As such, it also removed, at least in
theory, an important obstacle to more constructive and less overtly politicized engagement
by major powers and donors in conflict-afflicted societies. Crucially, this also permitted
international bodies formerly constrained by bipolar rivalry—most notably the United
Nations and its specialized agencies, funds and programs—to assume a more proactive role
not just in mitigating but also in addressing the deeper causes of violent conflict.
On the other hand, and more indirectly, the Cold War had done much to ensure that the
worlds of development and security, those inhabited by policy-makers and practitioners as
well as those populated by academics and think tanks, had remained heavily compartmen-
talized. The end of the Cold War brought those worlds closer together. In part this was a
result of the liberating impact of the passing of the old order on the study of “security.” As the
stable management of relations between East and West ceased to be the overarching preoc-
cupation of policy-makers and academics, traditional conceptions of security came to be
questioned more widely on the grounds that they were overly state-centric and too accepting
of the distinction—seen as increasingly untenable in a more “globalized” and interdependent
world—between issues of “low” and “high” politics. In their place, a broader understanding,
encompassing what the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) described in its
1994 Human Development Report as “new dimensions of security,” was called for. Significantly,
the same UNDP report—self-avowedly “people-centered” in its orientation—introduced the
notion of “human security,” a multi-dimensional conception of security that included, inter
alia, economic, food, and health security (UNDP 1994). While human security may thus be
seen as an invitation to re-think conventional and state-centric understandings of security, it
was also an implied criticism of the tendency among neoclassical economists to place the goal
of economic growth at the center of the meaning of development (see Harriss in this volume).
These changes in the discourse on security and development have been seen by many as
evidence of an epoch-making shift in normative attitudes among members of international
society following the end of the Cold War. Whether a “solidarist consensus” has in fact
emerged among states, however, remains a moot point and, unsurprisingly, claims to that
effect have been far more muted after the events of 9/11 and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Still, there is no question but that humanitarian issues, broadly conceived, have become
more prominent on the international agenda with the passing of the old bipolar order. This
can be seen above all in the remarkable growth of “peace operations” since the early 1990s
and the tendency for international military action—whether coercive or consent-based—
increasingly to be justified on humanitarian grounds (Roberts 2001). And this brings us to
the second major reason for concentrating discussion of the history and practice of develop-
ment and peacebuilding on the post-Cold War period.
The post-Cold War era has witnessed a dramatic growth in externally aided efforts to con-
solidate and build, as the jargon would have it, “self-sustaining” peace in countries emerging
from war and violence. The vast majority of these peacebuilding interventions have been
mounted under UN auspices. By one count, between 1989 and 2011, thirty-four missions
incorporating a peacebuilding mandate were launched, ranging in size and scope from com-
paratively small-scale missions in Central America in the early 1990s to the assumption of
full-fledged governmental authority in East Timor and Kosovo (Berdal and Zaum 2012). In
addition to these come post-war reconstruction activities, notably in Iraq and Afghanistan,
where the UN’s role has been more marginal, though the operations themselves have raised
key questions and stimulated fierce debates about the role of development initiatives and
development actors in post-war stabilization and recovery efforts.
While these interventions have varied greatly in scope, scale, and intensity of commit-
ment by external actors, they have all differed from traditional UN operations in one crucial
respect. Concerned with the legacies and socio-economic dislocations brought about by
internal conflict and civil war, peacebuilding mandates have typically been framed in deeply
ambitious terms, aimed at nothing less than the wholesale transformation of conflict-affected
societies. It is the intrusive character and the sheer transformative ambition of modern
peacebuilding that have brought to the fore a wide range of practical, conceptual, and even
philosophical issues regarding its relationship to development.
From An Agenda for Peace to “Obstacles to Peacebuilding”

The term “post-conflict peacebuilding” was coined by then UN Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali in An Agenda for Peace, a report commissioned by the Security Council in
January 1992 to provide member states with recommendations on how to improve the
366 mats berdal
rganization’s capacity for “preventive diplomacy, for peacemaking and for peace-keeping.”
o
The final report defined peacebuilding as “action to identify and support structures which
will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict” (Boutros-
Ghali 1992). Its identification as a separate category of action was premised on the conviction
that placing “an achieved peace on a durable foundation” required simultaneous, mutually
reinforcing action in a wide range of areas, from political to “legal, institutional, military,
humanitarian, human rights-related, environmental, economic and social, cultural or demo-
graphic” (United Nations 1998, para. 65).
At one level, this was a conception of peacebuilding—aspirational, broad, and ambitious—
with which it is difficult to quarrel. It was also a reflection of the optimism that marked debates
at the time about the UN’s role in a world no longer at the mercy of Cold War rivalry. The initial
elaboration of the concept contained little, however, about implementation and, in particular,
was silent on how development—and specifically what kind of development priorities—would
reinforce the desired end-state of peacebuilding. More problematic still, the catch-all nature of
the concept served to obscure the importance of distinguishing strategically between different,
potentially competing peacebuilding goals in the aftermath of armed conflict (Cousens 2001:
10 and 13). Among the first to draw attention to this, and thus to raise larger and more searching
questions about the connection between development and peacebuilding, were Alvaro de Soto
and Graciana del Castillo, in their 1994 article “Obstacles to Peacebuilding” (1994).
The immediate background to “Obstacles to Peacebuilding” was what its authors saw as the
perilous state of the peacebuilding process in El Salvador. Since the peace agreement signed by
the government and the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) at
Chapultepec in January 1992, the UN had remained centrally involved in the implementation of
ambitious reforms aimed at “preventing the recurrence of violence—the post-conflict peace-
building phase” (de Soto and del Castillo 1994: 70). These included, crucially, the creation of a
new National Civilian Police Force and a land-transfer program for ex-combatants and FMLN
guerrillas designed to facilitate their political and socio-economic reintegration into society; the
kind of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration/Security Sector Reform (DDR/SSR)
activities that have been the staple of peacebuilding operations ever since. Running parallel to
UN peacebuilding efforts, however, was a separate process sponsored by the Bretton Woods
institutions, involving an exacting program of macro-economic stabilization and structural
adjustment. The UN and the Bretton Woods institutions had in effect ended up overseeing two
distinct but simultaneous processes, the result of which was to leave El Salvador with “a very real
dilemma:” “Should it sacrifice economic stabilization to proceed with implementing the peace
accords, or should it strictly carry out its stabilization and structural adjustment program, per-
haps endangering peace?” (de Soto and del Castillo 1994: 70). It was a dilemma, de Soto and del
Castillo added, that was immediately relevant to other countries emerging, or hoping to emerge,
from civil war at the time, notably Cambodia, Mozambique, Somalia, and Angola.
Key Issues and Controversies
Beyond drawing attention to the crisis in El Salvador, “Obstacles to Peacebuilding” may

usefully be seen as having identified three sets of issues that have remained at the centre of
discussions about the relationship between development and peacebuilding.
The first concerns the lack of transparency, flexibility, and coordination within the UN
“system” and the wider donor community when confronted with the particular challenges of
war-torn societies.
The second concerns the importance of recognizing—when aligning developmental pri-
orities to peacebuilding, as well as in the design of specific policies in “post-conflict” settings—
the far-reaching and transformative effects that war and protracted violence invariably have
on state and society. In part this is about a proper appreciation of the political, social, and
economic costs of war and their legacy effects. It is also, however, about the importance of
understanding better the distinctive political economies that emerge in the course of war
and that persist (if in mutated form) into the “post-conflict” period.
The third issue was only alluded to by de Soto and del Castillo: whether the fundamental
priorities of international financial institutions in the case of El Salvador—aiming for mac-
ro-economic stability and rapid economic growth through the application of the strictures
of the “Washington Consensus,” with its emphasis on fiscal discipline, privatization, and
liberalization—are at all appropriate to countries emerging from war.
Transparency, Flexibility, and Coordination

The principal policy concern of de Soto and del Castillo in 1994 was the absence of any kind
of consultation, let alone strategic coordination, among the bodies charged with shepherd-
ing forward fragile peace processes on the one hand, and those concerned with development
and economic policies on the other. The problem has since come to be described somewhat
euphemistically as one of limited “system-wide coherence,” and its persistence among UN
agencies and donors remains a very real obstacle to the attainment of strategic objectives
in peacebuilding (UN 2006). Related to this, however, was a further obstacle, again not
confined to El Salvador: the lack of external funding for politically sensitive but critical
peace-related programs, most notably for DDR and SSR activities aimed at reintegrating ex-
combatants into civil society and productive economic life after the termination of armed
conflict (and thus, in theory, also reallocating resources and manpower away from the mili-
tary sector towards developmental objectives). In addition to the obvious political sensitivi-
ties involved, a major reason for this was the lack of “flexibility in the application of the rules
of financial institutions or adjustment of such rules when UN post-conflict peacebuilding so
requires” (de Soto and del Castillo 1994: 79). Anticipating what has since come to be known
as “peace conditionality,” de Soto and del Castillo proposed that concessional financing
might in the future be granted if and when parties demonstrated compliance with the terms
of peace agreements.3
To what extent have these concerns about strategic coordination and flexibility been
addressed? The answer is mixed. Not long after de Soto and del Castillo aired their worries,
IFIs and donor countries formally acknowledged the “special challenges” posed by post-
conflict societies. The Articles of Agreement of the IFIs—which in theory prevent them from
interfering “in the political affairs of any member state”—have ceased to be more than a pro-
cedural obstacle to involvement in peace-related activities. The procedural fix for becoming
involved in DDR, for example, was to treat it as an innocuous-sounding “public expenditure
management” issue. Additionally, a range of new financing facilities and instruments have
been established, starting with the Emergency Post Conflict Assistance (EPCA) facility set
368 mats berdal
up by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1995, initially an extension of existing

emergency assistance policy for countries experiencing natural disasters to include coun-
tries emerging from armed conflict. Since the mid-1990s, the World Bank’s concessional
lending arm has provided more than $6 billion in reconstruction assistance to “fragile and
conflict-affected states,” and technical assistance, training and support for structural
reform—covering areas such as banking reform, fiscal capacity, privatization, and “public
enterprise restructuring”—have become routinized.
And yet, for all this, the suggestion that these changes in architecture and modalities for
engagement in conflict-affected societies amount to a “fundamental change in the way the
Bretton Woods institutions address their respective mandates” (del Castillo 2010: 84)
remains deeply contested. As will be discussed more fully below, disagreement has centered
on whether the underlying or core priorities of the IFIs and donors have also changed to
take account of the realities of post-war societies and the operational requirements that
flow from these.
As for the wider issue of strategic coordination and system-wide-coherence, evidence of
progress is still harder to detect. The deeper source of the problem here lies in the function-
ally fragmented, inter-governmental, and deeply political character of the UN “system.” UN
agencies, funds, and programs each have their own budgets, charters, and governing bodies
(on which sit donors), resulting in a loose confederal system that is resistant to partial reform
and remains, in crucial respects, profoundly dysfunctional.
The resulting challenge is not a new one. An early report (produced in 1969) on the UN
development system memorably concluded that the UN undertook activities with “very little
‘brain’ to guide it” and that “its absence may well be the greatest constraint on all capacity”
(Jackson 1969). The growth of UN peacebuilding activities over the past twenty years has mag-
nified the tensions built into the system, tensions which a proliferation of new coordinating
mechanisms have only partly mitigated. Even the establishment in 2005 of the much-vaunted
Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) and an associated Peace Support Office—specifically
intended to coordinate the actions of peacebuilding actors—has not managed to overcome
the structural and political obstacles to effective coordination and delivery.
The Transformative Effects of War and its Consequences

Behind de Soto and del Castillo’s concern with coordination and flexibility lies a more serious
issue: the need for donors to recognize that the formal end of hostilities following armed con-
flict does not signify that either peacebuilding or development ever starts from scratch. In
part that recognition involves treating societies emerging from conflict on their own terms,
acknowledging historical context as well as the cultural, economic, and political specificities
of war-torn societies. Equally important, it requires an appreciation of the transformative
effects of war itself, of the destruction and suffering it involves to be sure, but also of its differ-
ential impact on societies and groups within it and on the complex and innovative ways that
politico-economic elites and ordinary people adapt to wartime conditions and protracted
violence. The result of these transformations is to ensure that “post-conflict” situations present
challenges very different from those of “traditional” development, including those associated
with recovery from natural disasters. There are three aspects to the distinctive nature of “post-
conflict” societies to which scholars and, increasingly, practitioners have drawn attention.
The Primacy of Political Considerations in Peacebuilding

Political stability in post-war settings, especially following negotiated settlements aimed at
ending civil wars, is invariably fragile and susceptible to reversal and breakdown, as the his-
tory of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Angola in the 1990s showed all too well. In Cambodia,
Mozambique, Guatemala, El Salvador, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the formal end of hostilities
marked the beginning of peacebuilding, not the end of peace processes. In these circum-
stances, the requirements of political stabilization must assume priority. This, perhaps the
chief lesson from post-Cold War peacebuilding efforts, carries important implications for
the design of economic policies and the involvement of development actors in peacebuild-
ing. As James Boyce makes clear, it means, above all, that “‘optimal economic policies’ are
often not possible or even desirable in the short run. Indeed, pursuing policies that are opti-
mal from an economic viewpoint . . . can have tragic consequences for the political, security
and social transitions” (Boyce 2002: 4).
The Socio-economic Costs and Dislocations of War

The direct and indirect costs of war and protracted violence present post-war development
challenges that are, arguably, better understood now than they were in the mid-1990s. Even
though there is considerable variability across cases, wars are, unsurprisingly, destructive
and costly in their effects on society and the economy. In addition to the human toll exacted,
war destroys capital and infrastructure, and it acts as a disincentive to saving and investment.
Importantly, as Frances Stewart and Valpy FitzGerald have shown in a wide-ranging and
comparative study of war and underdevelopment, “the range of capital destruction in war-
time is not only broad but also concentrated on those capacities which are recognized as
being critical for sustainable development in poor countries” (Stewart and FitzGerald 2001:
16). These include physical assets (e.g. manufacturing plants, government institutions, com-
munications and transport infrastructure) as well as human and social capital.
Countries emerging from war are also hampered by the damage done to legal and regula-
tory structures needed for attracting investment and stimulating economic activity, with
civil wars particularly destructive of systems designed to protect land titles and property
rights. This in turn has severely undermined the capacity for post-war authorities to gener-
ate and collect revenue (Boyce and O’Donnell 2007).
Another distinguishing feature of post-war settings has been high levels of unemploy-
ment and underemployment, especially so where war’s end has been accompanied by large-
scale demobilization of combatants. The potentially destabilizing impact of restive and
dissatisfied ex-combatants—heightened by the abundance of weapons and the continued
existence within post-war societies of wartime organizational networks—makes the issue of
unemployment especially important to tackle.
Notwithstanding the destruction wrought by years of war, in El Salvador the IFIs followed
“their perceived paths as if there were no war” (de Soto and del Castillo 1994). Since then,
donor countries and international organizations have routinely come to acknowledge the
“special circumstances” of war-torn societies. Even so, individual cases often suggest that
formal recognition of special status does not translate into operational policy. Tackling
unemployment, in particular, has not received the attention it merits; if anything, donor pol-
icies, especially those of the IFIs, have tended to exacerbate the problem (Pugh 2005).
370 mats berdal
The Political Economy of War and Peace

While the economic costs and developmental damage of war are real and incontrovertible, it
is also the case that war does not bring economic activity, or indeed development, to a halt.
Groups, individuals, and households do not remain passive in response to violence, the col-
lapse of entitlements, and the weakening of the formal economy. Instead, and as a growing
number of micro-level studies of conflict have shown, they adapt—often in dynamic and
highly innovative ways—to the conditions and opportunity structures created by violence
and the disintegration of formal institutions. Alternative systems of coping and even of gov-
ernance emerge as economic activities and networks are transformed rather than destroyed
by conflict. As a study commissioned by the UNDP noted in 2008, the “severe developmen-
tal damage that violent conflict inflicts in the formal sector shifts economic activity to the
informal sector,” and the resulting war economies “reshape, but do not eliminate, patterns of
accumulation, exchange and distribution” (UNDP 2008: 15).
The political economy approach to the study of conflict and peacebuilding focuses on the
interaction of these war economies with the political agendas of conflict actors and the
informal power structures that exist within “post-conflict” settings. It examines how differ-
ent actors in conflict often come to acquire a vested interest in the continuation of political
instability and disorder. The range of actors involved is often wide and varied: political and
military elites; government officials, traders, middlemen, and transnational corporations;
neighboring states and regional powers; individuals and populations for whom the require-
ments of survival may involve some form of accommodation to violent processes. The result
of their adaptations to conflict and radical uncertainty is often a resilient political economy
of conflict where economic activity and violence are closely intertwined, and which persists
into the post-war period. The range of motives and interests held by various actors, and the
tendency for these to mutate over time, make, not surprisingly, for a fluid and highly dynamic
post-war environment. The implications for development and peacebuilding in “post-conflict”
settings are potentially wide-ranging.
David Keen has persuasively argued that the political economy perspective poses a fun-
damental challenge to the way the development community has traditionally thought
about war (Keen 1997). That community’s tendency, often implicit in the design of projects
and interventions, has been to treat war as a form of “developmental malaise:” that is, to
see it merely as the collapse or breakdown of an otherwise peaceful and linear trajectory of
growth and development. Thus, the IMF’s approach to EPCA, alluded to above, “is based
on the notion that conflicts, like natural disasters, are essentially temporary negative
shocks that require only a relatively short period of reform and assistance” (IMF 2008:
10–11). In this view, the separation between war and peace is essentially clear-cut and
unambiguous.
And yet since war and protracted violence also involve the emergence of new socio-
economic and political orders that outlive the formal end of hostilities, such a sharp distinction
between “war” and “peace” is not tenable. To acknowledge this is also to accept a different
understanding of what is actually involved in transitions from war to peace, an understand-
ing based on an appreciation of who stands to benefit and who stands to lose from continued
conflict, not on the belief than one is dealing with a clean slate. It also means that pre-
packaged or templated solutions to the challenges of post-war development and recovery are
likely not only to fail but to have unintended and perverse consequences.
There is a further, thought-provoking implication here. It has been made by Ken

Menkhaus and draws on his own extensive fieldwork into local governance in Somalia. The
transformation of political economies by war and conflict, he argues, may in some circum-
stances create new, more promising bases from which to start thinking about both develop-
ment and peacebuilding. If so, it means that the generally accepted view that “war retards
development,” creating what amounts to a “conflict trap” (World Bank 2003), requires qual-
ification. “Crises which at the first glance appear to be a manifestation of a ‘conflict trap’
may in fact be in a state of evolution, with the potential to produce new social orders out of
chaos” (Menkhaus 2004: 41). In place of the idea of a “conflict trap,” Menkhaus proposes an
alternative metaphor: a cyclone, that is, a violent storm that “feeds off itself in the fashion of
a vicious circle, but in the process alters its own environment in ways which can eventually
weaken if not extinguish it” (Menkhaus 2004: 41). It is a conclusion echoed by Christopher
Cramer, who argues, similarly, that “violent conflict, however destructive, may contain
dynamics that have the potential to help bring about progressive long-run change” (Cramer
2006: 10).
Goals, Tasks, and Priorities

Alvaro de Soto and Graciana del Castillo were concerned, above all, with the failure of exter-
nal actors to synchronize economic policies with political processes aimed at consolidating
peace in post-war El Salvador. They did not, however, fundamentally question the central
objective of the IFIs’ adjustment policies in the country. And yet much of the debate sur-
rounding the contribution of development to peacebuilding since the mid-1990s has focused
on the approach of the IFIs to post-conflict situations, these having provided the dominant
template, also for the wider donor community, for the kind of developmental and economic
objectives that should be pursued in societies emerging from war.
The debate has revolved around the appropriateness of imposing a set of policy priorities
on post-war countries derived from the so-called “Washington Consensus,” a term coined
by John Williamson in 1989 and at the heart of which, in terms of policy prescription, was an
emphasis on “disciplined macroeconomic policies, the use of markets and trade liberaliza-
tion” (Williamson 2004).
The core principle guiding policy was a reliance on market mechanisms, the effective
functioning of which was to be advanced through promoting three key “pillars” of Washing-
ton Consensus advice (Stiglitz 2002: 53). The first is fiscal consolidation, to be achieved
through the curbing of public expenditures and the control of deficits, necessary to avoid
inflation, ensure macro-economic stability, and promote rapid economic growth.4 The sec-
ond is privatization, pushing where possible for the breakup of state-owned industries, and,
more generally, for the expansion of private sector activity all round. The third pillar is mar-
ket liberalization aimed at stimulating entrepreneurial activity by removing barriers to the
free flow of trade and capital. The combination of these policies, so the Consensus holds,
provides the best assurance for long-term and sustained economic growth. Significantly,
however, the original Consensus attached little or no priority to equity as a goal of policy, and
was unconcerned with the distributional impact of the policies advocated (Williamson 2004:
12)—precisely those areas of policy whose neglect in post-conflict interventions, many argue,
have placed the long-term sustainability of peace at risk.
372 mats berdal
Criticisms of the way these policies have been adapted, applied, and promoted by IFIs and
donors in post-conflict settings range across a spectrum. It is nonetheless useful to distin-
guish between two broad categories.
On the one hand, there are those who see evidence of progress and learning on the part of
IFIs and donors, while still emphasizing the need to focus greater attention on the negative
externalities of their policies. This may be regarded as a “reformist” position, one that accepts
the importance of macro-economic stability and growth as objectives for post-conflict
peacebuilding but recognizes the vital need for these to be pursued in ways that address
equity concerns and the distributional impact of growth. “A single-minded focus on eco-
nomic growth and efficiency,” as Boyce notes, can all too easily end up fuelling “social ten-
sions that jeopardize peace” (Boyce 2010: 119). Minimizing those tensions requires policies
that focus on tackling “horizontal inequalities,” that promote broad and balanced growth,
and that stimulate job creation (Stewart and Samman in this volume). In this view, the prob-
lem with the Washington Consensus package, apart from what it leaves out, is not necessar-
ily the policies in themselves but their calibration to the political and socio-economic
realities of fragile post-war societies. Even within the “reformist” camp, however, the degree
to which progress has been made and learning internalized by institutions and donors is
contested. To some, the Bretton Woods institutions “have come a long way since the early
1990s” (del Castillo 2010: 83), and the World Bank itself, in adopting “citizen security, justice,
and jobs” as the theme of its 2011 World Development Report (World Bank 2011), appears to
acknowledge, at least on paper, the limitations of standard development practices in post-
war settings. Against this, however, evidence of actual changes in operational policy and of a
more conflict-sensitive approach on the ground has remained patchy and uneven.
This brings us to the second, more radical or uncompromising line of criticism of
Washington Consensus policies and their application to post-war settings. These not only
emphasize lack of results on the ground but stress the real and lasting damage done to the
prospects of peace stemming from a fundamental incommensurability of IFIs’ institutional
goals and the requirements of post-war peacebuilding. Susan Woodward puts it bluntly:
“Neither the IMF nor the World Bank seeks to build peace.” Instead, “their goal is to transform
the structure of prewar and wartime economic and political power to create a state that facili-
tates private-sector, market-led growth, particularly its capacity to service its foreign debt
while lowering public expectations to that which a country can afford” (Woodward 2012: 13).
It is a line of criticism shared by those who have come to view the IFIs and Western donors
more generally as pursuing what amounts to a “liberal peace project,” a “project” that not
only “ignores the socio-economic problems confronting war-torn societies” but actively
“aggravates the vulnerability of sectors of the populations to poverty and does little either to
alleviate people’s engagement in shadow economies or to give them a say in economic recon-
struction” (Pugh 2005: 25). The actual existence of a coherent “project” pursued by Western
donors to impose a “liberal peace” has for good reasons been called into question, not only as
an empirical reality but also as a useful conceptual construct (Zaum 2012). Even so, writers
on the “liberal peace” have offered an important and critical corrective to the more techno-
cratic and unreflective donor discourse on development and peacebuilding. Drawing atten-
tion to the “silence surrounding structural violence” and the neglect of the “everyday
experiences of people” (Pugh, Cooper, and Turner 2008: 4), they have called for alternative
policies and “emancipatory engagement with local populations,” giving priority to social
protection, inclusive growth, and the systematic incorporation of “welfare considerations”
into peacebuilding (Richmond 2008: 300). Rather than relying on privatization and exports,
investment should be targeting public goods, infrastructure, and, above all, employment.
Bottom-up versus Top-down
Understanding local context and informal power structures is one of the central themes to
have emerged from the post-Cold War experience, policy, and academic discussion of peace-
building. Indeed, some of the most trenchant criticisms of international peacebuilding
efforts in recent years have centered on its “top-down” character and the concomitant ten-
dency not only to ignore micro-level sources of violence, but also to neglect potentially
promising “bottom-up” processes likely to reinforce sustainable peace (Autesserre 2010). In
terms of the latter—that is, in terms of seeing post-conflict societies and local actors as a posi-
tive resource and an essential partner in the quest for peace—two aspects of the debate
regarding the contribution of development to peacebuilding merit special attention.
First, as political economy perspectives on war and peacebuilding have all tended to high-
light, societies at war do not simply sink into anarchy, chaos, or uncontrolled lawlessness.
Those caught up in and affected by conflict and violence find ways of adjusting to the realities
of war and the socio-economic dislocations it brings in its wake. In doing so, they often dem-
onstrate great ingenuity and entrepreneurial skill in the development of coping mechanisms.
Such mechanisms in turn, though “often informal and undervalued,” may involve “collabo-
rative structures [that] can be the basis for local institutions which are vital to the rebuilding
of governance and civil society” (Barakat 2010: 262). As the now routine references to local
ownership and community development in donor documents suggest, the importance of
“placing local actors and resources at the centre of recovery efforts” (UNDP 2008: xix) is
widely recognized, at least at the level of declaratory policy. The recognition extends to the
role of the domestic private sector whose importance in helping to stabilize post-conflict
environments—assisting in the delivery of services, rebuilding infrastructure, even offering
direct support to peace processes—has been highlighted in several studies (Banfield,
Gündüz, and Killick 2006).
Second, several studies of individual peacebuilding operations have emphasized how
development programs and actors are often better placed than more overtly political players
to aid local conflict resolution efforts and support bottom-up peacebuilding. In part, so the
argument runs, this is because they engage directly with local authorities and key community
groups (for example, elders or women’s groups), and therefore possess a superior under-
standing of the drivers of conflict. Furthermore, because development and reconstruction
touch on the real and immediate needs and aspirations of local populations, they also per-
force provide a common and more “non-political” basis for cooperation and reconciliation.
By firmly anchoring development and reconstruction in local communities, political ten-
sions are diffused and redirected in favor of reconciliation and peace. This is why, in the
words of Roger Mac Ginty, “to be genuinely sustainable, reconstruction and recovery must
have an organic quality involving the participation of local people” (Mac Ginty 2010: 48).
Echoing the logic of functionalist thought, Mac Ginty makes a wider point in support of
local involvement and the placing of development at the centre of peace processes. Citing a
specific instance of local level negotiations and peacebuilding in Sri Lanka, he comments:
374 mats berdal
Rather than concentrate on constitutional and security issues at the outset, negotiations
focused on post-war reconstruction and development. . . . The rationale behind this approach
was that parties who had been acculturated to a process of functional cooperation on recon-
struction and development activities would then be able to deal with macro-political issues
on the basis of embedded trust. (Mac Ginty 2010: 47–8)
Others have, quite rightly, cautioned against too simplistic, even romantic, an embrace of the
“local.” As noted earlier, the political economy of many post-conflict settings often involves
violent, predatory, and exploitative practices by local elites, spoilers, and power structures.
Partnering with these in the interests of development and recovery may prove, and often has
proved, anything but “emancipatory” for local populations.
A special challenge is likely to arise in post-war settings where one party has emerged
victorious from war and where predatory elites are in a position to set the terms of engage-
ment by external actors. A striking example of this, which also raises wider questions
about the real meaning and supposed virtues of “autonomous recovery” (Weinstein
2005), “local ownership,” and “indigenous processes,” is provided by Ricardo Soares de
Oliveira’s study of Angola’s oil-fuelled recovery between 2002 and 2008. That recovery,
impressive in many respects, not least in terms of generating rapid growth, is also a cau-
tionary tale. It offers, Soares de Oliveira suggests, a model of “illiberal peacebuilding”
(Soares de Oliveira 2011). This is a form of peacebuilding that is driven by local elites and
that is typically “high-modernist, patronage-based and illiberal” (Soares de Oliveira 2011:
308). In spite of, or indeed because of this, it has proven, judging from the Angolan case,
more credible in terms of generating durable political order than ill-coordinated and short-
term liberal international projects of the kind undertaken in Sierra Leone, the DRC, Liberia,
and elsewhere.
But, Soares de Oliveira warns, “stability and local ownership mostly come with a hefty
price tag in terms of liberal ideals” since “much that is progressive from a liberal perspective
is excised from domestic state-building by empowered political actors” (Soares de Oliveira
2011: 289). Moreover, while this may be considered by some to be a price worth paying for
political order and rapid economic growth, such growth is most unlikely to be broad-based
or inclusive. Indeed, judging from Angola and other instances of “illiberal peacebuilding”
(Soares de Oliveira proposes post-genocide Rwanda under Paul Kagame, Sri Lanka since the
end of the civil war in 2009, and Eritrea since independence in 1991), the benefits of growth
have accrued, above all, to members of the ruling elite and those—entrepreneurs, businesses,
and political allies—with connections to it.
The Impact of Peacebuilding on Development
Much of the discussion in this chapter has focused on the question of what contribution
development, specifically what kind of development, can make to the building of durable
peace in war-torn societies. The scale, scope, and ambitious nature of many post-Cold War
peacebuilding interventions, however, justify asking a slightly different if not wholly opposite
question: What impact have large-scale peacebuilding operations, usually with a significant
development component, had on development?
Ever since the UN operation in Cambodia (UNTAC) in 1993, a number of studies have
drawn attention to the potentially distorting impact of large-scale international deployments
in economically weak and vulnerable post-war settings. The influx of aid, the sudden arrival
of expatriates, and the recruitment of locals for professional services in support of missions
have often had a distorting impact on local economies and markets. In the case of Cambodia,
one study found that foreign aid and expenditures by UNTAC placed upward pressure on
local wages and the price of housing stock, and “diverted labor and investment away from
the production of goods towards tertiary sector activities providing services essentially for
foreigners living in Cambodia” (UNRISD 1993: 21). Market distortions of this kind have also
been compounded by a strong and persistent bias among peacebuilders (especially the UN
and its agencies) against using local suppliers for goods and services, something that has
acted as a brake on the creation of local capacity and has done little to stimulate local eco-
nomic activity or help unleash entrepreneurial energies in aid of recovery.
There are other distortions that come from the infusion of aid into weak and fragile post-
war economies, one of which is the danger of aid flows “crowding out” domestic revenue
mobilization, reducing the incentive for governments to tax their own populace (Boyce 2010:
105). Another anomaly, also highlighted by Boyce, is the “pervasive tax exemptions” that
exist on post-war aid flows and that not only deprive the government of much-needed reve-
nue but “[send] an unmistakable message to the local populace: rich and powerful people do
not have to pay taxes” (Boyce 2010).
Most of these adverse and distorting effects of large peacebuilding footprints are now rec-
ognized, on paper at any rate, by donors and aid bureaucracies. An important step in miti-
gating them, it is widely accepted, would be to “avoid excessive reliance on parallel
mechanisms to deliver development assistance” (UNDP 2008: xx) and to try instead to route
aid through national and local government, in so doing also strengthening the legitimacy of
local and national governments, itself an important peacebuilding objective. Complement-
ing this, much greater efforts can be made, especially by the UN and its agencies, to procure
supplies locally—thus stimulating local investment and private sector activity—and to adopt
a wages policy that would counter the worst distortions introduced by excessive salaries. In
short, and as a detailed report on the economic impact of peacekeeping found in 2006, UN
missions “need to be more conscious of their economic impact and the relationship between
economic recovery and other mission objectives” (UN DPKO 2006: 51).
There is a final set of reflections that has emerged from the literature on the role of the
development community in post-conflict settings. It concerns the nature of the interactions
between donors and development actors on the one hand, and the elites who control the
State in war-afflicted and still divided countries on the other. The former, for understandable
reasons, have naturally tended to focus on implementing programs and meeting targets,
something that has often fostered a technocratic and process-oriented approach to dealing
with what are, ultimately, deeply political issues. It also, of course, has required of them that
they deal with and work through governmental authorities and the elites in power. These,
however, have often been able to shield themselves with the trappings of sovereignty and, in
so doing, to ensure that processes that undermine peacebuilding in the long run are left
unaddressed; indeed, are even encouraged, and flourish undisturbed by the presence of
development activity and development actors (Uvin and Bayer 2012).
The consequences of this can be catastrophic. In an important work on the development
community’s involvement in Rwanda in the years before the genocide, including the period
376 mats berdal
of the Arusha peace process, Peter Uvin notes how the country was widely thought of as
“a well-developing country—facing serious development problems, but dealing with them
much more effectively than were other countries” (Uvin 1998: 2). It now, of course, represents
an “extreme example” of the “failure of development aid,” one in which “the process of
development and the international aid given to promote it interacted with the forces of
exclusion, inequality, pauperization, racism, and oppression that laid the groundwork for
the 1994 genocide” (Uvin 1998: 3). The story of Rwanda, Uvin concludes, made “one more
case for broadening the concept of development” beyond the focus on economic growth at
the macro level. While aid agencies have paid “lip service” to this lesson, its “practical, oper-
ational implications,” Uvin adds, “have still not been well understood” (Uvin 1998: 231).
Uvin’s findings echo a recurring theme of the present chapter: while lessons and signifi-
cant insights have undoubtedly been acquired in the course of more than two decades of
development and peacebuilding, translating these into operational policy and practical
results on the ground remains, for a complex of reasons—political and bureaucratic, domes-
tic and international—a formidable challenge.
Notes
1. I am most grateful for the comments provided by Michael Pugh and Dominik Zaum on an
earlier draft of this chapter.
2. Isaiah 2:4: “And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they
shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (The Bible, King
James version).
3. For the concept of peace conditionality, see James K. Boyce (2002).
4. Williamson, writing in 2004, stressed that while fiscal discipline was indeed vital, he had
been “studiously neutral” in pronouncing on the correct size of the public sector, nor had
he argued that cuts in public spending tout court were the only way to achieve macro-
economic stability (Williamson 2004).
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chapter 22
v iol ence , i nsecu r it y, a n d

cr i m e i n dev el opm en t
thought
keith krause
In 2000 the United Nations General Assembly approved its Millennium Declaration, an
ambitious road map designed to galvanize international action to promote peace, secu-
rity, and disarmament; development and poverty eradication; environmental protection;
and human rights, democracy, and good governance. When translated into practical
benchmarks for action, however, the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
contained no reference to peace and security, and focused on “traditional” development
goals such as eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, improving educational achieve-
ment, improving maternal health care, and reducing child mortality. One goal focused
on environmental sustainability. No goals were set for two of the pillars of the Millen-
nium Declaration: peace, security, and disarmament; and human rights, democracy, and
good governance.
There were complex reasons for this slippage between lofty declarations and practical
policies guidance, but it was also emblematic of the gulf between the twin discourses of
“security” and “development.” Since the eighteenth century, ideas about, and practices of,
development and security have evolved in disconnected institutional, scholarly, and non-
governmental forums, an evolution that has hampered attempts to understand how violence
and physical threats to security are inter-linked with broad development processes. Recent
attempts to re-think the “security–development” nexus have encountered great resistance
and significant misunderstanding, on both sides of the divide. This has, among other things,
hindered the development of effective policies and programs to reduce violence, crime, and
insecurity in ways that could promote human, social, and economic development.
Although the relationship between armed violence, insecurity, and crime on the one hand,
and human, social, and economic development on the other is complex and poorly under-
stood, many studies point in the same direction. As the World Bank’s 2011 World Develop-
ment Report concluded, no low-income fragile or conflict-affected country has achieved a
single Millennium Development Goal (World Bank 2011: 1; see also Collier 1999). While
focusing broadly on conflict-related violence, this message is also echoed by studies that
380 keith krause
focus on crime and other forms of violence (UNODC 2005; Skaperdas 2011). The implica-
tion is that insecurity, conflict, crime, and violence are development disablers.
This chapter examines this nexus between insecurity and development through three dif-
ferent optics: conceptual, empirical, and programmatic. It first traces the shifting under-
standings of the link between insecurity and development, and contextualizes the recent,
and sometimes heated, debates about the “securitization” of foreign aid and development
assistance. The second section presents an overview of the scope, scale, and distribution of
armed violence in conflict and non-conflict (including criminal) contexts, to set the stage for
a more detailed examination of the evidence for the different pathways by which insecurity
may undermine development. The final section reviews some of the programmatic responses
within the development community to deal with insecurity related to conflict, crime, and
violence.
Whose security? What Development?
Tracing the relationship over several centuries between concepts as slippery as “develop-
ment” and “security” is not straightforward. Other contributors to this volume (specifically,
Harriss and Williams) deal with the changing understanding of development, which this
chapter will treat as “progress in human well-being” (Stewart 2004: 261). “Security,” on the
other hand, is a different matter, and to capture the impacts of conflict, crime, and violence
on progress in human well-being (and vice versa), this chapter will adopt a broad under-
standing of threats to security, including both external (war and internal conflict) and inter-
nal (crime and inter-personal violence) dimensions, as well as of the objects of security (from
state/national security to individual and human security concerns) (Buzan 1991). What will
be kept constant is the focus on “freedom from fear”: freedom from the threat of physical
violence associated with conflict and criminal activity.
The first move to separate the discourses of security and development was taken by the
economic thinkers associated with Adam Smith and early political economists (Rothschild
1995; Hettne 2010). Their promotion of liberty of commerce between states, and the freeing
of individual enterprise within the state, was a direct disavowal of earlier doctrines of eco-
nomic mercantilism, which associated national security with the accumulation of gold and
silver with which to fight wars. Separating economic growth and individual well-being from
state security policy was the first move in a long tradition of treating security concerns as
distinct from development—and perhaps even considering too-great attention to security
concerns a hindrance to development. Of course, economic theory was also part and parcel
of the broader currents of the Enlightenment and liberal thought, which associated develop-
ment with improvements in human well-being, emancipation, and progress, through the
progressive application of reason to political and social life.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the causal arrow ran one way: eco-
nomic development was understood to contribute positively to the achievement of security
from violence and crime within the state (internal security) through the expansion of the
state’s power and institutional reach. One of the main consequences was the progressive pac-
ification of society through the elimination of domestic threats to governments and the
violence, insecurity, and crime in development thought 381
maintenance of public order through the growth and increased efficacy of security institutions
such as the police, gendarmes, and the criminal justice system. Of course, many other factors
contributed to what Norbert Elias (1982) called the “civilizing process,” and it certainly had
negative as well as positive aspects for the security of individuals, societies, and regimes.
Overall, however, levels of crime and inter-personal violence decreased enormously from
the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. This only confirmed the developmentalist
view that socio-economic progress brought about improvements in human well-being in all
relevant dimensions, and that ultimately it would bring forth the “better angels of our nature”
to reduce violence between individuals and groups (Pinker 2011).
By the early twentieth century, a high level of everyday security from conflict, crime, and
violence was taken for granted in Western Europe, and seen as wholly distinct from the proc-
esses of wealth creation and development as human progress. Optimistic analysts such as
Norman Angell and Ivan Bloch argued at the turn of the twentieth century that economic
prosperity and interdependence had made war obsolete or unthinkable, perpetuating the
belief that development and progress led to greater personal security, even to the level of
national and international security (Bloch 1899; Angell 1909). Unfortunately, these predic-
tions were proven terribly wrong in the trenches of the Great War, and the processes of mod-
ernization and industrial development also radically altered the capacity of states to threaten
the security of their citizens, and that of other states, through mass warfare and state vio-
lence. This paradox of modernity—its ability simultaneously to create unprecedented
domestic peace and total insecurity on a global scale—helps explain the twentieth-century
preoccupation with inter-state war and large-scale state violence as the main threats to
security (Krause 2009).
Development and human progress was, however, still regarded as the “solution” to war
and insecurity, especially as influential analyses of the consequences of the Great War (such
as John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919) pointed presciently
to the potentially destabilizing and conflict-producing consequences of failed or incorrect
economic policies. Likewise, analyses of the protectionist policies of the 1930s associated
them (and the Great Depression) with the rise of fascism and authoritarianism—and the
Second World War (Kindelberger 1986). Not surprisingly, this vision of economic develop-
ment as the solution to the problem of conflict and war informed the Keynesian orthodoxy
of “embedded liberalism” that shaped the post-war Bretton Woods institutions (Ruggie 1982;
Lombardi, this volume) and the entire multilateral architecture (Jolly, this volume) dealing
with reconstruction and development since 1945.
One important illustration of how security was considered as a subordinate or derivative
good was the way in which mainstream economic thought considered investments in secu-
rity as essentially unproductive—captured by the idea of a “guns versus butter” trade-off.
Military spending and spending on personal security (through private security or personal
protection) were considered inefficient, since they did not enhance productive capacity or
(with the possible exception of “military Keynesianism”) generate growth. The empirical
evidence is mixed, but on balance “suggests that there is little or no evidence for a positive
effect on economic growth and that [military spending] is more likely to have a negative
effect, or at best no significant impact at all” on economic growth (Dunne and Uye 2009).
This one-way view of development and insecurity posed a dual problem. First, it presumed
that conflict, crime, violence, and insecurity are exogenous to development processes, and
that they constitute ruptures, pathologies, or disruptions that are not integral to or inextricably
382 keith krause
intertwined with development itself. As several analysts have pointed out, the process of
development itself may exacerbate insecurity and trigger violence, through rapid social
change, the unequal distribution of goods and growth, or differential access to benefits
(Cramer 2007). Second, it recognized that the minimal conditions of security (in all its
dimensions) were a precondition for development, especially in conflict-prone and fragile set-
tings. The trade-off between “guns and butter,” if it exists, only kicks in after a baseline level of
security has been established. Empirically, in many states in the post-colonial world, these
basic conditions of security either did not exist or were compromised by large-scale conflict,
crime, and violence, thus potentially undermining the promotion of development as a means
to attenuate conflicts and enhance security. These observations ultimately reopened the
debate on the connection between development and conflict, crime, and violence.
Post-colonial Development Policy
It was some time, however, before the bi-directional linkage between insecurity and devel-
opment manifested itself in policy circles. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, national security
and economic development concerns continued to occupy two distinct worlds of policy and
practice. Geopolitical interests in the Cold War were not absent from the overall aims of
development policy (“making the world safe from communism”), and both the United States
and the Soviet Union designed their different “aid architectures” around consolidating alli-
ances and winning allies in the early years of decolonization. Development assistance, in this
sense, has never been free from security concerns. The security under discussion was, how-
ever, that of the West (or East), and not necessarily that of the governments or citizens of
newly independent states, and development policies often went hand in hand with some
fairly destructive Cold War interventions (Bates 2009; Harriss, this volume). International
institutions such as the World Bank, by contrast, excluded the national security concerns of
recipient states from their mandates because these were seen as touching upon issues of
national sovereignty. Defense spending, public order, political violence, and state security forces
were all excluded from the ambit of development policy making, which concentrated first
on technical assistance, and then on meeting basic human needs and promoting poverty
reduction (and more recently on achieving the MDGs).
The mainstream understanding of the link between development on the one hand, and
violence, crime, and insecurity on the other rested on two beliefs:
• Economic development was a precondition for security, and increased economic devel-
opment would reduce the incidence of conflict and violence within, and potentially
even between, states.
• The process of development and socio-economic change was more or less distinct from
the dynamics of conflict and insecurity within and between states.
These two beliefs were firmly anchored in the organizational culture and practices of devel-
opment organizations. As anyone who has visited development agencies, connected with
non-governmental development organizations, or spent time with development practitioners
can testify, the language of “conflict and insecurity” often triggers an allergic reaction, and is
seen as deeply threatening to the core mission of alleviating poverty and improving human
well-being. The “Birkenstocks versus boots” stereotype tapped into a deep clash of visions
and missions.
But the shifting nature of contemporary security challenges, and some specific events,
eroded the neat compartmentalization of development and security concerns. Four signifi-
cant changes can be highlighted.
First, the end of the Cold War meant that local and regional dynamics of insecurity and
conflict became more evident in such places as the Horn of Africa and the African Great
Lakes region. The end of the Cold War also somewhat muted the geopolitical concerns shap-
ing development assistance.
Second, the genocide in Rwanda served as a wake-up call in some quarters, as Rwanda
was a “donor darling” in the early 1990s, receiving the largest levels of per-capita develop-
ment assistance in sub-Saharan Africa. The massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis by the
genocidaire government suggested, however, that development policy that was not “conflict
sensitive” could exacerbate conflicts, and find its entire raison d’être challenged (Uvin 1998).
Third, the changing nature of contemporary political violence—now almost entirely
focused on internal, communal or civil conflicts, often between economically motivated
armed groups such as the warlords in West Africa—meant that inter-state war essentially
disappeared as a source of concern for policy-makers (Kaldor 2006; Brzoska 2007). The
changed nature of contemporary conflicts, and their often large-scale impacts on the civilian
populations, meant that their developmental consequences could not easily be ignored. This
was perhaps best exemplified by the nearly decade-long conflict in the eastern Democratic
Republic of the Congo, which involved armed groups and proxy forces from more than seven
states, and cost upwards of five million lives, mainly because of increased mortality among
the displaced populations of the region (Prunier 2009). The protracted nature of many inter-
nal conflicts, captured by the observation that around 20 percent of armed conflicts erupted
into renewed violence within five years after a settlement, brought to the fore some of the
challenges to achieving “progress in human well-being” in situations where state institutions
were weak and conflict-prone (Suhrke and Samset 2007). An entire cottage industry has
grown up around the analysis of failed, weak, or fragile states, and the governance and devel-
opment challenges posed by these countries, home to more than 1.5 billion people, and recip-
ients of roughly one-third of official development assistance (OECD 2011a: 11).
Finally, a more recent concern with the cross-border consequences and impacts of large-
scale transnational organized criminal activity has emerged at the margins of the develop-
ment agenda (UNODC 2005, 2007). As the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC) put it, “The growth of global crime is a threat to the rule of law, without which
there can be no sustainable world development” (UNODC 2010: 19). The linkages are com-
plex and under-studied, but the basic argument—that large-scale criminal activity corrodes
state institutions, undermines effective governance, and erodes the delivery of services and
public goods—can be linked to the broader concerns of the development community.
At the conceptual level, a closer examination of how security and development might be
linked was facilitated by the broadening of the definition of security from a narrow concern
with the threat to state sovereignty posed by armed forces of external actors, to a concern
with societal and human security: the security of people and communities within states
(Hampson et al. 2001; Klingebiel 2006). This mirrored the shift in development policies and
384 keith krause
practices from attention to “development as macro-economic growth” to concerns with

human and sustainable development. Using a human security lens, it became clear that the
negative impacts of conflict, crime, and violence on development did not necessarily dimin-
ish when armed conflict ended. In fact, various studies suggested that the threat of insecurity
was merely displaced—from war and conflict to crime and “disorganized violence” (includ-
ing sexual and gender-based violence), and sometimes further along the spectrum to more
subtle forms of repression (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2010). One result was a cottage industry
in publications and projects exploring the “security-development nexus” (Goodhand 2003;
Waddell 2006; Chandler 2007; Stern and Öjendal 2010; Tschirgi, Lund, and Mancini 2010).
An Integrated Approach to
Conflict, Crime, and Violence
The previous section highlighted some of the ways in which sharp distinctions between dif-
ferent forms of violence and insecurity, whether caused by conflict or large- and small-scale
criminal activity, are increasingly difficult to draw. One implication is that to assess the devel-
opmental impacts of violence and insecurity, analysts should adopt an integrated approach
to conflict, crime, and violence to gain an overview of their global scope, scale, distribution,
and changing nature.
There have been several recent attempts to make such comparative judgments, based on
the large-scale aggregation of different indicators in such things as the State Fragility Index
(Marshall and Cole 2011), the Failed States Index (Fund for Peace 2011), or the Global Peace
Index (Institute for Economics and Peace 2012), all of which include aspects of conflict, vio-
lence, and insecurity as key components of their analysis. These efforts highlight the concen-
tration of insecurity and state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central
America, but do not isolate the ways in which insecurity and fragility contribute to (or are
the result of) underdevelopment. Nevertheless, their findings all point in the same direction:
those regions of the world facing the greatest development challenges are also bedeviled by
conflict, crime, and insecurity.
A more robust way of making comparisons and finding linkages between security and
development is to focus on one indicator—lethal violence—as a proxy for overall levels of
violence and insecurity. The 2011 report of the Geneva Declaration Secretariat, Global Bur-
den of Armed Violence 2011: Lethal Encounters, does that, based on a composite and compre-
hensive cross-national data-set covering conflict and non-conflict lethal violence for the
period 2004–09 (Geneva Declaration Secretariat 2011).1 Its main findings are highlighted in
the map in Figure 22.1 and the table in Figure 22.2. The map charts the distribution of death
rates (per 100,000) from armed violence around the world, while the Figure 22.2 presents
the fifty-eight countries with rates of lethal violence greater than 10 per 100,000 (the global
average rate of lethal violence is 7.9 per 100,000).
The first observation to make from Figures 22.1 and 22.2 is that the number of people dying
in non-conflict settings is much greater than the number dying in conflicts: more than
three-quarters of all victims of lethal violence die in non-conflict settings, while only about
one-tenth die in direct conflict situations.2
LEGEND:
Per 100,00 population
>30
20–30
10–20
3–10
<3
No data
figure 22.1 Global distribution of lethal violence (death rates per 100,000), 2004–9 annual average.
Source: Geneva Declaration Secretariat, Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011: Lethal Encounters, p. 52.
More than 526,000 people die violently each year, and countless more are injured and/or
suffer from long-term or short-term disabilities or the psychological consequences of violence
and insecurity. These violent deaths are concentrated geographically in Central America
and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the fourteen most violent countries (death rates
greater than 30 per 100,000) are in these two sub-regions, as can be seen from the top entries
in Figure 22.2. These fourteen countries have only 4.6 percent of the world’s population, but
account for 25 percent of all violent deaths.
What is more important to note is that violence and insecurity are often as great or greater
in non-conflict or non-war settings: only six of the fourteen most violent countries were
active conflict zones between 2004–09 (Iraq, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Central African Repub-
lic, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and the levels of armed violence in
non-conflict settings such as El Salvador and Jamaica are higher than in most war zones.
These observations confirm the need to adopt a holistic approach to how conflict, crime,
and violence affect development processes, and underline that the security–development
nexus is not exclusively about armed conflict and post-conflict challenges. The changing
nature of contemporary armed violence has blurred the line between armed conflict and
crime, and between politically motivated and economically motivated violence. High levels
of gang violence in El Salvador and Guatemala, vigilante justice in post-war and fragile states
such as Liberia and Timor-Leste, post-election violence in Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire, and high
levels of urban crime in cities such as Kingston, Jamaica and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil amply
demonstrate how a distinction between armed conflict and criminal violence is increasingly
difficult to make. The growth of networks of transnational organized criminal and non-state
armed groups, as well as the resource-exploitation aspects of many contemporary conflicts
386 keith krause
El Salvador
Iraq
Jamaica
Honduras
Colombia
Venezuela
Guatemala
South Africa
Sri Lanka
Lesotho
Central African Republic
Sudan
Belize
Congo, Democratic Republic of
Swaziland
Congo, Republic of
Somalia
Brazil
Malawi
Palestine
Dominican Republic
Namibia
Chad
Ecuador
Lesser Antilles Region
Puerto Rico
Equatorial Guinea
Bahamas
Afghanistan
Mozambique
Guyana
Guinea-Bissau
Côte d’Ivoire
Ethiopia
North Korea
Eritrea
Tanzania
Botswana
Russian Federation
Mauritania
Gabon
Paraguay
Benin
Papua New Guinea
Panama
Mali
Nicaragua
Cameroon
Guinea
Togo
Mexico
Kazakhstan
Burundi
Mongolia
Uganda
Lebanon
Peru
Madagascar
Source: GBAV 2011 database 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
figure 22.2 The most violent states (death rates per 100,000), 2004–9 annual average
Source: Geneva Declaration Secretariat, Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011: Lethal Encounters, p. 53.
(such as in the eastern DRC), also underline the weakness of these distinctions (Bannon and
Collier 2003).
Different forms of armed violence are also often present simultaneously, and the same
armed actors can be involved in politically motivated and economically motivated violence.
Even in traditional conflict settings, such as Iraq since 2003, the seemingly arbitrary or crim-
inal targeting of non-combatants by insurgents, militias, and sectarian groups may seem
chaotic or random, yet a closer look at underlying patterns of violence suggests that violence
also serves the political purposes and goals of armed groups (Green and Ward 2009). In
Somalia, pirates—generally pursuing private economic interests—are increasingly entan-
gled in conflict dynamics, as local officials as well as opposing militias increasingly rely on
the pirates’ firepower and strength to carry out protective and predatory tasks (Geneva
Declaration Secretariat 2011: 16). And a focus only on political violence in a country such as
Kenya misses the high levels of everyday victimization that might have greater development
consequences than conflict-related violence.
The Development Costs of

Conflict, Crime, and Violence
A growing recognition that security from conflict, crime, and violence is a precondition for
growth and development, and that persistent inequality, deprivation, and underdevelopment
can be a cause of conflict, violence, and insecurity, does not, however, demonstrate empiri-
cally how and under what conditions this relationship may hold. This section reviews what is
known about these linkages and highlights the obstacles to making the case for precisely how
conflict, crime, and violence may have a negative impact on development processes.
Despite the complex and fluid nature of most contemporary violence and insecurity, most
analyses of the impact of conflict, crime, and violence on development and human well-
being are not based on an integrated approach. Instead, research tends to rely upon two dis-
tinctions: the first concerning the level of organization of perpetrators (from highly
organized collective groups to individuals), the second concerning the motivation behind
the actions (from political/ideological to economic/material and individual psychological
motivations). These two distinctions give rise to the matrix shown in Table 22.1.
Each of these types of violence and insecurity poses different challenges to realizing progress
in human well-being. It has not been at all straightforward to demonstrate the negative impact
different forms of insecurity might have on development, and under what conditions. More
importantly, demonstrating a specific link does little to point to what should or could be done
to alleviate the situation from a policy-making or programmatic perspective. Research focus-
ing on at least four of the cells of the matrix has tended, though, to confirm that various forms
of insecurity are associated with significant economic costs and development impacts.
Economists and development specialists such as Paul Collier (1999) and Frances Stewart
and Valpy FitzGerald (2000) have attempted to quantify some of the direct and indirect costs
of violent armed conflict (Lichbach 1989; Skaperdas 2011). Although it might seem obvious
that conflict destroys infrastructure, lives and social capital, the post-1945 economic miracles
of countries such as Germany and Japan did lead some scholars to question how costly war
was over the medium and long term. And some economists have pointed out that calculating
Table 22.1 Classifying conflict, crime, and violence

Political/ideological Economic/material Psychological
Collective Inter-state war, civil war, Warlords, organized Riots, social violence
communal conflict between criminal groups, gangs
informal armed groups
Inter-personal Some forms of terrorist “Ordinary” crime and Domestic violence
action, isolated attacks inter-personal violence and violence against
women
388 keith krause
the economic costs of armed conflict is beside the point—what was the “benefit” of liberat-
ing Europe from Hitler, or of the French Revolution, or of various revolutionary or liberation
struggles? (Gutiérrez-Sanin 2009). In the longer run, an influential school of thought has
argued that the development of the modern state, its bureaucracy, and its representative
institutions owes much to the influence of the preparation for and fighting of wars (Tilly
1992), implying that war and conflict may have a long-term net developmental benefit.
Nevertheless, contemporary analysts at least seem to agree on the huge short-term devel-
opment costs and consequences of armed conflict. One analyst puts the cost of a typical civil
war at US$50 billion (Collier and Hoeffler 2004) and estimates that an average armed con-
flict reduces GDP by 2.2 percent per year for at least five to seven years (Collier 1999), while a
comprehensive review of various studies (Lindgren 2005) puts the average cost at 3.7 percent
of GDP per year. From a “willingness to pay” point of view, Gregory Hess (2003) estimated
that individuals who lived in conflict zones would sacrifice up to 8 percent of their income to
live in peace—a considerable, if indirect, estimate of the burden of conflict.
In addition to macro-level economic costs, there are also micro-level impacts associated
with particular sectors or development trajectories. For example, Neumayer (2005) high-
lights the negative impact of various forms of violence (including human rights violations)
on tourism, finding a clear negative relationship. Other analysts have focused on such quan-
tifiable impacts of conflict as lower levels of educational attainment, poor health outcomes,
increased mortality levels of the under-five and other vulnerable groups (beyond violent
deaths from conflict), migration and displacement, and chronic poverty (Ghobarah, Huth,
and Russett 2004; Justino 2006, 2010). Once again the evidence points in the same direction:
that violent conflict has a negative impact on a range of indicators associated with develop-
ment and human well-being.
The impact on the development of large-scale criminal and non-conflict violence is less
well studied. Organized crime and large-scale non-conflict violence do not have the same
effects as armed conflict (there is less destruction of physical capital and infrastructure, state
institutions remain functioning, and there is less migration and displacement), so the path-
ways by which it has an impact on development are less visible. In addition, almost all research
has concentrated on one direction of the relationship: the degree to which developmental
challenges such as poverty, inequality, or weak criminal justice systems contribute to increased
levels of violent crime (Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza 2002; Neumayer 2005; Heinemann
and Verner 2006). Nevertheless, among its other human and social costs “crime has poten-
tially deleterious consequences for growth, through reduced productivity and shortened
planning horizons for investments in physical and human capital” (Soares 2009: 28).
There are many approaches to calculating these costs, and the more comprehensive the
calculation method, the higher the estimate is likely to be. In some Central American coun-
tries where such calculations have been attempted, the costs are equivalent to several per-
centage points of GDP per year. In Guatemala, the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) estimated health and lost productivity costs, private security costs, security and
justice costs, and material losses at 7 percent of GDP per year. In El Salvador, the equivalent
figure was 11 percent of GDP (UNDP 2006). In Colombia, a country affected by conflict and
non-conflict (especially urban) violence, the government estimated the cost of violence at
around 18 percent of GDP in the early 1990s (Heinemann and Verner 2006: 2), and in Jamaica
it was 3.7 percent of GDP (UNODC 2005). These figures are greater than the costs of conflict
violence calculated above, although the differences are accounted for in part by the different
methods used, as well as by the intensity of insecurity and violence in these four countries.
There is comparatively little information on criminal violence in Africa, but the UNODC
concludes that “there is good reason to believe that this crime problem is undermining
development efforts,” based on a qualitative assessment of the social, economic, and govern-
ance costs that criminal activity imposes (UNODC 2005: ix).
The figures for the costs of crime include all sorts of criminal activity, including interper-
sonal violence, gang-related violence, and petty crime (robbery, theft, assault, etc.). When
focusing even on the lowest level of violence—interpersonal violence—the developmental
costs can still be considerable, especially where such violence is pervasive or chronic. Crimi-
nal violence imposes direct costs in terms of policing, health care, and loss of accessibility
due to high-violence “no-go zones,” and represents a “tax” (via extortion) on legitimate busi-
ness. One study of productivity losses due only to premature death from homicide in 90
countries estimated the costs as at least US$90 billion and perhaps up to US$160 billion per
year in 2004 (Geneva Declaration Secretariat 2008). Another specific example is the cost of
domestic violence and violence against women, and although most work on its cost and
impact has focused on the developed world (Day et al. 2005), the evidence of its widespread
global nature suggests a major developmental burden (WHO 2005).
Regardless of which aspect of conflict, crime, or violence one looks at, insecurity in all its
forms imposes significant development costs and is a “development disabler.” But the impli-
cations for how development programming (or national policies and programs) could be
oriented toward preventing and reducing conflict and violence are not clear, and depend on
whether one regards conflict, crime, and violence as exogenous to the development process;
as “givens” in a socio-cultural context; as negative but unavoidable outcomes of the develop-
ment process; or as an aspect of development that can (and should) be addressed as part of
good development policy and practice. Certainly until recently, conflict, crime, and insecu-
rity were regarded as regrettable but external aspects of the process of development, about
which little could be done. This view has, however, been changing in the past decade.
Securitization of Development
What have been the implications for development policies and programs of this changing
understanding of the relationship between armed violence and development? Many donors
developed both policy and programmatic responses addressing the link between insecurity
and development, although there was also significant resistance in the development com-
munity to the perceived “securitization” of development. At the policy level, major develop-
ment actors and agencies—including the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD), the UK Department for International Develop-
ment (DFID), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Swedish Inter-
national Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), the German Development Institute,
and others—all adopted specific policies to deal with work in conflict-affected or fragile
states (DFID 2005; USAID 2005; Klingebiel 2006; SIDA 2006; OECD 2011a).
In general, these policy frameworks recognized that development challenges in fragile,
violent, and insecure situations were severe, and that “development as usual” programming
390 keith krause
was impossible or inappropriate in such contexts. In some cases, explicit commitments have
been made to enhance spending in insecure regions: DFID, for example, has pledged to
direct 30 percent of its development assistance to fragile and conflict-affected states, and the
Swiss Development Cooperation Agency has made a similar commitment (DFID 2012).
Beyond this, many development actors promoted specific programs and principles that
focused on particular “drivers” of conflict, crime, and insecurity, implicitly or explicitly rec-
ognizing that insecurity needed to be addressed as part of good development practice. This
included a focus on promoting security and justice sector reform, facilitating peace proc-
esses, supporting armed violence prevention and reduction work, and promoting state
building (OECD 2012).
Two things are noteworthy about this programming agenda. First, tackling broad issues
such as “state building” recognizes that development programming without attention to
issues of governance, legitimacy, and institution-building is not likely to have the desired
long-term results. The idea of “state building,” with its resonance of colonial intervention at
all levels of governance, represents, however, a huge and contested agenda (OECD 2011b).
Second, efforts to work on specific aspects of security sector reform (SSR), including police
training, military reform, and violence prevention and reduction, clearly transgresses the
divide between development and security concerns of states and ruling elites, and reaches
deep into the heart of the power structures of fragile and conflict-affected states (Sedra 2010).
These efforts to rethink the security–development nexus were not uncontested. At a subtle
level, the nexus was reinterpreted as “promoting peace and security through development
cooperation” (SIDA 2005, 2006), which essentially argued that development practitioners
merely had to be sensitive to the ways in which their programs could contribute to broader
security-building goals, rather than rethinking where, what, and how they programmed
(DFID 2005). Co-optation was also sometimes coupled with more active resistance, as the
potential subordination of development assistance and programming to geo-strategic imper-
atives gave rise to fears of the “securitization of development,” either in terms of where devel-
opment assistance was directed, or how development programming was done. As Klingebiel
notes, “a choice of countries in development policy geared solely or primarily to security or
geostrategic thinking would lead to withdrawal from countries and areas of activity . . . which
did not have any (immediately) obvious relevance to security” (Klingebiel 2006: 5). These
fears were sometimes justified, as when Ministry of Defense officials argued that development
assistance should be directed to places where states had deployed troops. At the programming
level, the way in which development assistance was allocated and programmed could also be
bent toward military and security imperatives, and the “risk of development policy being sub-
ordinated to objectives and strategies with a military bias are plausible in many areas and veri-
fiable in a number of examples” (Klingebiel 2006: 5; DFID 2010).
Future Challenges
The World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report focused on “conflict, security, and devel-
opment,” and marked a watershed in high-level policy attention to the security–development
nexus. Yet as this chapter suggests, untangling the many ways in which conflict, crime,
v iolence, and insecurity are linked to development processes, affecting each other in rein-
forcing and reciprocal ways, is not an easy task. What is clear is that armed conflict and crim-
inal violence act as “development in reverse,” and impose significant human, social, political,
and economic costs on states and societies. Furthermore, the policy challenges—both for
donor countries and for national violence prevention and reduction programs—are signifi-
cant. Among other things, what is needed is a better micro- or local-level understanding of
the complex social systems in which violence and crime are embedded, in order to identify
clear entry points for policy and programming. Like all effective public policy, a strong evi-
dence base is needed—and is still lacking—for most programming initiatives, with the result
that sadly, “for too many in the developing world, insecurity remains the norm and develop-
ment a dream that cruelly eludes their grasp” (Bates 2009: 115).
Notes
1. A discussion of the methodological and data collection issues involved in aggregating data
from different sources can be found at: <http://www.genevadeclaration.org/measurability/
global-burden-of-armed-violence/global-burden-of-armed-violence-2011.html>.
2. A significant number (10 percent) are victims of unintentional homicide, while an esti-
mated 4 percent of victims die during exchanges with law enforcement officials.
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chapter 23
th e r e sou rce cu rse a n d

tr a nspa r ency
charles cater
Introduction
This chapter critically examines policy responses to corruption and conflict in natural
resource-dependent developing countries, including conceptual linkages made between the
resource curse and transparency. The first section explores these concepts, while the ensuing
discussion summarizes their institutional manifestation in terms of transparency-based ini-
tiatives, advocacy campaigns, laws, and policies intended to reduce corruption and resolve
conflict related to the extractive industries: UN commodity sanctions regimes, the Kimber-
ley Process, Publish What You Pay (PWYP) and Extractive Industries Transparency Initia-
tive (EITI), World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs, and the
Dodd–Frank Act of the United States. The third section analyzes transparency-oriented
approaches to the resource curse in comparative context: how underlying assumptions about
the efficacy of transparency and the nature of corruption and conflict have translated into
policy; and the political economy of participation, implementation, and enforcement. In
conclusion, the chapter reconsiders the use of transparency as a tool to address corruption
and conflict in the extractive industries from the perspective of recent trends in international
development. Ultimately, the available evidence suggests there is sufficient reason to ques-
tion the core assumption shaping international policies toward natural resource-related cor-
ruption and conflict: that increased economic transparency necessarily translates into
enhanced political accountability.
The Concepts
The following overview of the resource curse concentrates principally on the political and
social (rather than economic) dimensions of the problem, particularly connections between
natural resource dependence, conflict, and corruption; while the discussion of transparency
396 charles cater
traces the origins of the concept in Western political philosophy and its diffusion as a norm
of governance and development. Both are useful as a precursor to subsequent analyses
regarding how these two concepts intersect at the level of international policy responses to
conflict and corruption.
The Resource Curse

The “resource curse” refers to negative development consequences associated with natural
resource abundance or natural resource dependence. The contemporary use of the term can
be traced to Richard M. Auty’s book, Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The
Resource Curse Thesis (1993). Another similar oft-cited phrase is “the paradox of plenty,”
which derives from Terry Lynn Karl’s book, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-
States (1997). Numerous other economists and political scientists have also been concerned
with explaining correlations between natural resource abundance or dependence and a wide
range of negative development outcomes, including poor economic performance, the
absence of democracy, low societal welfare, conflict, and corruption (see, for example, Sachs
and Warner 1995; Leite and Weidmann 1999; Bannon and Collier 2003; Humphreys, Sachs,
and Stiglitz 2007; Ross 2012; Le Billon 2012). Although the specific causal mechanisms for
these different aspects of the resource curse remain a subject of considerable debate
between and within academic disciplines, the risks associated with resource dependence
are widely accepted. Extrapolated to their logical extreme, resource curse theories would
even seem to suggest the highly counter-intuitive conclusion that it might actually be pre
ferable for certain developing countries to leave oil and mineral deposits in the ground,
rather than suffer the negative effects associated with their extraction, exploitation, and
export (Ross 2001). On the other hand, not all developing countries dependent upon pri-
mary commodity exports have experienced a “resource curse.” Notable recent counter-
examples—such as Chile, Botswana, and Malaysia—would seem to suggest that the typical
adverse impacts on development can be mitigated, particularly through improved govern-
ance at the national level.
Popular discourse, media coverage, and non-governmental organization (NGO) advo-
cacy reports referencing “blood diamonds,” “conflict commodities,” and “oil-fuelled war”
reflect commonly held assumptions regarding a relationship between natural resources and
armed conflict.1 Paul Collier, while serving as Director of the Development Research Group
at the World Bank, made the influential claim that the incidence of civil war correlates with
levels of natural resource dependence and that this could be explained by a “rebel greed”
hypothesis based on assumptions regarding the rational pursuit of economic self-interest by
insurgents (Collier 2000). Collier’s theory resonated with policy-makers—including those
who implemented UN sanctions regimes on diamond exports by rebel groups from Angola
and Sierra Leone—to such an extent that it became the dominant paradigm for assessing
“resource wars.” In subsequent versions of Collier’s work, the “rebel greed” hypothesis was
replaced with a less controversial approach emphasizing the opportunity (i.e. availability of
lootable commodities and lack of state deterrence capacity) rather than motive for insur-
gency (Collier with Hoeffler 2011). Shifting the analytical emphasis to state actors, William
Reno and David Keen have explained how extensive resource-based patronage networks
can undermine state institutions and thus increase the risk of civil war, while noting that
the resource curse and transparency 397
state political and military elites also frequently engage in war profiteering, thus creating
incentives for conflict perpetuation (Reno 2000; Keen 2001). Lastly, Michael Ross and
Philippe Le Billon have developed theories regarding how various properties of natural
resources (e.g. point versus diffused, labor-intensive versus capital-intensive, distant versus
proximate, and lootable versus non-lootable) have differential impacts on intrastate conflict
(Ross 2003; Le Billon 2005).
Corruption is another conspicuous symptom of the resource curse. Although accurately
quantifying levels of corruption is very difficult, the available evidence suggests a probable
correlation between natural resource dependence and corruption. For example, nearly
two-thirds of the twenty-five lowest ranked countries on Transparency International’s Cor-
ruption Perception Index are dependent upon oil and/or mineral exports, compared with
just a fifth of the twenty-five highest ranked countries (Transparency International 2011).2
The capture and distribution of natural resource rents—defined as returns in excess of costs
including normal returns to capital—are common mechanisms for corruption. Corruption
can be centralized in the form of patronage networks and decentralized in the form of rent-
seeking (Kolstad and Wiig 2009). Both forms are prevalent in countries with significant rev-
enues from oil and mineral exports, especially if they are controlled by the public sector or a
small number of firms. But why should one care about corruption associated with the extrac-
tive industries? Some would even argue that corruption can actually have economic benefits
as it functions to “grease the wheels” of capitalism, particularly within a weak institutional
environment (Méon and Weill 2008). However, the mainstream consensus is that corrup-
tion has a negative impact on development outcomes: it reduces growth, reduces foreign
direct investment, increases income inequality, and deters foreign aid. Finally, the facilita-
tion of corruption by international commercial banks and the “supply side” role of transna-
tional resource corporations have been underemphasized within the academic literature but
have become areas of increasing focus for policy-makers.
A few points require clarification before proceeding. First, there is a lack of uniformity
within the literature regarding what is meant by natural resource dependence or abun-
dance. In general, most resource curse dynamics require an exportable surplus from which
rents can be appropriated. Using broad criteria for categorization, IMF data show there are
more than fifty countries in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East that are
either “hydrocarbon rich” or “mineral rich,” defined as at least 25 percent of fiscal revenue
or 25 percent of total exports (International Monetary Fund 2007: tables 1 and 2). This
would suggest that the resource curse could have significant implications for development
processes in much of the global South. Second, not all natural resources have the same
impact on development trajectories; the resource curse is significantly more pronounced
with high-value, point, and non-renewable commodities (e.g. diamonds, oil, and minerals)
than with low-value, diffuse, or renewable commodities (e.g. coal, agriculture, and
timber). Accordingly, international policy making thus far has focused principally on the
extractive industries (as will the analysis in this chapter). Third, although correlations
between primary commodity dependence and negative forms of economic and political
development are well documented, there remains a wide range of competing explanations
regarding the underlying causal mechanisms for various outcomes (e.g. Dutch Disease,
price volatility, rentier state, and declining terms of trade). This lack of consensus among
political scientists and economists regarding the nature of the problem does not bode well
for policy-makers in search of solutions.
398 charles cater
Transparency
The origins of the concept of transparency in Western political philosophy can be traced
back to the ancient Greeks and the writings of notable late eighteenth-century thinkers
such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, but it is the English philosopher
Jeremy Bentham who is perhaps most closely identified with the idea. Bentham believed in
a multifaceted approach to promote accountability and provide “securities against misrule”:
open and transparent government, or what he referred to as the “Panopticon” principle, a
free and vigorous press, and the centrality and power of public opinion, which he termed
the “Public Opinion Tribunal” (Odugbemi 2009). In Writings on the Poor Laws, a collec-
tion of initially unpublished manuscripts from the 1790s, Bentham claimed, “I do really
take it for an indisputable truth, and a truth that is one of the corner-stones of political
science—the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave” (Bentham 2001: 277). For
Bentham, accountability was not necessarily to be found in checks and balances or other
similar internal institutional arrangements, but rather through the external weight of
informed public opinion. Other thinkers, such as Adam Smith, were primarily concerned
with the consistency and transparency of government administration, particularly with
respect to the payment and collection of taxes. Foreshadowing current debates regarding
financial disclosure requirements for the extractive industries, Smith wrote in The Wealth
of Nations that taxes “ought be certain and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner
of payment, the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear to the contributor and to every
other person” (Smith 1776).
In terms of the diffusion of transparency as a contemporary norm of national govern-
ance, the United States played a central role throughout the twentieth century. Louis Bran-
deis, who subsequently became a highly prominent and influential U.S. Supreme Court
Justice, notably commented in an article for Harper’s Weekly in 1913, “Publicity is justly
commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of
disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman” (Brandeis 1913). Following the
defeat of the Axis powers in the Second World War, the United States served as a reference
point for open, liberal democracy. Significant institutional reforms promoting transparency
included the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
of 1966, and the Government in the Sunshine Act of 1976 (Hood 2006). The FOIA seems to
have been a particularly important model, as nearly seventy countries had adopted similar
legislation as of 2006; more than a quarter of these are developing countries in Africa, Asia,
and the Americas, while more than a third are countries in Eastern Europe or the former
Soviet Republics (Privacy International 2006). However, in the wake of the September 11,
2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the world’s traditional proponent
of transparency took a substantial step backward as secrecy became the new modus operandi,
from confidential Energy Policy Task Force meetings to clandestine CIA prisons abroad.
Interestingly, a contrary trend concurrently gained momentum globally as other states
increasingly adopted transparency as a norm of governance and development.
The contemporary international ascendancy of transparency—as a norm and as a policy
tool—can also be observed through various forms of global governance: international law,
voluntary codes of conduct, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, and the
policies of intergovernmental organizations. The General Assembly adopted the UN Con-
vention Against Corruption, which mentions the term “transparency” no fewer than ten
times, in 2003. Similarly, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which were first
drafted in 1976, underwent substantial revisions in 2000, including updated provisions for
corporate disclosure and a new section on anti-corruption measures. Meanwhile, the inter-
national financial institutions (IFIs) have also introduced transparency stipulations into
their operating procedures and lending requirements. For example, each of the multilateral
development banks now has formal policies on access to internal documentation. These
reforms may have been prompted by a few different reasons: escalating pressure from civil
society, such as public protest at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle
in 1999; a realization that allowing increased transparency could mitigate demands for
more substantive organizational reforms, including the democratization of decision mak-
ing; and an awareness that transparency also complemented the prevailing “Washington
Consensus” agenda regarding good governance for World Bank and IMF recipient coun-
tries (Blanton 2007).
Two NGOs have also been particularly important for the contemporary diffusion of trans-
parency as a norm of governance and development: the Open Society Institute (OSI) and
Transparency International (TI). OSI, founded in 1984 by the Hungarian-born billionaire
philanthropist George Soros in order to support countries making a transition from com-
munism, now works on a broader range of issues, including corruption and freedom of
information. In terms of his world view, Soros was heavily influenced by his former mentor
at the London School of Economics, Karl Popper, whose two-volume The Open Society and
its Enemies was first published in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Popper
strongly argued against teleological approaches to the social sciences (i.e. the idea that
human events can be predicted and will follow a predetermined path according to certain
rules), which he saw as the intellectual basis for authoritarianism, whether in the form of fas-
cism or communism. Soros seized upon Popper’s indictment of closed systems of thought,
and advocated for the principles of liberal democracy through OSI, including facilitating the
widespread adoption of freedom of information laws in Eastern Europe and among the
former Soviet Republics. Transparency International, an anti-corruption NGO headquar-
tered in Berlin, was founded in 1993. TI’s “branding” of the term “transparency,” substantial
membership base through more than one hundred national chapters, and highly publicized
corruption indices have also been influential with respect to processes of global norm diffu-
sion. Both OSI and TI have been instrumental in promoting transparency as a policy tool,
including in relation to the extractive industries.
Institutional History
The following discussion traces how concepts and theories about the resource curse and
transparency have translated into advocacy campaigns by NGOs, policies of intergovern-
mental organizations, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and national laws: UN sanctions
regimes, the Kimberley Process, Publish What You Pay, and the Extractive Industries Trans-
parency Initiative, World Bank and IMF programs, and the Dodd–Frank Act. Each shares an
underlying assumption that natural resource revenue facilitates conflict and/or corruption
and that the solution involves some element of transparency.
400 charles cater
UN Sanctions Regimes
War economies interrelated with the exploitation of natural resources in the post-Cold
War era have posed a significant problem for UN mediation and peacekeeping. Faced with
an intractable intrastate conflict, the UN Security Council has typically imposed targeted
sanctions with the goal of reducing the income that insurgencies derive from resource
exports, such as in the cases of Angola (diamonds), Cambodia (timber), Côte d’Ivoire
(diamonds), Liberia (timber, diamonds), and Sierra Leone (diamonds). This is largely
consistent with Collier’s initial theoretical formulation identifying rebel economic self-
interest as a cause for civil war (although in the case of Liberia, the target was technically
Charles Taylor’s government for its backing of rebels in Sierra Leone); however, the UN’s
focus on constraining rebel income fails to address state war economies, including the
adverse effects of war profiteering by political and military elites. In practice, the imposi-
tion of UN sanctions on the export of natural resources from rebel-held territory may also
include the creation of a certification scheme to enable the continued legal export of the
commodity. Thus, rather than being perceived as a solution to intrastate conflict per se, in
this context transparency is expected to function as a precursor for the facilitation of legal
exports and the interdiction of illicit exports. More recently, the UN’s Group of Experts on
the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) issued industry guidelines for due diligence
outlining steps corporations should take to avoid trading in conflict minerals, such as
ensuring independent third-party audits and publicly disclosing information regarding
their supply chain (UNSC 2011). However, the guidelines are reliant upon voluntary imple-
mentation by member states (i.e. are not legally binding). This approach has yielded negli-
gible results thus far in the DRC.
One could perhaps conclude from the preceding discussion that the UN should assume
more control over revenue from the extractive sector in conflict situations; however, as the
Oil-for-Food program in Iraq demonstrates, there can also be risks associated with UN
administration of natural resource finances. As allowed by UN Security Council Resolution
986 of April 1995, Iraq resumed the sale of oil on the international market in order to finance
the purchase of humanitarian goods. The purpose of the Oil-for-Food program was to alle-
viate the widespread suffering of civilian populations caused by the comprehensive sanc-
tions regime imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War, while at the same time limiting the
Iraqi government’s capacity to finance further military expenditures through oil exports.
However, according to the final report of the Independent Inquiry Committee, chaired by
former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the Iraqi government of Saddam
Hussein benefited from more than $1.8 billion in illicit payments though the Oil-for-Food
program. There were at least $229 million in illegal surcharges paid by 139 companies buying
oil, and more than $1.55 billion in kickbacks by 2,253 companies selling humanitarian goods.
An estimated $11 billion in oil exports were also smuggled by the Iraqi regime outside the
UN-administered program (Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-
for-Food Programme 2005a). While senior UN management were largely cleared of corrup-
tion allegations, Volcker nonetheless concluded that “the gatekeepers of the Programme, the
Secretariat, the Security Council and UN contractors failed most grievously in their respon-
sibilities to monitor the integrity of the Programme” (Independent Inquiry Committee into
the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme 2005b).
The Kimberley Process

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), a multi-stakeholder commodity
tracking regime to prevent diamonds mined by rebel groups from reaching the world
market, came into effect in January 2003. The KPCS was a response to the limits of UN
Security Council regulation on a case-by-case basis and the need for a sustained global
approach, and also built upon technical innovations by UN sanctions regimes, such as
monitoring mechanisms and national certification schemes. As with the preceding UN
sanctions regimes on primary commodities, the KPCS is based on an assumption that
through increased transparency the income that rebel groups derive from natural
resources can be reduced or eliminated, thus preventing and resolving conflict; and
although the KPCS is technically a commodity tracking regime, it is designed to func-
tion as a sanctions regime since participants are only allowed to conduct business with
other participants, thus essentially excluding non-participants from the global diamond
trade. The Kimberley Process was initiated by South Africa in May 2000 in response to
media coverage of “blood diamonds” and “conflict diamonds” threatening the industry’s
viability. Other producing countries (e.g. Russia, Namibia, Botswana, Canada, and Aus-
tralia), centers of sorting and transshipment (e.g. the UK, Belgium, and Switzerland),
countries that cut and polish (e.g. Israel, India, and China), and consumer countries
(e.g. the U.S. and Japan) also had industries to protect. For transnational diamond cor-
porations, the incentive for joining the Kimberley Process was clear: insulate their busi-
ness from consumer backlash against the taint of diamond-financed civil wars. NGOs,
such as Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada, have also participated as
stakeholders.
Answers to questions regarding the effectiveness of the Kimberley Process will
undoubtedly vary according to whom you ask. For corporations involved in mining and
marketing diamonds, the KPCS has usefully deflected bad publicity from civil wars in
places such as Angola and Sierra Leone, thus protecting the image of diamonds for retail-
ers and consumers of the luxury good. Notably, the diamond industry no longer suffers
from the reputational problems it once did, even though there are still actual linkages
between diamonds and war economies in the DRC and Côte d’Ivoire. However, the NGOs
who saw their role as advocating for a rigorous oversight mechanism and guaranteeing
the integrity of the Kimberley Process have a very different perspective. In December
2011, Global Witness quit the KPCS, protesting that about $2 billion worth of rough dia-
monds from Zimbabwe had been allowed to access the global market. According to
Human Rights Watch, these diamonds were mined from the Marange fields following the
torture and killing of about 200 artisanal miners by 800 Zimbabwean troops backed with
helicopter gunships (Human Rights Watch 2009). Human rights groups—as well as the
U.S., Canada, and the EU—objected to KPCS approval for the sale of the diamonds; on
the other hand, accounting for the linkages between diamond mining and human rights
violations by state militaries was never actually part of the Kimberley Process mandate.
This was not an accidental oversight by the negotiating parties who drafted the KPCS, but
rather an integral aspect of its initial design which solely targeted rebel groups. There is
undoubtedly more transparency in the diamond trade, but it is doubtful to what extent
the Kimberley Process has prevented or resolved armed conflict.
402 charles cater
PWYP and EITI

Non-governmental organizations—particularly U.S.-based OSI and its spin-off Revenue
Watch Institute (RWI), UK-based Global Witness, and the Publish What You Pay (PWYP)
coalition—have been highly influential in advocating for anti-corruption measures within the
extractive industries. PWYP includes more than six hundred member organizations world-
wide, many of which are based in resource-rich developing countries. In an effort to promote
transparency, PWYP calls for full disclosure in three areas: payments by resource corporations
to the countries where they operate, revenues earned by governments from the extractive
industries, and licensing arrangements and contracts. The underlying assumption is that pub-
licly available information regarding precisely how much governments earn from oil/gas and
mining will then reduce corruption (i.e. more fiscal transparency will yield better political
accountability). PWYP also recognizes the importance of civil society in resource-dependent
countries as part of the potential equation for better accountability of governments. National
coalitions have been formed by PWYP members in at least thirty countries for this purpose,
but it is debatable to what extent these have been effective in practice. Perhaps most impor-
tantly thus far, the PWYP advocacy campaign was the principal catalyst for the Extractive
Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Overall, PWYP is more comprehensive in its advo-
cacy for disclosure by corporations and governments than EITI (they differ regarding contracts
and licensing arrangements). EITI consequently has more backing from both corporations
and governments than PWYP. Corporations typically consider the details of contracts to be
proprietary information, the disclosure of which may put them at a competitive disadvantage
in relation to other firms; while numerous governments for various reasons (e.g. protecting
sovereignty, maintaining negotiating leverage, or concealing corruption) have also resisted
disclosing contractual information such as concession agreements and signing bonuses.
Initially launched by the UK in 2002, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
now includes thirty-five countries in various stages of implementation (eleven countries are
EITI “compliant” and twenty-four are EITI “candidates”). EITI utilizes a multi-stakeholder
format that also includes participation by more than fifty of the world’s largest oil and min-
ing companies; the PWYP coalition and other civil society organizations; and the World
Bank, the IMF, and regional development banks, which also supply financing and technical
assistance to EITI. At first glance, EITI’s approach appears to be straightforward: companies
disclose what they pay to governments, governments disclose what they receive from com-
panies, and the two sets of data are independently verified, with oversight by a multi-stake-
holder group. However, there are several weaknesses within EITI that detract from its
potential as an anti-corruption mechanism. First, numerous countries and corporations
remain outside the EITI framework, including national oil companies (NOCs) from coun-
tries such as Russia, China, India, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Angola.3 Second, participa-
tion in and compliance with EITI are voluntary rather than mandatory. Third, it remains
questionable whether civil society organization participation has functioned as an adequate
oversight mechanism for corporations and governments (Bracking 2009). Lastly, EITI does
not cover a broader range of financial information such as concession contracts and govern-
ment expenditures, which are equally important as aggregate revenue data for promoting
transparency and mitigating corruption. Arguably, it may be precisely some of these draw-
backs for EITI—narrow scope, voluntary implementation, and limited oversight—that are a
source of its appeal for corporations and governments.
World Bank and IMF

Following decades of institutional indifference to corruption, the World Bank has become a
prominent advocate for transparency within the extractive industries. The World Bank pub-
lished an exhaustive, multi-volume Extractive Industries Review (EIR) in 2003. The report
identifies governance as a key challenge and advocates increased transparency in areas such as
revenue flows, project documents, and budget processes. The EIR also notes the fundamental
importance of developing governmental capacity for natural resource management and
industry regulation (World Bank 2003). Among the key reforms is the International Finance
Corporation (IFC)’s requirement for project contract transparency, such as with the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. The World Bank also initiated EITI++ in 2008, which
is designed to promote better governance, including regarding contracts and budgets. How-
ever, EITI++ relies upon the voluntary participation of governments, which has constrained
implementation. For example, an NGO assessment found that while the World Bank promoted
extractive industry transparency in nearly two-thirds of the resource-rich countries where it
engaged, it specifically addressed contract disclosure in fewer than 10 percent of these coun-
tries (Bank Information Center and Global Witness 2008: 15–16). The World Bank Group’s
involvement in the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline project further suggests limits to reform. In
2002, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the Interna-
tional Development Association (IDA) agreed to provide nearly $100 million in financing for
the governments of Chad and Cameroon, but with conditions applying to the former: the
establishment of a dedicated offshore escrow account, financial oversight by an independent
panel, and a revenue management plan committed to poverty reduction. In 2008, the IBRD
and IDA withdrew from the project because of repeated diversions of oil revenue from social
programs toward military spending by the government of Chad (World Bank 2008).
The IMF has also incorporated aspects of transparency into its work with resource-rich
developing countries, including the use of staff monitoring programs (SMPs) and the publica-
tion of a report identifying best practices related to the natural resource extraction industries.
First released in 2005 and revised in 2007, the IMF’s Guide on Resource Revenue Transparency
identifies four key “pillars” for promoting transparency and accountability: clarity of roles
and responsibilities, open budget processes, public availability of information, and assurances
of integrity (International Monetary Fund 2007). Although the report advocates extensive
policy prescriptions in fundamental areas such as legal frameworks and fiscal regimes, imple-
mentation has been sporadic, particularly since this has not been required by the IMF (Bank
Information Center and Global Witness 2008: 9–10). SMPs, which function as part of the
organization’s surveillance mandate, are a precursor to potential formal arrangements
between the IMF and low-income member states. The IMF’s staff monitoring program in
Angola offers some insight into chronic mismanagement of natural resource revenue and the
limits for IFIs to impose reforms. According to IMF reports, nearly 30 percent of Angolan
government expenditures from 1997 to 2002—$8.3 billion of $27.9 billion—either went inex-
plicably missing or were spent on extra-budgetary items and then inadequately accounted for
after the fact (International Monetary Fund 2002, 2003). As a point of comparison, total social
expenditures (i.e. education, health, social security, welfare, and housing) averaged merely 13
percent of government spending. Meanwhile, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos publicly
criticized the “police action of the IMF” and stated that the Angolan government would not
be pressured into disclosing oil sector data (Hodges 2004: 121).
404 charles cater
The Dodd–Frank Act

The U.S. Dodd–Frank Wall Street and Consumer Protection Act of July 2010 includes unprec-
edented provisions regarding tracking conflict minerals from the DRC (Section 1502) and
reporting requirements for oil and mining corporations listed on U.S. exchanges (Section
1504). The underlying assumption of Section 1504 is that mandatory public disclosure of
detailed financial data regarding what oil and mining corporations pay to the states where
they operate will promote transparency and therefore mitigate corruption. The Dodd–Frank
Act has faced significant opposition from corporations claiming that Section 1504 puts U.S.-
based corporations at a competitive disadvantage, that the reporting requirements will
impose unreasonable compliance costs on firms, and that disclosure will violate contractual
terms of confidentiality with host countries. Unsurprisingly, the private sector has lobbied
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to weaken the implementing rules that
were belatedly released in August 2012, but corporate objections are overstated (Kaufmann
and Penciakova 2011). The Dodd–Frank Act will apply to all U.S.-listed firms, which includes
nearly all of the largest internationally operating oil and mining companies in the world, and
studies indicate that disclosure is not incompatible with most existing contracts (Revenue
Watch Institute 2011).4 The SEC estimates industry compliance costs for Section 1504 at $1
billion, with recurring annual costs of $200 million to $400 million (Viswanatha and
Stephenson 2012). Section 1504 represents a major victory for advocacy organizations such
as Global Witness and RWI that have been campaigning for transparency. However, the
polarized public debate between advocacy NGOs and transnational corporations may have
obscured an even more fundamental underlying question: will the Dodd–Frank Act actually
work? At best, corporate disclosure of state resource revenue is a necessary but insufficient
measure to combat corruption.
Of the two parts of the Dodd–Frank Act dealing with the extractive industries, Section
1502 regarding conflict minerals in the DRC has perhaps been more controversial. Based in
part on the guidelines for due diligence submitted by the UN Group of Experts, corporations
listed on U.S. stock exchanges will be required to publicly declare whether or not their prod-
ucts contain conflict minerals, which are defined as coltan, gold, cassiterite, wolframite, and
other minerals mined in areas controlled by armed groups in the DRC or adjoining coun-
tries. In situations where a corporation is unable to certify their products are “DRC conflict
free,” they are obligated to report to the SEC the measures they have taken toward compli-
ance with Section 1502, including details of independent audits of their supply chain. Essen-
tially, the approach is based on using “naming and shaming” as a deterrent for purchasing
conflict minerals from the DRC; however, in practice the result has been a de facto embargo
on sourcing coltan from the region by manufacturers of laptops, mobile phones, and other
consumer electronics. Unsurprisingly, Section 1502 has also faced strong opposition from
U.S. corporations. The National Association of Manufacturers estimates compliance costs at
$9 billion to $16 billion, while the SEC’s own estimates are an initial $3 billion to $4 billion,
with recurring annual costs of $200 million to $600 million (Ayogu and Lewis 2011;
Viswanatha and Stephenson 2012). While it remains to be seen how Section 1502 will impact
U.S.-listed corporations, the unintended consequences at ground level in the DRC from what
has been termed “Obama’s Law” may already be apparent. Reportedly, the law has caused mas-
sive unemployment among miners in the eastern DRC as Western firms seek to reduce repu-
tational risk by sourcing minerals outside the region; and while the trade in conflict minerals
has diminished, militia leaders and corrupt military commanders still smuggle minerals
across borders, and security has not yet demonstrably improved for local populations (The
Economist 2011; Seay 2012).
Analysis
The diffusion of ideas can be explained partially at the level of concepts and theory and par-
tially at the level of material interests. This section assesses the institutional history outlined
above through reference to a two-part framework: first, the analysis explores how assump-
tions about corruption, conflict, and transparency have translated into various international
policies; and second, these policies are re-evaluated from a political economy perspective in
order to understand the incentive structures among actors and their influence on policy
making and implementation.
From Theory to Policy

The responses to natural resource-related corruption outlined in the previous section—
PWYP and EITI, polices of the World Bank and IMF, and Section 1504 of the Dodd–Frank
Act—share a common underlying assumption that increased economic transparency will
lead to improved political accountability and less corruption. The problem has been charac-
terized as follows: the extractive industries generate resource rents that are highly suscepti-
ble to illicit appropriation by domestic political elites, this theft has been facilitated by the
traditional financial opacity of the sector, and there are highly negative consequences for
political and economic development. Accordingly, international policy solutions have been
conceived in terms of increasing the level of transparency in the extractive industries, par-
ticularly regarding the amounts paid by transnational corporations and the amounts received
by states. While this approach makes sense at a theoretical level, in practice the precise causal
linkage intended between transparency and accountability remains ambiguous. Virtually by
definition, most developing countries lack the conditions required to translate information
about government finances into consequences for corruption: the rule of law, independent
media, educated citizenry, and democratic processes. EITI attempts to compensate for these
missing elements through the inclusion of domestic NGOs within a multi-stakeholder for-
mat, but this has been insufficient. Furthermore, EITI and the Dodd–Frank Act’s exclusive
focus on state revenue covers only half the equation, while IMF and World Bank attempts to
monitor state expenditure have often proven problematic.
While the responses to natural resource-related conflict covered in the previous section—
UN commodity sanctions, the Kimberley Process, and Section 1502 of the Dodd–Frank
Act—share core assumptions regarding the nature of the problem (i.e. natural resources
financing conflict) and the solution (i.e. tracking and/or interdiction), there are also dif-
ferences between these approaches that are worth noting. The KPCS and UN sanctions
regimes in countries such as Cambodia, Angola, and Sierra Leone specifically targeted
the exploitation of resources by rebel groups, while Section 1502 of the Dodd–Frank Act
focuses on “armed groups” defined as “perpetrators of serious human rights violations,” and
406 charles cater
UN sanctions regimes in countries such as Iraq, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire have broadened
the scope to include the state. These mechanisms also vary in terms of the degree of interven-
tion, but the assumed role for transparency in terms of resolving and preventing conflict has
been similar: as a precursor to interdiction (e.g. UN sanctions) or as a component of com-
modity tracking and industry regulation (e.g. KPCS and the Dodd–Frank Act). However,
assumptions regarding the role of transparency as a solution can only be as valid as the pre-
ceding analyses of conflict associated with natural resources. For example, if one conceives
of “resource wars” as principally a function of lootable commodities and the finances they
generate for combatants, then sanctions may be an appropriate policy; but if one assesses
these conflicts from a perspective conceptually incorporating state institutional weakness
associated with natural resource-based development trajectories, then the need to consider
broader approaches to state-building and peacebuilding becomes readily apparent.
Political Economy
The degree to which different transparency policies have been adopted as the preferred solu-
tion to corruption associated with the extractive industries can be explained partially
through reference to political and economic interests among the principal actors. In general,
transparency-based approaches are a low-cost and unobtrusive form of regulation for states
and industry, which is part of their appeal. But there are also important differences between
various initiatives, such as EITI and Section 1504 of the Dodd–Frank Act, which largely
explains the seemingly contradictory positions taken by corporations publicly claiming to
be proponents of transparency in one context but opposing implementation of transparency
legislation in another context. With voluntary participation and no independent oversight,
EITI remains popular within the extractive industries, while virtually without exception,
these same corporations have strongly opposed the mandatory financial disclosure require-
ments of the Dodd–Frank Act. Surprisingly, the SEC’s belated issuance of rules indicates
corporations managed to delay Dodd–Frank’s implementation but failed to water down this
modest reform effort. In addition to state-corporation relations, state-intergovernmental
organization (IGO) relations are another useful dimension of analysis for assessing the polit-
ical economy of transparency policies. As IMF staff monitoring programs in Angola and the
World Bank’s involvement with the Chad-Cameroon pipeline suggest, resource-rich devel-
oping countries may be resistant to external monitoring of state expenditures and financially
insulated from the exertion of pressure by the IFIs as well. This could be perceived as desira-
ble from the perspective of maintaining the sovereignty of developing countries, but that
may also be small consolation for civilian populations coping with kleptocratic regimes.
Transparency-oriented approaches to natural resource-related conflict have also been
heavily influenced by political and economic interests among powerful states, intergovern-
mental organizations, and transnational resource corporations. With respect to UN com-
modity sanctions, policy making by the Security Council has often been shaped by the
national interests of the permanent five (P5) members. This manifests itself in different ways,
but in general the P5 have been more willing to impose sanctions on commodities that are
not of strategic value (e.g. diamonds and timber) against rebel groups or states they do not
back (e.g. Cambodia, Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone), while at the same time unwilling to
impose sanctions on strategic commodities exploited by client states (e.g. China and oil in
Sudan). The choice of sanctions may also reflect economic constraints within the United
Nations, as they are a much less costly option than complex peacekeeping operations. The
Kimberley Process is another example where the main proponent of a transparency-oriented
policy mechanism, South Africa, had significant economic interests at stake in terms of pro-
tecting its domestic diamond industry, while transnational diamond corporations benefited
from the good publicity associated with participation as they simultaneously opposed NGO
proposals to strengthen the KPCS. Lastly, Section 1502 of the Dodd–Frank Act regarding
conflict minerals in the DRC has been strongly opposed by mining corporations claiming
unreasonable compliance costs, but this transparency-based due diligence scheme is actu-
ally a moderate form of regulation compared to interdiction. Consistent with long-standing
American concerns regarding access to strategic minerals in the DRC, Section 1502 also con-
tains a clause allowing the U.S. President to waive its provisions on the grounds of “national
security.”
Conclusion
The future prospects of natural resource-dependent developing countries and international

transparency-based policy responses to corruption and conflict could take divergent paths,
as the success or failure of one may not be predicated upon the other. On the one hand, it
would appear that solving the dual problems of corruption and conflict remains the princi-
pal challenge for developing countries suffering from the resource curse, and transparency
initiatives could play a useful role. On the other hand, developing countries such as
Botswana, Malaysia, and Chile have already emerged as contemporary success stories, each
suggesting that national governance may be the decisive variable for escaping the resource
curse. However, these cases don’t constitute evidence for the success of limited, sector-specific,
transparency-based reforms; if anything, they suggest that considerably larger state-building
projects are required, something that international actors have not proven very adept at thus
far. It remains to be seen whether the transparency approaches reviewed in this chapter (or
perhaps other international initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership) will prove
effective in reducing corruption and resolving conflict in natural resource-dependent states.
In other words, can mechanisms be facilitated so that citizenry can hold their own govern-
ments accountable? The evidence to date indicates that predominant assumptions regarding
how increased economic transparency translates into improved political accountability may
be overstated, although this does not mean that one should therefore take corporate claims
about the efficacy of industry self-regulation at face value (as private profit motive and soci-
etal good frequently diverge) and oppose modest reforms such as the Dodd–Frank Act. But
the mixed track record of transparency-based policies does imply that practitioners should
be realistic about the limitations of existing mechanisms so that they do not preclude further
policy innovation.
To a certain extent, development processes in natural resource exporting developing
countries will also be contingent on the evolution of relations with natural resource import-
ing countries, particularly the emerging economies of China and India. Currently, China
and India are the second and fourth largest consumers and net importers of oil in the world,
408 charles cater
with future consumption and imports projected to increase. Despite the principle of co-
development that dates back to the Bandung Conference of 1955, the reality is that the ben-
efits of increased South–South trade have essentially accrued disproportionately to the
emerging countries importing natural resources more than to the developing countries
exporting natural resources. The lack of engagement by Chinese and Indian firms with
Western-initiated, transparency-based programs has been criticized, but it is precisely this
“no-strings” approach—including with respect to associated soft loans and other develop-
ment projects—that many governments in developing countries find particularly appeal-
ing. Of course, as China and India have found with respect to conflict associated with the
oil industry in Sudan and South Sudan, there are also inevitable limits to the principle of
non-intervention, as increased investment also compels deeper political engagement. How
the risks of operating in natural resource exporting countries affected by corruption and
conflict are negotiated by the governments and firms of natural resource importing coun-
tries—both developed and emerging—will have a strong bearing on whether the former
manage to escape the resource curse. Whether or not future risk mitigation by states and
corporations integrally incorporates aspects of transparency or alternative approaches
emerge instead remains to be seen.
Notes
1. Interestingly, some of the most influential initial research was facilitated by states and
NGOs. Canada and the UK financed a conference in London in 1998, which resulted in the
publication of Berdal and Malone (eds.), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil
Wars under the aegis of the International Peace Academy (IPA) in New York. IPA remained
at the forefront of this evolving body of research and also continually engaged with the UN
Security Council. This was a clear (if perhaps rare) example of scholarly enquiry influenc-
ing policy responses.
2. Among those ranked the least corrupt are Canada (5), Australia (8), Norway (10), Qatar
(19), and Chile (21); among those ranked the most corrupt are Central African Republic
(154), Congo-Brazzaville (154), Papua New Guinea (154), Russia (154), Democratic Republic
of the Congo (164), Kyrgyzstan (164), Venezuela (164), Angola (168), Equatorial Guinea
(168), Chad (171), Sudan (172), Turkmenistan (172), Uzbekistan (172), Iraq (175), Afghani-
stan (176), and Myanmar (176).
3. These include Gazprom, Rosneft, PetroChina, Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation
(CNOOC), China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Sinopec, Oil and Natural Gas
Corporation (ONGC), Petronas, Saudi Aramco, and Sonangol. Notable exceptions include
EITI participants Petrobras (Brazil), Pemex (Mexico), Statoil (Norway), and QatarPet
(Qatar).
4. U.S. exchanges account for 57 percent of global market capitalization for oil and mining
companies, including national oil companies such as CNPC (China), Petrobras (Brazil),
Sinopec (China), ENI (Italy), and CNOOC (China); foreign oil firms such as Royal Dutch/
Shell (Netherlands/UK) and BP (UK); and foreign mining firms such as Vale (Brazil), BHP
Billiton (UK/Australia), Rio Tinto (UK/Australia), and Barrick Gold (Canada). Revenue
Watch Institute, “Oil and Mining Companies on Global Stock Exchanges,” <http://data.
revenuewatch.org/listings>.
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chapter 24
tr a nsitiona l j ustice
a n d dev el opm en t
pablo de greiff1
Introduction
At the highest level of generality, “transitional justice” refers to measures that are implemented
in order to redress the legacies of massive serious crimes under international law.2 These
include prosecutions of those responsible, truth-telling exercises, reparations to victims, and
institutional reforms to guard against recurrence of abuses. Given that this chapter makes
part of a collection whose audience will consist of readers interested in development, it aims
to show why development actors should be concerned about the legacy of human rights viola-
tions, and how transitional justice measures support positive development outcomes.
Efforts to establish direct links between transitional justice and development are just
beginning to take shape, a delayed response which is surprising given that the two fields have
been regularly deployed in the same contexts for more than two decades (see de Greiff and
Duthie 2009; Mani 2008). This disconnect has only become more obvious with the trend to
implement transitional justice measures in post-conflict and fragile settings which are the
objects of intense activity on the part of development agencies (and which along with suffer-
ing severe deprivation and other developmental shortfalls suffer also acute justice deficits).
The “Arab spring,” in which claims for economic opportunity, political freedoms, and justice
have been raised on a par, also provides a motivation to think about the connections between
transitional justice and development.
Trends in thinking about development likewise invite reflection about the relationship
between the field and transitional justice, as I will illustrate. Ever since development ceased to be
thought of merely in terms of economic growth and started incorporating concerns about insti-
tutions, governance, the rule of law, and, in fact, history (see Harriss, this volume), space has
been created—although not occupied—to consider the contribution that redressing past human
rights abuses might make to development (for an interesting set of reflections about the role of
the past in economics, though not focusing on human rights abuses, see Bayly et al. 2011).
The World Bank’s World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development has
the potential to break the virtually absolute isolation between the two fields, to the advantage
transitional justice and development 413
of both. This is the first major document from the World Bank—an institution that on the
one hand is not well-known for its interest in human rights, but that on the other, has signifi-
cant impact in setting the international cooperation agenda—that makes reference to transi-
tional justice and that places human rights violations at the heart of its analysis of conflict.3 If
the recommendations in the Report are followed up, one can expect that transitional justice
and development programs will be better integrated in the future.
This chapter is intended to clarify why such integration is desirable. The fundamental idea
is quite simple; there is no such thing as a radical new beginning. After periods of mass abuse,
political and institutional space will not only have to be shared with those who suffered the
brunt of the abuses, but the institutions would have shown themselves severely insufficient to
guarantee even the most basic rights and interests. Development programs instituted in con-
texts in which massive human rights violations have taken place need to confront the legacies
of such abuses, for some of the crucial institutions on which development relies will need not
just to regain the trust of victims, but to demonstrate that they are reliable, generally trustwor-
thy sources for the resolution of social conflicts. Leaving aside for the moment binding legal
obligations4 or perfectly defensible arguments that would show that addressing mass abuses is
important in its own right, I will argue that dealing with the past is important for development
purposes, both from the perspective of human development, and also because unredressed
massive human rights violations undermine dispositions, norms, and institutions that are
fundamentally important for future development. Perhaps the argument gains some plausi-
bility for this audience if from the outset we keep in mind that transitional justice, to the extent
that it represents an effort to reconstitute the force of basic norms, is neither concerned with
victims or with the past alone: recognizing moral and legal obligations to address abuses of
the past also has profound effects on current and future societal development and rule of law.
This chapter begins with a sketch of the notion of transitional justice and an account of
some of the milestones in its emergence as a field. This is followed by a discussion of the
impact on development of a failure to address the legacies of the past, concentrating on the
effects of massive human rights violations on the weakening of agency and the depletion of
civic trust or social capital. The next section addresses the question of how transitional jus-
tice can contribute to overcoming those effects by fostering recognition and trust, and
beyond pointing at plausible causal pathways mentions a social mechanism through which
transitional justice can operate, namely, its capacity to articulate and disarticulate social net-
works. The chapter concludes with a focus on the contribution transitional justice can make
to the rule of law, a notion that has played an important role in recent development thinking,
especially but not exclusively new institutionalism, and points out the second, and funda-
mental social mechanism underlying transitional justice, namely, norm-affirmation.
Concept of Transitional Justice
Obviously, this is not the place to attempt a full history of transitional justice. As is usually
the case concerning the history of fields of practice, there is no agreement on the “genealogy”
of transitional justice (for contrasting views, see Elster 2004; Teitel 2003; and Arthur 2009).
The term itself is of recent vintage, dating from the early 1990s, although the measures that
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form its core have a long history; criminal justice is of course as old as legal systems, and so is
reparations (despite the differences between inter-state post-war reparations and the more
administrative “reparations programs” which have become common in transitional con-
texts); truth-telling has long been a goal of judicial procedures but also of commissions of
inquiry common in parliamentary systems. And the history of vetting as well as other forms
of what we now call security sector reform (SSR) includes old practices such as the not so
praiseworthy purges following the Second World War.5
I will limit myself to mentioning some “milestones” in the development of the field.
Regardless of how deeply into the past the origins of transitional justice are traced by differ-
ent authors, most agree that the Nuremberg trials were a seminal event, taken together with
the various and in many ways continuing German efforts to “deal with the past,” including
reparations (Colonomos and Armstrong 2006; Authers 2006), denazification (FitzGibbon
1969), and memorialization initiatives (see Knowlton and Cates 1993).
The post-Second World War accountability exercises were followed by a lull in criminal
accountability that lasted for around four decades. After the war was over, there was a sort of
pendular swing in favor not just of de facto impunity but also amnesties, including those in
Spain, Brazil, and Uruguay, and the “due obedience” and “final stop”’ decrees in Argentina
(not all of these amnesties were of a kind: see Weschler 1990 on Brazil and Uruguay; Nino
1996 on Argentina; Aguilar 2012 on Spain; and Freeman 2009 for a general account of amnes-
ties). The policy of trials and punishment seemed to be replaced by one of “pardon and obliv-
ion.” At the international level, this sort of swing from prosecutions to impunity has often
been explained by the Cold War.6 Closer to the ground, it was not irrelevant that the transi-
tions in the countries mentioned in what Samuel Huntington (1991) called “the third wave”
of democratization and, in some of the transitions that followed, it differed crucially from
the German “transition” in having been “negotiated,” and consequently, transitions in which
members of predecessor regimes retained significant power, sufficient to derail the transi-
tional process if their interests were threatened.7
The fact that prosecutions were not carried out, however, did not mean that accountability
efforts stopped altogether. They rather took a different form: in the countries of the Latin
American Southern Cone, civil society organizations (some church affiliated or supported
such as those in Chile and Brazil, some not, such as those in Argentina) never ceased their
efforts to collect evidence of abuses. This information would eventually become crucial for
the operation of truth commissions, the formation of which constitute another critical mile-
stone in the development of transitional justice.8 Thus, truth commissions were formed in
Argentina (1983), Chile (1990), El Salvador (1992), South Africa (1995), Guatemala (1997),
and since then in more than twenty-five countries (Hayner 2011: xi–xii; lists forty truth com-
missions established from 1974 to 2009).
This process of the consolidation of the field around a core of measures was greatly
enhanced by the publication of the first three volumes of Transitional Justice, under the edi-
torship of Neil Kritz (1995). Like the appearance of encyclopedias, which have an integrating
effect on the disciplines that spawn them, these volumes were both a manifestation of, and a
contribution to, the coalescence of a field of knowledge and expertise.9 The exercise helped to
lay out the principal elements of transitional justice measures, comprising criminal prosecu-
tions, truth-telling, reparations, and institutional reforms, including vetting. As noted above,
each of these has antecedents in practice. Criminal prosecutions stretch from Nuremberg
through the domestic processes undertaken in Chile, Argentina, and other Latin American
countries, to the special courts established for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the former
Yugoslavia, to the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the subse-
quent debate on complementarity between international and national justice processes.
Truth-telling has a long history in public inquiries, but developed a greater depth of practice
with exchanges on comparable experiences of truth commissions, from Latin America to
South Africa to Morocco. Reparations developed well beyond its original inter-state origins
to incorporate administrative reparations from states to victims, both individually and at the
community level. Vetting and institutional reforms to ensure civilian oversight of security
forces, constitutional guarantees and accountability measures gathered force with the combi-
nation of experience from Latin America and the Central and Eastern European countries.
Kritz’s collection is only one of many expressions of the accelerated pace in the transmis-
sion of knowledge characteristic of a globalized world which helped in the consolidation of
the field. Other such manifestations included the various meetings in which expertise gath-
ered in countries where transitional justice measures were first implemented was shared
with countries that were grappling with these issues years later (Arthur 2009: 349); the grad-
ual availability of international cooperation funding for work in this area; the formation of a
specialized NGO; the increase in the number of courses and fellowships in academic centers
in the North and the consequent global circulation of “experts.” In short, the elements of a
transnational network for the diffusion of expertise and the exercise of advocacy developed
quite rapidly around transitional justice issues, and this network was an important factor in
the consolidation of the field (see Keck and Sikkink 1998 on the general phenomenon of glo-
balized networks around human rights issues).
The consensus that developed over time about the minimum core elements of a transi-
tional justice policy is reflected, for example, in the UN Secretary General’s Report (2004),
“The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies. This report
defines transitional justice as “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a
society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure
accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation” (UN Secretary General 2004: 4). The
report enumerates the main components of a transitional justice policy mentioning explic-
itly criminal justice, truth-telling, reparations, and vetting, and, furthermore, stipulates that,
far from being isolated pieces, these “mechanisms” should be thought of as parts of a whole:
“[w]here transitional justice is required, strategies must be holistic, incorporating integrated
attention to individual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vet-
ting and dismissals, or an appropriately conceived combination thereof ” (UN Secretary
General (2004: 9). Just recently, the Human Rights Council adopted a resolution creating a
Special Rapporteur for the promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparations, and Guarantees of Non-
Recurrence which incorporates this understanding of the elements of the field.10
Impact on Development
Having established what transitional justice is, the main question in this section is why “deal-
ing with the past” in terms of the legacy of human rights abuses is relevant to current and
future development. While I have dealt with the conceptual linkages between transitional
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justice and development in a more systematic fashion elsewhere (de Greiff 2009, 2011, and
2012), here I will make use of this work and concentrate on some considerations that might
be more salient to development promoters. Specifically, I will argue first that systematic
human rights violations undermine human capacities, and that therefore redressing those
violations is a development goal in its own right. Second, that systematic rights violations
undermine agency and social capital or civic trust, and that this also makes redressing and
preventing these violations important from a developmental perspective.
Systematic Human Rights Violations Undermine Human Capacities:

Redressing them is a development goal in its own right
The “phenomenology of victimhood” is dense and complex, but it overwhelmingly gravi-
tates toward the conclusion that the pain and suffering endured through the killing of fam-
ily members, torture, or disappearances is not only an outrage to rights, but also a direct
detraction from development in any common-sense understanding of the term. Atrocities
and their legacies clearly undermine most of the basic capabilities in Sen and Nussbaum’s
version of “human development”—that is, most of those capacities that make a life human
(Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2002). These include longevity (life), bodily health, and bodily integ-
rity, all of which are diminished in obvious ways by systematic abuses; the exercise of emo-
tions (“not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety,” Nussbaum
2002: 129); the ability to use practical reason (stunted by atrocities to the extent that their
legacies lead to, among other things, great distortions in one’s sense of control over one’s
own life plans); the capacity to engage in forms of affiliation that are free from humiliation
and that exemplify respect, including equal worth; the ability to play (in the sense of being
able to laugh and enjoy recreational activities); and the ability to have basic control over
one’s political and material environment—all of which are diminished or undermined in
the wake of abuses.
Measures of development that do not take this into account risk missing obvious aspects
of individual and societal welfare which are crucial to the experience of the people con-
cerned, despite possible economic growth: in Tunisia before the 2011 revolution, for exam-
ple, macroeconomic and social measures of development all showed strong progress, but
grievances over abuses by the security forces and lack of opportunities for political participa-
tion (aside from dissatisfaction with microeconomic opportunities and with governance
issues) played a large role in spurring the protests which eventually overturned the regime,
and were clearly viewed by much of the population as a key measure of dissatisfaction with
their welfare.
Systematic Human Rights Violations Undermine Agency and Social Capital:

Restoring them is important for development
Serious human rights violations shatter normative expectations fundamental to our sense of
agency in the world. The expectations that get broken whenever human rights are violated
are not just whimsical ones; they are based on general norms—that is, they are expectations
whose satisfaction we reasonably feel entitled to. They are expectations about, for example,
what constitutes legitimate treatment of others and at the hands of others, about situations in
which it is “normal” to expect the assistance of others, about the state being the guarantor,
rather than the violator, of fundamental rights, and so on. The very basic, fundamental
nature of these expectations explains the pervasive fear that their defeat generates: victims
experience a deep sense of normative disorientation (How could this have happened? If this
happened, then anything can happen), of solitude (How could anyone do this to me, and,
crucially, how come no one prevented it?), and of resentment (This should have never hap-
pened, I was entitled to better treatment). (See de Greiff 2009, and references therein.) In
contexts of massive human rights abuses, non-victims often have the sense that after what
happened to the victims, no one can be safe, no one can really know what to expect. The end
result is a generalized weakening of agency, trust, and social capital, not only for victims but
for society as a whole.
These effects can be parsed out in more detail. Massive human rights abuses can be said to
weaken agency in at least two ways. First, through a version of “adaptive preferences.” Pov-
erty, for instance, is taken by the World Bank in its World Development Report 2006: Equity
and Development to be a developmental blockage at least in part because it leads to dimin-
ished expectations (World Bank 2006: ch. 2, esp. 48ff.). Arjun Appadurai (2004: 68) frames
the argument in terms of how deep poverty stunts “the capacity to aspire.” The mechanism is
arguably the same in both cases. Both poverty and victimization weaken the capacity to
aspire and diminish people’s expectations. This may obviously impact very basic develop-
mental dynamics, such as the willingness of people to have their children travel to attend
school or health clinics, the functioning of markets and trade, and investment in small
enterprises.
Aside from the effects of massive human rights violations on individuals, there is another
way in which this type of violations can be said to diminish agency. Systematic violations
have effects not only on individuals’ capacity to aspire, but also on their willingness to coor-
dinate action with one another. It is not uncommon for the populations of areas which have
known massive abuses to lead substantially more reclusive lives than they led before the vio-
lations, to withdraw from public spaces, to disengage from social networks. Take, as an illus-
tration, a description of the effects of the years of terror in Argentina: “people avoided
sensitive issues unless they were certain of the loyalty of the audience. Careless disclosures
were as dangerous as deliberate reports. Vast portions of society sequestered themselves in
their own family circle, restricting non-kin relationships to old friends. This tactic proved to
be extremely isolating …” (Malamud-Goti 1996: 114).
Of course, this is no mere fluke effect, but one of the intended (and predictable) conse-
quences of the exercise of terror. The point is to disarticulate possible sources of organized
opposition. Hampering social organization makes it significantly more difficult for people to
raise claims against the institutions of the state. In the long run, however, this diminished
capacity for social coordination constitutes an obstacle to development.
The basic insights stemming from the literature on social capital and civic trust can be
introduced at this point in order to complete the case for the developmental relevance of
dealing with the past. That trust between people is correlated with growth, and even with
increased equity, there seems to be no doubt any longer. Large cross-country studies indicate
that increases in levels of trust between people are associated with increases in growth both
in gross domestic product (GDP) and investments, and that inequality is associated with
lower trust levels (see Zak and Knack 2001; Knack 2002). Accounts of the developmental
418 pablo de greiff
impact of civic trust have centered on its contribution to diminishing transaction costs, and,
when absent, on the decrease in rates of investment. Several cross-national studies using a
variety of indicators show strong correlations between respect for civil and political rights
and economic growth, and show conversely that violence and political instability are nega-
tively related to growth rates and investment (see World Bank 2011: chs. 2 and 3).
In order to move beyond mere correlations, a few words about civic trust are in order. The
sense of trust in question here is not the thick trust that characterizes relations between inti-
mates, but neither is it reducible to a mere expectation of regularity or predictability. Trust,
as an alternative to monitoring and the appeals to sanctions, involves shared normative
expectations: I trust someone not merely when I experience confidence in the regularity of
his or her behavior—I can be highly confident that in grossly corrupt systems officials will
predictably try to extort me, but that, of course, does not mean I trust them—but rather,
when I am convinced that among that person’s reasons for actions is a commitment to
values, norms, and principles that we share. In dealing with strangers and with institutions
in complex and highly differentiated societies, the relevant values, norms, and principles are
abstract and general. So, we trust an institution when we act on the assumption that the insti-
tution’s constitutive norms are shared by those who run and participate in the institution.
This account of the effects of massive human rights violations, which links a norm-based
account of victimhood (rights violations shatter normative expectations fundamental to our
sense of agency in the world) with a norm-based account of civic trust, helps explain why
dealing with the past should be of interest from the standpoint of development. Aside from
the arguments about the effects of systematic violations on human capacities, on agency, and
on civic trust or social capital, this account should be helpful in two ways: first, by providing
an explanation of how the effects of serious human rights violations ripple from direct vic-
tims to much broader constituencies, the account clarifies that justice is not a matter of inter-
est to victims alone. To the extent that the violation of fundamental rights is at the same time
the breach of general norms, everyone is affected by it. Ultimately, this is not only a function
of bonds of concern or even of relations of dependence, but mainly, a function of the nature
of the norms that are shattered when human rights are violated—namely, the general norms
that give rise to the expectations that undergird basic agency and social competence. Focus-
ing on the diminished agency (at least in the sense of the counterincentive people receive for
raising claims) not just of victims but of entire communities that comes in the wake of mas-
sive violations of human rights helps us to see the developmental relevance of “dealing with
the past.”
Second, and more importantly, the account clarifies that the reason why confronting past
atrocities is relevant for development purposes goes beyond their spill-over effects from vic-
tims to others—what in a sense is not an irrelevant issue of numbers. It also deepens our
understanding about the way the effects work: massive human rights violations do not simply
diminish the capacity for agency, the willingness of people to raise claims, and in that sense
their possibility of initiating action in the world; for development purposes, it may be more
compelling to stress that the violations thereby diminish the possibility of having people act
together. One does not need to agree with the details of the social capital literature to
acknowledge that unaddressed massive human rights violations make social coordination
more difficult, that this has developmental consequences, and therefore to consider seriously
whether the type of redress offered by transitional justice measures can, indeed, make a
contribution to development.11
There is a significant literature on the negative impact of authoritarianism on levels of

civic trust and the depletion of social capital in the Central and Eastern European countries
(see Kornai and Rose-Ackerman 2004; Rainer and Seidler 2009), and reference has already
been made to a similar treatment of the Argentinean case (Malamud-Goti 1996). There is
nothing peculiar about these cases. The argument in this section is meant to explain the gen-
eral mechanisms at play. I will close with a comparison between two countries meant to illus-
trate the huge developmental blockage that the inability to deal with the past represents and
the advantages of finding ways of doing so. Contrast the experience of Bosnia-Herzegovina
with that of South Africa. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, while important advances were made in
increasing citizen trust in some institutions after the war—notably the judiciary and the
army, due to vetting and professionalization measures—the lack of an accepted shared nar-
rative over responsibility for the war undoubtedly plays a role in blocking collective action at
national level, constraining important reforms that the society would need to address social,
economic, security, and fiscal challenges, not to mention the prior actions necessary to move
forward on European Union accession. In South Africa by contrast, while society still faces
political tensions and developmental challenges as well as outstanding claims related to
accountability for specific abuses, recognitions of the past by leadership, the truth commis-
sion’s work, and associated measures have created a largely shared narrative of Apartheid
history across South African society. This in turn has enabled it to combine redistributive
measures with responsible macroeconomic management and to face new challenges,
whether on social and economic policy or in dealing with the recent popular debate over
appropriate artistic freedom related to images of leadership.
Fostering Trust
Accepting the adverse effects of a failure to address the legacy of the past, there is still, of
course, an outstanding question: how can transitional justice measures help? One way of
answering this question would be by marshaling the empirical data that would show that in
fact, the implementation of the measures contributes to overcoming the developmental
blockages mentioned, in particular, that they strengthen human capabilities, help rectify
adverse terms of recognition and resolve high degrees of social and institutional mistrust.
This sort of empirical work is in its infancy.12 There is no agreed upon measuring methodol-
ogy and, indeed, no agreement about what to measure to begin with (see van der Merwe,
Baxter, and Chapman 2009; Duggan 2010). While some of the results of incipient quantita-
tive research are heartening (see Olsen, Payne, and Reiter 2010; Sikkink 2011) most of it con-
sists of efforts to establish correlations, and this will rarely be sufficient to settle any
substantive disagreement. Here, then, I will rather move to an explanatory plane and sketch,
albeit very briefly, the reasons why it makes sense to think that transitional justice can con-
tribute to the accomplishment of developmental ends, trying to illustrate the claims with
some examples.13 Needless to say what follows is not a substitute for empirical verification.
But it is significant that it is possible to offer an account of the causal links that can lead from
the implementation of the measures to these results.
Here nothing more than a sketch of those links is possible.
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Recognition
Arguably, the various transitional justice measures aim at providing recognition to victims
(see Honneth 1995, 2007; on the notion of recognition). The type of recognition that is rele-
vant is one that acknowledges the victims’ status as victims and the abuses to which they were
subject, gives public space to their stories, and tries to reverse the marginalization which they
typically suffer. But this is not all. In fact, it is even more important to recognize their status as
rights bearers, ultimately, as co-participants in a common political project, that is, as citizens.
How do the measures promote this aim? Truth-telling mechanisms explicitly provide a forum
for acknowledgment by the state of victims’ experiences and responsibility for abuses; prosecu-
tions by affirming that the violation of the rights of others shall not remain inconsequential;
reparations by signaling that the state takes violations of rights sufficiently seriously as to mobi-
lize resources, something that typically involves the expenditure of “moral capital” as well.
Finally, institutional reform, with vetting processes as a starting-point, contributes to recogniz-
ing people as rights-bearers to the extent that it re-affirms the force of norms according to which
state officials are public servants, and that, from these norms, flow rules about job retention, pro-
motions, and dismissals. These mechanisms are often very powerful vehicles for providing voice
to marginalized groups in society, which is in itself a poverty reduction goal. In Morocco, for
example, the truth commission recognized for the first time, in public hearings, the experience
of women subjected to sexual and other forms of abuses as part of state-sponsored repression. In
Peru, the truth commission gave voice to men and women from ethnic communities who had
long been marginalized from most economic, social, and developmental debates.
Hence transitional mechanisms can promote individual improvements in welfare by
acknowledging people’s stories, desire for justice, and rights to compensation—and, perhaps
more importantly, by giving them channels of voice and recognition as having equal citizen-
ship rights. Transitional justice measures can be seen as a set of judicial and non-judicial
measures that serve to signal the significance of the status of citizens as rights bearers. This is
a not inconsequential shift when one thinks of the demands displayed during the Arab
Spring: polling of citizens in these and other countries have noted that they place justice and
accountability among their highest priorities, along with practical concerns such as security
and job creation.
Fostering Civic Trust and Positive Social Capital

The argument concerning the trust-inducing potential of transitional justice measures must
start by reiterating the point that trust should not be reduced to mere empirical predictabil-
ity, but that it involves an expectation of a shared normative commitment. Trusting an insti-
tution, the case that is particularly relevant for us, amounts to assuming that its constitutive
rules, values, and norms are shared by its members or participants and are regarded by them
as binding. So, to illustrate, predictable abuses on the part of police forces, from extortion to
torture, needless to say, do not produce confidence in them. The lived experience of the
police force’s willingness to protect all citizens regardless of their political, social, religious or
ethnic affiliation, and in accordance with the law, does.
How do transitional justice measures promote this sense of civic trust? Prosecutions can be
thought to promote civic trust by reaffirming the relevance of the norms that perpetrators
violated. Judicial institutions, particularly in contexts in which they have traditionally been
essentially instruments of power, show their trustworthiness if they can establish that no one
is above the law. View the effect of the Nuremburg trials, the prosecution of Charles Taylor, or
that of both senior and junior military officials in Chile and Argentina. An institutionalized
effort to confront the past through truth-telling exercises might be seen by those who were
formerly on the receiving end of violence as a good faith effort to come clean, to understand
long-term patterns of socialization, and, in this sense, to initiate a new political project around
norms and values that this time around are truly shared. This was part of the point behind the
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Reparations can foster civic trust by
demonstrating the seriousness with which institutions now take the violation of their rights, a
seriousness that is manifested, to put it bluntly, by the fact that “money talks”—and so do
symbolic reparations measures—that even under conditions of scarcity and competition for
resources, the state responds to the obligation to fund programs that benefit those who were
formerly not only marginalized but abused. Chile and Morocco, for instance, have valuable
lessons to teach in this area. Finally, vetting can induce trust, and not just by “re-peopling”
institutions with new faces, but by thereby demonstrating a commitment to systemic norms
governing employee hiring and retention, disciplinary oversight, prevention of cronyism, and
so on. Bosnia-Herzegovina, post-Dayton, established an ambitious vetting program, and
Argentina managed to vet, albeit indirectly, promotions to the highest ranks of the military.
In addition to pointing out the causal pathways that may lead from the implementation of
transitional justice measures to the provision of recognition and the strengthening of civic
trust which are relevant for the achievement of development goals, it is worth pointing out
that the present account allows for the formulation of the social mechanisms through which
transitional justice can achieve these (On the notion of social mechanisms, see Hedström
and Swedberg 1998). The two main mechanisms are manifestly relevant from the standpoint
of development; these are norm-affirmation and the articulation and disarticulation of social
networks.14 I address norm affirmation in the conclusion.
Dismantling of “Spoiler” Networks and Negative Social Capital

To start with the “negative” first, transitional justice measures have the capacity to disarticu-
late some social networks, and to respond to pernicious forms of social capital, and both are
developmentally relevant. The Central American cases provide ample evidence that net-
works within security forces who have conspired or been used to carry out abuses are fre-
quently recycled into organized criminal groups involved in illegal trafficking activities, or
that they remain as a “standing force” that threatens future institutional and even political
change. Transitional justice measures aimed at institutional reform—vetting, civilian over-
sight of the security forces, professionalization programs—help lower the risks of “spoiler”
networks which may challenge future development.
Articulating Civil Society Networks and Fostering Social Capital

Transitional justice measures also serve to help articulate social capital, through incentiviz-
ing the formation of civil society networks. There is sufficient international experience with
transitional justice measures now to assert confidently that one of the virtually inevitable
422 pablo de greiff
consequences of even putting one of these measures up for discussion in the public agenda
in a country—let alone implementing one such program—is the formation of a plethora of
civil society organizations. Transitional justice catalyzes civil society organization. This is as
true of reparations measures as it is of truth commissions, and as true in South Africa as it is
in Morocco and Peru. We are currently watching this mechanism in action in Tunisia and
even in Egypt, where civil society organizations doing work on transitional issues are multi-
plying rapidly. This is no mere unintended albeit frequent correlate of transitional justice
measures; my point here is that it is an important explanatory mechanism: transitional jus-
tice measures work, to the extent they do (that is, they help to provide recognition and to
promote civic trust), in virtue of their success in catalyzing the (re)articulation of networks.
Rule of Law
The implementation of transitional justice measures can be considered both as a manifesta-

tion of development in its own right—for justice is a part of development rather than outside
it—and as an instrumental contribution to the attainment of conditions that are needed for
development. This dual character of transitional justice is not unlike that of another concept
it is closely related to in both theory and practice, namely, the rule of law, which has also been
thought to be both instrumentally and inherently valuable. Virtually all transitional justice
measures have been defended on the basis that they promote the rule of law (for a review of
some of the relevant arguments, see de Greiff, 2006).
In this final section I will shed this reticence, not the least because of the prominent role
that the rule of law arguments have long played in development thought, a role highlighted in
institutionalist strains in economics and development (see North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009).
North and new institutionalists take a commitment to “liberal” associational norms and to
the constraints on the distribution and exercise of powers through formal laws that regulate,
among other things, the very process of institutional change, in other words, the commitment
to the rule of law, to be a critical if not the critical explanatory factor in development.
Instead of rehearsing the arguments for the developmental relevance of the rule of law, I will
continue with the explanatory turn I took in the previous section and outline the way in
which transitional justice can be thought to strengthen the rule of law. The various transi-
tional justice measures contribute to strengthening the rule of law as follows: criminal trials
that offer sound procedural guarantees and that do not exempt from the reach of justice
those who wield power illustrate nicely the generality of law; truth-telling exercises that con-
tribute to understanding the many ways in which legal systems failed to protect the rights of
citizens provide the basis on which, a contrario, legal systems can behave in the future; repa-
rations programs that try to redress the violation of rights serve to exemplify, even if it is ex
post facto, the commitment to the notion that legal norms matter; and, finally, institutional
reform measures, including those that screen out those who abused their positions, help to
make rule of law systems operative for the future in the service of all citizens.15
Consistent with the interest in understanding how the measures can be thought to attain
whatever ends are attributed to them, and not just in observing correlations, here again
I think it makes a difference not just to establish possible causal pathways but to articulate a
social mechanism: the overall strategy I have followed up to this point has been one that
emphasizes the importance of norms; a norm-based account of the effects of human rights
violations (including the weakening of agency and the depletion of social capital) has been
linked to norm-based accounts of recognition and of civic trust, as two of the ends which
transitional justice can promote. There is of course, no need to add that the notion of the rule
of law is itself norm-based. There is no plausible understanding of the rule of law that does
not depend on insisting on the centrality of some norms. More interesting, then, is to point
out that providing recognition, promoting civic trust, and strengthening the rule of law,
depends upon the successful affirmation of the same norms: recognition and civic trust are
closely related to one another: recognition implies respect for a certain status, a specific
standing, that of a legal subject—and thereby one possessed of rights, defined in terms of
basic norms. It is precisely on this ground that persons can develop the attitudes and disposi-
tions in their interactions with others who remain, largely, strangers, and in their interac-
tions with impersonal institutions, which characterize (civic) trust. The status in question,
that of citizen, and the dispositions that accompany it, rest, in turn, on the web of norms that
constitute the democratic rule of law, the basic means both of stabilizing expectations and
diminishing risks, on the one hand, and, on the other, of allowing claims-raising as a funda-
mental activity when the norms are breached.
The policy implications of this approach to the links between transitional justice and
development are several. In the context of the wider debate on development goals post-2015,
it raises questions as to the incorporation of justice aspects as both an enabling goal and a
final measure of development outcomes (by no means only transitional justice, rather transi-
tional justice mainstreamed into other measures of progress in meeting people’s aspirations
for justice). In operational terms, it would argue for closer links between national processes
of decision making to address crimes of the past, with future priorities. This is not an argu-
ment for giving absolute primacy to transitional justice measures in national development
planning—like other measures to improve welfare and governance, trade-offs will be needed
on the timing, cost, and sequencing of measures—but rather to consider transitional justice
as an integral part of societal planning (and budgeting) in situations of post-conflict recov-
ery or transition from authoritarian rule.
Finally, this chapter raises questions for a future research agenda. I have noted examples of
existing research on how citizens perceive accountability for past abuses as part of their over-
all welfare, and on the impact of transitional justice measures on economic and social devel-
opment. An equally promising angle for research is the reverse causal link: how do
development measures—in education, in civic and community empowerment, in regulatory
reform—support outcomes in terms of accountability for past abuses? Both these angles
merit more research in the coming period. This is particularly relevant since the field is see-
ing a “fourth wave” of demands for transitional justice, most notably in the Arab States, but
equally involving countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America which have yet to
fully grapple with these issues.
Notes
1. The views expressed in this chapter do not necessarily represent those of the ICTJ. It tracks
closely views elaborated in much more detail in de Greiff (2009, 2011, and 2012). My g ratitude
424 pablo de greiff
to Sarah Cliffe and David Malone who provided extensive comments, and to Shaina Wright
for research assistance.
2. In the past that transitional justice measures were applied largely in cases where gross
violations of human rights had taken place. Its increasing application in post-conflict set-
tings requires an expanded reference: “serious crimes under international law” including
violations of both international human rights law and humanitarian law. In the remainder
of the chapter, I relax the use of these terms and mention non-technical terms such as
abuse, atrocity, and terror to refer to phenomena to which transitional justice seeks to
respond.
3. Full disclosure: I participated in the process leading up to the production of the WDR,
advising the team responsible for the Report on justice-related issues.
4. Legally, transitional justice responds to violations of foundational elements of the interna-
tional legal architecture: among others, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Pun-
ishment of the Crime of Genocide; the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights; the 1984 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment of Punishment; the International Convention for the Protection of All persons
from Enforced Disappearance; the Geneva Conventions of 1949; the 1977 Protocol Addi-
tional (No.I) to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949; and the Protocol Additional
(No.II). Several UN documents reflect the specific ways in which transitional justice
measures constitute an effort to give substance to internationally binding obligations to
secure the rights to justice, truth, and reparations. UN Secretary General, The Rule of Law
and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict States, U.N. Doc. S/2004/616, August
23, 2004. Report of the Independent Expert to Update the Set of Principles to Combat Impu-
nity, Diane Orentlicher—Add. 1: Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion
of Human Rights through Action to Combat Impunity, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/2005/102/Add.1,
February 8, 2005; and the Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and
Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious
Violations of the International Humanitarian Law, U.N. Doc. A/RES/60/147, December 16,
2005.
5. Of course, this is not to say that transitional justice has adopted these practices unmodi-
fied. The history of transitional justice has included efforts to avoid the vices of some of
these practices, including the retroactive application of law in criminal procedures, the
politicization and lack of transparency of commissions of inquiry, the state-centric nature
of old reparations, and the arbitrariness of mass purges. For some representative samples
of literature on each of the four basic measures, see de Greiff (2006); Mayer-Rieckh and
de Greiff (2007); Lutz and Reiger (2009); and Hayner (2011).
6. Arthur (2009) usefully reminds us, however, that it was not just the Cold War, but the
apprehensions of European colonial powers, particularly of France because of its “Alge-
rian problem,” which explain the post-war blockage concerning the establishment of a
permanent international criminal court (until the adoption of the Rome Statute of the
ICC in 1998).
7. José Zalaquett (1988) presents the first attempt to establish correlations between types of
transitions and possible outcomes. This became of interest to political scientists. Huntington
(1991: 209) presents a similar model. Correlations between transitional justice and other
factors including the predecessor regime’s degree of intolerance, post-transitional elite
turnover, and previous experiences with some of the measures have been attempted in the
literature.
8. The information collected over the years by civil society organizations would also play an
important role in the trials that started much later in Chile, and that resumed in Argentina
after 2001. Chile and Argentina each have more than five hundred ongoing cases against
former abusers. See Filippini (2009) and Collins (2011).
9. Highlighting the publication of Kritz’s Transitional Justice as a milestone in the develop-
ment of the field is not to be taken as an argument about the importance of “academic”
literature. In fact, the divide between academics and practitioners, especially in the earlier
stages of the development in the field, is artificial, for a good number of the individuals
who helped give shape to the field in its origins were both academics and practitioners
(see Arthur 2009: 344–5).
10. A/RES/HRC/18/7, 11 October 2011. The author was elected by the HRC for this position.
11. It may be objected that this implies that economic activity automatically diminishes with
the onset of human rights violations, which empirically may or may not be the case. The
objection, however, oversimplifies the complicated relationship between politics (broadly
conceived) and economic activity. The argument is that trust is one (of many) enabling
conditions of social coordination, and therefore weak bonds of (“bridging”) trust do not,
as in a uni-causal mechanism, impede growth. Obviously, reality is more complicated
than that.
12. I hasten to add that this is true not just of transitional justice but of most complex inter-
ventions in the social world, even those with a longer history and both synchronously and
diachronically larger budgets. These include SSR programs, rule of law and justice reform
programs, and, indeed, a good part of development assistance work.
13. Some caveats are in order: the argument is not predictive, but explanatory. Whether
the implementation of transitional justice measures will bring about these effects or
not in a particular situation is an empirical matter that cannot be decided a priori.
And, obviously, the argument is one about contributions to the overcoming of those
developmental blockages brought about by human rights violations, not about either
causal sufficiency, or about developmental blockages tout court. See de Greiff (2011,
2012) for a longer discussion about the assessment of the impact of transitional justice
initiatives.
14. I am using “networks” here to refer to both formal and informal, official and unofficial
“groups,” organizations, or enterprises (and thus in a sense that is akin to the organiza-
tional dimensions of the established “practices” to which Douglass North (1991) refers
with the term “institutions.”
15. This commitment to the rule of law is not exhausted by a commitment to a formalist
understanding of the notion, for such an understanding is compatible with many forms of
arbitrariness, as long as these are regularly and predictably patterned. If the notion of the
rule of law is to have any critical purchase, it has to take seriously the idea that legitimacy
refers also to characteristics of the very process of making laws and to the substance of the
laws thus produced.
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en v ironm en t a n d h e a lth
In contrast to the preceding sections, the subjects of environment and health are more rooted
in the natural sciences. Each of the following chapters tackles a concept associated with the
natural world, understanding and describing a biophysical reality independent of human
agency or the values of society. At first glance, these are technical fields of knowledge and the
domains of agronomists, water engineers, and medical practitioners. Some degree of famili-
arity with the tools of natural science inquiry is useful, including a comfort with quantitative
measures, a critical perspective willing to subject theories to empirical testing, and a willing-
ness to revisit or discard cherished explanations when they are proven false. Yet no reader
should be discouraged from entering this section.
In keeping with the spirit of this volume, each chapter is written with the intention to offer
something to both the casual and expert audience. The former may gain a basic understand-
ing of each concept and appreciation for its key works and thinkers. The latter may gain
insights into how each concept has contributed to the wider social and political dimensions
of international development. Indeed although each of the authors refers to the natural
world, each chapter quickly identifies how real life decisions over food, water, land, and
health are intimately tied to the institutions society uses to govern itself. Thus this section
illustrates the interplay of natural and social science, the porous membrane between an
impartial “world without us” and the influence of the human condition.
Three sets of observations are useful for introducing this section. First is that natural
science has come to provide much of the substance of what is considered as development.
Second is that the idea of sustainability, after pulling together thinking about environment
and development, has now largely torn apart into discrete topics. Third is that thinking on
development has taken a positivist turn, with natural science explanations shaping how
development is understood.
The Substance of Development
While thinking on development may not have experienced a paradigm shift, with older the-
ories being displaced by newer ones, the practice of development certainly incorporated
multiple scientific revolutions. In the post-war period, natural sciences and engineering
were expected to provide the “freedom from want” described by Roosevelt in 1941. Looking
back at the key wins for development, one experiences what historian David Edgerton (2009)
describes as the “shock of the old.” Vaccines, bed nets, and water treatment trace their roots
to nineteenth-century efforts in public health, while the hybrid crops of the Green revolu-
tion relied more on centuries-old plant breeding than modern genomics. Science raised the
production function to derive more benefit from the limited bounty of a finite world. Sixty
years after Roosevelt’s address, half of the Millennium Development Goals would have an
explicit focus on food, health, and physical surroundings.
In practice, the way science evolves is often longer term, and less predictable, than antici-
pated. Billions of dollars in development finance were, and continue to be, invested in inten-
tional efforts to create vaccines or improve crops. Meanwhile some fields of science evolve in
tandem with application. The first aircraft flew before aeronautics could fully explain how
they did so. It was once thought that the basic human needs of food, water, and health would
be met long before the luxuries of television or the Internet reached all corners of the world.
Yet today more people have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet. Science provides tools,
yet its influence depends on whose hands it empowers: whether by governments designing
smarter health systems, or poor farmers growing more nutritious food. In sum, natural
science contributes much of the substance of what is considered as development.
The Road to Rio and Back Again
Out of the shadow of the Second World War emerged a renewed concern with the idea of
international community, of nations and people working together toward a common future.
While the roots of environmental conscience can be traced back to historic concerns of pre-
venting famine, conserving wilderness, and securing public health, the 1960s and 1970s saw
such threads weave together in new ways. Rachel Carson (1962) warned of a “silent spring”
caused by the effects of chemical pollution on animal and human health, and Barbara Ward
(1966) offered a vision of humanity inhabiting a finite Spaceship Earth. In 1972, the Apollo 17
mission captured a photo of the Earth from space, which soon became a symbol of the inter-
dependence of humanity. The United Nations convened a conference on the human envi-
ronment in Stockholm, marking a new awareness of the problems with industrial
development, such as acid rain and air pollution. These issues catalyzed action, as their sci-
ence was well understood, with clearly identified point-source causes, and with measurable
impacts on nature and the economy. This same tractability underpinned efforts to curb water
pollution in many countries, and the Montreal Protocol to phase out substances that deplete
the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere.
The 1980s and 1990s saw this consciousness pull together under the idea of sustainable
development. The World Conservation Strategy (IUCN 1980) argued that the conservation
of nature required alleviating poverty, while the Brundtland Commission (WCED 1987)
called for development to “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability
of future generations to meet their own needs.” Thinking on the environment acquired the
concepts of natural capital and intergenerational equity. The United Nations once again con-
vened a conference on environment and development, this time in Rio de Janeiro, around
the issues of deforestation, desertification, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. These
430 environment and health
were more intractable issues plagued by diffuse causes and uncertain consequences. They
could not be easily addressed through technology or regulation, but instead raised a funda-
mental question of what type of development to pursue.
In the twenty-first century, thinking on environment and development has once again
torn apart into its constituent parts. The Agenda 21 action plan proved unwieldy and has
been largely forgotten, while climate change negotiations took on a life of its own. Water,
energy, health, and agriculture appear to offer a more tangible set of entry points, gravitating
action toward the nation-state once more. Yet what has endured is a realization that the inter-
face of environment and development is not merely matter of understanding the bio-physical
reality of ecology or epidemiology. It is instead about how this bio-physical reality is affected,
and potentially resolved, by the economic and social processes through which society governs
its interaction with the environment.
Development Turns to Positivism
Natural science has subtly reshaped the intellectual rules that guide thinking on develop-
ment. Early development thinkers were steeped in classical literature and the writing of phi-
losophers. A generation ago, the test for accepting a development theory was whether it
helped understand the world: Did it interpret historical events or predict what might happen
next? Stages of economic growth and demographic transition were concepts valued for their
ability to diagnose the problems facing society and for prescribing action. Today the rules of
natural science exercise an increasing influence on the imagination. Thinking on develop-
ment has become much more data-driven. The apparent success of mathematical models in
economics, or randomized-controlled trials in clinical medicine, has inspired the applica-
tion of these methods more broadly. The search for development shifted from a quest for
explanation, to a search for “what works,” for narrowly defined links of cause-and-effect
between interventions and outcomes.
Development theories must now be falsifiable, and development practice to be based on
empirical evidence. Grand narratives still shape global agendas, but in everyday life the prac-
titioner is more likely to speak of policy experiments, measurable targets, and development
indicators. Yet the reality of development is messy, full of wicked problems with multiple
variables and causal mechanisms, most of which cannot be controlled. Today people are
adapting to change in the world’s glacier-fed rivers and semi-arid lands often without relying
on the computer models of greenhouse gases.
Looking Ahead
This section of the volume assesses concepts associated with the role of environment and
health within development. M. S. Swaminathan, Rajul Pandya-Lorch, and Sivan Yosef
(Chapter 25) describe how thinking on food security evolved over the past century, from on-
farm production of staple crops, to broader concerns of nutrition and links with markets.
Cecilia Tortajada (Chapter 26) examines the drivers of water use, including economic
growth, population, energy use, and agriculture, and cautions that there is a tendency to set-
tle for the easiest rather than the right solution. Julio Berdegué, Tomás Rosada, and Anthony
Bebbington (Chapter 27) define rural transformation as reorganizing society in a given
space, and identify poverty and inequality “traps” that cause uneven development outcomes.
Ben White, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., and Ruth Hall (Chapter 28) trace how land reform
gained and lost ground in development debates, to regain prominence with contemporary
concerns of gender and intergenerational equity. On climate adaptation, Fatima Denton
(Chapter 29) encourages looking beyond biophysical impacts, to strengthening institutions
and governance as a means to foster resilience and reduce vulnerability. Tim Evans (Chapter
30) traces waves in thinking from tropical health focused on diseases endemic to developing
countries, to global health focused on overcoming inequity. Finally, Nandini Oomman and
Farley Cleghorn (Chapter 31) identify the conditions needed to eradicate diseases and reflect
on future directions given growing demands for health care in a reality of fiscal constraint.
References
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chapter 25
agr icu lt u r e a n d food

secu r it y
mankombu sambasivan swaminathan,
rajul pandya-lorch, and sivan yosef
Introduction
In the wake of the 2007–8 and 2010–11 world food price crises, agriculture and food security
are high on the global agenda. They were last at the forefront in the 1960s and 1970s, when
poor weather reduced harvests in many countries, cereal stocks were perilously low, food
prices were high and volatile, and food shortages and famines were killing millions of people
in Asia (notably Bangladesh and China) and Africa (notably Ethiopia and the Sahel). The
World Food Conference was convened in 1974 to assess the magnitude of the food problem
and to discuss solutions. National and international policy-makers ramped up investments
in agricultural science and technology; in hard and soft infrastructure such as irrigation,
electricity, roads, and education; and in improved policies to encourage farmers to grow and
sell more food and to conserve natural resources.
These efforts led to enormous gains in agricultural productivity, increased the global avail-
ability of food, and lowered food prices. The Green Revolution—the breeding of improved
rice and wheat varieties, combined with increased use of fertilizers, irrigation, and supportive
public policies—spread rapidly across Asia and improved the livelihoods of an estimated
1.8 billion people (Hazell 2009). Agriculture was a key driver of growth and development for
many of the world’s poorest countries and helped countless people improve their incomes and
thus their access to food. The proportion of the world’s population going hungry declined
dramatically, from about one-third in the late 1950s to about one-eighth in the late 2000s.
As world food supplies burgeoned and food prices fell, policy-makers became complacent
and began to neglect agriculture. Investments in agriculture did not keep pace with other
investments and agriculture’s profile on the global agenda slowly diminished. Yet the number
of people going hungry remains stubbornly at just below one billion. In 2006–8, 850
million people in the world were undernourished, a number virtually unchanged from
1990–2. Of course, while the total number may have remained unchanged, large numbers of
people have moved in and out of hunger over this period: in approximate terms, for every
agriculture and food security 433
person who moved out of hunger in China after 1990, another one moved into it in Africa or
South Asia. In 2011, the hot spots of hunger were South Asia (home to 40 percent of the
world’s hungry people) and sub-Saharan Africa (25 percent) (FAO 2011). Going beyond calo-
rie deficiency, about 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient malnutrition, also known as
“hidden hunger,” caused by a lack of critical dietary micronutrients such as Vitamin A, zinc,
and iron (WHO and FAO 2006).
The world food price crisis of 2007–8—wherein weather-related shocks such as droughts
and floods were compounded by escalating demand for agricultural products from emerg-
ing economies, high oil prices, the expansion of biofuels, and panic-induced protectionist
policies—sharply raised food prices, ignited food riots around the world, and threw many
millions of people into hunger and poverty. The factors that pushed up prices then were
again at play a few years later, making it evident that a fundamental transformation of the
world food system was underway. Agriculture is no longer about food production only;
the purpose of agriculture has broadened to development outcomes such as nutrition and
health, sustainability of natural resources, and remunerative employment. An Evergreen
Revolution—increases in agricultural productivity without associated ecological harm—
is needed.
This chapter reviews the evolution of food security and agricultural development; assesses
how agriculture has contributed to improving food security; highlights the experiences of
India, China, and Ethiopia; and looks forward to opportunities for leveraging agriculture to
improve food and nutrition security.
The Evolution of Food Security
The term “food security” originated in the mid-1970s when the World Food Conference
defined food security in terms of assuring the availability and price stability of food: “availa-
bility at all times of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady
expansion of food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices.” In the
early 1980s, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) included a focus on physical
and economic access to food at the individual and household levels. The 1986 World Bank
Report on Poverty and Hunger brought in temporal aspects, distinguishing between
“chronic” and “transitory” food insecurity—chronic food insecurity being associated with
structural poverty and low incomes, and transitory food insecurity being associated with
natural disasters, economic collapse, or conflicts (World Bank 1986). This was complemented
by Amartya Sen’s entitlement approach toward analyzing famines, which concluded that
food insecurity depends as much on people’s inability to access food (because of poverty or
inequitable distribution systems) as on the actual supply of food (Sen 1981). The “right to
food” movement has also been influential in framing food security as a human right, a right
that is derived from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Currently, twenty-three countries explicitly refer to this right in their constitutions.
Today the internationally accepted definition of food security is that emerging from the
World Food Summit of 1996: “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical
and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs
434 mankombu sambasivan swaminathan et al.
and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” This definition reinforces the multidi-
mensionality of food security—availability, access, and absorption/utilization of food:
Availability refers to the physical availability of food in desired quantities as deter-

•
mined by production net of feed, seed, and wastage plus net imports and draw-down
of stocks. As noted in the World Food Summit definition, food security also depends
upon the ability to obtain food at all times, including through economic or climatic
shocks or non-harvest seasons, as well as the availability of locally acceptable foods, as
compared to taboo foods which may be proscribed on the basis of culture, religion,
health, or economic value.
Access is determined by the bundle of entitlements related to people’s initial endow-
•
ments and what they can acquire, especially in terms of physical and economic
access to food.
Absorption is the ability to biologically utilize the food consumed, which is turn is
•
related to the availability of safe drinking water, sanitation, hygienic environment, pri-
mary health care, and nutritional knowledge. This broadening of food security toward
nutrition security is a recent evolution.
Food Security and Agricultural

Development
Agriculture and food security have been intertwined throughout human history. Agricul-
tural growth is critical for improving food security, most immediately by increasing food
production and availability. Agriculture grows crops and livestock for food and raw materi-
als and is the main source of calories for the world’s population. The availability of food is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition to assure food security. The rural poor are often net
consumers of food, and poor households can spend over half of their income on food
(Headey 2011). Agriculture, as the employer of approximately 50 percent of people in low-
income countries, raises the incomes of the poorest and most food-insecure people. Non-
farm employment that is linked to agriculture, such as food processing, manufacturing, and
transportation, also employs many rural people. By acting as a source of income, agriculture
and agriculturally-related sectors enable people to purchase the food they need to augment
what they can grow themselves.
Higher incomes also allow households to purchase higher-quality food, safer food, and a
more diverse diet, gains that contribute to the more nutrition-focused dimensions of food
security. Income growth in households and across countries has been projected to signifi-
cantly reduce malnutrition, though direct health and nutrition interventions are also needed
to ensure the impact (Haddad et al. 2003). Whether a higher income can successfully trans-
late into better nutrition is also influenced by the level of power women have within the
household. Women are more likely to spend the income that is under their control on food,
health care, and the education of their children (Meinzen-Dick et al. 2012).
Closely related are the linkages between agriculture and ecology. Poor management of
natural resources such as land and water can lead to soil erosion, water siltation, water-borne
diseases, and even water scarcity. Similarly, poor farming practices can lead to contamina-
tion of food and water by microbes, chemicals, and toxic metals. These factors all have a
negative impact on sustainable agricultural yields, and producers’ and consumers’ health
and nutrition. Protecting the quality of natural resources, preserving biodiversity, and
putting into place better pest management practices that protect farmers from excessive pes-
ticides and consumers from toxins can ensure that the relationship between agriculture and
ecology is a positive one. At the same time, though, improving the safety of food cannot raise
food prices to the point where poor households can no longer afford to purchase food,
threatening their food security (Pinstrup-Andersen 2012).
Agricultural growth is a catalyst for broad-based economic growth and development in
most low-income countries. Very few countries have experienced rapid economic growth
without agricultural growth either preceding or accompanying it (Pinstrup-Andersen and
Pandya-Lorch 1995). Agriculture’s linkages to the non-farm economy generate considerable
employment, income, and growth in the rest of the economy. Economic growth raises
incomes, increases the asset base, and creates wealth; it enables governments and communi-
ties to better provide the enabling environment, infrastructure, and services essential for
improving food and nutrition security.
Barrett, Carter, and Timmer (2010) review how the discourse on agricultural develop-
ment has evolved. They note that the critical role of agriculture in the broader develop-
ment process was first documented by W. Arthur Lewis, who pointed out that “economies
in which agriculture is stagnant do not show industrial development” (Lewis 1954). John-
ston and colleagues (Johnson and Mellor 1961; Johnson and Kilby 1975; and Johnson and
Clark 1982) and Mellor (1966, 1976, and 1986) all saw higher productivity on small farms as
the key to rapid poverty reduction and structural transformation. Schultz (1964) made the
case for technical change in agriculture as a key driver for higher productivity. As Barrett,
Carter, and Timmer (2010) note, “If W. Arthur Lewis built the intellectual framework sup-
porting the ‘why’ of agriculture’s role in economic development, T. W. Schultz built the
framework for understanding the ‘how’ of stimulating agriculture to play that role.” Eicher
and Staatz (1998) observed that in the 1950s and 1960s many development economists
focused on analyzing how the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors interacted during
the process of economic growth. During the 1970s and 1980s attention shifted to under-
standing the rural economy, and in the 1990s to how the rural economy was linked to a
broader world market and the role of institutions.
Barrett, Carter, and Timmer (2010) highlight a few salient points. First, they find gen-
eral consensus that structural transformation is the only sustainable pathway out of
poverty. This realization hones in on the role of institutions in both defining a country’s
pattern of economic growth and distributing the benefits of that growth equally to its
citizenry. Second, the rural non-farm sector often facilitates linkages between agricul-
ture and the larger economy, linkages that make agricultural transformation essential to
overall economic development. Finally, the food security of individuals and nations
depends not only on supply side factors associated with agricultural productivity, but
equally on demand factors related to incomes, risks, health status, social protection pol-
icies, and caregiving within the household. Higher productivity in agriculture releases
capital and labor that can then be used for gains in the larger economy. Agriculture also
spurs industrialization. It provides raw materials for use by the industrial sector, pro-
vides markets for industrial outputs, and provides the exports for the foreign exchange
that is needed to import capital goods.
The Evolution of Agriculture
Modern worries about the ability to ensure food security for a booming world population
are not new. In the United States, the industrial revolution led to a massive population
increase, from 5 million in 1800 to 76 million in 1900. Previously, the thinking about the
role of agriculture had been dominated by classical theory, which viewed agriculture as a
sector with low productivity and decreasing returns which only passively provided food
and employment. In this context, agriculture had to release labor and capital for the indus-
trial sector to thrive, and technological innovation in industry occurred independently of
agriculture (Diao et al. 2007). In response to this boom in population, the discourse placed
agriculture in a more active role characterized by innovation. Farmers, scientists, and engi-
neers developed technological advances such as tractors and harvesters, and pushed
improvements in animal breeding and animal health. Agricultural research and extension
was carried out by land grant universities, which first appeared in the 1860s and focused on
teaching practical agriculture, science, and engineering. Commercial agriculture also
began to emerge during this time period with the advent of the commercial fertilizer indus-
try. When the 1930s brought on the Dust Bowl, a decade of drought and dust storms in the
Great Plains of the United States, the federal government undertook conservation projects
to prevent soil erosion and subsidized farmers so that they could afford to reduce agricul-
tural intensification.
The ideas of Thomas Malthus, who espoused the nineteenth-century theory that popula-
tion growth will inevitably outstrip the availability of food and other natural resources, were
for a long time influential in framing the discourse on agriculture and food security. The expe-
rience of the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s and 1850s, for example, was explained away as
the problem of overreliance on a single crop, the supply of which was wiped out making it
impossible to feed a booming peasant population. In reality, applying Sen’s approach to the
famine would have revealed the failings of a larger agricultural political system that reduced
Irish farmers’ landholdings to subsistence levels and pushed them into famine.
Malthusian sentiments continued into the 1950s and 1960s, when agriculture focused
solely on intensifying staple food production, primarily the staple cereals of maize, wheat,
and rice. As developing countries emerged from war and conflict, and were buffeted by pests
and droughts, agriculture was challenged to address widespread hunger. The Rockefeller
Foundation responded to the challenge by leading the formation of a global agricultural
research system based in Mexico with the aim of increasing the output (greater production)
and yields (greater production from a given area of land) of mainly wheat, but also beans,
maize, potatoes, and other staple crops. Research, science, and technology were put to work
for agriculture—to fight wheat rusts, to develop improved crop and livestock varieties, to
improve resistance to pests and diseases, to better use fertilizers and other chemical inputs,
and so forth. The eventual success of the Mexico program in developing semi-dwarf, high-
yield varieties of wheat mirrored agricultural research successes in other parts of the world,
such as rice in the Philippines and tropical agriculture in Colombia and Nigeria. In the 1960s,
the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation helped to formally establish research
centers in these four countries. A series of policy consultations with other key actors such as
the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) resulted in the founding of the Consult-
ative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in 1971.
The transfer of knowledge and seeds from the early CGIAR centers—mostly new wheat
varieties from Mexico, and subsequently new rice varieties from the Philippines—helped
catalyze the Green Revolution in India. At its most basic level, the Green Revolution was the
introduction of a package consisting of modern inputs—improved seeds, fertilizers, and
pesticides—together with a supportive economic and policy environment that included
food price stabilization policies as well as substantial investments in irrigation systems, rural
roads networks, fertilizer production, and provision of credit to farmers. The Indian govern-
ment invested heavily in the infrastructure and policies that made this possible. Assured and
remunerative marketing, under which a minimum support price for farmers is coupled with
a guaranteed procurement at that price, was a major factor in the widespread acceptance of
dwarf wheat by farmers (Swaminathan 1993).
While India was at the epicenter of the Green Revolution, the initiative spread rapidly
across much of Asia. The global population boom that followed the Green Revolution
prompted fear of a Malthusian crisis, but farmers adopted the new farming practices and
technologies to such a massive extent that cereal yields and outputs doubled between 1965
and 1990, not only pulling India and other Asian countries back from the brink of famine but
also generating food surpluses. An estimated 1.8 billion people benefited from the Green
Revolution in terms of improved access to food and increased earnings from agriculture
(Hazell 2009). The Green Revolution also worked to confirm the view of agriculture as a
growth sector on its own.
In the 1970s, agriculture evolved to include environmental and equity considerations. Sus-
tainable development issues came to the forefront, partly in response to concerns associated
with the Green Revolution such as the overuse of agricultural chemicals, the depletion of
scarce water resources, and the neglect of farmers and communities in policy-making proc-
esses. These concerns encouraged a shift away from a narrow focus on increasing staple food
productivity to a more complex perspective on agriculture and rural development. This lat-
ter approach coupled intensive agricultural practices with integrated pest management prac-
tices, improved water management practices, precision farming, and other tools and
techniques that facilitated stewardship of natural resources. Efforts were accelerated to make
the Green Revolution not only more sustainable but more pro-poor. New policies, programs,
and investments were specifically designed to integrate rural communities into decision-
making processes about their own agricultural and rural development as a way of addressing
sustainability along with equity issues. There was growing attention on land reform, espe-
cially the equitable distribution of land with secure property rights, access to credit and
financial services, and programs more geared toward small-scale farmers.
During the 1970s and 1980s, agriculture diversified out of major cereals. As a means of
improving food security and increasing farm incomes, investments were scaled up in raising
the productivity, cultivating, and marketing of non-staple and high-value crops such as leg-
umes, fruits, and vegetables as well as dairy, livestock, and fish. This period was marked by a
few widespread successes. Many countries in Asia, for example, benefited from the diffusion
of improved mung beans, with traits such as higher yields and shorter maturity times, that
reached an estimated 1.5 million farmers. The global initiative to eradicate rinderpest, a live-
stock disease capable of killing more than 95 percent of infected animals, was yet another
success that helped avoid enormous losses of milk, meat, and vital income for pastoralists.
The initiative represents the first time an infectious disease has been eliminated since the
eradication of smallpox in humans in 1977. In India, Operation Flood created a national
dairy grid and accompanying infrastructure that transformed the country from being a net
importer of dairy products to being a major player in world dairy markets (Spielman and
Pandya-Lorch 2010).
During this same time period, agriculture also moved its attention from the farm to mar-
kets. Market-driven development became a popular approach in many economies. A major
incentive for countries to pursue this approach was the introduction of structural adjust-
ment programs in order to reduce public deficits and improve balance of payments. The
terms of these structural adjustment programs often necessitated the liberalization of
national markets and a boost in private investment in the economy. In terms of the link to
agriculture, market forces were expected to contribute to agricultural development by free-
ing up seed and fertilizer markets from state-owned monopolies and by removing price-
setting policies in agricultural commodity markets to encourage more vibrant trading.
Other countries homed in on food value chains, defined as the sum of the activities and
actors that interact with a food product as it moves through research, production, storage and
processing, distribution, retailing, and marketing. A value chain is different from a supply
chain in that each activity and actor presumably adds value to the product. Value has tradition-
ally been defined in financial terms, but can also be defined according to added nutritional or
food safety value (Hawkes and Ruel 2011). During this time period, countries undertook efforts
to make value chains more efficient by closing the gaps that link farmers to markets through
traders, processors, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers. Value-chain-oriented policies
aimed to improve the incentives of farmers to increase production and consequently improve
the food security of both producers and consumers.
As the thinking about the role of agriculture in the wider economy evolved, it became
clear that agricultural development could be stimulated by policies and developments out-
side the agricultural sector. Economic reforms could change the traditional urban biases that
historically discriminate against farmers, by reducing distortionary effects of exchange rate
and lending policies on the agricultural sector, and opening new market opportunities and
leveraging trade and aid.
China provides the most compelling example. Between 1978 and 1984, China undertook a
series of reforms that transformed the country’s food and agricultural sector and reduced hun-
ger on a scale unrivaled in history (Bruce and Li 2009). The reforms effectively reintroduced
household farming after more than thirty years of collective agriculture. More than 95 percent
of China’s farmland was returned to some 160 million farm households. The reforms contrib-
uted to enormous increases in rural incomes and grain production, and a dramatic reduction
in rural poverty. In Vietnam, similar reforms between 1987 and 1993 led to the decollectiviza-
tion of agricultural production and improvement of land tenure security, liberalizing of mar-
kets, and the promotion of new economic incentives; the reforms transformed the agricultural
sector and dramatically increased food security (Kirk and Do Anh Tuan 2009).
In recent years, the development community has begun to pay more attention to the link-
ages between agriculture, nutrition, and health. There is increasing recognition that agriculture
plays a central role in the production, access, and use of nutritious and safe food. It also influ-
ences other determinants of nutrition, such as access to clean water and sanitation. Health is
now considered a major goal of food systems, in part because of the triple burden of malnutri-
tion: hunger, nutrient deficiencies, and excess calorie intake that leads to overweight and obes-
ity in many countries. In the 2010s, many donors and governments redesigned their programs
to increasingly focus on nutrition alongside hunger. The United Nations launched the Scaling
Up Nutrition (SUN) movement, the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Pro-
gram (CAADP) began looking at nutrition security, and the CGIAR launched a major new
program on nutrition and health. These developments reflect a change in thinking about agri-
culture as a tool that can bring disparate sectors together to create a healthy and safe food sys-
tem that can meet the food security needs of many.
A few major factors have enabled agricultural development to substantially improve food
security and feed billions of people. First, sustained investment in agricultural research and
development helped make the link between agriculture and food security in many coun-
tries during the past fifty years. Advances in crop breeding formed the basis for the suc-
cesses achieved during the Green Revolution. Technologies stayed ahead of pests and
diseases, and boosted yields in many parts of the world. Research on marketing systems
triggered reforms that achieved national level food security in some countries. Although it
is difficult for policy-makers and donors to make long-term commitments to science and
technology, given the long lead times involved, such investments nonetheless proved vital
in addressing global hunger.
Second, private incentives have been an important factor in increasing the likelihood of suc-
cess in agricultural development. Incentives can encourage investments in agriculture, helping
markets provide timely information that can boost production of and access to safe and healthy
foods. Different actors can be motivated to cooperate and collaborate with one another along
the entire food chain, from inputs and production to processing and marketing.
Finally, many successful initiatives emerged from localized experiments. These allowed
participants to adapt incrementally, rather than through a “big bang,” to the political and
cultural landscape. Great successes in agriculture came not only from scientific progress but
from the practical experiences of local communities. Examples include community forestry
in Nepal in the 1970s, efforts to regreen the Sahel in the 1980s, and homestead food produc-
tion in Bangladesh in the 1990s (Spielman and Pandya-Lorch 2010). In all of these cases, cre-
ating a space for agricultural experimentation and innovation helped achieve widespread
food security.
Country Experiences
The varying agricultural paths taken by different countries during the past fifty years provide
an opportunity to place the evolution of agriculture and food security, and the discourse on
this evolution, in a national context. Emerging economies offer particularly rich narratives
of how the linkages between agriculture and food security play out in the real world. India,
which grew at a rate of 4.2 percent per year from 1990 to 2005, has seen very little commen-
surate decline in child undernutrition, a paradox that remains unexplained (Gillespie and
Kadiyala 2012). In this case study, agricultural growth has not automatically translated into
food security, underlining the need to shed light on the factors that complicate this relation-
ship. The second case study follows the evolution of China, highlighting the importance of
local experimentation in designing effective agricultural policies and incentives. The Chi-
nese narrative is a success story, showing that agricultural growth can indeed translate into
reductions in hunger and an increase in food production and food security. Finally, the third
case study focuses on Ethiopia, and the efforts made there to cater to a hugely agrarian soci-
ety characterized by mostly smallholders working in vastly different agroecological areas. In
this last narrative, the relationship between agricultural growth and food security has not yet
been clarified.
India
Looking back on India’s progress in agriculture since 1947, India has gone through four dis-
tinct phases in its agricultural evolution (Swaminathan 2011):
• Phase I (1947–64): The emphasis was on the development of infrastructure for scien-
tific agriculture—establishment of fertilizer and pesticide factories, construction of
large multi-purpose irrigation-cum-power projects, organization of community
development and national extension programs, and initiation of agricultural universi-
ties. Still, the growth in food production was inadequate to meet the consumption
needs of the growing population, and food imports became essential.
• Phase II (1965–85): The emphasis was on maximizing the benefits of the infrastructure
created during Phase I, particularly in irrigation and technology transfer. The reor-
ganization and strengthening of agricultural research, education, and extension along
with the creation of institutions for providing farmers assured marketing opportuni-
ties and remunerative prices for their produce led to a quantum jump in the produc-
tivity and production of crops such as wheat and rice, a phenomenon christened in
1968 as the Green Revolution.
• Phase III (1985–2000): Organization innovations such as Technology Missions were
introduced—the Mission approach involved concurrent attention to conservation,
cultivation, consumption, and commerce. This period saw a gradual decline in public
investment in irrigation and the infrastructure essential for agricultural progress as
well as a gradual collapse of the cooperative credit system. Large grain reserves led to
a mood of complacency toward agriculture.
• Phase IV (2001 to present day): Fatigue among policy-makers resulted in stagnant
technology, extension, and production. A weak coalition government and powerful
lobby interests meant little progress in reforming policies relating to inputs, irrigation,
food prices, subsidies, and food distribution. Recent steps, however, seek to reverse
this decline, including the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee
Act. Also being discussed are policies to address the mismatch between production
and post-harvest technologies by way of improving crop storage.
The Indian enigma is the persistence of widespread undernutrition in spite of substantial

progress in agricultural production. Agricultural growth led to great strides in food production
in India, but chronic undernutrition persists. One part of the solution to this enigma likely
involves focusing on crops and livestock that have large nutritional impacts on both farmers
and consumers. Another part may involve addressing socio-economic factors that affect the
link between agriculture and nutrition, including the distribution of assets, particularly land;
the role of women; rural infrastructure; and rural health and sanitation (Gillespie and
Kadiyala 2012). The Women Farmers’ Entitlements Bill of 2011, for example, was introduced
in the Indian Parliament with the aim of establishing women farmers’ rights to agricultural
inputs, land, water, and credit, among other resources.
India will remain a predominantly agricultural country for much of the twenty-first cen-
tury, particularly with reference to livelihood opportunities. Enhancing small farm produc-
tivity and profitability will likely make a major contribution to reducing hunger and poverty.
An integrated crop–livestock–fisheries farming system is the way forward for the country.
This calls for an Evergreen Revolution (i.e. increase in productivity in perpetuity without
associated ecological harm), focused on rain-fed farming areas and crops suited to these
areas (Swaminathan 2010). The technology required has three components: (i) defending the
gains—through soil health enhancement, water harvesting and management, credit and
insurance, technology and inputs, and remunerative marketing; (ii) extending the gains—
through an appropriate mix of technology, services, and public policies; and (iii) making new
gains—through improvement in post-harvest technology, agro-processing, genomics and
gene pyramiding, and integrated asset reform aimed at equitable land distribution and utili-
zation of water.
Looking forward, the National Food Security Bill 2011 mandates the government to pro-
cure wheat, rice, and nutri-millets (often called coarse cereals). Such procurement at a remu-
nerative price is the pathway for stimulating interest among farmers to produce more. India
is also just beginning to uncover the potential agri-business, diversification, marketing and
exports, as well as increasing the value addition to food production. The country is exploring
whether, with proper protections for the poor and vulnerable, commercial agriculture can
be a catalyst for economic development.
To sum up, Indian agriculture has undergone considerable technological and manage-
ment transformation since 1947, when the country gained independence. The human popu-
lation, which was about 350 million then, has now reached 1.2 billion. There is hence no time
to relax. Jawarhalal Nehru said in 1947, “Everything else can wait, but not agriculture,” and
that message is even more relevant today.
China
During the past thirty years China has implemented significant reforms, catalyzing an agri-
cultural transformation that in turn set off an economic transformation. China has gone
through several phases in its agricultural development (Fan, Zhang, and Zhang 2002; Bruce
and Li 2009).
• Phase I (1949–52): The Communist Party launched a “land-to-the-tiller” program

wherein it confiscated land and redistributed it to peasants. Farming families were still
made to sell their crops to the government at fixed low prices and also faced substan-
tial taxes on their farming income.
• Phase II (1952–8): Production cooperatives were created and later scaled up to com-
munes. This collectivization was expected to provide a base for the developing rural
industry, an assumption that did not materialize.
• Phase III (1959–78): With full collectivization in the Great Leap Forward, a strict
system of controls was placed on price and quantity of inputs and outputs as well as
production decisions. Grain production declined, serious famine ensued, and food
shortages were widespread. The entire agricultural system was tightly controlled
and farmers had few incentives for improvement and efficiency in agricultural
production.
• Phase IV (1978–84): A few brigades in the Anuhi Province began to secretly distribute
their land among their member households, leading to a two- to five-fold increase in
production. The experiment eventually received support from Party leaders, introduc-
ing the opportunity to divide communal lands into household holdings. Thus, a shift
toward the household responsibility system wherein production teams could choose
to produce more food than the quota assigned to them, thus keeping the excess food.
While in January 1980, only 1 percent of the production teams had converted to house-
hold farming, by December 1983, 98 percent had done so. This shift was accompanied
by reforms in the state procurement system for agricultural products, with signifi-
cantly higher prices for major crops. Farmers were allowed to grow cash crops, like
vegetables, and to trade grain.
The household responsibility system created two types of surpluses in labor (due to new effi-
ciencies) and funding (for investing in local enterprises). These surpluses, along with an
assortment of old, unused collective factories, created a “perfect storm” that was seized upon
by local townships and village governments. Millions of Township and Village Enterprises
were formed using inexpensive local labor and infrastructure. This boom in rural industri-
alization eventually employed more than 135 million people, approximately one-third of the
rural labor force. The two-pronged strategy developed in China for enhancing on-farm pro-
ductivity and increasing non-farm employment opportunities through the Township and
Village Enterprises is one of the key reasons why China’s rural poverty rate is so low.
In just a few short years, the reforms increased calorie consumption among rural
people, doubled their incomes, and slashed the poverty rate from 76 percent in 1980 to 23
percent in 1985. This progress has remained relatively constant during the past few
decades. China managed to reduce its number of undernourished citizens by nearly 40
percent from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s (FAO 2011). Agricultural growth has also
remained on an upward trend. In 2010, for example, China’s total grain production
exceeded 550 million metric tons for the first time in half a century. Today, China supports
more than 20 percent of the world’s population with 98 percent overall food self-sufficiency,
an impressive feat.
Ethiopia
Ethiopia is one of the most agrarian countries in the world: only 16 percent of Ethiopians live
in urban areas, and in 2006, agriculture’s share of GDP was 48 percent, one of the highest
rates globally. Nevertheless, the country regularly experiences serious food shortages due to
low productivity, droughts, and variable rainfall.
Since 2000, Ethiopia has seen vast economic growth, mostly driven by agricultural pro-
duction. The country has invested heavily in its agricultural sector through an Agricultural
Development Led Industrialization strategy. Much of this strategy is based in previous poli-
cies, which evolved through the decades to eventually focus on access to modern inputs and
agricultural extension by smallholders, who comprise the majority of the agriculture sector
(Spielman, Kelemwork, and Dawit Alemu 2011).
• Phase I (1968–73): Ethiopia’s Imperial regime promoted Comprehensive Integrated

Package Projects, which provided modern inputs, credit, and agricultural exten-
sion, and helped cooperatives to form. The scale of these projects, however, was
too small to impact agricultural productivity or to effectively reach the majority of
smallholder farmers. Instead, policies in this period mainly served the country’s
feudal class.
• Phase II (1974–91): Under the military Derg regime, Ethiopia’s feudal system was dis-
mantled and the gap filled by peasant cooperatives, state-owned farms, and collectives.
Research and extension services, which previously had focused on specific areas, were
now extended to the entire country. However, by the end of the regime, extension was
viewed as a political instrument rather than a service provided to smallholders. In the
1980s, political instability and armed conflict, exacerbated by a sequence of rain fail-
ures, led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a catastrophic loss of livestock. The
government responded by forcibly resettling villagers, while the international com-
munity invested heavily in food aid and humanitarian relief, much of which is now
believed to have been used for military purposes.
• Phase III (1992–2000): The government pursued agriculture-led industrialization,
which introduced policies to boost the production of cereals, accelerate agricultural
growth, and attain food security. A large extension program reached approximately 40
percent of farm households. The government also liberalized markets for agricultural
products and promoted the use of seed and fertilizer packages to intensify the produc-
tion of staple crops.
• Phase IV (2001–8): Maize prices collapsed, partly because of intensified production.
Drought hindered the production of most cereals and highlighted the country’s vul-
nerability to price and weather shocks. Afterwards, though Ethiopia achieved 12 per-
cent annual growth in agricultural GDP, food price inflation soared from 2 percent in
2003–4 to 78 percent in 2007–8 (Spielman, Kelemwork, and Alemu 2011). The gov-
ernment allocated three million hectares of land for commercial agriculture and
offered an array of incentives to encourage investors, the majority of whom came
from India.
Despite investments in policies that prioritize agricultural production, Ethiopia has not yet
seen stable cereal yields, lower food prices, or less reliance on food aid. These obstacles
appear to underpin the 2010–11 drought and famine in Somalia and the Horn of Africa.
This shows that agricultural development strategies need to be tailored to local contexts in
order to achieve food security. Since the agricultural sector is characterized by smallholders
working in heterogeneous agroecological zones, policies need to focus on improving farm-

ers’ access to inputs and information and incentives to adopt and use technologies in each
area. A vibrant private sector may be well placed to provide flexibility in input and services
to a wide variety of smallholders.
Looking Forward
Significant advances have been made in improving the availability of and access to food, but
far less progress has been achieved in improving the quality of food. There is currently a shift
from the concept of food security at the aggregate level to one of nutrition security at the
level of every child, woman, and man. This is evidenced by a number of recent initiatives that
link agriculture, nutrition, and health. Opportunities to improve nutrition and reduce health
risks exist all along the agricultural value chain, from production to post-harvest processing
to marketing and trade. Interventions include biofortification (the breeding of new varieties
of food crops with improved nutritional content), and school feeding programs and home
food production (to increase consumption of micronutrient-rich vegetables, fruits, and ani-
mal-source foods). Some important tools that could help to leverage agriculture for better
nutrition and health include economic levers, which include, at the broadest level, agricul-
tural growth or overall economic growth (with the caveat that growth alone is not enough to
solve the nutrition problem); and social levers, which involve bringing people together across
sectors and within communities to work jointly toward improving nutrition and health.
Work on mainstreaming nutritional considerations in the design of cropping and farming
systems research must accelerate.
Looking ahead, agriculture will remain for many developing countries the most effective
and frequently the only viable lead sector to generate economic growth. Diversification out
of agriculture will occur in the long term, but in the short term many countries lack
alternatives.
One major challenge is to produce more and more from diminishing per capita arable
land and irrigation water resources and expanding abiotic and biotic stresses. Climate
change will put more pressure on agriculture by way of either excess or deficit of precipita-
tion, more extreme weather events, and shifting seasons. On the other hand, agriculture
can offer opportunities for mitigating emissions through carbon sequestration, soil and
land use management, and biomass production (Nelson 2009). More generally, invest-
ments in science and technology will be key, especially in the areas of agricultural research
and development, in order to keep the pipeline for innovation, discovery, and dissemi
nation full. Resources must also be targeted to nutrition-relevant projects, like work on
nutrient-rich vegetables and other crops and livestock, as almost all agricultural research
through the years has been directed toward increasing production of a few staple crops (Fan
and Pandya-Lorch 2012).
With long lead times for developing new technologies for small-scale farmers, sustaining
public investment in agricultural science and technology in the face of competing demands
for public resources will not be easy. The quick uptake of new technologies, such as bioforti-
fication, is also complicated by the need to conduct careful research on consumers’ willing-
ness to purchase and utilize new crop varieties. While the public sector is critical in directing
attention to the development of crops that can benefit the poor, the private sector can play a
significant role in scaling up successful interventions, coordinating disparate actors along
the value chain, and reaching a wide array of consumers through marketing campaigns.
Considering the different motivations of these two sectors, private–public partnerships will
be crucial in order to create win–win propositions for both producers and consumers.
Another key challenge is the ability to reach smallholders, who comprise the majority of
farmers around the world. Smallholders often cannot keep up with the rising demand for
food and face limited resources, high marketing and transportation costs, and poor access to
markets, affordable inputs and technologies, credit, and infrastructure. Creative options—
such as insurance schemes to help reduce small farmers’ risk from weather and price shocks,
group lending and contract farming to link farmers to food supply chains, and investments
in smallholder climate change adaptation—are just a few possible solutions (Fan 2011). These
and other initiatives can help smallholders increase their agricultural production sustainably
as well as achieve food security for themselves and their families.
On the macro level, the food price crisis has given way to a number of proposals meant to
smooth global price volatility and ensure the food security of the poor, who are most vulner-
able to price shocks. These proposals, some of which are already being actualized, include
the reform of biofuel policies, the expansion of social safety nets, the elimination of export
bans, the creation of an early warning food crisis system, and the establishment of a globally
managed emergency physical grain reserve.
Agriculture has evolved over the past half century from a narrow focus on staple cereals to
a wider array of crops and livestock and fisheries, from subsistence farming to commercial
agriculture, from the farm to off the farm and toward the larger economy, and from food
security to nutrition security. Agriculture has increasingly integrated gender, equity, and
sustainability considerations into its portfolio. We should look upon agriculture not just as a
food-producing machine but as the major source of skilled and remunerative employment,
the backbone of the rural livelihood system, and a powerful engine toward larger economic
growth. Still, agriculture and food security are part of a larger system that depends on effec-
tive and inclusive institutions, growing non-rural sectors, and attention to demand factors
such as incomes, health, social protection, and care practices to pull people out of poverty
and help them live long, healthy lives.
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chapter 26
water r e sou rce s: a n

evolv i ng l a n dsca pe
cecilia tortajada
Introduction
Water management in much of the world is at a critical juncture. Even when it has to
fulfill an essential role in promoting development and reducing poverty at the national
and sub-national levels, water is often scarce, polluted, mismanaged, misgoverned, and
poorly allocated. A main handicap has been that water management has often been con-
sidered an end unto itself rather than a means to an end, that end being to achieve overall
development, economic prosperity, improvement of quality of life, and environmental
conservation.
Overall, developed and developing countries are confronted with the urgent need to sup-
port the increasing demands of growing populations and of the energy, industrial, and agri-
cultural sectors, as well as to respond to environmental concerns with sources of water that
are scarce, over-exploited, or too polluted for the intended uses. In spite of its relevance in
terms of security, water is generally not regarded as a key determinant for development and
is conspicuously absent from political agendas.
At present, the fast-evolving global landscape is contributing to the complexity of the
management of water resources, as related decision making depends increasingly on other
sectors’ policies, performance, and prospects. These include the economic growth of emerg-
ing powers that are setting their own agendas in the use of natural resources at the global
level, including water; increasing urbanization, population growth, and changing consump-
tion patterns; the growing need for clean and reliable sources of water for the expanding
domestic, energy, industrial, and agricultural sectors; and the growing influence of new
actors in decision making, with players changing in number and type. Clearly, global
changes, driving forces, and water-based expectations for the myriad of uses and users
present a challenging scenario.
Global drivers of change are also adding to the many old and unresolved issues that plague
the water sector and impact development: water institutions that do not function properly,
many of them with overlapping and/or conflicting decision-making structures; legal and
water resources: an evolving landscape 449
regulatory frameworks that are outdated and unresponsive; increasing and unregulated
withdrawals for cities, industry, agriculture, and energy; a prevailing focus on increasing the
quantity of water supplied rather than reducing consumptive demand; and water prices and
tariff structures that do not consider socially desirable outcomes. The sum of these forces has
resulted in a large number of “basin closures” around the world, where every available drop
is allocated.
Conventional wisdom as it relates to the management of water resources needs to be chal-
lenged and reconsidered so that it is able to address current and future development. Look-
ing forward, the water sector will have to become more innovative and develop more effective
ways to become part of the development landscape, not as a bit player but as an active
participant.
Following is a brief review of the international efforts that have aimed to influence global
thinking on the environment, taking water into consideration.
History of Thought
Global thinking on environment and development has been influenced by a long series of
international conferences, starting with the United Nations Conference on Human Environ-
ment held in Stockholm in 1972. For the first time at a global meeting, participants discussed
the notion that environment should not be considered separately from economic and social
development, because they depend on each other. Broad environmental policy goals were
then proposed in the hopes of fostering a global response toward the goal of preserving the
human environment.
Several UN world conferences followed, including the ones on Population (Bucharest,
1974), Food (Rome, 1974), and Human Settlements (Vancouver, 1976). In 1977, it was the turn
of the Mar del Plata Water Conference. Fundamental aspects of water policies and water-
related problems were discussed by countries that had committed to work toward a new
international economic order and whose objective was to achieve collective self-reliance in
the development efforts. A direct outcome of this conference was the International Drinking
Water Supply and Sanitation Decade, 1981–90, aimed at providing universal access to safe
drinking water and sanitation by 1990. In spite of the importance of these goals, it was impos-
sible to achieve them for a myriad of reasons that included political, institutional, legal,
policy, and financial limitations.
Many other water conferences followed, among them the Global Consultation on Safe
Water and Sanitation for the 1990s, International Conference on Freshwater (Bonn, 2001),
and several World Water Fora. The 1992 International Conference on Water and Environ-
ment, held in Dublin, was expected to propose sustainable policies and action plans on water
for further consideration during the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. However, the
Dublin conference missed this extraordinary opportunity because it was organized as an
expert group meeting, rather than as an intergovernmental preparatory meeting under UN
rules. Its recommendations were thus not considered at the Rio Conference on Environment
and Development.
450 cecilia tortajada
In 2001, the German government held the International Conference on Freshwater in

Bonn. The aim was to develop recommendations to be presented at Rio+10, the World Sum-
mit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. The conclusions expressed the concern of
the international community about the situation of water resources in the world: “Ten years
after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro,
and the Conference in Dublin, and years after the world conferences in Paris and The Hague,
there is still a need for greater commitment by governments worldwide to implement the
principles agreed in relation to water resources. . . . Although governments have agreed to
implement nationally agreed principles internationally, there is a widening gap between the-
ory and practice . . .” (Tortajada 2007).
In September 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted the Millennium Declaration.
Among its numerous development goals (known as the Millennium Development Goals, or
MDGs) was to reduce by half the proportion of people unable to reach or to afford safe drink-
ing water by 2015. Meanwhile, the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Devel-
opment supported that the proportion of people without basic sanitation should also be
reduced by half by 2015.
The achievement of these goals represented a major challenge for all countries, consider-
ing that 1.1 billion people lacked access to clean water and more than 2.5 billion to sanitation
(WHO 2004). From that moment, it was clear that the economic, legal, institutional, and
political implications of this decision were immense, and that the goals would be achieved
only if governments, the private sector, civil society organizations, and national and interna-
tional development agencies undertook to act upon them.
In another global effort, in 2003 the UN General Assembly established the International
Decade for Action “Water for Life” with the overall objective of promoting a greater focus on
water issues. Last but not least came the 2012 Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Develop-
ment with its focus on green development, which revealed that many fundamental develop-
ment issues remain unresolved.
In translating the principle of sustainable development and sustainable water resources
into specific targets and actions over the years, the philosophical consensus has shattered
into a cacophony of definitional debates, interpretations, recriminations, and slogans.
Regardless of the rhetoric, and although most countries have sought to protect their image
over more than forty years of global conferences, poor management of water resources con-
tinues to have serious social, economic, and environmental impacts at the local level.
Additionally, there appear to be two realities in the world: one that countries and their
populations are facing in the field, and a very different one that seems to be the result of the
game of global target setting. In the midst of a very complex situation where billions of peo-
ple face every challenge in terms of access to clean water, the UN announced in early 2012
that the MDG on “improved” drinking water had been achieved in 2010, five years ahead of
schedule.
Unfortunately, “improved sources of water” does not mean that the water is safe and clean,
much less drinkable and free of potential health hazards. For the UN, it means that people
have access to twenty liters of water (not necessarily clean drinking water) from a source that
is improved within one kilometer of their premises. Water can come from a polluted well or
from a bucket of polluted rainwater that is unfit for drinking: it does not matter as long as it
fits the statistics.
Trends
Much of the twentieth century focused on developing water infrastructure. During the early
1990s, the focus shifted to the management of water resources, still largely along sectoral
lines. By the end of the decade, the concepts of river basin management and integrated water
resources management were being promoted, encompassing a multi-sectoral approach and
a wider range of social and environmental issues. It was recognized that many of the activi-
ties related to a broader approach to water resources management had little to gain from a
paradigm that focused mainly on the construction of water infrastructure. The new policies
were expected to take into consideration economic, social, and environmental aspects that
would result in more effective regulations, incentives, instruments, and investment plans.
Overall views then shifted from sub-sectoral and project-based approaches to broader issues
like demand management, private sector involvement, water pricing, environmental protec-
tion, and stakeholder participation.
Even though both concepts (river basin management and integrated water resources
management, or IWRM) have been part of national policies for years, their implementation
continues to represent a challenge for the different countries. Reasons include institutional
and legal frameworks that have not progressed over time; lack of coordination between sec-
tors and institutions; centralized decision making; non-availability of financial resources on
a timely basis; etc. Additionally, processes like decentralization have yet to produce the
expected outcomes, such as availability of investment funds, more efficient and effective
decision making, active participation by local institutions and water users, and encourage-
ment of local initiatives, to mention only a few.
The development discourse continues to evolve, moving now into governance and vary-
ing concepts of “good governance.” According to the UN, water governance includes politi-
cal, economic, and social processes and institutions by which governments, the private
sector, and civil society make decisions about how best to use, develop, and manage water
resources (UNDP 2004). It refers to the range of political, social, economic, and administra-
tive systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources and the delivery of
water services at different levels of society. It comprises the mechanisms, processes, and
institutions through which all involved stakeholders, including citizens and interest groups,
articulate their priorities, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations, and mediate their
differences. It emphasizes the causality of water-related problems by pointing out not only
the natural limitations of the water supply or lack of financing and appropriate technologies,
but profound failures in water governance, such as how individuals and societies have
assigned value to, made decisions about, and managed the water resources available to them
(Tortajada 2011).
The water resources landscape has been influenced by ideas, concepts, discourses, and
paradigms on specific issues that have ebbed and flowed over the years. Nevertheless, their
effective incorporation and implementation at the local level have proved to be extremely
difficult, irrespective of the country concerned. The fact that the global environmental situa-
tion (including water resources) continues to deteriorate seems to indicate that deeds have
not matched the words of national and international leaders in terms of actual implementa-
tion of policies, programs, and plans, and that much still remains to be done.
Following are some global drivers for change that are having, and are likely to continue to
have, substantial impacts on the evolving landscape of water resources. It would not be sur-
prising if they also had a decisive influence on the future direction of the history of thought.
Drivers of Change
The world has become increasingly interconnected, witnessing a historic transfer of power
from the West to the East. Unprecedented rates of economic and population growth, posi-
tive from many viewpoints, seem to overwhelm the pace of progress in curbing environmen-
tal and resource pressure. This, in turn, has negative long-term impacts on the development
processes of the countries involved.
Natural resource sectors at the global level are facing increasing demands for their out-
puts, mostly as large economies like Brazil, Russia, India, and China continue to experience
rapid growth. Sectors such as water (including quantity and quality), agriculture, energy,
fisheries, forestry, and minerals still need to put stronger policies in place to reduce the envi-
ronmental impacts of rapid growth.
OECD countries in general have addressed a number of environmental challenges by imple-
menting policies that protect human health and ecosystems, and that tend to use resources
more efficiently and aim at preventing further environmental degradation. Regarding water
resources, planning and management practices have improved during the last decades in terms
of both quantity and quality: institutions, laws, and regulations have been set; baskets of policy
alternatives for more efficient management of the resource have been formulated; point sources
of pollution (pollution discharges, mostly from industries and municipalities, that originate
from a single location, typically a pipe) have been reduced; emerging contaminants and their
implications on human and ecosystem health have been identified and studied; and stakehold-
ers’ participation is increasingly encouraged through different means. Overall, the interest in
preserving sources of water has increased in response to domestic demands that can be sup-
ported by sound investments and policy initiatives.
Even then, OECD countries face major management, institutional, and financial chal-
lenges to comply with stringent environmental regulations, control agricultural (especially
non-point) sources of pollution (those that come from oil, animal waste, pesticides, herbi-
cides, fertilizers, road salts, bacteria, sediments, and any other contaminants that end up on
the ground naturally or from human activity), and replace aging water infrastructure. For
example, to maintain current services, the OECD estimates that spending on water would
need to increase by 20 percent in France and the UK, and by over 40 percent in Japan and
South Korea. In the case of the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
estimates that an investment of $192 billion for wastewater treatment plants, pipe repairs,
and the purchase and installation of new pipes will be necessary. Overall, it is estimated that
by 2025, annual (current and investment) expenditure on water and wastewater services will
reach some $600 billion for OECD countries (half for Mexico and the United States), and
$400 billion for large emerging economies (half for China) (Kauffmann 2012).
In terms of water use, even within the OECD, some countries are more efficient than oth-
ers. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (Hutson et al. 2004), in the United States, water
use at the national level in 2000 was similar to that in the 1950s (1,383 gallons per capita per
day) and 30 percent lower than in 1975. Water use for irrigation was 8 percent less in 2005
than in 2000, and withdrawals for domestic supply (the third largest user of water at the
national level) were only 2 percent more in 2005 than in 2000.
Nevertheless, not all large economies use water efficiently. The last twenty years have wit-
nessed radical increases in the economic growth rates of several developing countries, which
in turn have put enormous pressure on natural resource utilization, often accompanied by
their continuing inefficient use.
Limited water resources for different uses have led the world to increasingly consider the
use of so-called non-conventional sources of water (e.g. desalinated sea water or treated
wastewater). Wastewater is thus increasingly considered as a resource for irrigation as well as
for direct and non-direct potable uses in several parts of the world, for example Australia,
Singapore, and the United States.
Population and Consumption Patterns

A second driver of water use is the increasing global population, living mostly in urban areas
with a decline in rural population. Much of the population growth over the next twenty years
will occur in the poorest regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (UN 2011). In contrast,
the population of the more developed regions is expected to change minimally and even
decrease if not for immigration from other countries.
The forty-eight least developed countries are likely to grow the fastest, at 2.5 percent per
year. It is predicted that the main increases in population up to 2050 will occur in only eight
countries: in descending order, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Congo, Ethiopia, the United States,
Bangladesh, and China. Together they will account for almost half of the expected increase
in global population during this period. The drawback of this situation is that water use in
these countries is already limited because of physical scarcity and poor management.
In terms of economic growth and total use of natural resources, at one end of the spectrum
are the United States and China. At the other end are the countries of sub-Saharan Africa,
which remain vulnerable to economic disruptions, population stress, political instability,
environmental degradation, and water scarcity. Despite increased demand for commodities,
of which sub-Saharan Africa is a major supplier, local populations may not necessarily expe-
rience any significant improvement over the long term. The region is thus expected to remain
at a disadvantage relative to other parts of the world. Unless the efficiency, management, and
governance practices of water use improve significantly, population growth will lead to
higher water consumption and greater pollution of surface and groundwater.
Economic growth over the past two decades has contributed to the emergence of a sizable
middle class, particularly in Asia, and a corresponding increase in resource consumption.
Assuming the growth of consumption continues at around the same rate as over the past
twenty years, by 2030 Asia will be at the forefront, accounting for some 43 percent of global
consumption. In terms of water resources, important concerns will continue to be reliable
supply of clean water for a growing population; development of infrastructure and associ-
ated social and environmental impacts; and depletion of good quality water bodies, due
mainly to increasing pollution in and around urban centers caused by very low levels of
wastewater treatment and poor disposal practices.
Energy and Water Implications

Strongly linked to water availability in terms of quantity and quality is energy production.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (USEIA) (2011), the global
demand for energy will increase by 53 percent from 2008 to 2035. Most of the increase in
consumption will be in non-OECD countries because of sustained economic growth, which
it is estimated will increase by 85 percent, compared to 18 percent in OECD economies. Fos-
sil fuels will continue to supply much of the energy used worldwide, but renewable energy
will witness the fastest growth, increasing from 10 percent of total energy use in 2008 to 14
percent in 2035.
Demand for electricity, which constitutes a growing percentage of global energy, has
increased more rapidly than consumption of liquid fuels, natural gas, or coal in all end-use
sectors except transportation. It is expected that non-OECD countries in general, and Asia
in particular, will lead annual increases of electricity consumption averaging 4 percent from
2008 to 2035. Since no large-scale electricity can be generated without water (for hydro-
power, and cooling of thermal and nuclear plants) and since the water sector is a major user
of energy (mostly for pumping), reliable sources of water would have to be available for the
production of electricity, most likely at the cost of other uses and users. Some examples are
France and the United States, where the major user of water is the electricity-generating
industry and not the agricultural or industrial sector.
In terms of hydroelectricity, Brazil and Canada are the countries where hydropower pro-
duces the largest share of electricity, with 85 percent and 60 percent respectively. For the
2008–35 period, strong growth in hydroelectric generation, primarily from mid- to large-
scale power plants, is expected in China, India, Brazil, and countries in Southeast Asia such
as Malaysia and Vietnam (USEIA 2011).
Bhutan is one country where the energy sector (mostly hydropower-based) has had a very
positive impact on the socio-economic development of the country. According to 2010 fig-
ures, with only 5 percent of hydropower potential developed, the country had the highest per
capita consumption in South Asia, with the water-based energy sector representing 19 per-
cent of GDP and 45 percent of direct internal revenues. It is also an excellent case of South–
South cooperation, where India almost entirely finances Bhutan’s hydropower developments
and purchases most of the energy produced (79 percent in 2010). Even though energy pro-
duction is so important economically for Bhutan, it is completely dependent on the some-
times very erratic monsoon rains and receding glaciers (Rinzin 2012). In Chile in 2008,
almost 40 percent of the total generation of electricity was hydropower-based. Nevertheless,
unusually hot and dry summers raised the possibility of power shortages, forcing the coun-
try to seek alternative sources of electricity.
Clearly, water requirements for the electricity sector are very important in order to meet
national and international electricity demands. Therefore, they need to be explicitly factored
into water use and management policies in order to respond to challenging long-term needs.
In countries where available water resources are already allocated, finding additional water
for electricity generation will be a very difficult task.
Not only is water required for generating electricity, but significant amounts of electricity
are required to extract, pump, transport, treat, and distribute water. An estimated 2–3 per-
cent of the world’s energy consumption is used to pump and treat water for urban and indus-
trial uses (Tortajada 2008). One example is Mexico City, where pumping stations have been
used for decades as part of the water supply, sanitation, and wastewater treatment networks,
to bring in clean water and pump out wastewater. In 2000, the National Electricity Board
estimated that one-fifth of the electricity Mexico produced was used to pump water in and
wastewater out of the capital city. Another example is the city of Dhaka, where provision of
water for domestic use depends on the availability of electricity for pumping purposes. In the
case of India, dependence is even higher, since 60 percent of the urban population and 85
percent of the rural population rely exclusively on groundwater and consequently need elec-
tricity for pumping.
Development of thermoelectric power plants has become increasingly challenging
because of trade-offs between energy, environment, and water security-related issues, as well
as land use and political considerations. In the United States, for example, thermoelectric
generation represents the largest percentage of electricity production, with coal-based power
plants accounting for about half of the electric supply at the national level. According to the
U.S. Geological Survey, thermoelectric power production in 1995 represented 41 percent of
freshwater withdrawals (water taken from a source) and 3 percent of freshwater consump-
tion (water that is not returned to the source), or more than three billion gallons per day.
Overall, thermoelectric power plants withdraw approximately 94 liters of water for each
kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, primarily for cooling. Since thermoelectric generating
capacity in the country is expected to increase by nearly 15 percent between 2008 and 2035
(depending on the technology that is used), the associated water consumption nationwide is
expected to increase from 28 to nearly 50 percent, resulting in escalating competition for
water resources (Feeley et al. 2008). One of the trends at the global level is intense competi-
tion for scarce water resources, mostly polluted, to cover the needs of increasing numbers of
uses and users.
Problems with finding adequate sources of water to generate electricity have already sur-
faced. For example, in 2006, in response to environmental and water supply concerns, an
Idaho State House Committee unanimously approved a two-year moratorium on the con-
struction of coal-fired power plants in the state. In Arizona, the government decided not to
authorize a proposed power plant because of concerns about how much water it would draw
from a local aquifer. In South Dakota in 2005, the governor called for the different parties to
discuss drought-induced low flows on the Missouri River and the impacts on irrigation,
drinking water, and power plants. Water availability is already a serious constraint for the
further development of nuclear power, not only in the United States but in many other
countries.
Water is also required for extracting oil and gas, with new sources such as oil sands and
shale gas being particularly water intensive. The hydraulic fracturing process used to pro-
duce shale gas requires significant amounts of water, and many of the areas that have been
identified as having shale gas resources in different parts of the world have limited supplies
of water. In addition to water availability, there are also concerns about the potential con-
tamination of aquifers from artificial wells or surface spills. Consequently, in the United
States, particularly New York State, development of parts of the Marcellus shale is not pro-
gressing because drilling permits are not being issued. Similarly, France has taken legislative
action to ban hydraulic fracturing, and South Africa has placed a moratorium on hydraulic
fracturing while it investigates how best to regulate it to ensure that the environment and
water resources are protected. In spite of the real and potential impacts of the above activi-
ties, economic priorities continue to prevail in both developed and developing countries.
Agriculture and Environment

Irrigation is the largest user of water at the global level (about 70 percent). Overall con-
cerns are that the amount of land and water currently available will not be sufficient to
provide enough food for the increasing global population, and that more crops will have
to be produced with less water per unit of output. This could indeed be the scenario if irri-
gation organizations, services, and techniques do not improve; if technology cannot make
irrigation techniques more efficient; and if non-conventional sources of water—such as
wastewater, desalinated sea water, and brackish water—are not explored as alternatives
for irrigation.
However, this is not the case. Water users associations have been working for decades to
improve water allocation in developed and developing countries (including Australia, the
United States, Mexico, India, and Turkey). Although their performance and results are still
mixed, these projects have enormous potential. Technology has improved efficiency of irri-
gation tremendously (an excellent example is Nebraska in the United States), while greywa-
ter in Middle Eastern countries and wastewater in India and Mexico have long been used for
irrigation purposes. They have contributed to the livelihood of millions of people, even
though their use raises serious health and environmental concerns. There are thus vast pos-
sibilities to improve the efficiency of water use in the agricultural sector, with the distinct
potential to feed the world for years to come.
Food production encompasses far more than water and land requirements: it also
involves effective policies, efficient institutions, pricing, incentives, management prac-
tices, distribution channels, improved crops, technology, etc. Moreover, if the objective is
to ensure that the world does not go hungry, the most immediate action for the public and
private sectors as well as for the general population would be to focus on food availability,
so that the food already produced can be made available to consumers. For example, India
produces 15–20 percent of the world’s fruits and vegetables, but nearly half that quantity is
lost through lack of processing, supply chain, and storage facilities. The country also loses
25–30 percent of cereal production before it can reach consumers (see Swaminathan et al.,
this volume).
The interrelations between the different sectors often result in tensions because of trade-
offs between domestic, agricultural, energy, and industry-related water uses and users,
especially when water supplies are already insufficient in quantity and quality to meet the
various demands. As for the environment, in spite of the progress made in terms of related
policies, water allocation still depends on the water that is necessary for other uses. A note-
worthy example of water allocation for the environment is the Murray-Darling Basin
Authority in Australia, which has spent millions of dollars to buy water rights from farm-
ers for use by nature. Between 2008 and 2009, water trading is estimated to have increased
Australia’s gross domestic product by $220 million and gross regional product by over
$370 million, representing an important source of revenue for regions and local commu-
nities. In fact, water trading has maintained the productive capacity within the southern
basin. It has also been beneficial to irrigators because it has offered a way to manage uncer-
tainty around seasonal water availability, and has expanded their options to cope with the
impacts of drought.
The use and misuse of water resources have serious impacts in terms of their quality, and
thus quantity, available, which will be discussed next.
Water Quality: A Limiting Factor

for Development
The perceived global scarcity of water resources does not correlate to the physical availability
of the resource, but rather to its poor management and potential to impact countries’ eco-
nomic, social, and environmental fabric. One of the most challenging issues is water quality,
where poor management has global consequences as degraded water resources are more
limited in their overall use.
Water quality concerns are present in all countries as a result of overall sources of pollu-
tion affecting surface and groundwater. While it is often claimed that the main impediment
to controlling water pollution is lack of investment funds, failed efforts to clean many river
systems point to the complexity of implementing legal and institutional frameworks as well
as water policy instruments (regulatory, economic, information, and participation-related).
Other factors are lack of coordination among institutions, missing political will, and public
apathy.
An example of failed implementation is the attempted cleanup of the Ganges River and its
tributaries. The Ganga Action Plan (GAP), introduced in 1986, was a comprehensive set of
core and non-core schemes, including sewage treatment plants to reduce point sources of
pollution, low-cost sanitation, river-front development, and electric and improved wood
crematoria for non-point sources of pollution. Despite investments of $17 billion over fifteen
years, the objectives were not achieved. There were shortfalls in the allocation of resources,
technical design flaws, problems with land acquisition, contract mismanagement, lack of
adequate maintenance, and mostly, lack of interest from the affected states (Wate 2012). In
2010 the Government of India announced a $1.5 billion project for a second attempt to clean
the river. The rest of the funds are expected to come from the five affected Indian states: Utta-
rakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. Only time will tell how success-
ful this latest attempt will be. One thing is certain: policies, management practices, and
governance considerations are essential to clean the river. Money alone will never be enough
to achieve this goal.
In China, water quality challenges have been growing for decades. Therefore, in its twelfth
five-year plan (2011–15), the Chinese government allocated $190 billion for infrastructural
development for drinking water and $156 billion for wastewater treatment. However, even
such large investments cannot assure the success of the plan. That depends rather on the
careful implementation of the individual objectives, which in turn rely on a complex web of
politics and policies.
Serious water quality concerns due to point and non-point sources of pollution are not
limited to developing countries: they also represent a serious problem in developed coun-
tries like Spain, Greece, and Portugal.
Non-point sources of pollution from agricultural activities, especially from nutrients and
pesticides, are the major and growing problem for nearly all countries. This is of particular
concern where groundwater is a major source of drinking water for human consumption.
Agricultural practices are also responsible for an increasing number of hypoxic or dead zones
in different parts of the oceans due to the over-enrichment of coastal waters, with the corre-
sponding death of biodiversity, as the chemical breakdown of nutrients absorbs available
oxygen from the water. In the United States, for example, an estimated 383 million fish were
killed along the Texas coast between the 1950s and the 2000s (Diaz and Rosenberg 2011).
There have been many global attempts to improve water quality, with mixed results. The
Republic of Korea launched a stimulus package in 2009 that allocated $30.7 billion for water
and waste management, renewable energy projects, energy-efficient buildings, and low-
carbon vehicles. In the United States, an innovative scheme for Chesapeake Bay includes
water quality trading programs that allow wastewater treatment plants to buy nutrient
“credits” generated by other plants or by farms that reduce the nutrients they release into
water bodies. Its implementation is very challenging because of the large number of stake-
holders involved, and because it could have an impact on the economic growth of the states
involved (Maroon 2011).
Increasing Participation
The involvement of an increasing number and diversity of actors outside the public sector
has been a main driver for change in the water sector. This involvement comprises both
urban and rural areas and has become global in scope.
Participation of non-state actors has completely transformed water planning, manage-
ment, development, and governance-related decision making by ensuring that benefit-
sharing mechanisms are taken into consideration. Both affected and interested actors now
interact through partnerships that, thanks to modern communication technologies, tran-
scend national boundaries. With the emergence first of non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and more recently of social media, the “who,” “how,” and “where” of decision mak-
ing in the water sector have increased in richness but also in complexity. Decision making
has shifted out of the hands of governments, moving out of the control of a single party. In
fact, it has been in response to intense pressure from NGOs that policies for infrastructure
development have broadened to include social and environment issues. The involvement of
multiple parties has resulted in greater accountability and transparency of the government
and private sector actors, although not necessarily of the NGOs themselves, an issue that
remains to be resolved.
As emerging donors, China, India, Turkey, and Brazil comprise a new set of actors playing
an increasing role in the water sector. Their importance is due not so much to the amount of
aid they are disbursing as to the new roles they are playing, challenging the traditional
“North–South” aid architecture and broadening it to “South—South” cooperation based on
mutual national interests. This emerging architecture is modifying the sphere of influence of
donor countries, and challenging the rules under which aid is normally provided (see
Kharas, this volume).
Of these emerging donors, the most proactive has been China. Chinese aid to Africa, Latin
America, and Southeast Asia has increased from less than $1 billion in 2002 to an estimated
$25 billion in 2007 (Lum et al. 2009). It is claimed that China’s investments in Africa and
Latin America serve the country’s long-term economic interests via infrastructure, public
works, and natural resource development, while those in Southeast Asia reflect longer-term
diplomatic and strategic objectives.
Overall, it is China that has been investing more heavily in the water sector through its
support for infrastructure in the several countries, particularly in terms of dams. At present,
its support for water infrastructure outweighs that of all the development banks (including
the World Bank). In 2008, Chinese companies were involved in 97 dam projects in 39 coun-
tries, and by 2011 the country was supporting the development of 251 dams in 68 countries
(Tanaka 2011).
A concern at the international level is that social and environmental considerations may
not be an important part of dam construction guidelines when funds come from China, in
contrast to financial support from development banks, which is normally accompanied by
stringent requirements based on past experience (World Commission on Dams 2000).
A fact is that China is rewriting the terms and conditions of development aid in the field
of water development, and the rest of the world is having to take notice of this new major
actor.
Water Resources and Development
As water resources are so vital for overall economic and social development, and thus secu-
rity, of any country and any region, the question remains as to why their efficient manage-
ment has been so widely neglected when many countries are facing unprecedented problems
of scarcity and continuing deterioration.
Decisions regarding policy making, management, development, and governance of water
resources do not originate exclusively from the water sector but from the interactions
between the different sectors. It is actually in these interactions that the potential for coop-
eration and improvement exists, that discussions have to be carried out, alternatives have to
be discussed, and trade-offs have to be decided (Tortajada 2011).
For example, sub-Saharan Africa, an arid and semi-arid region, is, and is expected to
remain, the most vulnerable region in the world not only because of water scarcity and poor
water management, but because of economic disruption, population stress, and political
instability. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, water resources policy and
management are comparatively better, but the governments’ constrained capacity to manage
natural resources, including water, leads to non-compliance of laws and regulations and to
further deterioration of the resources. Other serious constraints include inefficient public
expenditure on water services and related projects, subsidy regimes that do not promote
organizational capacity growth, water organizations that do not attract and retain staff with
the skills required for efficient service delivery, and legislation that lacks the necessary imple-
menting instruments. Within the MENA region, Yemen is one of several countries where
institutional reforms for water supply and sanitation have been hampered by political unrest.
The reforms in the water sector have sought to improve water supply and sanitation services
for an increasing population (20 million people according to the 2004 census) and enhance
the representation of local authorities and communities in the management of water utilities
(Gerhager et al. 2008).
Lack of natural water availability can constrain development, but not when there are
platforms in terms of institutions, laws, investment funds, infrastructure, and human
capacities. One example is Singapore, whose broad vision for water resources has relied
on holistic planning that goes well beyond the boundaries of the water sector to focus
on the overall development of the city-state. Policy making has followed the “think
ahead, think again, and think across” philosophy that proposes a comprehensive, holis-
tic vision for the management of water resources. Within this philosophy, decision
making considers possible future events (“think ahead”), re-evaluates and modifies
decisions taken in the light of different scenarios (“think again”), and looks for experi-
ences and know-how worldwide with the objective of enriching its pool of knowledge
(“think across”). The importance of universal principles in the management of water
resources has long been recognized in the city-state. Nevertheless, a pragmatic
approach has prevailed, and concepts and ideologies have been valued only for their
usefulness in real terms.
Much of the world has been trapped for decades in the concepts of sustainable develop-
ment, integrated water resources management, and recently, green growth, with inaction as
an all-too-frequent result. These concepts have permeated the development discourse with-
out necessarily having visible impacts on natural resources management practices, water
included. This is not necessarily because of the concepts themselves, but because of the com-
plexity of their implementation, which involves institutional, legal, regulatory, financial,
social, and environmental considerations. They collapse under their own weight rather than
inspiring practical action in response to the reality facing each country. In contrast, Singa-
pore paid attention not to the concepts themselves but to the search for long-term alterna-
tives for water resources within overall development. This comprehensive policy making
process has propelled the city-state along the path to economic prosperity, improved quality
of life, and environmental conservation.
There is no doubt that water—for human use and for the energy, agriculture, and environ-
ment sectors—will be one of the most critical resource issues of the coming decades. There-
fore, paradigms for its policy making, management, governance, and development need to
be reassessed and modified on a constant basis within an overall societal and development
context. This is what Singapore has aimed at, with lessons worth analyzing in much of the
developed and developing world.
Conclusion
In the field of international development, it has long been recognized that there are major
gaps between current paradigms and those that may be necessary to address rapidly chang-
ing conditions. Poverty is both a cause and an effect of environmental degradation, and soci-
eties living in poverty will not have the means or incentives to make their environment an
important consideration. Similarly, even in a scenario of robust economic growth, increased
income and improved environmental quality are not always related, since more affluent
countries and citizens may not necessarily be concerned about protecting their environment
and natural resources, including water.
There is no universal blueprint for a transition to a sustainable society—all the more rea-
son why innovative and implementable policies are needed to reduce persistent poverty and
environmental degradation all over the world. In the water sector, policy making is more
complex now than ever before in history because of the extent of interdependence and inter-
linkages between countries, sectors, users, and uses. For it to be effective, policies need to
reach beyond the sector into a changing environment that becomes more intricate with
time.
Contrary to what would be expected, the influence of global events on water resources
policy making, management, development, and governance does not always result in new
and innovative ideas but in a homogenization of them. The water community has often set-
tled for the lowest common denominator in terms of thoughts, concepts, and innovations,
many of which have failed to provide feasible solutions. The end result has been that, while
the complexity of the management of water resources has increased exponentially, related
paradigms have improved only incrementally.
The need to address a very broad range of societal challenges cannot be met only by nar-
rowly focusing on strategies within one sector, such as water. It requires instead addressing
diverse systems of governance, challenging financial landscapes, promoting evolving tech-
nologies, and learning to cooperate with a myriad of governmental and non-governmental
actors under competing social, economic, and political priorities at the national and interna-
tional level. Above all, long-term policies require instilling new mindsets with the capacity
to respond to changing conditions and new interdependencies, a fact that is still to be
acknowledged within much of the water and development communities.
The changing world order and its associated impacts require a proactive attitude that
rejects old thoughts and concepts whose implementation has proved to be a serious problem
in the past: if they didn’t work in the known environment, they are unlikely to work in an
environment where the only certainty is change. Crises provide the opportunity to challenge
the unchallenged. The time may have come to engage in the construction of a new series of
thoughts that aim at holistic long-term visions for water resources. In the final analysis, it
will be the strong, sustained commitment of leaders and societies, and their willingness to
challenge prevailing wisdoms, that will contribute to development.
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chapter 27
th e ru r a l
tr a nsfor m ation
julio a. berdegué, tomás rosada,
and anthony j. bebbington1
Introduction
About 3.3 billion people live in the rural areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.2 An addi-
tional 1.3 billion reside in provincial towns and small and medium cities,3 most of which are
functionally entwined with their surrounding rural areas by their economies and labor mar-
kets, their social networks, their culture, and the proximate environment that they share.
These 4.6 billion people (two-thirds of the world’s population) control about 60 percent of the
world’s arable land and produce about two-thirds of our food and non-food agricultural prod-
ucts (by value).4 The bulk of our land-based global biodiversity lives with or immediately next
to these people. Agriculture and deforestation in the developing countries are responsible for
up to 28 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted on our planet, but rural areas also contain
the world’s most important carbon sinks, and most areas targeted for carbon capture are also
rural. About 1 billion poor people (70 percent of the world’s population, living on less than
US$1.25 a day) live in areas that are officially considered rural; to this we should add the
poor living in provincial towns and small and medium cities that should be considered part
of contemporary rural societies (OECD 2006). These places and societies are undergoing
change that is unprecedented in speed, depth, and the number of countries and people
involved,5 as well as in the potential of such change to do damage to our world, or—if governed
appropriately—to contribute to a much enhanced global society and to our planet.
In this chapter we will examine key features of this change process while reviewing the
evolution of ideas that have guided its analysis and inspired policy design. The main message
that will emerge is that the rural transformation is a comprehensive process of societal
change, driven by global and homogenizing forces that interact with localized structures,
institutions, and actors to produce uneven patterns and outcomes of development.
In the next section we introduce the concepts of “rural” and “rural transformation.” We look
at some of the key global drivers of rural change and go on to discuss institutions, structures,
464 julio a. berdeguÉ, tomÁs rosada, and anthony j. bebbington
and human agency as the factors that explain the unevenness of rural societies and rural
change. We conclude with some ideas for future work.
Definitions
We define the rural transformation as a process of comprehensive societal change whereby

rural societies diversify their economies and reduce their reliance on agriculture; become
dependent on distant places to trade and to acquire goods, services, and ideas; move from
dispersed villages to towns and small and medium cities; and become culturally more simi-
lar to large urban agglomerations. Despite these common trends, the rural transformation
within different countries has different outcomes in terms of economic growth, social inclu-
sion, and environmental sustainability. While global forces drive this transformation, they
are mediated by localized social structures and institutional frameworks, and local societies
at any given time have different potentials to do and see things—that is, they have different
levels of human agency.
The rural transformation is about rural societies changing rather than disappearing.
Rural transformation is the reorganization of society in a given space, rather than about a
space that empties as people and economic activity move away. The rural transformation is
embedded within a wider process of structural change that involves the whole of a country
and that sees a decline in the relative weight of agriculture in the overall economy, a corre-
sponding increase in industry and services, migration of rural people to cities, and a transi-
tory period of rapid demographic growth (Timmer and Akkus 2008). However, this process
transforms rather than destroys rural societies, and in this chapter we are therefore con-
cerned with the changes that take place in the rural space as such wider structural changes
unfold.
“Rural development” refers both to the applied study of change in rural societies6 and to
the practice of changing such societies. In either sense, the standpoint of the policy analyst or
practitioner is oriented by normative views that usually include elements of economic
growth, social inclusion, political democratization, and environmental sustainability.
Our definition depends on how the content of “rural” evolves with the ongoing transfor-
mation. By “rural” we understand a society and the space it occupies, where agriculture and
other primary activities account for a significant proportion (but not necessarily the major-
ity) of land use, employment, income, and economic output, and where population densities
are distinctly lower than those of large cities in the same country. This is a broad definition
that includes the “deep rural” areas with very low population densities, distant from major
cities, where almost every household has at least one member employed in agriculture or
other primary activities. It also includes the provincial towns and small and medium urban
centers that are functionally linked to a “deep rural” hinterland, where agriculture and other
primary activities still account for a significant share of employment, and where many of the
services and industries are also directly related to primary production.
Given this definition within any region or country, there is a gradient from “purely rural”
to “purely urban,” with an important intermediate range of places that are a combination of
both. This allows the concept of “rural” to evolve with the changing nature of rural societies.
the rural transformation 465
For example, European rural areas today are very different from what they were a hundred
years ago, and they also differ from contemporary rural areas elsewhere, such as in Nepal.
Nevertheless, to the European citizen a rural area is distinctly rural, even though that does
not mean, today, that its population is mostly employed in agriculture (in fact, starting in the
1970s European manufacturing relocated to rural areas (Keeble, Owens, and Thompson
1983)), or that its inhabitants lack access to basic services or are isolated from the general
events of their respective countries.
The rural transformation is, in essence, a process whereby the sharp economic, social,
and cultural differences between rural and urban gradually blur and bleed into each other
along a continuous gradient. In a contemporary rural village such as Mutambu, in
Burundi, you will find elements that are “purely rural”: for example, every household in
the village practices agriculture. But you will also find characteristics that until a few years
ago one would have found only in urban places: many children attend school and have
access to some degree of health services; many households have a mobile phone, and
almost everyone owns a radio and is informed about current events. Men and women
derive much of their income from non-farm jobs, and the young people are fans of the
same football teams as children in Chile, Italy, and the USA who have been raised in urban
environments.
By the same token, a provincial city such as Latur, in Maharashtra, India, with a popula-
tion of 400,000, has a number of features (such as, for example, its thirty institutes of
higher education) that tell us that it is undisputedly an urban location. However, at the
same time, it is intimately interdependent with its surrounding rural region as its economy
is based on the production, processing, and trade of pulses, sugarcane, soybean, and fruits.
Indeed, without agriculture it would lose most of its urban jobs. Both the Mutambus and
the Laturs of this world are part of the rural transformations that are taking place in the
global South.
The notions of what is rural and what constitutes rural change have evolved over time.
As one would expect, the contents of the definition have been heavily influenced by the
dominant or competing meta-discourses on development: structuralism, modernization,
dependency or Marxist theories, endogenous development, the Washington Consensus,
neo-institutionalism . . . each of these discourses has left its mark on the study of rural socie-
ties and on the practice of rural development.
Between the end of the second World War and the 1970s, the notion of “rural” was associ-
ated with “agriculture” (including artisanal fisheries, forestry, cattle husbandry, and pasto-
ralism). The rural transformation was synonymous with the structural changes experienced
by countries as a whole, as they “left behind” agriculture and moved toward economies based
on industry and services. Urbanization was seen as closely associated with this change, as
people moved from the places where agriculture was practiced to those where industry and
services were located. Rural development policies during this time were fused with those
aimed at the modernization of agriculture, as it was understood that the growth of the prin-
cipal economic activity was the gateway to improvements in the well-being of rural popula-
tions. The Green Revolution, one of the most transformative and large-scale policy
innovations that rural areas have ever experienced, is iconic of this period.7 The works of
Johnston and Mellor (1961), Lipton (1968), Schultz (1968), and Hayami and Ruttan (1971) are
classical references for the student of this period. The 1982 World Development Report (World
Bank 1982), for example, proposed an almost exclusively agricultural agenda to reduce rural
poverty in the developing world. The transitions that had taken place in the advanced West-
ern societies were seen as the model to be imitated; economists from the North would go to a
developing country and the deviations from the developed country model would largely
determine the policy prescriptions.
Starting in the 1970s the concept of “rural” begins to take distance from its strict identi-
fication with agriculture. One line of intellectual and policy development departed from
the realization that small and resource-poor farmers often faced insurmountable chal-
lenges in the process of agricultural modernization. Under the umbrella of Farming Sys-
tems Research (FSR), social scientists, economists, and agronomists began to work on
issues of intra-household dynamics and equity, markets and policy, and historical contexts
(Sebillote 1974; Collinson 2000; Mazoyer and Roudart 2006). Led by Chambers (1983),
others began to address issues of power and social participation. Despite their origin with
a focus on agriculture, these early ideas evolved and provided much of the intellectual
background to sustain the development of the “Sustainable Rural Livelihoods” approach
or framework (Carney 1998). By then, diversified economies and inter-sectoral linkages,
rural–urban linkages, gender relations, markets, environment, and policy and institu-
tional contexts had gained firm root in any good analysis of rural issues; the relevant units
of analysis were no longer limited to the farm and the household, but encompassed
broader, interacting systems.
A second line of intellectual development also emerged in the 1970s, through the concept
of integrated rural development (IRD). IRD projects focused on “community well-being,” in
contrast with the agricultural focus of FSR or its francophone equivalent, recherche-dévelop-
pement. IRD was an operational approach to project design and implementation that never
had a clear conceptual underpinning. Yet paradoxically, it has continued to have an indirect
intellectual influence despite its operational failures and decline as the preferred approach to
rural development starting in the mid-1980s. Most assessments agree that the shortcomings
of IRD can be attributed to the coordination failures arising from the multiple, diverse, and
ambitious objectives that a typical project aimed to achieve simultaneously, acting through
large numbers of components and agents. However, the practice of IRD left important les-
sons and inspired new “area development” or “place-based development” approaches that
gained traction after the mid-1980s. These approaches include “community-driven develop-
ment” (pioneered in Brazil and favored by the World Bank and other international agencies
such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development), “territorial development”
(which evolved from an original inspiration in European policies and is now widely used in
Latin America), and a plethora of other experiences practiced around the developing world
under the generic label of “local development.”
What is clear today is that rural, the rural transformation, and rural development are
no longer synonymous with agriculture, agricultural modernization, or agricultural
development. The distinction becomes greater as countries develop. The 2008 World
Development Report, titled Agriculture for Development (World Bank 2007), placed devel-
oping countries in three categories based on the share of agriculture in the national econ-
omy and of rural poverty in total poverty: “agriculture-based,” “transforming,” and
“urbanized.” According to this classification, only 14 percent of the world’s rural popula-
tion live in agriculture-based countries such as Rwanda, while 77 percent are in trans-
forming countries such as India, and 9 percent are in urbanized developing countries like
Brazil. Only in the agriculture-based countries does it continue to make sense to think of
rural societies and the rural transformation using a sectoral, that is, agricultural, concep-
tual lens or policy toolkit. In the following section we will discuss the global forces that
are responsible for driving rural societies away from their original characteristic as agri-
cultural communities.
Global Drivers of the Rural

Transformation
Despite important regional, national, and local idiosyncrasies, the rural transformation is driven
by factors that are active across the globe. In our opinion, three of these factors are particularly
important: (i) The diversification of rural economies away from an almost complete reliance on
agriculture, together with (ii) the progressive globalization of agrifood systems, transform the
economic base of the rural economy and the livelihood strategies of individuals and households,
as well as the conditions under which they and rural organizations, communities, and firms
engage with the economic processes of their own country and beyond; (iii) The urbanization of
rural regions reduces and eventually eliminates the relative isolation in which rural people have
lived for centuries. It broadens their access to public services, puts them in touch with new ideas,
brings in new social actors, elites, and coalitions, and increases the frequency and diversity of
interactions among rural people and between them and outsiders. The development of roads
and telecommunications services is an additional factor that is essential to the other three, for
there can be no diversification of the economy, no globalization of agrifood markets, nor urban-
ization of rural regions, if people cannot move around with relative ease and safety and if goods
and services cannot be traded beyond local communities. These global forces interact and rein-
force each other. Economic diversification stimulates and is supported by the agglomeration of
people, organizations, and firms in towns and cities, and that in turn makes it easier to develop
effective and stronger linkages with global agrifood systems.
These forces are global in scope, despite the fact that at any given point in time different
countries will be experiencing them at different strengths and in different ways. Going back
to the typology of the 2008 World Development Report, most rural areas of an agricultu
rally-based economy will demonstrate only incipient economic diversification, globalization
of agrifood systems, urbanization, and access of rural people to roads and telecommunications,
compared with a country in the “transforming” or “urbanized” category.
Diversification of Rural Economies

As countries develop, not only do the shares of agriculture and other primary activities,
industry, and services change across the whole economy; similar changes happen within
rural societies. The changing composition of rural household income demonstrates the
shifting importance of farm- and non-farm activities in the local economy:8 rural China
went from 17 percent non-farm income in the early 1980s to 40 percent in the late 1990s;
rural Tanzania, from 11 percent in 1991 to 46 percent in 2000; and rural Mexico, from 43 per-
cent in 1997 to 67 percent in 2003. It has been estimated that the shares of non-farm income
in total rural household income in the late 1990s was 47 percent in Latin America and 51 per-
cent in Asia. Even in Africa, Barrett, Reardon, and Webb (2001) cite different sources that
estimate that non-farm sources accounted for as much as 40 to 45 percent of average rural
household income during the 1990s. Rural women have high participation in the non-
agricultural sectors of diversified rural economies, although often in less lucrative activities
such as small-scale commerce and cottage industries.
Haggblade, Hazell, and Reardon (2007) summarize the state of the art with respect to the
emergence and transformation of the non-farm sector in rural economies, and what follows
is largely based on their work. The process can take place under two broad scenarios: one
catalyzed by increasing agricultural productivity in some regions, the other observed in stag-
nant rural areas.
Under the first set of circumstances, rising labor productivity in the agricultural sector
releases workers who can then undertake non-farm activities. Simultaneously, a share of the
increasing farm income (due to productivity gains) is invested outside agriculture, for exam-
ple, in commerce of agricultural products or in small-scale manufacturing of low-value
goods. The higher income also allows the same households to buy more non-food items.
Increased non-farm income can allow new investments in the farm economy, thus substitut-
ing for imperfect or missing financial markets that affect agriculture particularly hard in
developing countries. Growing demand (due to increased income) stimulates diversification
and, eventually, specialization of different households in different activities and in different
combinations of farm and non-farm work. Growing trade follows from specialization. The
growing number of people involved in services and manufacturing supports the growth of
towns and cities, and the agglomeration of economic activity becomes, in itself, a force that
attracts new investment and new workers. Agricultural workers respond to the growing
demand for labor in the towns and cities sometimes by relocating, and sometimes by estab-
lishing labor markets linking towns and hinterlands and involving workers commuting daily
or seasonally. Over time, both the farm and the non-farm activities become more sophisti-
cated and productive.
We suggest that the model summarized by Haggblade, Hazell, and Reardon (2007) is,
however, dependent upon relatively equitable access to land, such that surplus from growing
agricultural productivity is to a large extent captured, saved, spent, and reinvested locally.
This is why this model of a virtuous cycle has been observed in the Green Revolution regions
of Asia, and in selected parts of Latin America and Africa that for historical reasons had a
large class of small- and medium-sized locally-based farmers.
The growth of “township and village enterprises” in China is a good example of this model.
The explosion in the number and economic importance of these enterprises since the
reforms of the late 1970s is credited with making an important contribution to the rapid
development of that country in the years immediately following initial political reforms.
In about fifteen years, the number of township and village enterprises increased from 1.5
million to 23 million, and their workers grew five times to a peak of about 135 million, while
the value of their annual output rose 37 times to over US$300 billion, producing about 40
percent of China’s exports (Han 2010).
In the case of stagnant rural regions, processes are far less positive. What we see there is a
process of outmigration of poor rural people who can no longer sustain their livelihood on
the basis of subsistence agriculture, as pressure on the land grows because of population
growth, natural resource degradation, and declining soil fertility. While many people migrate
to distant regions, others take refuge in low-pay, low-productivity non-farm work, much of
it in the form of rudimentary cottage industries. Elbers and Lanjouw (2001) report about
half a million non-farm rural enterprises in Ecuador in the mid-1990s, each of them employ-
ing on average 1.4 family members, with the largest group engaged in petty commerce. In
Ethiopia, in 2003 there were 975,000 cottage and handicraft establishments, employing 1.3
million people (Ayele et al. 2010). Small towns do emerge but often lack sufficient stimulus to
grow much. A more diversified, but low-income, high-poverty rural region is the outcome of
this type of process. Such conditions may change rapidly, and often dramatically, if large-
scale investors come to these regions to develop new activities, attracted by the low value of
land and by the fact that local actors are socially and politically too weak to oppose alterna-
tive uses of natural resources. Such changes are not necessarily for the better, and to some
extent recent literature on “land grabs” has begun to document such transformations (Jour-
nal of Peasant Studies 2012).9
Globalization of Agrifood Systems

While the rural transformation involves the diversification of the rural economy, agriculture
continues to be a highly important activity. Decades ago, the agrifood systems of much of the
developing world were local and fragmented, and agriculture in many places was predomi-
nantly a subsistence activity. Today very few rural places share those characteristics. As a
general rule, agriculture, even in poor countries, is now linked at least partially to markets
through product, services, and labor networks that extend from sub-national to national
and intercontinental trade.10
From the 1950s through the 1970s, governments led food modernization policies and pro-
grams, investing in municipal wholesale markets, parastatal processing firms, and state-run
retail chains (Reardon et al. 2009). As a result, fragmented markets gradually gave way to
regional and national networks with a few wholesale markets in provincial and national cap-
itals as the central nodes. These networks grew in importance when conditions such as rural
roads, electrification, and other services and infrastructures improved enough to allow the
trade of higher-value perishables over longer distances. Cross-regional trade stimulated the
emergence of specialized production, and this fed back into the process of rural economic
diversification discussed in the previous section.
Starting in the 1980s and as an integral part of economic liberalization strategies and
structural adjustment programs, a new phase of change in agrifood systems rapidly took
off. One consequence was the doubling of international food trade, but there has also
been a remarkable, if less visible, transformation driven by the rapid expansion of mod-
ern food retail—the so-called “supermarket revolution” (Reardon and Berdegué 2002).
According to Reardon et al. (2009: 1717), this transformation has been “characterized by
consolidation, multinationalization, specialization/differentiation, and organizational
and institutional change via the rise of vertical coordination . . . and private grades and
standards.”
This revolution began in the 1980s in the richer countries of Latin America, followed by
subsequent waves in East and Southeast Asia, then Central America and other parts of
Asia including China, then Southern and Eastern Africa, and finally South Asia. Within
each country the pattern is usually the same, with the process first affecting services to the
middle- and high-income classes in the main cities, but quite rapidly moving to secondary
cities and eventually to towns and villages.
The growing presence and power of global food retailers is driven by a number of demand
and supply factors (Reardon, Timmer, and Berdegué 2004). Demand-side factors include
increasing real income of a growing middle class in many developing countries, urbaniza-
tion, and the increased opportunity cost of women’s time. On the supply side, economic lib-
eralization and changes in market protection and foreign direct investment policies were
crucial for the arrival in developing countries of multinational agrifood processors and
retailers. These firms had the capital and know-how to make use of advanced logistic
and inventory management, which were indispensable to establish sophisticated grades and
standards systems and to centralize procurement, while at the same time cutting costs.
Through product differentiation (i.e. grades and standards) and lower prices, these firms
were able to rapidly establish a growing presence in developing regions, often buying out the
leading domestic firms. At the same time, the presence of these firms put pressure on domes-
tic players to adjust or perish. This adjustment involved adopting institutional and organiza-
tional principles that were the same as or similar to those of the new dominant firms. Market
forces are supported by public policies, some of them general in scope (e.g. foreign direct
investment) but others quite specific (e.g. programs to promote contract agriculture linking
producers, processors, and retailers).
These changes reach the rural areas via the concomitant transformation of food procure-
ment systems, which, across developing regions, has involved three shifts that have radical
implications for farmers: (i) from public to private standards of food quality and safety; (ii)
from spot market relations to vertical coordination mechanisms; and (iii) from store-specific
local procurement to centralized procurement using distribution centers. All of these shifts
translate into profound technological, organizational, and managerial changes at the farm
level (Reardon et al. 2009).
The revolution in the agrifood systems brought globalization to the door of developing
world farms. Modern wholesalers, processors, and retailers source primarily from others
when they have the choice. They buy from small farmers when medium or large farmers do
not produce certain products or in contexts where there are very few large farms. When
companies do buy from small farmers, they will look for those with access to good roads and
irrigation, which are in this context more important than area of land, as long as producer
associations can supply sufficient volume. Most evidence shows that small farmers partici-
pating in the modern food industry have greater net earnings per unit of land or of volume of
product sold than those operating only in traditional markets (Reardon et al. 2009). Yet, a
concurrent trend that has very significant implications for the rural transformation is the
widespread concentration and transnationalization of agrifood markets that has excluded
huge numbers of resource-poor and even small and medium farmers and traders.
Urbanization
From von Thünen (1826) to Krugman (1991) and including Marshall (1920), Christaller
(1966), Lösch (1967) and Jacobs (1969), economic geography and economics have convinc-
ingly shown that urbanization is an integral part of the development process. In this section
of the chapter, however, we are not looking at the process of urbanization in a country as a
whole. With our focus on the rural transformation, we will explain specifically the urbaniza-
tion that takes place within rural areas, while accepting without reservation that the rural
transformation is part of nation-wide processes of structural change that involve the reloca-
tion over time of millions of people to distant urban centers that are not part of the rural sec-
tor. What do we mean by “urbanization of the rural areas?”
The three large developing regions, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, are experiencing a
rapid decline in what each country officially defines as rural populations, at a rate of between
1 and 2 percent per year over the period 1985–2015. Latin America already has fewer than 20
percent of its people living in what are officially described as rural areas, and in fewer than
twenty years from now Asia and Africa will have crossed the 50 percent threshold. But where
is the rest of the population? It is often assumed that they have all moved to large cities, pop-
ulating the vast slums of places like Mexico City, Mumbai, and Lagos. Less remarked upon is
that numerous small and medium urban centers (here defined as those with fewer than
500,000 inhabitants)11 are growing vigorously in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, at a pace
that is as fast as or faster than the rate of population growth of large urban agglomerations
and mega-cities.
In Latin America the share of the total population living in small and medium-sized pro-
vincial towns and cities is already 40 percent. In contrast, in this developing region—as hap-
pened before in the USA, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand—we already observe a
stabilization and, in several countries, a decline in the share of the total population that
resides in large cities, at a level around or below 50 percent, while provincial small and
medium urban centers continue to expand quite rapidly. This pattern is consistent with
Williamson’s (1965) hypothesis of an ∩-shaped curve between growth in per capita income and
urban agglomeration: in the early stages of development, agglomeration economies drive a
cumulative process that favors greater urban concentration. As cities grow, agglomeration
diseconomies and congestion costs begin to accumulate and favor dispersion of economic
activity among more but smaller urban locations.
We do not know for sure if or when Africa and Asia (where large cities are still growing in
their share of total population) will follow this same pattern in which the population share of
large cities stabilizes, “deep rural” areas continue to decline, and small and medium urban
centers grow in relative importance. In each of these two regions the share of population in
provincial towns and small and medium cities is already above 20 percent, and is growing at
a pace that resembles that of Latin America in the 1950s to 1970s.
The relative importance of these provincial small and medium urban centers depends on
the degree of urban concentration, that is, the degree to which the urban population locates
in a very small number of very large cities.12 Over one-third of the population of Angola lives
in the largest three cities, compared with 19 percent of Brazilians and 13 percent of Pakistanis.
Different African countries show quite distinct levels of urban concentration, even for simi-
lar levels of urbanization (e.g. Tanzania, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of
Congo have similar levels of urbanization, at 26, 31, and 34 percent urban population, respec-
tively, but their cities with one million people or more house 29, 16, and 51 percent of all
urban dwellers). If the country-wide urbanization process follows a pattern of urban con-
centration, the result is a very different kind of rural transformation than when the overall
urbanization process is distributed among a larger number of small, medium, and large cities.
Christiaensen and Todo (2009) argue that the latter type will lead to more socially inclusive
growth, compared to highly concentrated urbanization.
The emergence of these provincial small and medium urban centers, and their linkages
with deep rural areas, is a critical feature of the rural transformation and of contemporary
rural societies in the global South (Tacoli 2006). These urban places and their rural hinter-
lands are functionally intertwined in rural–urban territories. As countries develop, more
and more of the rural population lives in these rural–urban territories. In Mexico, for exam-
ple, 7 percent of the population lives in 554 “deep rural” territories that lack even a small
town, and 43 percent in 399 rural–urban territories with a small to medium provincial city
(population up to 250,000). The functional linkages between urban centers and their rural
hinterlands are grounded in labor, product, and services markets; public service provision;
social networks; and environmental services. People who live in the rural areas of the terri-
tory may commute to work or study in the urban center, and urban men and women may
work in the fields during peak agricultural seasons. Rural dwellers shop in the nearby town,
and urban merchants rely on those consumers to keep their businesses alive. Prosperous
small and medium farmers invest part of their profits to open a small shop in the nearby
city. The city attracts and retains skilled workers, technicians, bureaucrats, managers, teach-
ers, and doctors. Local radio stations, provincial newspapers, and technical schools are
established, and organizations open local and regional offices, providing sources of new
ideas.
All these changes give birth to social and political coalitions that would be unimaginable
in a landscape that is purely agrarian. Urban centers connect rural societies with the outside
world in ways that simply do not occur when the most populated place is a village of a few
hundred or, at best, a few thousand individuals. In summary, the emergence and further
development of rural–urban territories has the effect of diffusing what once were sharp eco-
nomic, social, and cultural distinctions between urban places, people, and societies, and
rural ones.
And yet, despite these enormously powerful global forces, rural societies are and remain
heterogeneous. Why?
Uneven Rural Development
If the global forces discussed above operate across all regions and countries and are homog-
enizing factors that reduce many critical differences between rural and urban, why are proc-
esses of rural change so uneven? In particular, how and why do different patterns of rural
change lead to uneven combinations of economic growth and social inclusion (changes in
poverty and in different forms of inequality)?13 Clearly there must be additional forces at play
that have a differentiating effect on the patterns and outcomes of rural change and that drive
the spatial distribution of rural transformation.14
Neoclassical economic geography sees such unevenness as an unavoidable element in
gradual and long-term processes of market-driven convergence. In this narrative, regional
development policy is considered ineffective, distracting from the benefits of agglomeration
economies, and advisable only in extreme cases where cultural or ethnic differences prevent
people and capital from moving from lagging places to others where they can realize their
full economic potential (World Bank 2009).
For others, however, the “unevenness” is largely the result of poverty and inequality traps
(Barca 2009). The concepts of poverty traps and inequality traps have emerged as an analyti-
cal framework that is particularly useful to explain the unevenness in the characteristics and
outcomes of the rural transformation, despite the presence of the same global drivers.
Poverty traps tell us about situations where people at the low end of the income distribu-
tion are stuck in a situation of poverty because they are poor to begin with: a lack of resources
generates more constraints. Inequality traps, on the other hand, describe “situations where
the entire distribution is stable because the various dimensions of inequality (in wealth,
power and social status) interact to protect the rich from downward mobility, and to prevent
the poor from being upwardly mobile” (Rao 2006). The difference between the two concepts
is that inequality traps involve persistence in a ranking of different individuals or social
groups, rather than persistence in absolute levels of deprivation (Bebbington et al. 2008);
hence, inequality traps involve individuals or groups across the whole distribution, not just
the poor.
If unevenness in the patterns and, particularly, in the outcomes of the rural transforma-
tion is a normal and transitory feature not of markets perfectly at work, but of social struc-
tures that take the form of poverty and inequality traps, then place-based development
policies are not only justified but are a necessary element in the toolkit of rural development
strategies.
Social structures and the institutions that create and sustain them play important roles in
the long-term reproduction of the inequality and poverty traps in which so many social
groups and territories become enmeshed (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001; Ferreira
et al. 2004; Bourguignon, Ferreira, and Walton 2007). These institutions15 are in turn a prod-
uct of human agency, that is, of the conscious and unconscious efforts of different social
groups to sustain or oppose them.
Localized poverty and inequality traps caused by the interaction of structures, institu-
tions, and human agency, together with differential endowments of natural resources and
geographical conditions, can explain why global homogenizing forces fail to have the same
effects in different rural societies. Such an explanation, however, would predict a largely
“path dependent” rural world where long-term equilibria are disrupted only by external
forces operating on the existing structures, institutions, and human agents. As we have dis-
cussed previously, factors exogenous to the rural areas are critical to the rural transforma-
tion, but if taken alone they are insufficient to explain the unevenness of the rural
transformation.
One can recognize two sources of endogenous change in rural societies (cf. Mahoney and
Thelen 2011). First, there are tensions and contradictions among different institutions that
co-exist in the same rural space and society, opening up fissures for change and rule break-
ing. For example, in a given rural society the institution of communal land tenure may exist
in tension with the institutions governing extractive industry concessions and investments,
and those governing environmental regulation. Second, people participate in and give mean-
ing to many institutions at the same time. This makes it possible that their experiences and
interpretations of those different institutions will highlight contradictions among them. Dif-
ferent groups will give higher priority and attention to different institutions, and as power
relations among social groups change, so too will the preeminence of one set of rules over
another. Human agency is thus at the core of any explanation of the rural transformation, as
any experienced practitioner of rural development will readily recognize. This is why the
rural transformation is not a perfectly predetermined, path-dependent product of global

forces and localized structures rooted in history. Human agency resides in the potential to
do and see things differently, and institutional change will occur only when this potential is
realized. This notion has some resonance with Sen’s distinction between human capital—the
assets that people have as a result of education, health, etc.—and human capability—the
capacity of people to engage meaningfully and fruitfully in the world and ultimately to
change parts of it (Sen 1997, 1999).
Conclusion
We have discussed the evolution of our collective understanding of rural societies and how
they change, since the early sectoral focus on agricultural societies and agricultural develop-
ment, through to current ideas that put a strong emphasis on “places” and “placed-based”
development. Throughout this evolution, rural change has always been conceptualized as
resulting from the interaction of global and local factors. For example, the economic theo-
ries on agriculture and growth and agriculture and development, which provided the intel-
lectual support for the Green Revolution policies in the 1960s and 1970s, soon realized that
they had to take into consideration such local idiosyncrasies as farmer risk aversion or the
nature of local input markets.
Rural societies, like all others, bear a heavy inheritance of structures and deeply rooted,
difficult-to-change institutions that have repeatedly shown their power in mediating the local
effects of global forces and in defeating the “best” policy designs. Yet local rural societies are
hardly autonomous from global forces that affect them either actively or by omission. Indeed,
to be bypassed by the forces of economic diversification, of integration into regional, national,
and global agrifood systems, and of urbanization most likely means that areas will be left, as
Amartya Sen (1999) would put it, in a state of “deprivation, destitution and oppression.”
Notes
1. The authors wish to thank Dr María del Pilar Casal for her support in compiling and very
efficiently surveying the extensive literature that was consulted in preparation for this
chapter.
2. Population estimates for 2010 from the UN Population Division’s World Population Pros-
pects, 2010 Revision, and World Urbanization Prospects, 2009 Revision.
3. Urban areas with populations of less than 500,000.
4. FAO Stat for 2010.
5. At its starting point in the mid-nineteenth century, the rural transformation of Europe,
North America, and Australia and New Zealand involved around 250 to 300 million
people.
6. Rural development is therefore not a scientific discipline, as it completely and quite eclec-
tically relies on the theories and methods of a wide range of sciences.
7. See also the chapter on “Agriculture and Food Security” by Swaminathan, Pandya-Lorch,
and Yosef (this volume).
8. These data come from studies cited in Haggblade, Hazell, and Reardon (2007) using the
country-specific official definitions of rural.
9. See also the chapter on “Land Reform” by White, Borras Jr., and Hall (this volume).
10. In recent years the globalization of land markets (land grab) has become an important,
much studied, and highly debated topic; see the chapter on “Land Reform” by White,
Borras Jr., and Hall (this volume).
11. It would be ideal to have comparable data for urban centers of different sizes, since a
population threshold of 500,000 may be too high for many developing countries.
12. While urbanization and urban concentration tend to be confused, they are quite different
processes (Henderson 2003).
13. We do not address in this chapter the highly important environmental dimension of this
uneven development.
14. Kanbur and Venables (2005), the World Development Reports of 2006 and 2009 (World
Bank 2005, 2009), and de Blij (2009) offer excellent entry points for the student of the
spatial dimension of development; even if their focus is not specifically on rural societies,
we believe that they are useful in understanding the unevenness of the rural transforma-
tion process. There are several books and journals dealing with the same issue but with a
focus on a particular region: for Asia, the volume edited by Kanbur, Venables, and Wan
(2006); for Africa, the Journal of African Economies special issue (December 2003) dedi-
cated to the spatial dimension of development in the continent; for Latin America, two
special issues of Cuadernos de Economía (2004 and 2005), and more recently and specifi-
cally for rural regions, the volume edited by Modrego and Berdegué (2012). Also very
useful are a number of papers on the spatial distribution of welfare indicators, often using
the Small Area Estimates methodology (Elbers, Lanjouw, and Lanjouw 2003), that have
been prepared for numerous countries in the three developing regions (e.g., Kijima and
Lanjouw 2003; Araujo et al. 2008; Elbers, Lanjouw, and Leite 2008).
15. These institutions are both formal and informal, and include norms, values, and other
manifestations of local cultures.
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chapter 28
l a n d r efor m
ben white, saturnino m. borras jr.,
and ruth hall 1
Introduction
In the past century, land reform has played a massive, central role in the time-
paths of rural and national poverty, progress, freedom, conflict and suffering. For
the next half-century at least, where agriculture continues central to the lives of
the poor, the role of land reform will not decline.
(Lipton 2010: 10)
Given the predominance of agricultural production and employment in the economies of

developing countries, it is not surprising that land has been both an important issue in devel-
opment theories and debates and a major arena of rural social and political movements and
agrarian conflict. In the early history of development thought it was widely recognized that
access to land is crucial to poor people’s capacity to construct viable livelihoods and over-
come rural poverty, and also that existing structures of land tenure were often serious obsta-
cles to improving farm productivity (Warriner 1969; Jacoby and Jacoby 1971). It was also
recognized that patterns of landholding were major correlates of political power structure,
social hierarchy, and economic relations in poor agrarian economies (Ghose 1983: 3).
This chapter uses both classic and contemporary literature to trace how land policies, and
particularly land reform, have gained, lost, and regained prominence in development strate-
gies and debates since the Second World War. We start with some issues of definition, and
continue with the experience of land and agrarian reforms during the Cold War period. The
next section traces the decline and resurgence of land policies during the post-Cold War
decades and the sometimes fierce debates between advocates of state-led redistributive land
reforms on the one hand and market-led reforms on the other. In the final section we intro-
duce some contemporary issues and debates on gender and generational issues in land policy
and the contemporary “land rush” involving sometimes spectacularly large corporate land
deals, and conclude with reflections on the new ideas of food and land sovereignty driving
today’s agrarian movements.
480 ben white, saturnino m. borras jr., and ruth hall
Land Reforms and Agrarian Reforms
The redistribution of property in land is a very difficult change to carry through . . . it

is inevitably a political question.
(Warriner 1969: xv)
Land reforms generally are efforts to correct what are seen as historical distortions in the
allocation of land ownership and use rights. These distortions may have resulted from colo-
nial land grabbing and dispossessions, enclosures, landlordism, or previous reforms them-
selves (such as some forms of socialist collectivization). It is therefore not surprising to see
that national land policies have been shaped by the historical experience of different coun-
tries. Land reform objectives also tend to include a broader macro-economic aim of enhanc-
ing farm productivity and the farm sector’s contribution to overall economic development:
reformed land tenure structures are usually expected to promote agrarian transition
(whether to capitalist, modernized, smallholder, or collective systems).
The generally accepted definition of land reform as “redistribution of property or rights in
land” has not changed much in the past half-century. Normally definitions include some
notion of the intended beneficiaries (small farmers, entrepreneurs, the landless, farm work-
ers, labor tenants, women, the youth, the rural poor). Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz (2002)
define land reform as including
not only redistributive reforms of ownership rights, but also the establishment of collective or
communal forms of farming, state-sponsored land colonization schemes . . . and land tenure
reforms, i.e., changes in the contractual arrangements between the landowner and those who
cultivate the land. In addition, tax (and credit) measures intended to create incentives for
large landowners to sell part of their holding sometimes are described as “market friendly”
land reforms. (Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz 2002: 279)
A conventional definition of redistributive land reforms is more restrictive, referring specifi-

cally to “programmes that redistribute land ownership from large private landowners to
small peasant farmers and landless agricultural workers . . . [and] are thus concerned with a
redistribution of wealth” (Griffin, Khan, and Ickowitz 2002: 280). One could reasonably
argue for inclusion, in a non-normative definition, of those upside-down land reforms—of
which there are many historical and some contemporary examples—in which land rights
have been taken from the poor and given to the rich.
Most frequently, land reforms have aimed to establish or consolidate a large and solid class
of viable, market-oriented, and surplus-producing peasants. This was true not only of the
East Asian “success stories” of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, but also of the first stages of
socialist land reforms (prior to collectivization) in the Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam,
North Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia (Lipton 2010: 192–4). Ajit Ghose, summarizing these
experiences in the early 1980s, observed:
A revitalisation of the peasantry is a necessary first step . . . irrespective of the nature of the
new system: whether it is a capitalist, modernised peasant economy or a collective sys-
tem. . . . [T]he immediate task of agrarian reform is to establish the peasantry as the principal
actor on the rural scene. (Ghose 1983: 17)
It is common to distinguish land reforms (which aim to alter structures of access to land)
and agrarian reforms, a more comprehensive approach that, besides (and sometimes even
land reform 481
instead of) land reform, aims to promote access of landholders to the various inputs (knowl-
edge, credit, markets) they need to increase productivity and enhance sustainable livelihoods.
The land reform versus agrarian reform distinction is problematic for at least two reasons.
First, any successful land reform is necessarily accompanied by the other supporting meas-
ures mentioned above, if they were not already in place, rendering the distinction redundant.
Second, as Erich and Charlotte Jacoby noted four decades ago, the distinction is untranslat-
able in many world languages—“land reform in French is réforme agraire, and in Spanish
reforma agraria” (Jacoby and Jacoby 1971: xiv–xv). The notion of “agrarian reform” does,
though, serve the purpose of emphasizing the inadequacy of redistributive land reform by
itself in bringing about lasting, structural change in the rural economy and society.
The leading international agency concerned with land issues is the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (FAO), but the World Bank has also exercised powerful
influence over land policy thinking and programming in recent decades. The FAO held a
major World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development in 1979. Paradoxically,
this occurred not long before international and national efforts at land reform began to decline
(from the early 1980s onwards), for a number of reasons, principally Structural Adjustment
with the emerging dominance of neo-liberal frameworks and the roll-back of the state.
Land Reforms during the Cold War
In the first three decades after the Second World War, various models of land and agrarian
reforms were implemented. These were the agrarian components of the multiple different
models of “development” that co-existed at the time, from purely capitalist to purely social-
ist, plus a variety of in-between models, all of them at that time still in the “mainstream” in
contrast to recent decades in which a single, broadly neo-liberal model has dominated.
Doreen Warriner, who was associated with the UN FAO’s promotion of land reforms from
the 1950s onwards, observed how land reform became “an instrument of the cold war, used
by Russia and China to promote communism and by America to prevent it,” and noted
the “stimulating and also stupefying interaction of conflicting ideologies” in this period
(Warriner 1969: 37). Cold War politics made its own contribution to confusion about the
concept and theory of land reform. The United Nations Economic and Social Council even
dropped “land” from the definition of land reform when it adopted a resolution in 1962
defining such reform as “an integrated programme of measures designed to eliminate the
obstacles to economic and social development arising out of defects in the agrarian struc-
ture.” The definition, as Erich and Charlotte Jacoby (1971: 25) note, “reflects the efforts of the
West to prevent land reform being considered identical with land redistribution as the East
claimed,” typifying the “slipshod approach to land reform which almost paralysed the United
Nations agencies in charge of the programmes.”
Both the United States and the Soviet Union showed rather inconsistent attitudes to
reform, depending on the political context. For some decades the United States backed
redistributive “land to the tiller” models in some countries, involving confiscation of excess
holdings and their redistribution to smallholders, and revisions in tenancy laws enabling ten-
ants and sharecroppers to become owners of their plots. The best known examples are those of
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The theoretical basis for this kind of “classic land reform” was
set out by (among others) Lipton (1974). Many other countries tried to replicate these models,
often with support from the West (Walinsky 1977; Christodoulou 1990). But these attempts
were generally only partially successful and in many cases outright failures. At the same time,
however, U.S. sponsorship of land reform was almost absent in countries where U.S. firms
owned large farms, and opposition to land reform was a motive for U.S. support for the over-
throw of the governments of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Allende in Chile in 1973.
From the late 1960s onwards, the U.S. downplayed strategies based on politically-difficult
land reform in favor of “green revolution” small-farm modernization through adoption of the
new high-yielding varieties of maize and rice and purchased inputs. Other organizations that
had sponsored advisory missions on land reforms also shifted their interest at about this time.
But there were several notable exceptions in which land-to-the-tiller reforms were thought
necessary to forestall rural communist revolution. In this the U.S. government was influenced
by Roy Prosterman’s “index of rural instability,” a theory claiming that when landlessness
reached 40 percent of rural households, radical rural insurrection was likely to ensue (Pros-
terman 1976). The United States supported land-to-the-tiller reforms for this reason, with
Prosterman as advisor in (among others) the Philippines, South Vietnam, and El Salvador.
Meanwhile, several countries chose the path of collectivization (China, North Vietnam,
Cuba), usually in stages beginning with a land-to-the-tiller and cooperativization phase, as
noted above. China and the Soviet Union were also prominent in supporting the establish-
ment of collective agriculture in the countries in their orbit of influence. However, one
should not oversimplify the support for such reforms in the Cold War period. The Soviet
Union tolerated a large private peasant sector in Poland, and the reversion from collectivism
to peasant farming in Yugoslavia from the early 1950s (Lipton 2010: 321).
Many post-colonial land reforms in this period (both capitalist- and socialist-oriented),
like the colonial upside-down reforms before them, involved the declaration of the state as
the ultimate, sovereign owner of all land and other natural resources. As recent concern and
research on large-scale corporate land acquisitions have shown, this often leaves cultivators
under “customary” forms of tenure especially vulnerable to dispossession and eviction when
large-scale investors (transnational or domestic) make deals directly with governments for
the purchase or lease of large expanses of land, through the legal manipulations that “render
untitled (but traditionally occupied and used) lands as unowned, and the state, by default,
their legal owner” (Wily 2012: 752).
Decline and Resurgence in

Development Agendas
In the early 1990s the Bangladeshi economist Rehman Sobhan noted the disappearance of
land reform from international development agendas: “The multilateral agencies, once in
the vanguard of the intellectual movement for land reform, now mention such proposals
for reform not at all or in highly qualified small print” (Sobhan 1993: 3). Byres (2004) notes the
virtual disappearance of land reform from policy agendas during the 1970s and 1980s and
its reappearance in “market friendly” form in the 1990s. The end of the Cold War led to
land reform 483
decollectivization and a new wave of privatizing land reforms in many post-socialist/transi-

tional countries (Spoor 1997). Since 2000, many new land projects of the World Bank and
USAID have focused on “land administration,” not involving direct redistribution of land
rights from large landowners to small peasant farmers or the landless, but aiming to
improve the legal, technical, and institutional framework for land ownership, with the
object of promoting “tenure security” and the working of land markets.
In Africa, land reform receded with the introduction of structural adjustment programs
through the 1980s, together with the closure of state farms and withdrawal of state roles in
input and output markets. By the early 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the end of the
Cold War, it was making a return as part of interventions geared toward market reforms to
stimulate agriculture. The World Bank report Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduc-
tion devoted only 14 pages to redistributive land reform policies (Deininger 2003: 143–56),
compared to 125 pages on the need to establish secure property rights to land and to make
these rights easily transferable through “free” land markets from less to more efficient pro-
ducers (Deininger 2003: 7–132).
The World Bank’s position has been described variously as “market-assisted land reform”
(MALR), “market-based land reform” (MBLR), and “market-led agrarian reform” (MLAR).
Its main proponents, Klaus Deininger and Hans Binswanger, defined the four key elements
of the World Bank’s land policy as: promotion of owner-operated family farms on both effi-
ciency and equity grounds; secure property rights to land so as to enhance owners’ effort and
investment and facilitate land transactions; a policy and regulatory environment that pro-
motes transfers to more efficient land uses; and a role for egalitarian asset distribution and
redistributive land reform where the agrarian structure is highly dualistic, characterized by
very large and very small holdings (Deininger and Binswanger 1999: 2).
This shift from classic state-led land reform to MLAR has been influenced by the so-called
evolutionary theory of land rights. This application of the neoclassical theory of induced
institutional innovation holds that rising scarcity and values of land or other resources, when
reaching the point where the benefits of private ownership outweigh its costs, will lead to
institutional innovation in the form of the creation of private property rights in those
resources (Hayami and Ruttan 1985; Fitzpatrick 2006: 998). The evolutionary theory pro-
vides the theoretical justification for market-led or market-assisted (rather than state-led)
land reforms, in which the main role of the state is seen as the provision of land titling pro-
grams and the promotion of a level playing field in which the market can do its work of
bringing together “willing buyers” and “willing sellers.” Another powerful advocate of inter-
vention to promote private property rights is Hernando de Soto, whose influential book The
Mystery of Capital advocates land titling programs to bring poor rural people with informal
smallholder tenure into the formal system, allowing them to use their land titles to acquire
working capital through bank loans (de Soto 2000). Several recent policy reforms in African
countries have been framed as ways to empower the poor through titling their “dead
capital.”
Belgian economist Jean-Philippe Platteau’s influential (1996) critique of the evolutionary
theory found it wanting both as an exposition of historical processes and as a normative basis
for structural reform based on individual, private property rights. The theory loses credence
when confronted with the reality of property systems in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, which—despite growing competition for resources—remain “plagued by widespread
legal uncertainty, resource conflicts, and environmental degradation . . . in many contexts,
relatively viable resource-governance regimes have reverted to open access notwithstanding

conditions favourable to the creation of property rights” (Fitzpatrick 2006: 999). The World
Bank statement on land policies recognizes one part of the problem, noting that “there are
many cases where the vicious cycle of increased scarcity of land leading to more precise defi-
nition of property rights has not materialized, but instead conflict has arisen” (World Bank
2003: 9). Another problem is that registration (titling) of individual property rights in land is
not a neutral process, typically favoring certain more influential categories of cultivators and
excluding others (among them women), and may ultimately create less and not more security
of tenure (Platteau 1996: 39–49).
Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s major contribution to the understanding and strengthen-
ing of property rights held in common was showing that competition, conflict, and resource
depletion were not the inevitable outcomes of increased scarcity—the commons need not be
a “tragedy.” She drew attention to the durability of common property regimes that govern the
sustainable use of common pool resources like grazing lands, forests and forest products,
water, rivers, and marine resources—resources which are central to the livelihoods of most
of the world’s rural population. Privatizing these resources through titling is not the only
policy option. Ostrom’s work demonstrated that stable resource use can be achieved through
collective self-governance by users themselves, by adopting what she described as eight prin-
ciples for managing common property resources: clearly defined boundaries, locally appro-
priate rules regarding use and harvesting, user participation in decision making, systems for
monitoring that are accountable to users, appropriate sanctions for violation of rules, cheap
and accessible systems for dispute resolution, enabling the community of users to define
itself, and to build nested institutions at different levels, on the basis of local common prop-
erty regimes (Ostrom 1990).
In response to this and other work defending common property against private titling, the
World Bank, for some time a major supporter of conversion of lands held in customary ten-
ure to individual ownership titles, has now partly retreated from the “de Soto” position, espe-
cially for Africa. “[In] many traditional tenure systems, households undertake investments
that range from marking boundaries to planting trees. . . . Increasing security of tenure does
not necessarily require issuing formal individual titles. . . . [M]any studies indicate that
in Africa formal land title had little or no impact on either investment or farm income”
(Deininger 2003: 37, 39). The experiences of Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa, considered
success stories by proponents of market-led reform, suggest that the model simply does not
work in the manner predicted by its proponents, and the market cannot replace the redis-
tributive function of the state (Borras 2003).
In an article that provoked much debate in the Journal of Agrarian Change, Griffin, Khan,
and Ickowitz (2002) set out the case for radical redistributive land reform as an alternative
to market-assisted reform. These authors argue that confiscation of land holdings is a key
element in successful land reforms. By themselves, market-friendly experiments are unlikely
to make major inroads into landlord power or the distribution of holdings. Fragmented
labor markets and systems of labor control prevent land markets from working in favor of
the poor, and thus bring limited change in the distribution of landholdings. Debate concern-
ing the theoretical coherence and empirical outcomes of market-assisted reforms appears to
be growing and fracturing, as the scope of debate extends beyond the mechanisms for the
acquisition of land and the selection of beneficiaries to its location within processes of agrar-
ian and even macroeconomic change.
land reform 485
Arguments for and against various types and directions of land reform are part of the
larger underlying debate on the respective merits of large- and small-scale agriculture. Con-
trasting views on land reform reflect the tensions between opposing standpoints on small-
farm viability and the future place of small-scale agriculture in globalized food (and fuel,
feed, and fiber) regimes. Rural social movements campaign for the small-scale alternative
and claim that it can both provision the world, and do this in environmentally-friendly ways.
This alternative is argued to generate more employment for local people than large-scale,
energy-intensive monocrop farming, which tends to have an “enclave” character, with only a
few exceptions such as horticulture. For example, La Via Campesina, the world’s largest and
most influential alliance of peasant movements, insists that “small-scale farmers can feed the
world and keep the planet cool” (La Via Campesina 2009, 2010). Quite authoritative scien-
tific support for the viability and potential of smallholder futures comes from the important
but largely unnoticed international study conducted by the International Assessment of
Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), Agriculture at a Cross-
roads. This report, which drew on the expertise of about four hundred specialists from all
over the world, concludes that industrial, large-scale monoculture agriculture is unsustaina-
ble and must be reconsidered in favor of agro-ecosystems that combine mixed crop produc-
tion with conserving water supplies, preserving biodiversity, and improving the livelihoods
of the poor in small-scale mixed farming (IAASTD 2009). Further support may be found in
the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food on agroecology as a scientific
framework to “facilitate the transition towards a low-carbon, resource-preserving type of
agriculture that benefits the poorest farmers” (UN General Assembly 2010b: 3).
If we take seriously the potential of small-scale farming as the basis for an agricultural
future, we need to distinguish between the failures of conception and realization of the origi-
nal redistributive land reform agendas (particularly as influenced and distorted by Cold War
agendas) and “the possibility of reappraising such reforms as an instrument for moderniza-
tion, technological diffusion, development and democracy as part of a sustained assault on
rural poverty” (Sobhan 1993: 3). Notwithstanding its problems, Lipton reminds us, “at least
1.5 billion people today have some farmland as a result of land reform, and are less poor, or
not poor, as a result. But huge, inefficient land inequalities remain, or have re-emerged, in
many low-income countries. Land reform remains both ‘unfinished business’ (Walinsky
1977) and alive and well” (Lipton 2010: 8).
(Trans)national Agrarian Movements
In the 1990s a convergence of political processes and events jump-started a renewed interest
in redistributive land reforms globally. The post-authoritarian regime in Brazil passed a land
reform law in 1988 that has become a key institutional anchor for the mobilization and land
occupation campaign by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST). Around the same
time, the post-Marcos government in the Philippines enacted a new land reform law around
which nation-wide land claim-making campaigns by poor peasants were launched and sus-
tained. The regime transition from the apartheid era in South Africa has resulted in some
significant concessions for the poor, including the 1994 land reform law that in turn inspired,
at least for a short while, the birth of a national landless people’s movement. In Zimbabwe,
the issue of land and land redistribution was central to the 1980 regime transition, albeit ini-
tially with a limited, market-assisted land reform combined with resettlement program. But
in the mid-1990s, a spark for a nation-wide agitation for land occurred that would ignite the
controversial fast-track land reform beginning in 2000. The 1998 regime transition in Indo-
nesia similarly opened up institutional reforms that would encourage further mobilization
by the rural poor to claim land. Other places where significant calls and mobilizations for
various forms of redistributive land policies have occurred during this period include Chia-
pas, Honduras, Guatemala, India, Bangladesh, and East Timor.
The rise of transnational agrarian movements that are in turn linked to local-national
movements mobilizing for redistributive land policies has amplified the demand for
redistributive land reform in the twenty-first century. La Via Campesina coordinated key
(sub-)national campaigns for land and aggregated them at the regional and international
level to extend the political reach of local and national campaigns. Launched in 1999, La Via
Campesina’s Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform (GCAR) has been framed against the
World Bank’s MLAR and aims to promote redistributive land reform. In 2006 this campaign
found expression in the successful International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural
Development, which issued a progressive declaration and vision for land reform.
National campaigns for redistributive land policies have resulted in varied outcomes, with
Zimbabwe and the Philippines posting the most significant results in terms of percentage of
redistributed lands in relation to total agricultural lands, and number of beneficiaries rela-
tive to total rural populations. The Brazilian land reform, while frequently in the global
media limelight, did not cover as much of the total agricultural lands and rural population,
while the South African land reform has achieved much less. Many land reform settlements
established in the past or recently, from West Bengal to Brazil, from Mozambique to the
Philippines, have been targeted by corporate land grabbers. Indeed, the current phenomenon
of land grabbing has reaffirmed the relevance of land reform, but has also exposed existing
land reforms as an inadequate land policy response, as we argue below.
Current Issues and Debates
Among many currently hot issues and debates on land policy, space allows us to mention
only three.
Gender Issues in Land Policy

Land for women has to do with survival; for men it has to do with power . . . the
men will be the first ones to oppose our participation in land tenancy.
(A Mayan woman NGO worker in Guatemala, quoted in Deere and de Leal 2001: 1)
Are you suggesting that women be given rights to land? What do women want?
To break up the family?
(India’s Minister of Agriculture, responding to Bina Agarwal’s submission to the
Indian Planning Commission on Land Reform, 1989. Agarwal 1997: 3)
land reform 487
Many studies have documented the importance of women’s access to land resources in their
own right, and the persistence of gender discrimination in land rights policy and practice
(see particularly Agarwal 1994 for South Asia; Deere and de Leal 2001 for Latin America;
and Jacobs 2010: ch. 8 and Tsikata and Golah 2010: chs. 4 and 5 for cases from sub-Saharan
Africa). The UN’s 1979 Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women, now ratified by 187 of the UN’s 193 member states (CEDAW 2012), firmly estab-
lishes women’s right to “equal treatment in land and agrarian reform as well as in land reset-
tlement schemes” (Article 14(g)). But land reforms have themselves often affected women
detrimentally.
Moser (1993) pointed out that state-codified, individual forms of land allocation and
resettlement often annihilate women’s customary rights to land. “Household”-based mod-
els of land reform and resettlement programs, which in practice assign titles not to house-
holds but to “household heads,” usually exclude married women as beneficiaries of
redistribution, or subsume them under the husband’s title (Jacobs 2010: 43). The same
applies to many large-scale contract-farming schemes such as the oil-palm ventures rapidly
expanding in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In one Indonesian example, land in
customary tenure (in which women had their own rights to land) was first claimed by the
state, then allocated to plantation companies and part of it reallocated to contract-farmer
households as two-hectare monocrop oil palm plots; although there was no formal gender
restriction on who should be the smallholder participant, or what should be the gender of
the household head, in practice only the male “Head of Family” is registered as the small-
holder (White and White 2012).
Gender relations, thus, are affected centrally by agrarian reform policies, and gendered
agency may affect the direction of policies: “land reforms are not democratic unless women
achieve rights, autonomy and better life chances within them” (Jacobs 2010: 192).
Generational Issues in Land Policy

Much less is known and written about generational issues in land control. The World Bank’s
(2006) report on youth, Development and the Next Generation, hardly mentions agriculture, even
in its chapter on employment, while the Bank’s report Agriculture for Development (World Bank
2007) does not mention youth at all. But several recent studies have highlighted “youth and agri-
culture” as a new field of problems and future work (for example, IFAD 2010; van der Geest 2010;
Leavy and Smith 2010; Chicago Council 2011; Sumberg 2011; Proctor and Lucchesi 2012).
Just as feminist analysis and feminist-informed policy need to be brought to bear on issues
of gender and land rights, we need to bring generational analysis and youth-focused policy
to bear on the intergenerational tensions that we see almost everywhere in rural communi-
ties. In particular we need to understand young people’s problems in getting access to farm-
land and other agriculture-related opportunities in societies where gerontocracy, agrarian
inequality, and corporate penetration of the agrifood sector, in varying degrees, are the order
of the day. In many or most agrarian societies, the older generation—parents, or community
elders in places where land is controlled not individually but by customary law—retain con-
trol of land as long as possible. The tension between the desires of the older generation to
retain control of resources and the desire of young people to receive their share of these
resources, form their own independent farms and households, and attain the status of
economic and social adulthood is a common feature of many agrarian societies, but surpris-
ingly neglected in research.
Various studies show how access to land is narrowing for young people, and reveal the
tensions this generates. Julian Quan, reviewing changes in intra-family land relations in sub-
Saharan Africa, notes:
[L]imitations in young people’s access to land, land concentration, and land sales and alloca-
tions outside the kin group by older generations can become highly problematic where alter-
native livelihoods are not available, and can trigger wide social conflicts. (Quan 2007: 57)
It is not surprising if today’s young rural men and women are reluctant to wait for the passing
of the older generation (when they may be 40 or 50 years old) to be farmers, and decide to
move to the city, a trend which now extends to all social classes and (in most countries) both
genders. The issue of intergenerational transfer of land rights—or, when that does not hap-
pen, intergenerational dispossession, when one generation sells off land that ought to be
passed on to the next—deserves our attention. If we are interested in small-farm-based alter-
natives to industrial capitalist agriculture, there needs to be a generation of rural men and
women interested in taking up the challenge.
New Enclosures? The Current Debate on Corporate

Land Deals
Buy land—they’re not making it any more.
(Mark Twain)
There is currently much debate about how to tackle the challenges brought about by
corporate “land grabs.” Large-scale, government-supported corporate acquisition of con-
tested lands and common lands, and the accompanying dispossession of local farmers,
pastoralists, and forest users is currently occurring on an unprecedented scale in Africa,
Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union, and most particularly in sub-Saharan
Africa. Several studies have tried to document the location and extent of land deals in
recent years (GRAIN 2008; Cotula et al. 2009; von Braun and Meinzen-Dick 2009; World
Bank 2010; Oakland Institute 2011; Oxfam 2011; Anseeuw et al. 2012). With some differ-
ences in definition and the time span covered, recent estimates of the total area of large
land deals worldwide range from 43 million hectares (World Bank 2010) to 80 million
(Anseeuw et al. 2012) or even 227 million (Oxfam 2011). Among these and other reports
there is reasonable consistency that at least 60 percent of total acquisitions are in sub-
Saharan Africa. Lorenzo Cotula’s (2012) critical review of available evidence points to
sources of both over- and under-estimation, but confirms that the phenomenon is massive
and growing.
These deals are usually accompanied by government and corporate promises to develop
modern, industrial forms of agricultural production for export, and to provide good jobs
and incomes for local people. But research has long ago shown that these industrial (capital-
and energy-intensive) forms of agriculture are unsustainable. They also do not provide
employment on any significant scale, tending to create enclaves of capital intensive,
monocrop farming with minimal linkages to the local economy.2
land reform 489
There has been a wide range of responses to the current land rush—positive, negative,
and neutral. Advocacy of a large farm model for agricultural growth, linked to assumed
comparative advantages in a globalized economy, is often at the center of justifications for
large-scale corporate land deals (Collier 2008). A “dualistic” agrarian economy is envis-
aged, with large-scale farms engaged in capitalist production often for export, while small-
holder farms gradually disappear or are incorporated as part of contract farming
arrangements, with the former peasantry proletarianized, providing low paid labor to the
new estates and plantations. This is the trajectory envisaged in the World Bank’s much-cited
(and much criticized) report on Agriculture for Development (World Bank 2007).3 In the
increasingly integrated value chains of global agricultural production, it is argued, only
large farms or smallholder outgrowers hooked into large agri-business nuclei can compete,
and meet the kinds of standards required for successful export. An agri-business-oriented
vision for agriculture, with large-scale farms at the core, even if linked through outgrower
schemes to smallholders, is one that some see as the logical and perhaps inevitable exten-
sion of global capital into rural economies: a culmination of processes of agrarian change
and capitalist transformation.
These arguments have been taken on by national governments, investors, and donor agen-
cies alike. This has made many policy actors—eager to promote private sector driven invest-
ments but on the other hand committed to a discourse of support for smallholder
farming—ambivalent about the process of global land grabbing. The World Bank, for exam-
ple, does not oppose corporate acquisition of land—and indeed facilitates it through its
International Finance Corporation—but proposes corporate codes of conduct to ensure
“responsible investment in land.” The G20 endorsed Principles for Responsible Agro-Invest-
ment, for example, include: respecting land and resource rights; ensuring food security;
ensuring transparency, good governance, and a proper enabling environment; consultation
and participation; responsible agro-enterprise investing; social sustainability; and environ-
mental sustainability (FAO et al. 2010).
Others are skeptical about the efficacy of codes of conduct (Borras and Franco 2010).
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, is a lone voice
within the UN family arguing for a broader vision: not to deny the need for investment in
agriculture, but to develop an alternative program for agricultural investment based on
reorientation of agricultural systems toward modes of production that are both produc-
tive and sustainable.
Land investments implying an important shift in land rights should represent the last and
least desirable option, acceptable only if no other investment model can achieve a similar
contribution to local development. (De Schutter in UN 2010a: 20, emphasis added; see also
De Schutter 2011)
In between these two positions is the initiative around the now-approved FAO-anchored
Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and For-
ests in the Context of National Food Security. The complex negotiations for these Voluntary
Guidelines have involved key state actors both for and against stronger guidelines, as well as
a range of civil society organizations and social movements with differentiated positions on
land grabbing. Their implementation will likely become a key arena of political contestation
in the coming years between key actors wanting to influence the institutional rules that gov-
ern land deals (White et al. 2012).
Concluding Reflections: From

Security to Sovereignty
A full century of modern land reformism has been accompanied by a growing understand-
ing of the politics and social relations of land property. We now know that monopoly control
that denies the rural poor access to and control over land is not confined to formal private
property rights, but rather cuts across property regimes: elites and corporations control land
via private property rights in formal titled systems, and via traditional arrangements in the
commons, in state, and public lands. The converse of this is that effective control by the rural
poor over land resources does not always have to be through individualized private property
rights; it can also be achieved and maintained through communal, community-based, state,
and public property arrangements. The essence of redistributive land reform is the shift of
power to exercise access to and control over land resources toward the rural poor; but his-
torically and traditionally, land reform has been confined more strictly to redistributing
(usually private) lands from monopoly control of landed classes to landless or near-landless
classes and groups. Following this conventional framework, land reform remains relevant
today, in settings where private land concentration occurs.
Yet, as discussed above, contemporary corporate land grabbing has been targeting lands
that do not fall under formal private property systems: state and public lands, and also indig-
enous peoples’ and community lands that are being claimed by the state. This is the key land
issue of the moment. Some kind of redistributive reform is urgent and necessary to prevent
people from getting expelled from their land. But land reform—conventionally framed as
discussed in this chapter—is unlikely to be the most effective policy and political framework
in settings such as these. The call for “land tenure security” (almost always interpreted as
promoting individual private property titles) by the World Bank and other mainstream
institutions may be well-intentioned, but it does not have the pro-poor and pro-peasant
farmer bias of redistributive land reform and is likely to facilitate, not prevent, problematic
land deals.
If, as our analysis suggests, there is a need to recast popular demands from land reform or
tenure security to something else, then “land sovereignty,” a concept currently being debated
by various civil society and rural social movements, is worth considering. It is defined as “the
right of working peoples to have effective access to, use of, and control over land and the ben-
efits of its use and occupation, where land is understood as resource, territory, and land-
scape” (Borras and Franco 2012). It is both a call to action against a renewed corporate and
(trans)national global push to enclose the commons and an assertion of the need for a peo-
ple’s enclosure of the land; supporting working peoples and their human right to control
over land. Land sovereignty goes beyond viewing land just as a resource to also considering
land as territory and as landscapes. This embraces struggles by indigenous movements, rural
laborers, urban activists, and social movements North and South who have sometimes been
excluded in traditional land reform campaigns.
Moreover, land sovereignty embraces plural understandings of property rights, encom-
passing communal, community, state, and/or private rights. It privileges the commons with-
out romanticizing it, and recognizes the importance of state property while confronting
the contradictory role of the state in land conflicts. It builds on redistributive land reform,
land reform 491
looking to go beyond it by supporting land restitution for people who previously benefited
from land reform but have been displaced and dispossessed in more recent land grabs, and
by supporting other land policies whose redistributive content can be shaped through mass
struggles: for example forest land reallocation policies, community-based forest manage-
ment, tenure reform, and leasehold reform. Finally, it connects with the popular demand
and movements for food sovereignty—broadly defined as the rights of people to produce,
distribute, and consume safe and healthy food in a sustainable manner—allowing for a
mutually reinforcing, synergistic interaction between them.
Land sovereignty thus includes redistributive land reform, land restitution, forest land
reallocation, and so on; it aims to clarify the basic principles of what a truly pro-poor land
policy is, and provide a broad and flexible concept that can bring such policies, programs,
actions, and endeavors into a singular, common alternative framework.
Therefore, a relevant “redistributive land reform” for the twenty-first century is one that
can provide an overarching policy and political framework for public action and political
mobilization. It should build on the proactive stance of conventional land reform that calls
for ending land monopolies where they exist, but go beyond it to call for pro-active people’s
enclosure campaigns where local communities assert their right to have full access to and
control over their land resources. A relevant redistributive land reform for the twenty-first
century, therefore, is one that is linked—as land reforms were from the 1920s to the 1970s—to
broader visions of development.
Notes
1. The authors acknowledge Ian Scoones and Wendy Wolford for their support and
encouragement.
2. The classic statement on the link between enclave plantation economy and persistent rural
poverty is Beckford (1972).
3. Among many critical views on the World Bank report, see particularly Akram-Lodhi 2008
and Li 2009.
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chapter 29
cli m ate a da ptation

fatima denton
Introduction
Climate change has been described as the “greatest and widest ranging market failure ever
seen” (Stern 2006). While adaptation has focused predominantly on biophysical processes
and how they impact on lives and livelihoods, it will be equally important for developing
countries to make a transition toward strong governance and institutional arrangements to
blunt the negative impacts of climate change. The potential for sustainable development will
be realized if certain opportunities in climate sensitive sectors can be “exploited” to acceler-
ate adaptation action. Currently, institutional weaknesses disqualify many countries, partic-
ularly in Africa, from taking advantage of opportunities to access new monies available for
adaptation. As financing for adaptation grows, institutional vulnerability is an impediment.
Climate change presents developing countries with a “wicked” problem made more difficult
by weak institutions and governance (Brown et al 2010). These two fundamental ingredients
are necessary for the transition to a transformative development that will make adaptation
more sustainable. This chapter unpacks the concept of adaptation and vulnerability, and links
this to governance as the hook that enables adaptation. Climate change is shrouded in many of
the complex governance and institutional matters that are necessary to manage environmental
change. This tendency does not augur well for countries where governance systems and insti-
tutional arrangements are already relatively fragile and largely in transition.
Adaptation should go beyond discrete projects designed to reduce vulnerability, to instead
bring governments and people to the center of the action. African countries in particular
need “new” governance models that take into account local realities. Participatory processes
that favor deliberative decision making have the potential to make adaptation action more
sustainable and bring diverse social groups together. This aspiration needs transparent gov-
ernance systems and robust institutions to adopt a sustainable development pathway. In
short, adaptation is enabled, coordinated, and sustained within a governance regime that
respects a plurality of actors.
Even with strong governance and institutional arrangements, adaptation is the logical
response that allows vulnerable groups to re-think new strategies and thus “insulate”
themselves from climate threats. This chapter argues that reversing the negative trends of
496 fatima denton
climate change is essentially about deploying useable knowledge and empowering

vulnerable communities. Deliberative processes, in which different stakeholders are able
to bring their perspective to bare, provide the much needed “glue” for sustainability.
Focusing on the biophysical implications alone ignores the societal and cultural implica-
tions that provide a deeper understanding on how societies respond to, and their willing-
ness to participate in, different climate strategies. It also draws from experience in Africa
to reinforce the point that institutions are essential to making adaptation work in practice.
Thus this chapter points to a strong governance regime as a pre-condition for adaptation,
one that thrives on resilience. It begins with short histories of adaptation; one focused on the
concept itself and another on how it has been put into practice. Three key insights are then
discussed: that adaptation can entail re-engineering of institutions and organizations to bet-
ter enable local level experimentation; how governance shapes the opportunities for adapta-
tion in practice; and the need for deliberation among diverse stakeholders to reduce
vulnerability
Two Short Histories
Thinking on Adaptation
The concept of “adaptation” can be traced to the influence of Charles Darwin and its use
within evolutionary biology. As originally employed, adaptation refers to the relation
between an organism and its habitat. Over time, genetic variability gives rise to a variety of
traits in new generations of plants and animals, some of which prove more useful for obtain-
ing food, avoiding predators, and surviving in harsh climates. In evolutionary biology, adap-
tation is an unintentional and accidental process of natural selection, over multiple
generations, which shapes the physical and genetic structure of species.
In contrast, human “adaptation” to environmental change is concerned not with the phys-
ical ability of people to live in a different climate, but with changes in human behavior and
the ability of societies to cope with such change. Dewey (1929) saw adaptation as the capacity
of an individual to adjust to changing circumstances, as well as the process where an indi-
vidual draws on knowledge of the environment to modify it to meet their needs. Such an
understanding of adaptation resonates with anthropology and the study of how people
coped with changing climate and resource availability over time through changes in technol-
ogy, behavior, and social structure. Adaptation also carries with it the notion of a certain
degree of self-reliance, of people relying on their own agency.
Modern thinking on ecology relates adaptation to the idea of resilience, or the capacity of
ecosystems to persist in their original state following a disturbance such as fire, disease, or
drought. Resilience is maintaining stability in certain aspects of ecosystem structure or func-
tion, such as the mix of animal and plant species, and denotes both an ability to withstand
change and to recover afterwards. Holling (1986) describes an iterative four-stage process
including release, renewal, growth, and conservation. For example, fire can devastate a forest
in the short-term,1 while the burned material releases nutrients previously tied up in old
growth vegetation. Grasses quickly re-establish plant life in the enriched soil, to be succeeded
climate adaptation 497
later by trees and their canopies which capture sunlight before it hits the ground, to out-
compete shorter plants for this resource. In time, the forest can regain and conserve an eco-
system similar to conditions prior to the fire. Forests thus both experience short-term
catastrophe and maintain themselves over the longer term.
It is axiomatic to state that human societies and their physical environment are intercon-
nected, that people can alter the environment and must adapt to changes in it. As our under-
standing of the natural world is incomplete, we are limited in our ability to predict future
conditions and face uncertainty regarding the effect human actions have on the environ-
ment. Embracing this limitation, Holling (1978) coined the term “adaptive management” to
describe an approach in which efforts to manage the environment are treated as experiments
to be learned from. Studying communities of people dependent on natural resources,
Ostrom (1990) found that local people can and do devise norms and institutions to safeguard
common property. Folke et al. (2003) incorporate these concepts to argue that human socie-
ties and their physical environment co-evolve as joint social-ecological systems. Akin to the
forest described above, society must be resilient by learning to live with change and uncer-
tainty, nurturing diversity for reorganization and renewal.
Young (2002) identifies a need for human institutions to “fit” the scale of environmental
dynamics. Institutions are seen as collective action based on economics and public choice,
which focuses on utility and game theory, or as social practice based on anthropology and
sociology, which focused on the role of culture, norms, and habits. These two schools of
thought make different assumptions regarding actor rationality, source of behavior, and con-
straints. A potential mismatch can derive from differences in spatial boundaries or jurisdic-
tion, for example certain fish species, such as salmon, pass through multiple jurisdictions
during the lifecycle from upstream spawning grounds, to the open ocean, and back again. As
no single institution can encompass all aspects of the environment, society requires “inter-
play” among different institutions at different levels. Similarly there can be diverse institu-
tional configurations at the same level that are useful for managing common property
resources. Dietz et al (2003) argue that such interplay requires complex, redundant, and lay-
ered institutions; a mix of institutional types; and designs that facilitate experimentation,
learning, and change.
The ability of human society to adapt to environmental change is thus tied to governance,
or how power and responsibilities are exercised. Dietz et al (2003) note that governance “con-
veys the difficulty of control, the need to proceed in the face of substantial uncertainty, and
the importance of dealing with diversity and reconciling among people and groups who dif-
fer in values, interests, perspectives, power, and the kinds of information they bring to situa-
tions.” Fabricius et al. (2007) distinguish between the capacity to “adapt” and to “govern.” The
former is an ability to detect and respond to environmental change, while the latter is an abil-
ity to lead, plan, and act; akin to the public policy skills of developing policies, negotiating
among interests, and implementing actions. These authors use the capacities to adapt and
govern to describe a typology of “powerless spectators” (weak–weak), “coping actors”
(strong–weak) and “adaptive managers” (strong–strong). Thus, beyond a technical ability to
cope with change, adaptation is tied to the location of power and influence within society.
Pahl-Wostl (2009) argues that climate change and variability reveal the “vulnerability” of
current environmental resource regimes. Governance sets a context within which adapta-
tion policies are pursued, yet the imperative to adapt can prompt rethinking of how society
498 fatima denton
governs itself and the development path it chooses to pursue (Pelling 2011). The connection
between adaptation and governance is explored further below.
Much of the literature on climate adaptation focuses on case studies of national-level plans
or community-level case studies in preparing for hotter, drier, or more variable conditions.
The negative consequences of climate change is a public bad, the opposite of a public good,
that affects people differently depending on their location and their ability to marshal enti-
tlements to cope with the stress, not unlike Sen’s (1981) thinking on how poor people are able
to survive famine. According to Sen, a person can acquire food through production,
exchange, or donation; acquiring different commodities through various legal channels of
acquirements. Adger, Lorenzoni, and O’Brien. (2009) address the issue of fairness in distrib-
uting costs between the emitters responsible for climate change and those required to adapt.
It is now a widely accepted view that those societies least able to cope with climate impacts
will have to contend with the worse vagaries of climate impacts. Those individuals and
groups most able to control resources within society, can use them to enhance their own
adaptation and impose the cost involved onto others. At the same time, the most vulnerable
people and places tend to be those already excluded from decision making. Tropical and
subtropical agricultural systems in the developing world will bear the overwhelming brunt
of coping with the adverse effects of the climate system (Thomas and Twyman 2005). These
aspects of thinking on adaptation connect with Rawls’ concepts of distributional and proce-
dural justice, and draw attention to the political economy of who is vulnerable and why they
are so.
Adaptive capacity is often seen as the antonym of vulnerability. The term often connotes
agency—the ability of societies, individuals, and households to reduce climate-related vul-
nerabilities, to moderate the inherent damages, cope with and recover from the conse-
quences. The recovery potential of the exposed unit is a significant factor in understanding
both the concept and reality of adaptive capacity. The term “adaptation” has been widely used
to mean efforts undertaken to enable people to cope and to reduce their vulnerability, and
adaptation research is now a discipline in its own right. Adaptation allows us to evaluate
and assess the degree and potential outcomes of vulnerability. It also provides an opportu-
nity to evaluate appropriate response options and their effectiveness following vulnerability
assessment studies. It is intended to moderate the impacts of climate change, to cope with its
consequences, and to take advantage of new emerging opportunities as a result of these
adjustments.
Adaptation is not entirely a new and discrete field, but offers a novel framing for a range of
existing efforts, including urban planning, public health, and agricultural extension. In par-
ticular, adaptation policies tend to act in the realms of human geography or human ecology
(Füssel 2007). Human geography offers a tradition of disaster risk reduction and seeks to
identify and mitigate exposure to hazards. This can include modifications to physical infra-
structure—such as housing, road networks, water storage and drainage systems—as well as
land use planning to ensure that people live in safe conditions protected from flooding, dis-
ease, or other disasters. Here vulnerability is defined as “the characteristics of a person or
group in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist, and recover from the impact
of a natural hazard” (Janssen et al. 2006).
The human ecology tradition emanates from economics and studies how people cope
when change undermines the viability of their livelihood. For people reliant on ecosystem
goods and services, the pace and severity of climate variability and change threatens their
means of making a living. One approach is to spread risk through diversification, increasing
the sources of income and reducing reliance on climatic conditions. More dramatic coping
mechanisms include wholesale change of livelihood strategies, such as switching from farm-
ing to paid employment, or seasonal or permanent migration to a more favorable location.
Agrawal and Perrin (2009) describes five classes of adaptation practices within rural com-
munities, including: seasonal and permanent migration; storage of food, water, and animals;
diversifying assets, occupations, and production; pooling of community resources; and
exchange such as access to new markets, and purchase of insurance, seeds, and other inputs.
Livelihoods and options do not necessarily insulate vulnerable resource dependent societies
from climate change impacts. Wealth and stable livelihoods can be an attribute of adaptive
capacity, yet do not necessarily create a sufficient “buffer” potential.
Adaptation in Practice
The term “adaptation” only entered climate change policy about two decades ago. The initial
emphasis was on establishing the scientific basis of climate change: understanding how con-
centrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases affect the balance of solar energy
retained within the atmosphere. The World Climate Conference in 1979 led to a number of
working groups, including one focused on impacts. By 1985, while admitting that substantial
uncertainty remained, the state of the science had progressed to the point that the World
Meteorological Organization, United Nations’ Environment Programme, and the Interna-
tional Council of Scientific Unions called for greater attention to the analysis of policy and
economic options, considering a “range of social responses aimed at preventing or adapting
to climate change” (Adger et al. 2009). Despite this early reference to “adapting,” the original
1986 structure of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continued a focus
on anticipating impacts. It was not until 1995 when the IPCC renamed this Working Group
II to specifically address adaptation, defined as “adjustment in natural or human systems in
response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or
exploits beneficial opportunities.”
Thus the first decades of climate policy were framed around encouraging a global effort
toward mitigating emissions. The focus was on establishing a limit, developing policy instru-
ments to meet it, and negotiating how to share the burden of costs involved. In 1992, the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)2 established the
goal of avoiding dangerous interference with the climate system, committing its parties to
limit emissions with the aim of returning to 1990 levels. The original convention also includes
language committing members to “cooperate in preparing for adaptation to the impacts of
climate change” (Article 4.1e). Nonetheless climate negotiations largely focused on how to
curb emissions rather than how to live within a hotter, drier, or more variable world. Five
years later, the Kyoto Protocol introduced a Clean Development Mechanism which allows
countries to meet their national targets by investing in projects that reduced emissions in
developing countries, such as changes in fuels, land use, or technology. Two percent of the
proceeds from the sale of such reductions were directed to an Adaptation Fund to finance
additional efforts in developing countries.
A key phrase in the UNFCCC and subsequent agreements is the “common but differenti-
ated responsibility” of developed and developing countries. The early industrialization of
500 fatima denton
developed countries means they are historically responsible for a larger share of past emis-
sions which contributed to current climate change. At the same time, developing countries
largely avoided limits to their own emissions. They looked to developed countries to provide
them with access to cleaner technologies, and to assume the costs involved in implementing
the convention. Finally, the projected consequences of climate change, ranging from
drought, flooding, and changes in crop yields, are expected to hit developing countries the
hardest. The original convention calls upon parties to assist the developing countries “that
are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adap-
tation to those adverse effects” (Article 4.4).
In 2001, UNFCCC parties agreed to create two new funds under the Global Environmen-
tal Facility, one targeted to Least Developed Countries and another Special Climate Change
Fund open to all developing countries. In 2009, the Copenhagen Accord included an agree-
ment “that developed countries shall provide adequate, predictable and sustainable financial
resources, technology and capacity-building to support the implementation of adaptation
action in developing countries” (Article 3). UNFCCC parties subsequently established a
Green Climate Fund to serve as an independent financing instrument to support developing
countries to mitigate their emissions and adapt to climate change. This Fund intends to raise
up to US$100 billion annually by 2020. By some estimates, in 2010, mitigation efforts
attracted 95 percent of the almost US$100 billion available in climate financing (Buchner
et al. 2010), yet looking forward, one can anticipate a rebalancing with a greater share of
investment going into adaptation.
The past decade has seen a growing acceptance that some degree of climate change is now
unavoidable. All countries have been urged to facilitate adaptation through measures in
energy, transport, industry, agriculture, forestry, waste management, and land use planning.
Access to financing under the GEF Least Developed Countries Fund is contingent on these
countries preparing a National Adaptation Program of Action (NAPA) which prioritizes
among measures in agriculture, water and coastal management, early warning and disaster
risk management, energy, health, and infrastructure. This diversity underlines how adapta-
tion is not one sector, but the interaction of many sectors. Some adaptation plans included
special efforts to integrate the voices and concerns of poor and vulnerable citizens in weigh-
ing potential investments, whereas others lack a solid base of evidence on which to assess the
relative benefits and costs involved in different options. In this sense, the ability to prepare
and implement an adaptation plan speaks to the strength of governance within each
country.
In many ways, fostering adaptation is becoming synonymous with doing development.
For example, Adger, Lorenzoni, and O’Brien (2009) describe the purpose of adaptation as
protecting vulnerable populations, providing information for planning, and protecting
public goods. These goals could easily fit within the development plans of many countries.
Yet the impacts of climate change also threaten to reverse some of the progress realized over
the past decades. The impacts of climate change are likely to derail development processes,
and much of the hard-won progress made toward realizing the Millennium Development
Goals. Many development projects need to factor climate hazards into their planning, as fail-
ure to incorporate such risks can cause an increase in disasters, and extreme events can incur
losses that will offset decades of development work (Kreimer and Arnold 2000). There is
thus substantial attention to “climate proofing” development, investing in policies and pro-
grams that will work under a range of potential future conditions.
Conversely, development needs to avoid so-called “mal-adaptation” or investments that are

dependent on climate stability. There is growing recognition that not every adaptation to
climate change is good. This is most clearly illustrated in large capital investments, such as dams
and bridges, which may be compromised if rivers dry up or severe storms become more fre-
quent. Additionally, improving the productivity of certain crops may result in water demand
for irrigation systems in dry land areas. This in turn might increase soil salinization or decrease
the water available for resource dependent communities who have little or no access to irriga-
tion systems, thus increasing the vulnerability of affected farmers. In addition, some scholars
see adaptation as the panacea for correcting mistakes made in social and economic pathways
that have led to poverty, inequity, and environmental problems (Eriksen et al. 2011).
The practice of development and adaptation also intermingle in terms of financial flows
and the actors involved. Although funding for climate financing is supposed to be new and
additional, many donors have pledged new funds for adaptation while flat-lining or cutting
back on their aid budgets. Indeed, the estimated US$100 billion dedicated to climate financ-
ing in 2010 rivaled the approximately US$130 billion dedicated to official development assist-
ance. Despite the attention garnered by the high profile of Global Environment Facility and
World Bank, the majority of public financing for developing countries to address climate
change has thus far been directed through bilateral channels. In many instances, aid agencies
have assumed a key role in delivering on their countries’ pledges. The advantage of this real-
ity is that climate financing is building on the recent principles of development effectiveness,
such as ownership and alignment, yet at the same times risks undermining the potential for
more global platforms, such as the Green Climate Fund.
Taking adaptation seriously means paying more attention to local efforts. Whereas much of
climate policy has focused on global negotiations, the practice of adaptation is rooted in local
reality. What adaptation means is specific to the particular landscape and livelihoods of each
place. For instance, in Bangladesh, it means local investments in shelters helped to reduce the
force of cyclones (Adger et al. 2003). On the Moroccan coast it means dealing with a scarcity
of freshwater; around Cape Town it involves modifying irrigation practices; and in northern
Kenya it means reviving communal management of pasturelands. As in theory, adaptation
practice links existing approaches into a novel way of dealing with the risks society now faces.
Looking forward, the practice of adaptation can be expected to evolve in two ways. First,
local communities should not simply implement national plans, but engage in local experi-
mentation. People need the freedom to identify local vulnerabilities and enhance their
communities’ resilience to changing conditions. Second, adaptation needs to go beyond
incremental adjustments to the status quo. In many places, adaptation will prove to be more
than simply doing the same under different conditions, but will instead prove to be the
tipping point for more radical rethinking of development, including the abandonment of
previous livelihoods and old ways of doing things.
Shift from Biophysical to Social
Adaptation tends to be conceived of as a question of technology and biophysical changes.

Both adaptation and mitigation require enabling fiscal environments, investment in public
infrastructures, effective monitoring and the relevant research and development facilities to
502 fatima denton
deploy low-carbon technologies. Many countries in the developing world are not well pre-
pared to put in place these kinds of requirements. Yet, by effectively targeting sectors such as
agriculture and energy—two sensitive sectors hitherto considered as engines of growth—
some opportunities can be exploited. For example, in the agricultural sector, carbon seques-
tration has the potential to enhance adaptation and sustainability of crop production by
increasing carbon concentration in the soil through better management practices, which
would yield multiple benefits for biodiversity, soil fertility, and productivity, as well as soil
water storage capacity. Also, integrated crop rotation and crop diversification, and zero or
reduced tillage has the potential to improve soil carbon sequestration and reduce greenhouse
gas emissions. Equally, opportunities exist in carbon trading and Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) that would imply positive spinoffs in forestry
and agriculture.
Some actions address adaptation and mitigation simultaneously. Adopting drought-re-
sistant cultivars, such as Jatropha, can have several benefits. It can be used as a living hedge to
prevent soil erosion. It is also used traditionally by women to make soap, and thus constitutes
a source of livelihood. From an energy perspective, the promotion of the efficient use of bio-
mass, shells, peanuts, and bagasse can both reduce the use of charcoal and wood-fuel as well
as the likelihood of deforestation. Other sources of energy such as wind power can be used
for crop processing, irrigation, water pumps; and decrease dependence on biomass and
wood fuel. Equally, the use of biogas plant can mean the production of sludge for fertilizers,
adapting to soil erosion while mitigating emissions. Similarly, conservation tillage can
increase soil water retention in drought conditions while sequestering carbon below ground.
There is also potential for small-scale irrigation facilities to conserve water and increase crop
productivity and soil carbon.
Yet climate change is more than a manifestation of biophysical processes alone. The pre-
dominant question remains: how does society manage itself under a changing and uncertain
future? Focusing on the biophysical implications alone ignores the societal and cultural
implications that provide a deeper understanding of how societies respond to, and their will-
ingness to participate in, different climate strategies. The pursuit of adaptation requires mov-
ing beyond narrowly focused, technical projects, to instead embrace the interplay of
institutions and governance. Building climate resilience is largely contingent on creating and
sustaining institutions with a credible governance regime that create incentives, influence
policies and galvanize communities toward collective actions.
Three key insights emerge from such a perspective. First, adaptation can entail re-engi-
neering of institutions and organizations to better enable local level experimentation. Sec-
ond, governance shapes the opportunities for adaptation in practice, facilitating
communication and coordination between local- and national-level action. Third, delibera-
tion among diverse stakeholders is a means of reducing vulnerability, in which different
stakeholders are able to bring their perspective to bear and provide the much needed “glue”
for sustainability.
Adaptation as Re-engineering Institutions

Institutional economics scholars argue that predictable and stable institutions are important for
wealth creation and human well-being. The complexity of the climate system and the nature–
society linkages calls for an “institutional renewal” that helps in moving toward a sustainable
development pathway. Indeed, climate change has revealed the magnitude of the institutional
challenge, and how unprepared many countries are in dealing with the reality of climate change.
Jordan and O’Riordan (1997) argue that organizations are more tangible than institutions, with
specific remits, resources, and staff, and they have a more observable capacity to influence
events. Organizations are therefore more physical while institutions tend to be more intangible.
Although the definition of institution as “behavior” has been criticized (Hodgson 2006), it
remains the predominant definition—in short, rules that influence behavior, encompass values,
and norms that are held by individuals and organizations (O’Riordan and Jordan 1999).
In many parts of Africa the relatively high susceptibility to climate variability and impacts
is largely attributed to the quality of institutions. Climate related perturbations may substan-
tially reduce production patterns and crop yields due to the high dependence on rain-fed
agriculture in many countries. Frequent floods and experiences of extreme events, droughts,
and heat waves are altering the patterns of disease. Hence, some diseases are spreading to
areas where there were relatively few incidences, placing further burdens on a health system
that is already under much pressure.
Institutions play a critical role in natural resource management. Managing natural
resources is often rooted in issues revolving around entitlements, land tenure and use and
access, ownership and control of resources. Adaptation is closely linked to the management of
resources that are considered common property, not least, pastures, water, and energy. How-
ever, because of the complexity that underpins the management of natural resources, and the
commensurate problems of doing so across scales and sectors, adaptation requires an institu-
tional basis to hold the different “players” accountable and to guide the rules of the game.
Pelling and Hugh (2005) argue that stakeholders can perceive an institutional architecture as
having the authority to influence adaptation. Communities that exhibit a high degree of adap-
tive capacity are able to do so as a result of the strength of their governance system, institu-
tional support base, entitlements, social network, technology, human resource, and the
relevant health infrastructure.
Institutions are important in leveraging power and control and can influence the behavior
of individuals and communities vis-à-vis the management of climate extremes and variabil-
ity. In short, institutions can shape the way in which societies plan, prepare for, and adapt to
climate change impacts. Hence, institutions constitute a double-edged sword—either to dis-
able or enable the process of adaptation. Institutions are not neutral—they distribute advan-
tages to some and deny others similar advantages. In the climate change arena institutions
through their management and control of natural resources will create winners and losers.
Insufficient institutional capacity can compromise the work conducted by local people on
the ground. For instance, many institutions in Africa have been created to deal with single
issues relating, for example, to agriculture, desertification, or food security. The complexity
of working across scales and addressing multiple risks is quite challenging. Hence, institu-
tional weakness can affect the ability of vulnerable groups to anticipate or plan for negative
impacts of climate change. They react rather than initiate. Gupta et al. (2008) argue that cli-
mate change compels institutions to enhance their adaptive capacity which may further
compel them to go through a process of “renewal” or change commensurate with the pace
and speed of environmental change.
Informal institutions can be custodians of knowledge. Knowledge generation and
processes can be a principle tool in adapting to climate change impacts. However, in
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Africa, traditional knowledge is often not valued as a reference point for managing climate
risks and emerging threats. In Kenya, the importance of indigenous knowledge under
increased climate uncertainty created strong reciprocal alliances between the Kenyan
Meteorological Agency and the indigenous communities commonly known as rainmak-
ers. The Agency consequently decided to establish a center to sustain the heritage of the
Nganyi community, following attempts to calibrate indigenous climate forecasts with sci-
entific forecasts and the efficacy of the calibrated results in improving productivity
(Ziervogel and Opere 2010).
Institutional discourse tends to ignore informal institutions and the role they play in ena-
bling societies to adapt. Because local and national institutions have a key role to play in the
management of natural resources, this role is extended to the way in which they enable or
disable adaptation and the incentives structures they put in place to sustain adaptation activ-
ities. Subsequently the governance mechanisms they oversee need to be relatively robust in
order to deal with processes that are inherent in adaptation regimes. In Tanzania and Malawi,
it was found that local institutions helped in shaping the effects of climate hazards in various
important ways. They influence how urban and rural people define climatic risks and
impacts, and how they shaped the ability of urban and rural people to respond to climate
impacts and pursue different adaptation practices. Local institutions are important in lever-
aging support from within—influencing knowledge flows, and acting as intermediaries in
mediating external flows on adaptation and practices.
Governance Shapes Opportunities for Adaptation

A viable institutional architecture together with a sound governance system can determine
the success or failure of adaptation process. Africa is largely cited as one of the most vulnerable
continents in the world as a result of its limited capacity to offset the varied impacts of climate
variability and change. While institutional vulnerability has been cited, it is often perceived as
part of a mixed range of factors affecting Africa’s overall potential to fight climate impacts. In a
continent where institutions are still relatively fragile and governance regimes invariably
youthful, climate interventions will have a short shelf life if they are not part of an institutional
and governance regime. In addition, the potential for transformative action is reduced in the
absence of a credible governance model and viable institutional architecture.
Scholars and practitioners still remember the World Bank’s assessment of Africa’s devel-
opment problems as largely attributable to a “governance crisis” (Brautigam and Knack
2004). Indeed, the continent showed little capacity to deal with many of its socio-economic
development challenges—many of which had their foundation, putatively or real, in the gov-
ernance regime or lack of it. While the concept of good governance gained momentum since
the 1980s, climate change has unmasked the complexity of governance regimes. Adaptation
cannot be divorced from governance. African countries, due to difficulties in managing eco-
nomic growth, face similar challenges in managing environmental change. Nonetheless,
with the severity of climate variability, and the frequency and pace of change, countries in
Africa are increasingly under pressure to cope with increased hazards and risks. The transi-
tion to a low-carbon pathway and mainstreaming of adaptation and mitigation in policy
decisions necessitates good planning processes, regulatory and policy instruments to both
enforce and oversee response strategies. Climate variability and change exacerbate weaknesses
in the management of natural resources. The magnitude of impacts and possible response
strategies are overwhelming for fragile institutions already weakened by structural difficul-
ties and social and economic problems.
Governance is often perceived within the framework of policy, polity, and political proc-
ess. It tends to feed on political processes—and how choices are translated into decisions.
The notion of governance has traditionally been conflated to a single unitary central decision-
making authority where the state assumes full control and sovereignty over people. Yet the
definition has gradually evolved to embrace multiple networks, actors, processes, and a more
transparent management. Governance approaches that fall under the political category per-
ceive governance as a system of rules that shape the action of actors. Pahl-Wostl (2009) argues
that there are four dimensions of governance: institutions and the relationship between for-
mal and informal institutions; actor networks with an emphasis on the role and interactions
of state and non-state actors; multi-level interactions across administrative boundaries and
vertical integration; and governance modes, including bureaucratic hierarchies, markets,
and networks.
The complexity of climate change is such that governance at national and local level needs
to be working in close collaboration. In addition, climate change raises unique challenges
that will require new knowledge and modes of processing information useful for the benefit
of vulnerable communities. Although knowledge remains an important resource in the
management of climate change, it is this very knowledge that is in short supply in terms of
the policy and governance regimes that will move vulnerable communities toward trans
formational development. Thus, while climate change has been hailed as the biggest threat
to humanity, the “invisible” threats relating to a weak knowledge base and a fragile or non-
existent governance mechanism have been downplayed in the face of the seemingly “visible”
bio-physical problems.
Governance and institutional arrangements can render climate change adaptation effec-
tive. There are many attributes of resilience that tend to mimic good governance. These
include the ability to remain flexible, to self-organize, and to adapt. Although adaptation
happens locally it is affected by national institutions and the incentives they create. Local
institutions can influence collective behavior toward climate change, and institutional
arrangements can enhance or derail adaptation activities in a given context. Both the
governance regime and the institutional architecture are important in shaping adaptation.
Thus, building resilience is rooted in understanding the concept and how much it is linked to
every aspect of climate policy, management and sustainable development. Good governance
is important to enable societies to avoid mal-adaptation, while opaque systems of govern-
ance risk making climate action more problematic. It will mean the ability of societies to rely
on robust institutions, mechanisms of checks and balances that are fully functional, and
processes of decision making that are imperfect, complex, and non-linear.
Activities relevant to adaptation are essentially about the distribution of resources and the
implementation of a fairer system that will benefit the most vulnerable. Addressing vulnera-
bility is complex and messy and involves underlying issues of equity across scales, social
groups, and over time. Governance needs to “retrofit” and customize itself to deal with this
messiness and current asymmetries. Changes in agro-ecological systems will influence food
production systems and affect both agricultural production and growth (El Ashry 2009).
Climate variability and change are forcing resource dependent communities to adopt robust
and ingenious adaptation practices to resist the impacts of climate change.
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Reducing Vulnerability through Deliberation

A strong, transparent and flexible governance regime will enable societies to test both
national and decentralized mechanisms to enable adaptation processes. Experience in Africa
demonstrates that participatory processes and deliberative forms of decision making are
well suited to making adaptation work in practice. They enable governments to understand
how development policies and planning can cause vulnerability and disenfranchise seg-
ments of society, which is critical to understanding both the physical processes of vulnerabil-
ity and its underlying social undercurrents. Hence, governance is the “lubricant” of values,
principles and practices that form part of the institutional architecture. Transparent govern-
ance mechanisms are essential to plan for adaptation action and avoid mal-adaptation.
Often vulnerability is used to describe the extent to which someone’s “life and livelihood is
put at risk by a discrete and identifiable event in nature or in society” (Janssen et al. 2006).
Nearly all societies have some inherent vulnerability to climate. This is largely due to the fact
that climate tends to influence the places we choose to live in or the income we rely on (Adger,
Lorenzoni, and O’Brien 2003). Nonetheless, vulnerability remains a contested term. Vulner-
ability refers to the susceptibility of people and systems to the adverse consequences of cli-
mate variability and extremes. Understanding vulnerability—who is vulnerable, why, and
under what circumstances—is mediated by institutions and governance regimes.
The IPCC identifies key vulnerabilities and attributes several associated criteria. These
are, inter alia, the importance of the system-at-risk, the magnitude of impacts, their persist-
ence and reversibility, the potential for adaptation, and the distributional aspects of vulnera-
bilities, impacts, and adaptation. The IPCC (2007) defines vulnerability as “the degree to
which geophysical, biological and socio-economic systems are susceptible to, and unable to
cope with, adverse impacts of climate change.” Social vulnerability meanwhile, refers to the
potential state of human society that can affect the way they experience natural hazards.
Social vulnerability is associated with the sensitivity of human agency to the hazard, whereas
natural vulnerability refers to the sensitivity of natural environmental processes to the
hazards.
Factors affecting who is vulnerable, and to what degree and under what circumstances are
invariably dependent on human and physical forces that tend to shape the distribution of
assets in society (Pelling and Uitto 2001). According to Bohle, Downing, and Watts (1994)
vulnerability has three key characteristics: risk of exposure to stress, shocks, and crises; risk
of insufficient capacity to cope with them; risk of severe consequences of, and the attendant
risk of inability or slow potential to recover from stress, shocks, and crises.
Vulnerability tends to relate to political economy, class structure and reflecting social hierar-
chies on gender and class. Vulnerability can have a spatial interpretation—relating to space—
local, transnational, and regional and temporally referring to “long-term structural baseline
and short-term conjectural conditions” (Bohle, Downing, and Watts 1994). Nonetheless, vul-
nerability is a composite and relatively fluid term. Populations across the world differ in their
ability to organize themselves in a given context in the event of environmental disaster, and can
draw upon their assets, entitlements, social safety nets and networks, insurance and livelihoods
diversification to manage risks and adapt to given circumstances. Vulnerability can be per-
ceived as a complex mix of exposure to risk, capacity to cope, and ability to recover.
Vulnerability varies between individuals and social groups as well as over time and space.
Climate impacts will exact a much heavier toll on some social groups, especially women, in
developing countries who tend to shoulder a greater share of the household and community-
based incoming-earning activities. Adaptation processes may become disabled or skewed
based on the perception of main power brokers who may willingly exclude certain social
groups based on their own perceptions of what different members bring to the table. Hence,
in Southern Madagascar women’s voices were not heard as the governance process in place
was weighted toward social groups that wielded power and authority. Climate change is cre-
ating and will cause further inequalities between water rich and water poor societies. Pasto-
ralists, foresters, and other types of livelihoods will suffer when one adds increased climate
variability to current stressors. For instance, pastoralists across Africa have remained largely
at the periphery of development. Environmental stress mediates the much deeper political,
economic, and social forms of marginalization they face.
Adaptation is a process involving multiple actors and multiple vulnerabilities in different
social contexts—hence there is an implicit co-ordination problem in bringing stakeholders
to work together. Deliberative democracy seeks to bring different perspectives together and
lays a good foundation for a governance models that can progressively lead to sustainable
adaptation outcomes. In Africa, the creation of platforms constitutes important institutional
levers which allowed vulnerable communities to define their own adaptation agenda and
response strategies. Participatory Action Research became a clearing house for information—
information in Madagascar on crop varieties and how to use these to guard against climate
related hazards, information on making strategic choices in Ethiopia and expand farmers’
choices. In Benin, associative groups displayed a tremendous role in recovery potential,
and played a deliberate and efficient role in helping vulnerable groups recover from climate
hazards relating to floods and droughts. Hence, what started as a research method became
an institutional innovation through structured platforms, associative groups with rules and
a culture of sharing information that allows communities to adapt. Thus, the identification
of climate risks and relevant response strategies became important levers for social transfor-
mation and collective action.
Conclusion
Climate change has unmasked numerous challenges with implications for governance and
institutions. Climate change will continue to challenge governments and people across the
developed and developing world as they struggle to adapt. The challenge is that both local
and global governance need to revisit and perhaps “retrofit” current governance mechanisms
to deal with the scale, severity, and pace of change. Hence, in many ways, across several sec-
tors and scales, climate change compels governance to rethink its business model in which
“institutional renewal” can help put in place a strong and viable mechanism that can incor-
porate risks.
Climate change will continue to peripheralize vulnerable communities and test their
coping strategies due to several asymmetries and the uneven distribution of risks. Hence, a
governance mechanism that seeks “fair adaptation” becomes a critical model for sustaina-
ble development. Indeed, sustainable development because of its links with institutional
capacity and social equity has a strong underpinning for distributive and procedural justice
508 fatima denton
to ensure that both current and future generations do not become short-changed in a cli-
mate regime that compensates “winners” and marginalizes “losers.” Hence, both good gov-
ernance and supporting institutions are conduits to drive the process of social
transformation. Hence, the transformative change will come full circle if vulnerable com-
munities become more resilient and have greater adaptive capacity, but equally if govern-
ance regimes become more adaptable to absorb the complexity that comes with climate
change and variability.
Some actors find it difficult to “stagger” into this process of social transformation. It
requires a deeper consciousness and resolve, and the relevant institutional and governance
architecture to foster such changes. However for a truly transformational change—the chal-
lenge and opportunity are not to invest solely in discrete activities—but to use these as a
platform for broader, more sustained responses. The transition to a transformative pathway
will need political will and a degree of social organization to help vulnerable groups trans-
late adaptation options into climate related win–wins. Nonetheless, a number of adaptation
response strategies tend to deal with targeted short-term problems—and do not cater for
long-term radical changes. This means building the capacity of vulnerable communities
and testing adaptation options to determine their efficacy. It will also mean placing an
emphasis on the quality of process rather than an outcome-oriented set of responses.
Equally, the complexity of the climate regime, the uneven distribution of climate impacts
and the asymmetries in adaptive capacities across the developing world call for a new form
of governance in which vulnerable communities are at the center of the development they
seek to affect.
Adaptation is not something that can be done for people, but rather a set of actions that
they do for themselves to offset climate impacts and hazards. Living with a changing climate
may need more than incremental adaptation within infrastructure, livelihoods, and sectors,
to instead require more transformative development based on understanding people’s expe-
riences of vulnerability, response strategies, and recovery potential. Hence, the test is to iden-
tify win–win options in key climate sensitive sectors and to ensure that informal institutions
through the wealth of knowledge amassed over the years are in a position where they can
steer societies to a less insecure future. They will be able to use their knowledge and experi-
ences as departure points and will equally be in a position where they can test their knowl-
edge against critical climate change and vulnerability thresholds.
Notes
1. A few tree species are able to survive periodic burning, or indeed require it for activating
their seeds.
2. See <http://unfccc.int>.
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chapter 30
gl oba l h e a lth
tim evans
Introduction
In looking back at health in the twentieth century, Bill Foege—a former director of the U.S.
Center for Disease Control, a leader in the campaign to eradicate smallpox and the initiator
of the Child Survival Task Force—summed it up in four words: “spectacular achievement,
spectacular inequities” (Foege 1998). This succinct assessment provides an appropriate back-
drop against which to undertake a critical examination of how the global community has
marshaled its “development” resources for health in the last fifty years.
The chapter begins by providing an overview of the nature of health change over time
pointing to major transitions in the predominant types of health problems. The distribution
of these challenges across countries by levels of wealth and over time reveals evidence of
rapid improvements in key parameters such as child mortality, but persistent and growing
inequities in health between and within countries. Underlying responses to these health
challenges among development partners are diverse views with respect to health as a special
development good related to its definitions, determinants, valuations, and local/global
lenses. These are explored with respect to three periods of health development that reflect
major political transformations from the colonial period of “tropical health” through to the
Cold War period of “international health” and to the current context of “global health.”
Drawing on this history, a framework for health development in the post-Millennium Devel-
opment Goals (MDG) period is presented focused on equity, security, and systems for global
health followed by three concluding thoughts.
Health Transitions
The twentieth century witnessed improvements in health that were greater than in any other
period in history. Global life expectancy more than doubled (from less than 30 years to over
60 years) accompanied by the eradication of infectious killers, and the treatment and effec-
tive control of many other maladies. This rapid improvement in health reflects a number of
512 tim evans
transitions. The first is the “demographic transition” whereby societies previously character-
ized by high fertility transition to low fertility (Omran 1971). Total fertility rates plummeted
from a previous average of six–seven per woman to reach two–three per woman after the
transition. Indeed in some industrialized societies such as Italy, fertility is well below the
“replacement” level of 2.1.
Linked to the demographic transition is the epidemiologic transition in which societies
have moved from high to low rates of infant and child mortality due largely to the control of
infectious diseases. Accompanied by this transition is the relative growth in the importance of
chronic diseases associated with greater longevity of adult populations with the latest evi-
dence suggesting that chronic diseases now account for a majority of the world’s burden of
disease (Murray et al. 2012). More recently two further transitions have gained attention
linked to forces of globalization. The first—the nutrition transition—posits that the rapid shift
to more sedentary lifestyles and high fat diets is leading to worrisome increases in levels of
over-weight and obesity in the population (Popkin 2001). The second—the injury transition—
stems from growth in vehicular traffic and the associated rise in road traffic injuries and fatali-
ties (WHO 2004).
While these transitions are helpful in understanding overall trends in health, they mask
the rise of an unprecedented global health divide. Industrialized, or high-income, countries
have experienced sustained improvements in standards of living, nutrition, health, and
health care. Meanwhile, in low- and middle-income countries with much less favorable con-
ditions, health and health care has progressed much more slowly. The scale of this divide is
reflected in the extremes of life expectancy at birth for newborn girls, with those in Japan at
the high end (eighty-two years) and those in Sierra Leone at the low end (thirty-two years)
(WHO 2003). This fifty-year difference reflects the daunting range of health challenges faced
by low- and middle-income countries.
Low- and middle-income countries (defined as per capita income below US$12,000 per
year) account for more than 80 percent of the world’s population. Average life expectancy in
these countries lags far behind that in high-income countries. Whereas the average life
expectancy at birth in high-income countries is seventy-four years, it is only sixty-eight years
in middle-income countries and fifty-eight years in low-income countries. This discrepancy
has received growing attention over the past four decades. Initially, the situation in poor
countries was characterized primarily in terms of high fertility and high infant, child, and
maternal mortality rates, with most deaths and illnesses attributable to infectious or tropical
diseases among remote, largely rural populations. With growing adult (and especially
elderly) populations and changing lifestyles linked to global forces of urbanization, a new set
of health challenges characterized by chronic diseases, environmental overcrowding, and
road traffic injuries has emerged rapidly. The majority of tobacco-related deaths globally
now occur in low- and middle-income countries, and the risk of a child’s dying from a road
traffic injury in Africa is more than twice that in Europe. Hence, low- and middle- income
countries in the twenty-first century face a full spectrum of health challenges—infectious,
chronic, and injury-related—at much higher incidences and with more prevalence than are
documented in high-income countries and with much fewer resources to address these
challenges.
The stratification of these challenges by country wealth is further nuanced by looking at
the relationship between country life expectancy and GDP/capita (Figure 30.1). Two obser-
vations are particularly important. First, over time the curve between health and wealth is
global health 513
Scatter-diagram of relations between life expectancy at birth () and national income per head for
nations in the 1900 s, 1930 s and 1960 s.
1960’s
70
65
1930’s
60
55
50
45
%
40
1960’s
35 1930’s
1900’s
30
25
20
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800
National income per head, 1963 US dollars.
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epiderniological Association
The Author 2007; all rights reserved.
figure 30.1 Scatter-diagram of relations between life expectancy at birth and national
income per head for nations in the 1900s, 1930s, and 1960s.
Source: Preston, Samuel (2007). “The Changing Relation Between Mortality and Level of Economic Development,”
International Journal of Epidemiology, 36(3), 484–90, by permission of Oxford University Press.
shifting to the left indicating that for a given level of country wealth, more health is achieved
in 2005 than in 1970. This reflects a system-wide efficiency gain in health, or in economic
terms a “shifting” of the health production possibility frontier curve. This observation points
to the strong improvements in health that have been recorded that have transcended levels
of wealth. Indeed, if one looks at the rate of improvement in childhood deaths over the last
forty years the figures globally are quite staggering. The total number of childhood deaths
has been cut by over half. Whereas in 1970 there were over sixteen million childhood deaths
annually, in 2010 there were less than eight million deaths annually. Factoring in increases in
population, this translates to a rate of improvement of greater than 10,000 children’s lives
saved per day over the forty year period (WHO 2008a).
The second observation is that at any given level of GDP/capita, particularly at lower lev-
els of GDP there is substantial variation in health performance. Some countries like Costa
Rica, Cuba, and Bangladesh have much better than expected health given their level of
wealth while others such as Russia, South Africa, and Pakistan are well below the curve.
As average levels of health vary across regions and countries, so too do they vary within
countries. Rural populations have higher mortality rates than urban dwelling populations
on average but urban slum populations have worse health status than rural populations
(WHO 2008b). And in almost all countries, lower economic quintiles have lower coverage
514 tim evans
of essential health services like immunization. Indeed, disparities within countries are
often greater than those between high-income and low-income countries. For example, if
low- and middle-income countries could reduce their overall childhood mortality rate to
that of the richest one-fifth of their populations, global childhood mortality could be
decreased by 40 percent. These inequities in health and health care are pervasive across
countries (including high-income countries) conforming to the “inverse-care law”
whereby those with the greatest health needs are least likely to receive the care they need
(Tudor Hart 1971). This social patterning of health has very disturbing dimensions.
Amartya Sen’s analysis of gender inequities has pointed to more than 100 million missing
women in Asia. The world’s two largest countries—India and China—in their 2011 Census
data revealed worsening discrimination against the girl child with increases in the skews
in the sex ratio at birth compared to ten years earlier. In the poorest, most remote counties
of the United States, women’s life expectancy at birth has declined almost three years since
1980 (Ezzati et al. 2008). The rapid growth of urban squalor now reveals that in a given city
life expectancy of the rich can differ from life expectancy amongst slum dwellers by as
much as forty years! These and other data on inequities in health led Sir Michael Marmot,
Chair of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, to pronounce boldly
and bleakly at the launch of the Commission’s report in August 2008 that “social injustice
is killing on a grand scale.”
Health as a Special Good
Along with these evolving patterns of health, there have also been important developments
in our understanding and valuation of health not all of which are convergent. These are
worth noting as they have implications on how the global community frames and has dealt
with health in the broader context of “development.” Here we point to five constructs that are
indicative of the diverse understandings and values that are attached to health.
What is Health?
The WHO constitution states that health is not simply the absence of disease but a complete
state of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being (WHO 2006a). In spite of this broad defi-
nition of health, the world of allopathic medicine is founded on an International Classifica-
tion of Diseases (ICD) that is over a century old and is currently undergoing its twelfth global
revision. As such the basic accounting unit of health, either in terms of causes of death and/
or incidence or prevalence, is “disease.” Diseases have and continue to be the focus of global
campaigns aimed at eradication or control, such as small pox, polio, cholera, and flu. They
drive research priorities of national health research agencies and pharmaceutical companies.
And interventions to address diseases often inform the contents of “essential packages” of
health policies and strategies (Jamison et al. 2006).
However, there are important other dimensions of health that are increasingly valued.
First, arising from rapid declines in mortality and emerging from populations with living
chronic disabilities, there has been a growing focus on healthy living and “functioning,” the
global health 515
importance of the capability of undertaking activities of daily living and participating in

social, family, education, and employment activities (Ustun et al. 2003). These “function-
ings” have led to the emergence of new measures that value non-fatal health states and per-
mit the comparison of health outcomes across diseases and accord greater importance to
highly prevalent but low mortality conditions like mental illness (Murray and Lopez 1996).
Second, is awareness of the importance of “risks” to health that often cut across diseases
including behaviors such as smoking, sexual and physical activity, and living conditions,
such as indoor air pollution, water, and sanitation (WHO 2002). Understanding these risks
is leading to a growing set of opportunities to address health problems outside of the tradi-
tional doctor–patient setting.
What Determines Health?

Underlying all efforts to improve health are theories related to what determines health. These
theories have undergone a vast evolution since the earliest notions of “essences” in antiquity
to “miasma” in the middle ages to the break-through “bacteriology” of Pasteur and Koch in
the late eighteenth century, to the biomedical and genetic science revolutions of the twenti-
eth century. While we benefit from much more nuanced socio-biological, or rainbow mod-
els of determinants of health (Dahlgren and Whitehead 1991; Figure 30.2), there remains a
predominant more “popular” view—doctors prescribing drugs to patients for diseases—that
defines and drives the mainstreams of policy. This is closely aligned with an (unrealistic)
sense that individual choice over lifestyle decisions and care providers makes the individual
the primary agent of their health.
In recent years, the hegemony of the individual consumer of health care model is being
challenged both from below and above. From below, genetic and proteomic variability along
with exposures from air, food, and water-borne toxins are rapidly redefining individual risks
into larger sub-groupings and ecosystems that challenge traditional models of individual
risk (Rapport, Costanza, and McMichael 1998). And from above, the ground-breaking
insights of the British epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose made clear that societal changes in
behavioral norms and the circumstances that facilitate their adoption are much more impor-
tant determinants of behavior than individual choice. Rose’s observations related to the con-
stellation of deprivations that are found in lower socio-economic groups leading to a
clustering of unhealthy behaviors have also discredited over-simplistic notions of individual
choice in health (Rose 1992). The study of inequities in health has opened up more strategic
entry points for intervening on the social and environmental determinants of health as
important complements and often more cost-effective alternatives to individual health care
provision (WHO 2008b).
How is Health Valued?

Health is valued in many different ways from being seen as a consumable product, as an
investment, or as a right or entitlement.
Views of health as a consumable product are strongly associated with the notion of indi-
viduals exercising choice in purchasing health care, much as they might purchase food or
some other commodity. While such a view of health has major shortcomings, the vast
516 tim evans
figure 30.2 The Rainbow Model of Health Determinants

Source: Dahlgren and Whitehead (1991).
majority of health care in low- and middle-income countries is provided as a consumable

product paid directly by the sick consumer. Indeed, this view of health underlay the struc-
tural adjustment reforms of the 1980s whereby publicly-funded health care was seen as a
net drain on the economy and a brake on economic growth (Kim et al. 2002). Public budg-
ets for health, therefore, needed to be minimized with costs for health care transferred to
the consumer in the form of user fees.
Alternatively, drawing on human capital theory (Schultz 1961), health can be viewed as
stock, or health capital, with health care seen as an investment in that stock yielding positive
returns to the economy over time. This instrumental view of health was inherent in the land-
mark World Development Report entitled “Investing in Health” (World Bank 1993). It also
underpinned the thinking of the Commission on Macroeconomics in Health in 2001 that
advocated that increased public spending for health in low-income countries would contrib-
ute to (not detract from) economic growth (WHO 2001).
A third view of health is as a right or entitlement. It differs significantly from the other
views of health as either consumption or investment insofar as it places importance on
the intrinsic value of health. This view emerges from the WHO Constitution, which states
“the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental
rights of every human being without distinction to race, religion, political belief, eco-
nomic or social condition” (WHO 2006a). This view drove the “health for all by the year
2000” vision of the Alma Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care in 1978 and underlies
the global mobilization around universal child immunization and access to HIV
treatment.
global health 517
Local or Global
Health is also viewed with different lenses from local to global. The local view of health places
a premium on “community” and “context” as the defining parameters for thinking about
how to improve health. It attributes value to local knowledge and ownership through com-
munity participation in decision making as regards health and provision of services. It has
strong linkages to community development thinking. It eschews top down, one-size-fits-all
prescriptions imposed from the “outside” and embraces the concepts of “subsidiarity” and
decentralized planning.
In contrast, health is also viewed with a “global” lens. The global view recognizes common
challenges that transcend local or national contexts and the scale and scope efficiencies aris-
ing from addressing those challenges collectively. It also recognizes the relative disregard
that infectious pathogens have for administrative boundaries and the universal truths aris-
ing from health science that define the human species. It further recognizes the value of
being able to draw on larger pools of financial and technical resources to address health pri-
orities that countries or communities on their own are unable to muster. Indeed the non-
rival and non-exclusive properties of global health, or as some have argued its “indivisibility”
(Chen and Berlinguer 2001), have invoked the further notion of health as a global public
good (Chen, Evans, and Cash 1999).
From Tropical to Global Health
While there is no singular view of health as a special good, many strands of the diverse defi-
nitions, models of determinants, valuations, and local—global lenses can be seen to have
played out through the development discourse on health. This section looks at how some of
these diverse views have been expressed through three relatively distinct periods, corre-
sponding to tropical, international, and global health.
Tropical Health
The colonial era was marked by a keen awareness and concern for ill-health in the “tropics.”
This concern stemmed not only from the very high rates of mortality amongst colonial offic-
ers but extended more generally to the local population whose compromised health and
nutrition limited worker productivity thereby directly impacting the efficiency of the “extrac-
tion” economies. In the building of the Panama canal, for example, its completion was
delayed for years due to the enormous death toll amongst workers arising from yellow fever,
malaria, and cholera (McCullough 1978). Ill-health in the tropics thus constituted a major
constraint to economic development and as such merited investments to control diseases
(Winslow CEA 1951).
Dedicated schools of tropical medicine were established and scientists recruited to gener-
ate understanding and responses to these plagues. Societies of tropical medicine brought the
scientists together and the Rockefeller Foundation established laboratories across many of
the endemic countries sending the world’s best scientists to work on these problems
518 tim evans
(Jonas 1989). With new knowledge for prevention including vaccines, vigorous village-to-
village campaigns were waged with a view to eradicating or controlling disease.
Right through to the end of the colonial period in the early 1960s and for the next two dec-
ades thereafter, the development discourse and action was marked primarily by frontal
attacks on specific diseases: hookworm, malaria, yellow fever, measles, sleeping sickness
(T. Cruzi), and river blindness (Onchocerciasis). This period was marked by global cam-
paigns, the most notable and successful being the global eradication of small pox (Oomman
and Cleghorn, this volume). The global campaign against malaria led to its elimination
through Southern Europe, the Middle East, and large parts of Asia, however, despite heroic
efforts it failed in key areas such as Africa (Carter and Mendis 2002).
International Health
Despite some notable success in tropical health, the failure to eradicate malaria and the rec-
ognition in the post-colonial era of the need to develop the health systems of recently inde-
pendent nations led to the emergence of a subsequent period called international health.
Fueled by official development assistance, programs for the development of the health sector
in recipient countries began to emerge in the 1960s. These programs focused on medium-
term plans to further develop or sustain the health services of the colonial period in a pyram-
idal structure of local front-line clinics backed up by district and tertiary care referral
hospitals. In addition, the development discourse was fueled by concerns about a population
bomb—a Malthusian spectre—that the high fertility rates in low-income countries were
likely to create a population explosion that would outstrip food production and lead to wide-
spread famine and global insecurity (Ehrlich 1968). As a result, population control cam-
paigns superseded those for disease control of the tropical era. Similarly, there were concerted
efforts to address high levels of protein-energy malnutrition thought to arise primarily due
to insufficient caloric intake (Berg 1973).
The international health era was marked most prominently from a policy perspective by a
jointly sponsored WHO and UNICEF meeting in Alma Ata in 1978. The Declaration of Alma
Ata1 represented the first comprehensive vision of health development with particular rele-
vance to low- and middle-income countries. Primary health care efforts aimed to move care
closer to where people lived, to ensure their involvement in decisions about their own health
care, and to address key aspects of the physical and social environment essential to health
such as water, sanitation, and education. It had a strong focus on the need to work across dif-
ferent sectors, address the social and economic factors that determine health, mobilize the
participation of communities in health systems, and ensure the use and development of
technology that was appropriate in terms of setting and cost. In many respects, primary
health care corresponded with the broader “development” paradigm at that time with its
focus on integrated development and the use of “appropriate technology.”
Despite the consensus in Alma Ata in 1978, the global health community rapidly became
fractured in its commitment to the far-reaching measures called for by the declaration. In a
narrow health sector sense this fractionation arose from the continued tension between com-
prehensive and selective definitions of health of health care and what was most appropriate
for poor countries (Walsh and Warren 1979). More broadly, Alma Ata was seen as too much
like “socialist” health care in the bipolar politics of the Cold War. Furthermore, economic
global health 519
recession in the early 1980s with the emergence of monetarist economic policies in the U.S.
and the U.K., removed support for grand plans to expand spending on health in the public
sector. Finally, the advent of new leadership at UNICEF and the entrance of the World Bank
with the creation of its Population, Health, and Nutrition division in 1979, challenged the tra-
ditional multi-lateral dominance of WHO in health. UNICEF, with World Bank support,
launched in 1981 its own selective primary health care package for child survival called GOBI-
FFF (Growth monitoring, Oral rehydration, Breast-feeding, Immunization, Female educa-
tion, Family birth spacing, Food supplements) (Cueto 2004). A Task Force for Child Survival
composed of a coalition of public and private sector partners surged forward in the mid-1980s
with a much more “doable vision” of immunizing the world’s children by 1990.
Success with these initiatives supported the continued movement of health development
efforts away from the comprehensive approach of primary health care and toward programs
that targeted specific public health priorities. The tighter focus was fueled by the wider economic
context of fiscal retrenchment and structural adjustment leading to a downsizing of the public
sector in many countries and the imposition of user-fees for health under the (ill-conceived)
theory that local payment for health services would lead to more responsive, accountable and
sustainable health care. Neither efforts to create health or social sector exceptionalism (Cornia,
Jolly, and Stewart 1987) nor the rapid emergence of a global killer in the form of HIV/AIDS
could shake international health out of the clutches of structural adjustment. By the 1990s, pri-
mary health care had fallen out of favor in policy circles, rates of childhood immunization were
declining, public sector budgets for health were being cut back with a push to decentralize deci-
sion-making and delivery of services (Birn, Zimmerman, and Garfield 2000).
Global Health
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the galloping forces of a globalizing economy, the inter-
national health era closed and a new era of global health emerged. This era is marked by a
whirlwind of change facilitated by the entrance of new ideas and evidence, innovative insti-
tutional arrangements, and an impatience for greater global health security and equity. Sev-
eral key strands of this transformation are described below.
Research Partnerships
A landmark report from the Global Independent Commission on Health Research for
Development diagnosed a 10:90 gap in global research resources whereby a minority (10
percent) of the world research resources were directed towards the major burden of disease
(90 percent) affecting low-income populations that cannot exercise a market demand for
health services to address their needs (Commission on Health Research for Development
1990). In addition to recommending increasing investment in research it also advocated
tackling “market failures” in the research and development of new drugs and vaccines for
common conditions in low-income countries such as malaria and TB through innovative
partnership arrangements with the private pharmaceutical sector. Within a decade, a dozen
new public–private partnerships were created focusing on an accelerated development of
priority drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics for populations living in low-income countries
(Evans 2001; Fathalla 1999; Pablos, Chacko, and Evans 1999).
520 tim evans
Evidence and Targets

A novel metric brought two previously incomparable health outcomes of mortality and
morbidity together under one measure with the calculation of the global burden of disease
(Murray and Lopez 1996). Drawing on this common measure, The World Bank issued a
landmark World Development Report entitled “Investing in Health” in which it challenged
the prevailing view of health as a consumable product and recommended cost-effectiveness
analysis as the basis for informing the choice of health interventions (World Bank 1993). The
idea of health as an investment with a positive return to the economy was further advocated
in the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health arguing for investing a minimum of $38
per capita in low-income countries (WHO 2001). This linked closely with efforts in the
development community to expand government spending on health as seen in the Abuja
Declaration whereby African Heads of State committed to spending at least 15 percent of
government budgets on health.
More importantly, perhaps, were the rallying points for the global health development
community around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The goals were motivated
primarily on the basis that they represented minimal development entitlements across all
countries. The representation of health was very strong with three goals focusing directly on
health issues (child and maternal health, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria), and three
others related to the conditions for health (improved food security and nutrition, water and
sanitation, and women’s education).
Mothers and Children

At a 1999 meeting aimed at revitalizing child immunization, Rotary International tran-
scended the bounds of previous thinking by stating that billions of dollars—not millions—
were required to be serious about universal child immunization. Within a year, the first
billion-dollar public–private partnership was born as the Global Alliance on Vaccines and
Immunization (GAVI). In 2011, GAVI would receive further commitments totaling $4.3 billion
in a four-hour pledging meeting. At a similar scale, spurred on by slow progress in maternal
health, the Canadian government through its G8 leadership in 2010 launched a $5 billion
Muskoka Initiative as a precursor to a broader UN/global community mobilization entitled
“Every Woman, Every Child” valued at $40 billion.
HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria

Activists in South Africa challenged the global pharmaceutical industry’s prohibitive
prices for anti-retroviral therapy and opened the way for competition from global gener-
ics manufacturers and the negotiation of public health provisions within the World Trade
Organization discussions on trade-related intellectual property. The HIV/AIDS crisis in
sub-Saharan Africa with plummeting life expectancy especially in East and Southern
Africa was seen as a threat to development. Moreover, concerns about social stability and
the health of UN peacekeepers in 2000, led the UN Security Council to pass its first reso-
lution (#1308) on health, describing AIDS as a threat to security. Corresponding with
this, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan hosted the Presidents of U.S. philanthropic
global health 521
foundations at his residence to launch a $100 million effort aimed at preventing mother-
to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS. The 2001 G8 meeting launched the multi-billion
dollar Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (GFATM). In 2002, the U.S.
President announced a $15 billion Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEP-
FAR) targeting the fourteen hardest hit countries, soon followed by a similar billion-dollar
initiative on malaria.
Non-communicable Diseases
With success against many of the infectious killers and the aging of populations in most
countries, there is growing attention to challenges of non-communicable or chronic dis-
eases (NCDs) affecting adult and aging populations. While not typically part of the “devel-
opment” discourse, NCDs draw attention to the health risks of globalization whereby
market forces associated with sales of tobacco and high fat foods are particularly strong in
poorer countries. In these same countries, the market in health care for chronic diseases
is growing rapidly, raising important issues of equitable access, quality, and safety that
are largely unresolved. As such, NCDs represent the new global landscape of health
development.
The global community has responded in part with the establishment of the WHO Frame-
work Convention on Tobacco Control in 2003 that has now been signed by over 160 member
states. In 2009, a Global Alliance for NCD research was launched involving commitments of
$250 million from the world’s largest national research councils. More recently, the UN Gen-
eral Assembly Special Session in 2011 focused on NCDs, committing to increase efforts to
improve prevention and control of four of the most important contributors to the burden of
NCDs. Of note, this agenda was agreed in principle but lacked any commitments of new
funding reflecting the continued peripheral status of adult health in the health development
mainstream.
Outbreak Diseases
Amidst the ramping up of global efforts to reach the health-related MDGs, in 2003, the world
was caught off guard by the sudden appearance and rapid spread of a lethal new coronavirus,
soon labeled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Deaths in China, Hong Kong, Viet-
nam, and Canada put the global community on alert with an advisory warning against travel
to affected cities. While the brush with SARS was short-lived, it raised awareness of the
shared health vulnerability arising from the inter-connected global economy and pointed to
major weaknesses in stewarding a rapid and effective transnational response. Within five
years, two further pandemic events related to flu virus (H5N1 and H1N1) reinforced the pre-
mium on strengthening public health systems in all countries to global standards with clear
expectations on reporting and capacity for response. Also apparent was the capacity to pool
global scientific and institutional resources to address diverse dimensions of the response
such as: the rapid genetic sequencing of new pathogens; the development of diagnostics,
drugs, and vaccines; strategies to contain reservoirs of infection especially in livestock popu-
lations; and ensuring rapid delivery of antivirals and vaccines to at-risk or infected popula-
tions independent of their ability to pay.
522 tim evans
Framing the post-MDG Agenda
In taking stock of this transformation of the development discourse in health to its current
characterization as global health, a number of issues emerge that are important in defining
the post-MDG agenda in health. First is that there appear to be equity and security factors as
consensual values mobilizing collective action. Second is that progress in the realization of
these values is increasingly dependent on flexible and forceful systems for health that oper-
ate both within and increasingly across countries. Together these values and the growing
demands on systems capabilities can accommodate the wide ranging and rapidly changing
health challenges of the twenty-first century.
Equity
The equity value relates to a shared sense of concern that opportunities for health should be
equal across context, especially for children. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focuses
its global health programs on health equity, believing that a child in a poor country should
have the same rights and opportunities to survival as a child in a rich country. Global assess-
ments reveal disparities in health achievement across countries that are considered both
avoidable and unfair. The global mobilization around disparities in maternal and child
health, and priority infectious diseases, speaks to the ability of equity arguments to drive to
redress disparities and to mobilize significant resources. Interestingly in the case of HIV/
AIDS treatment and expensive childhood vaccines (e.g. pentavalent vaccines), concerns for
equitable access have trumped more “rational” decision criteria, such as cost-effectiveness,
that would deem such interventions as too expensive relative to their health benefits. This
raises a more complex and unresolved question of the criteria for identifying priorities for
global equity in the post-MDG agenda.
The agenda for health equity, however, is not only relevant at the global level: it transcends
all countries both rich and poor. Inequities in health in the U.S. with respect to geographic
residence or racial-ethnic background constitute a growing policy concern, as evidenced by
the “Healthy People 2020” ten-year agenda. Even Canada and the U.K. struggle with pro-
nounced social stratification of health risks and access to care. Further, the majority of the
poor will be found in middle-income countries in the immediate post-MDG era. As such,
the ubiquity of inequities in health in all countries and their ability to forge consensus for
action across countries offers a much more global agenda for health development in the
post-MDG period.
Security
The security value relates to the collective concerns associated with the emergence of an omi-
nous threat—classically an infectious pathogen—that transcends national borders with rela-
tive ease making it clear that there is no safe haven. Recent experiences with SARS, the flu
viruses, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and even the re-introduction of polio through migration,
global health 523
are among the numerous security risks that threaten to paralyze the global community. In
the post-MDG era, the security agenda in health is likely to expand. First, there is the evi-
dence that the intensive crop and livestock production practices associated with meeting
global demands for food are driving the emergence of new pathogens at an alarming rate
(WHO 2007). Second, there is insecurity arising from global climate change with severe
weather events, changes in disease vector habitats, and increasing salinization associated
with rising sea-levels. The health impacts of climate change are likely to overwhelm local
resources and spill over borders, thereby requiring access to a ready and resourced global
response capacity. This shared insecurity in health—vulnerability and unpredictability—
informs a common agenda of preparedness and response capacity both within and across
countries.
Systems
In pursuing an equity and security guided post-MDG agenda, a third plank of the agenda
emerges related to “systems” that (i) effectively prepare and respond to a global pandemic;
(ii) to scale-up low-cost interventions to prevent child and maternal mortality; and (iii)
provide effective secondary prevention for high blood pressure and diabetes. These tasks
require a level of functioning of systems for health that is all-too-often missing. In exam-
ining reasons for variations in health performance across countries, Angus Deaton refers
to “social-organizational failures including the delivery of health care” that are not auto-
matically ameliorated by higher income (Deaton 2006). Indeed, it has been the impatience
for results and inquiries into the reasons for slower than expected progress, that have
pointed to a set of systems short-falls found in virtually every country that cut across the
spectrum of priority interventions (Travis et al. 2004). These systems deficiencies include
massive shortages of skilled health workers, unreliable commodity procurement and sup-
ply chains, and inadequately maintained health infrastructures. In essence, it became
apparent that the challenge of achieving results in global health was much less about “what
to do” and much more about “how to do it” captured in the phrase the “know-do gap”
(Pablos and Shademani 2006).
In the last decade, there have been concerted efforts to begin to tackle health systems
both in their totality (World Bank 2007, WHO 2008a) and their component parts, be it
information systems (WHO 2011), the health workforce (WHO 2006b), or financing
(WHO 2010). Concerns about the systems bottlenecks to the performance of global
health initiatives (WHO 2009) led to explicit efforts by both GAVI and the GFATM to
incorporate systems considerations into their support for immunization and HIV/TB/
Malaria grants respectively. Despite these efforts, there are prevailing views of health sys-
tems challenges as a “black box” (Frenk 2010) reflecting both the confusion around their
complexity as well as the skepticism that there are effective means of improving their per-
formance. In response, a new era of systems science is fast emerging taking its place in
the mainstream of research priorities alongside more traditional domains of biomedical
and clinical science (Evans, Nishtar, and Atun 2008). Investing in this knowledge agenda
is a global enterprise and priority that should help to reconcile the unmet demand for
systems knowledge and know-how to achieve equity and security objectives both within
and across nations.
524 tim evans
Conclusion
In 2012, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Universal Health Coverage
(UHC) in all countries: access to affordable care to all according to need and without eco-
nomic compromise. This political momentum represents an unprecedented opportunity as
indicated by the WHO Director General’s statement that “UHC is the most powerful unifying
concept that public health has to offer” (Holmes 2012). However, the concept on its own is
insufficient to continue to steer the world towards systems that deliver greater equity and
security in health. A renewed commitment towards appropriate but ambitious goals and tar-
gets that are time-bound and to which politicians, policy-makers, and technocrats and the
population can be held accountable is a critical complement to the UHC clarion. These goals
must tackle at least three major systems challenges in order to have global relevance and trac-
tion: a common measure of comprehensive service coverage; a concerted strategy for financ-
ing health; and more effective governance mechanisms for global health interdependence.
Measuring Service Coverage

The pursuit of the MDG agenda in health has been of great relevance to the poorest countries
in the world but much less relevant to health challenges of middle and high income countries
of the world. While there remains an unfinished agenda related to higher than expected
infant, child, and maternal mortality in some low-income countries, the trends are in the
right direction and with continued efforts on these fronts, goals like the elimination of
unnecessary childhood mortality are within sight. This global convergence around the sur-
vival of mothers and children is an enormous achievement. It raises, however, the reality that
expectations for health have moved well beyond basic survival to span access to good quality
care from cradle to grave, including chronic diseases of aging and the range of settings from
community to tertiary facilities where such care is provided.
An index of service coverage is required that is sensitive to cost-effective interventions for
priority conditions across this matrix of the life course and intervention settings. Such an
index, appropriately constructed, can accommodate the differential health priority condi-
tions across countries (for example those with malaria), as well as accommodate over-time
changes in priority interventions to address the most important health conditions. Further-
more, an index could provide important insights into the critical balance between interven-
tions that are population- or community-based interventions compared to those services
provided in secondary or tertiary level facilities. Most importantly, an index of universal
service coverage could be used to make comparisons across countries over time.
Financing Health
It is disconcerting, to say the least, that in the twenty-first century the primary form of
financing for health in low- and middle-income countries is the most inefficient and inequi-
table: payment out of pocket at the point of accessing services. The magnitude of the impov-
erishing impact of health care expenditure on households in addition to its deterrent effect
on accessing care provides strong economic and health rationales to pay more attention to
fair financing for health (Xu et al. 2007).
global health 525
While national financing systems in low- and middle-income countries are hemorrhag-
ing wealth especially from the poor, at the global level, donor financing for health has
expanded to its highest levels in history, peaking at about $20 billion per annum in 2008
(Lu et al. 2010). Both the source of the flows and their forms have undergone a profound
transformation in the global health era with the creation of public–private billion dollar
funds such as GAVI and GFATM, bonds for immunization (IFFIm), and “advanced market
commitments” (AMC) for vaccines (Task Force on Innovative Financing 2009).
However, the longer-term financing issues associated with these instruments and the
nature of their interface with national health financing systems raises important policy con-
cerns that thus far have been inadequately addressed. The realization that the commitment
to funding treatment for persons with HIV/AIDS is four to five decades, rather than years
(a so-called “HIV treatment mortgage”) has pushed donors to consider the long-term
sustainability of financing. In addition, there is evidence that some countries in receipt of
global funds are using then as a substitute rather than an addition to national health budgets
(Lu et al. 2010). There are further concerns about criteria for eligibility for these funds in
relation to countries with higher GDP per capita such as China or South Africa. This links to
the observation of a bigger picture with respect to development assistance: despite increases
in donor financing for health, the national expansion of expenditures in health is much
faster. As such, the proportionate contribution of donor financing to national health financ-
ing is declining over time (WHO 2008a).
There is an urgent need to shift donor discourse and policy towards the development of
pre-payment financing as the back-bone of national health financing systems (WHO 2010).
This involves the articulation of national financing policies for universal coverage that con-
textualize the overwhelming evidence on the value of “pooling and prepayment” mecha-
nisms and the development of institutional capacities to carry out these functions (WHO
2010; Rockefeller Foundation 2010). It also requires more direct donor support for the devel-
opment of these financing systems or at the very least an explicit articulation of how external
financing flows are supporting the development of national financing systems. Time-bound
targets to achieve more equitable and efficient financing of national health systems could
include such indicators as reducing out-of-pocket payments to less than 30 percent of total
financing, a threshold that is linked with a minimal level of health-care-expenditure induced
impoverishment.
From a global perspective, there will be a growing need to understand the landscape of
global financing instruments that balances the needs for accountability and alignment
with opportunities for new initiatives and innovation. Short-term thinking with short-
lived entries and exits is likely to dampen enthusiasm and even sow a distrust of global
financing instruments. A longer-term strategy, focused on equity and security priorities
and informed by the magnitudes, duration, and types of global financing support required,
is likely to accelerate the emergence of road-worthy national financing systems for univer-
sal coverage and nurture the emergence of more sustainable global reserves for health
(Ooms et al. 2010).
Governing Interdependence
The mushrooming of global health partnerships, alliances, funds, and initiatives—accom-
panied by a shift in the resource psyche from millions to billions—has been exciting and
526 tim evans
bewildering. The landscape of global health is no longer defined primarily by multilateral

institutions comprised of member states but has been forced to expand to consider new
types of international institutions with constituency representation from the private sector,
civil society, academia, and philanthropy. Complex challenges like those related to pan-
demic flu or health worker migration or HIV/AIDS are demanding intensive, inter-sectoral
coordination and negotiation for which most institutions are ill-equipped to manage. From
a governance perspective, it has challenged all institutions to re-think their roles and posi-
tions in a new global reality of health interdependence in which there is no single leader,
issue, or comparative advantage that one institution can claim exclusively as their own. Not
surprisingly, in the midst of such rapid change, probing questions have been posed includ-
ing “who runs global health?” (Lancet 2009), concerns expressed about chaotic and dupli-
cative arrangements and calls for reforms of WHO, or more ambitiously re-thinking the
global health architecture (World Bank 2007). While no such blueprint has yet to emerge,
any governance reforms will need to accommodate the reality of an increasingly crowded
or pluralistic global playing field which David Fidler (2007) labels provocatively as “open
source anarchy.”
This global myriad of actors and partnerships is mirrored and magnified at the country
level. The influx of external initiatives and projects in low-income countries has led to con-
cerns about their duplicative, distorting, disrupting, and distracting impacts on overbur-
dened national systems (Travis et al. 2004; WHO 2009). Yet the underlying reality of
national health systems is much less a single coherent system and much more a plurality of
actors spanning the public, non-governmental, informal, and for-profit sectors with a host
of endemic public and private sector failures referred to by some as “mixed health systems
syndrome” (Nishtar 2010). Efforts in the global community to “align and harmonize”
around a single health plan have struggled to embrace the complex plural character of
national health systems (Hutton and Tanner 2004; Murray, Frenk, and Evans 2007). More-
over, the growing recognition of the inter-sectoral, social, and transnational character of
health challenges—be it related to tobacco control, urban slums, healthy diets, medical
tourism, or the migration of health workers—is placing demands for flexible and innova-
tive governance arrangements that traditionally structured Ministries of Health are largely
unable to meet. The emergence of national strategies for global health and the new field
of global health diplomacy are indicative of efforts to begin to embrace the complex
and interdependent realities of global health in the twenty-first century (Rosskam and
Kickbusch 2011).
Further efforts to redefine and re-vitalize national and transnational governance
mechanisms for health will contribute to a badly-needed reservoir of ingenuity to address
dynamic and rapidly changing health problems. These problems threaten equity and
security both globally and nationally and will in no small way determine the success and
sustainability of achieving unifying targets around universal health coverage in the
twenty-first century.
Note
1. This city is now known as Almaty, Kazakhstan. The declaration text is available online at
<http://www.who.int/publications/almaata_declaration_en.pdf>.
global health 527
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chapter 31
ta rgeti ng dise ase s

nandini oomman and farley cleghorn
Introduction
Global Health as Development

Global health as global development is not a novel idea, but it has taken decades for this con-
cept to crystallize. The past fifty years of health development assistance from rich countries
and multilateral institutions to recipient countries has been characterized by philosophical
and funding swings that reflect the continuing debates on disease-specific interventions ver-
sus strengthening health systems, as well as the need for country ownership of both the prob-
lems and the solutions. In 2000 the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
included specific health goals focused on maternal and child mortality and infectious dis-
ease, as well as other conditions related to health, such as hunger and sanitation.
It was not until the early 2000s that development financing for global health increased
dramatically. Even then, donor dollars were motivated by and flowed to specific infectious
diseases, namely, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. For example, funding for HIV/
AIDS reached unprecedented levels by 2005. Funding commitments for HIV/AIDS in low-
and middle-income countries increased thirty-fold from 1996 to 2008, from US$300 million
to US$8.7 billion (Kates et al. 2012). Funding flowed through donor-established mechanisms
such as the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan
for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
Why are development dollars targeting these three infectious diseases? Looking back at
development success stories provides some answers to this question, and explains the per-
sistence of this relatively narrow approach despite concerns that such specifically targeted
funding may have the unintended consequence of undermining health systems designed to
meet a much broader array of public health needs.
Origins of the Concept of Targeting Disease

Even before it was linked to the notion of enhancing development gains and increasing the
effectiveness of public health responses to disease, eradication of specific diseases was
targeting diseases 531
t antalizing to thinkers and practitioners. This was particularly the aim of work on the ancient
scourges of humanity, such as smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, plague, and leprosy. The
promulgation, proof, and acceptance of germ theory and the subsequent rapid expansion of
medical knowledge since the nineteenth century was accompanied by enormous reductions
in disease burden and increases in life expectancy. These reductions occurred even prior to
the widespread use of antibiotics in the late 1940s. Levine et al. (2004) estimate that more
than half of all improvements in health indices since the nineteenth century were due to
social and economic advances, including housing and education.
The adoption of hygienic practices such as hand washing and proper food preparation
and storage, coupled with improved public and private sanitation, had an enormous impact
on disease prevention and mitigation. With the advent of antibiotics and vaccines, the con-
cept of conquering disease became closer to reality. This was not necessarily seen as a devel-
opment assistance priority, but as a worldwide cooperative effort that assumed that the entire
world shared the dream of eliminating these ancient diseases and the death, disability, fear,
and disruption that accompanied them. If diseases were conquered, it was thought, develop-
ment would inevitably follow.
A review of the literature and current medical knowledge reveals eight requisite condi-
tions for the eradication of an infectious disease. They are:
Biological conditions
(1) a completely described natural history and pathophysiology
(2) humans as the sole natural host, with only human-to-human transmission
(3) lack of a carrier state, i.e., the infection manifests as recognizable disease in all or the
majority of cases
Medical conditions
(4) a safe and effective (and cost-effective) vaccine or treatment intervention that works
in almost all cases
Leadership and resource conditions

(5) systems to deliver the vaccine or treatment
(6) surveillance systems that can detect the agent or condition and prove that eradica-
tion has been achieved
(7) political will to effect the eradication
(8) resources to effect the eradication
Over the past fifty years, there have been multiple attempts to identify human infectious dis-
eases that possess all the required conditions for eradication. While smallpox is the only
human disease that has been eradicated (rinderpest, an economically important disease of
livestock, was declared eradicated in 2011) and is explored in greater detail below, other human
infectious diseases targeted for eradication include poliomyelitis, dracunculiasis (guinea
worm disease), hookworm, malaria, yaws, and yellow fever. Only the first two on this list
meet most, but not all, of the conditions set out above for eradication and are still the subject
of active international campaigns, notwithstanding enormous challenges in their
532 nandini oomman and farley cleghorn
implementation. Five other common infectious diseases have been tagged as potentially erad-
icable with current technology: measles, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis, and cysticercosis.
No doubt increasing knowledge of disease causation, transmission, pathophysiology, and
epidemiology will allow multilateral health agencies to set targets for additional candidates
for disease eradication, though the above eight conditions are not expected to change signifi-
cantly. What is likely to evolve is the continued improvement in population health indices in
greater numbers of countries, particularly for childhood diseases. The resulting “health and
wellness space” may be rapidly filled by non-communicable chronic diseases that are becom-
ing more prevalent worldwide. Both the demand for and supply of modern health practice
are becoming significant indicators of social and economic progress in emerging economies.
Meeting the MDGs now occupies governments in meaningful ways not seen in the past. At
the same time, health goals have become a significant component of development assistance,
albeit not always the preeminent one.
A milestone in the evolution of current health and development assistance was the set of
conditions that fell into place for smallpox eradication. This was built on over two hundred
years of experience with vaccination, predicated on the notion that science held the answers
to major health problems and that these solutions could be applied worldwide with interna-
tional collaboration. Such conditions may prove difficult to reproduce for polio and other
diseases, because many countries are not willing or able to guarantee the collaboration and
security necessary for such a global campaign.
What follows is a discussion of the targeting of three diseases: smallpox, polio, and HIV/
AIDS. These examples illustrate the advantages and limitations of focusing on a single disease,
and the accompanying need for political stability, security, and a functioning health system.
Cases of Targeted Disease Approaches
Smallpox, the only example of successful total eradication, was eradicated using a targeted ver-
tical approach that depended on cooperation with local health authorities and surveillance sys-
tems. The effort was coordinated through a newly created nerve center at the World Health
Organization (WHO) with technical assistance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
(CDC). The fight against polio is very advanced. However, the need for all susceptible children
to receive three doses of oral vaccine maintained in cold chain has hampered the campaign’s
implementation. Finally, the global HIV/AIDS response, initiated as an “emergency” vertical
approach, has of necessity switched toward systems strengthening and country ownership to
consolidate the gains made in treatment and prevention of mother-to-child transmission and
the potential for similar gains in preventing sexual and intravenous HIV transmission.
Smallpox: Mission Accomplished

If a house is on fire, no one wastes time putting water on nearby houses just in
case the fire spreads. They rush to pour the water where it will do the most
good—on the burning house. The same strategy turned out to be effective in
eradicating smallpox.
(Foege 2011)
All relevant global organizations enthusiastically adopted the global smallpox eradication
campaign within a relatively short time span in the 1960s, prompted by the 1959 12th World
Health Assembly’s endorsement of eradication as a goal. At that time, it is estimated that
there were approximately 10–15 million cases of smallpox in more than 50 countries, and that
1.5 million to 2 million people died from the disease each year. The success of the two-decade
eradication campaign was preceded by more than two hundred years of accumulated knowl-
edge and experience with vaccination.
The World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated in 1980. Globally coordinated
efforts had rid the world of a disease that had once killed up to a third of its victims and left
others scarred or blind for life. The last case of indigenous smallpox was diagnosed on
October 26, 1977 in a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia. Subsequently, independent experts
certified each country was free from smallpox for at least two years, and that the surveillance
systems were in place capable of detecting outbreaks.
The smallpox eradication effort started by supporting national country programs to vac-
cinate people who were susceptible and assuring a supply chain of the vaccine was available
where needed. Regional organizations such as the Pan American Health Organization
(PAHO) led the effort. A special WHO unit created in 1967 by Donald Henderson, an Amer-
ican from CDC, provided technical support. WHO established a network of consultants who
assisted countries in setting up surveillance and containment activities. Production of vac-
cine was shifted from the United States and then the USSR to multiple sites in developing
countries to assure the supply chain.
As case numbers fell, the focus shifted to a combination of enhanced and focused surveil-
lance—rapidly identifying new clinical smallpox cases—and vaccination of all contacts of
such cases. This “ring vaccination” meant that anyone who could have been exposed to a
smallpox patient was tracked down and vaccinated as quickly as possible, effectively isolat-
ing the disease and preventing its further spread. The campaign focused resources where
they were needed and provided a stimulus to develop local health delivery systems. Accord-
ing to Levine et al. (2004), “This helped develop immunization services more generally—
health staff helping with the campaign received training in vaccination and search and
containment. This training was especially important for hospital-based health systems that
had no experience in setting up preventive campaigns.”
Smallpox was a prime candidate for eradication for several reasons. First, the disease is
highly visible in all clinical cases: smallpox patients develop a rash (pox) that is easily recog-
nized. Photographs of the typical rash were used by field workers in case identification. Sec-
ond, the time from exposure to the initial appearance of symptoms is fairly short, so the
disease usually doesn’t spread very far before it is first noticed. Third, only humans can trans-
mit and contract smallpox. People who survived smallpox developed lifelong immunity
against future infection. For everyone else, vaccination was highly effective. WHO trained
and deployed vaccinators quickly, and they could immunize large groups of people in a short
time. While logistically difficult, it was operationally possible and manageable as a program.
The campaign proceeded in stops and starts over the 1960s and 1970s, and intensified in
1967. At that time, smallpox was still endemic in twelve countries or territories in eastern and
southern Africa, eleven in western and central Africa, seven in Asia, and in Brazil in the
Americas. The WHO eradication plan included mass vaccinations using freeze-dried vac-
cine material, and the development of a system to detect, monitor, and investigate smallpox
cases and contain outbreaks. Three principles were vital to the WHO program: participation
of all countries, flexibility in implementing national programs, and ongoing research to

evaluate progress and deal with problems that arose.
The campaign was not without its detractors, who did not see the eradication of an already
waning disease as a shared global objective. WHO came under criticism from some health
workers and human rights advocates who objected to the search and quarantine aspects of
the program, in particular charging that campaign workers at times bent WHO and local
regulations to use police-type tactics. Later, some critics claimed that physicians used coer-
cion to ensure vaccination of quarantined individuals (Henderson 2009).
Despite its success, the campaign to eradicate smallpox would be difficult to replicate today. In
fact, Levine and Oomman (2009) point out that at the time, “No two national campaigns were
alike, which points to . . . the need for a flexible approach.” One reason is the change in the develop-
ment paradigm: the “donor-driven,” single-minded focus on smallpox would likely face resist-
ance today given the current development approach that emphasizes factors such as country
ownership, sustainability of effort, and relative impact on domestic health priorities. For example,
it is unlikely that the smallpox eradication campaign could have taken place in the current global
environment, with instability and conflict in the countries where the virus proved most difficult
to overcome. In an era where infectious diseases co-exist with chronic diseases, hard decisions
will have to be made for such success to be replicated: evidence-based allocation of resources,
setting health priorities, and maximizing coverage without sacrificing quality of services.
At the same time, smallpox eradication still offers lessons for global health priorities. The
disease had loomed large in human history, having killed more than 300 million people in
the twentieth century (Henderson 2009). The campaign also exercised a powerful influence
on the human imagination, having demonstrated a potential for a one-time monumental
effort of collective global will to reach a common goal. Finally, the smallpox campaign left
behind a number of important legacies, including the beginning of infectious disease sur-
veillance systems in many countries and an expanded program of immunization for child-
hood vaccinations against common diseases.
Polio: The Challenge of the “Last Mile”

We are so close, but we have to finish the last leg of the journey. We need to bring
the cases down to zero, maintain careful surveillance to ensure the virus is truly
gone, and keep defenses up with polio vaccines until we’ve confirmed success.
(Gates 2011)
The polio virus was first identified in 1908 in Vienna, Austria, although the disease had struck
children all over the world in the late 1800s. Despite advances in medical knowledge, polio
persists more than a century later. In the 1980s, PAHO set a goal to eradicate polio in the
Americas within ten years, and the World Health Assembly signed on to global polio eradi-
cation by the year 2000. Neither of these goals was reached, but the job is almost done. In
1988, polio was endemic in 125 countries and as many as 350,000 children were paralyzed
every year. Today, all but three countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria—have man-
aged to eliminate polio, and just about 200 cases were reported worldwide in 2012. In most
countries, the answer lay in routine immunization efforts and mass vaccination campaigns.
But why has it taken so long to eliminate polio in these three countries? A review of the con-
ditions for eradication outlined above offers a few suggestions.
Like smallpox, the natural history and pathophysiology of polio is well-known, and there
are safe and effective vaccines that work in almost all cases. The live attenuated Sabin vaccine
is preferred for population vaccination programs because of its high levels of immune
response and low incidence of secondary infection. However, polio differs from smallpox in
three ways. First, the polio virus can survive outside the human host, circulating in waste
water. Second, infection is not always recognized, with a small proportion of people infected
suffering atypical symptoms such as gastrointestinal illness, and 1 in 100 suffering paralysis.
Third, at least three oral doses of the vaccine are required to confer full immunity to a child,
so a functioning health system is needed for ongoing vaccine delivery.
All of the above suggests that the “last mile” to eradicate the polio virus is challenging, but
not impossible. Consider the case of India, which despite its high poverty and low demand
for vaccines in some areas did not shy away from its eradication efforts. Its last reported case
of polio was in January 2011, and the country is expected to be declared polio-free in 2014.
Recent interviews with practitioners suggest that this success was due to several factors,
including political leadership, public–private partnerships to enable delivery of vaccines to
hard-to-reach locations (e.g. Bihar and Uttar Pradesh), the use of new technology to identify
outbreaks and track the vaccination history of newborns, and the use of community health
workers to explain the benefits of childhood immunization to parents (Raina 2012).
The pressure to replicate India’s model is high, but different contextual challenges in Afghan-
istan, Pakistan, and Nigeria do not guarantee success in the short term. Even where health sys-
tems may be functional enough to deliver the vaccine to all children in need, issues of insecurity
and conflict as well as local misconceptions about and fear of vaccinations complicate the roll-
out of immunization programs. In all likelihood polio will be eradicated, but unlike smallpox,
eradication requires an ongoing effort that depends on strong health delivery and surveillance
systems. Some locations, including China and West Africa, have experienced recent outbreaks
of polio, brought in from Pakistan and Nigeria, respectively. This highlights the continued
threat of resurgence when every child has not been protected against the virus.
HIV/AIDS: From Emergency to Mainstream

Let me begin by defining what we mean by an AIDS-free generation. It is a time
when . . . virtually no child anywhere will be born with the virus . . . as teenagers
become adults, they will be at significantly lower risk of ever becoming
infected. . . . So yes, HIV may be with us into the future until we finally achieve a
cure, a vaccine, but the disease that HIV causes need not be with us.
(Clinton 2012)
The emergence of AIDS as a global political and scientific target was prompted by the
potential for the epidemic to reverse hard-won health gains. Longer life expectancies in sub-
Saharan Africa, which took decades to achieve, were being reversed in the 1980s and 1990s.
From the first description of the syndrome in 1981 to the recognition of high population
prevalence rates in sub-Saharan Africa, the response to the epidemic has been characterized
by high and low points: elegant science, social confusion, paranoia and discrimination,
heroism, and hard work.
As a disease caused by a newly described human retrovirus, HIV/AIDS has catalyzed an
intense biomedical response to find drugs to reverse the effects of immunodeficiency and a
vaccine to prevent infection. The former took more than fifteen years of effort before azi-
dothymidine was licensed in 1996, and by 2012 there were more than thirty-five approved
pharmacologic agents and combinations of agents to treat AIDS. The search for an effective
vaccine continues and has been beset with numerous setbacks, chief among them the elusive
search for a durable correlate of immunity to HIV.
But the biggest challenges are not biomedical. More than 36 million people were estimated
to be living with HIV in 2011, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa. Almost half of these people
(16 million) are eligible for antiretroviral therapy (ART) under current guidelines, and of
those, about half (8 million) have access to such treatment. Enormous global investment in
this biomedical model over the past decade has enabled this progress to happen as an “emer-
gency.” Given the fact that almost all transmission is via sexual exposure, the challenge before
us is to sustain this investment by reducing sexual transmission.
The continuing world financial crisis that began in 2008 has prompted the U.S. govern-
ment to take a much closer look at the costs of PEPFAR, its flagship program to assist the
most affected countries in their progress against AIDS. The Global Fund has also signaled
interest in managing program costs and rooting out corruption in grant management. Cost–
benefit and cost-effectiveness are the new buzzwords of the global AIDS response, and
clearly money is expected to be in short supply for the foreseeable future even as recipient
countries are expected to increase their own contributions to the effort.
Yet the unmet need for antiretroviral therapy and awareness-raising about effective pre-
vention is still enormous. Even with full funding, many countries face structural and sys-
temic limitations, from inadequate human resources to losses from corruption and poorly
functioning health systems. It takes time and commitment to build systems and operate
them for impact.
Much of this effort has focused on establishing country-led systems to deliver and dis-
seminate treatment. Tremendous progress has been made, but treatment needs to be cou-
pled with effective prevention efforts. The latter require both medical technology to ensure
safe blood supply and medical procedures, and an integration of health and education into
daily social and work life, including HIV testing and counseling.
Prevention also requires targeting young people before and as they become sexually
active, equipping them with knowledge of proven approaches (such as barrier methods),
promoting behavioral and medical interventions (such as male circumcision), and provid-
ing pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis. Yet such efforts are often undermined by the stigma
surrounding social taboos around sex in general, and sexually transmitted infections in
particular.
Combination prevention programs must be based on current data about transmission,
and they must reach people where they live and interact in their communities. Finally, the
costs of such programs must fit within the resources available and be able to integrate into
country, region, and local health priorities that compete for available resources.
HIV/AIDS donor assistance has been transformative in providing ART to halt and reverse
the immune sequelae of HIV and return people to health so that they can resume productive
lives. The impact of these interventions is still growing as systems are strengthened to deliver
ART successfully and meet the additional needs of patients (for food, water, shelter, etc.).
Notwithstanding the debate surrounding the questions of sustainability of and attribution to
specific programs, the short-term impact of more widely available treatment has been to
extend life and increase hope for millions of affected and infected people. The key
evelopment that enabled this transformation was highly active antiretroviral therapy as
d
defined by iterative clinical trials in the United States and Europe and which mandated a
comprehensive package of services (e.g. clinical, social, laboratory) to deliver drugs accord-
ing to best practice that could permanently suppress HIV replication.
Once it became clear that the efficacy of highly active combination treatment for AIDS
was so unequivocal and sustained even in low-resource environments, the barriers to wide-
spread treatment of people in the developing world, including the cost of ART, began to fall
and in effect, a best practice model was exported around the world. For example, in 2003–4
the average annual cost of delivering ART to a patient in the United States was $12,000–
$15,000. These high costs were met by federally funded entitlement programs administered
by states. Through advocates, activists, and donors such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund, by
2008 the cost had fallen to less than $1,000 per patient per year, and fell further to $200–$300
as the program reached a greater number of patients. Even then, costs were shared by recipi-
ent governments, donors, and others, including the patients themselves.
Paradoxically, the resounding success of life-prolonging treatment through effective and
affordable ART presents a setback in combating the pandemic, in that treatment success is
masking the still urgent need to focus on prevention. Under any given program of expanding
AIDS treatment, a predictable result is escalating program costs as average survival length-
ens (the initial PEPFAR models were computed with an overall five- to seven-year gain in life
expectancy, but the need for ART is permanent so long as the patient is alive) and patients
eventually need to switch to more expensive second- and third-line drug combinations. This
leads to the sobering conclusion that the models for delivering ART assistance are not sus-
tainable in the long term without concomitant prevention successes to ensure a diminished
need for treatment over time. South Africa, a middle income country, is a case in point: the
country now has the largest ART program in the world, with more than two million people
on treatment. However, the long-term costs of AIDS there are unsustainable unless further
gains are made in HIV prevention.
Given the sum total of knowledge about how to prevent and treat HIV, is it likely that
epidemic control will be achieved within the next generation? From our framework it is
clear that HIV does not fit the criteria established for eradication: there is no vaccine or
preventive technology that works in all circumstances, transmission is primarily sexual,
and successful treatment requires daily medication and extends the period when infected
persons may transmit HIV. Problems abound in HIV prevention. Unlike treatment, which is
fairly standard whether the patient is a poor woman or a rich man, a heterosexual or a homo-
sexual, an injecting drug user, or a combination of all of these (that is, the same drugs are
used in the same combinations to achieve the same effect, all else being equal), an effective
prevention approach depends on risk matrix, demography, geography, and other factors.
Some approaches can be broadly targeted. For example, sexual health education can build
demand for prevention services, though attaining consensus on what this means is a conten-
tious process. Other approaches require a narrow focus on so-called key populations, such
as interventions for young gay men or needle exchange programs for injecting drug users,
both of which are evidence-based but neither of which garners much support among recipi-
ent governments or even donors. Demand for prevention programs, especially among key
populations, still needs to be built and sustained in governments and communities; and like
drugs for treatment, once started, supply should not be interrupted. As with treatment, there
are severe policy, demand, and resource constraints. However, unlike treatment, achieving
consensus on the approach and scale of prevention programs is highly elusive and subject to
political interference, normative confusion about what works and for whom, and a lack of
understanding of what constitutes effective prevention. To even start this discussion requires
expending political capital and making tough policy and resource allocations. No wonder
the task is so daunting. People and politicians may listen to the doctor when it comes to
treatment but everyone is an expert when it comes to prevention.
It is also clear that to build on and consolidate the gains of the “emergency” and tar-
geted response to the global AIDS epidemic, the approach needs to change to a more sus-
tainable and systems strengthening one. This change shifts the locus of control to the
country, both government and non-government entities, and relieves the donors and
their agencies of some of the management burden. This shift has to be a gradual but clear
process that spells out roles and responsibilities and does not allow patients and their
lives to “slip through the cracks” during the transition. This also shifts the focus from
service delivery to technical assistance in building local capacity to manage disease pre-
vention and treatment.
In summary, the continuing global struggle against HIV/AIDS has entered a new phase
where there is widespread agreement about the policy goal of an AIDS-free generation.
However, given that there is no cure for AIDS, no effective vaccine, and no way to eradicate
HIV, determining what it takes to get there and how to finance the inexorably growing com-
mitments to services for people living with HIV, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, is going
to occupy development experts for the foreseeable future. The urgent need to match the
treatment success with prevention success, and the fact that the well-articulated AIDS medi-
cal treatment model does not impact sexual transmission, point to the need for a new model
operating beyond just health and embracing social, education, and financing systems if
eradication is to be a real possibility.
Key Debates
In the last decade two key debates have emerged around the practice of targeting a disease.
One is whether such intensive focus on one disease comes at the cost of neglecting others,
known as exceptionalization. The other is whether efforts that target a specific disease
strengthen the ability of health systems to respond to a range of priorities. The extraordinary
financial and implementation focus on AIDS in the last decade has heightened these ten-
sions in development discourse.
“Exceptionalizing” a Disease
The thirtieth anniversary of the first description of AIDS occurred in 2011. In those three
decades, much has changed in the global history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with global
access to appropriate therapy increasing exponentially. Yet numerous obstacles to control-
ling the epidemic persist, including a lack of widespread access to effective prevention pro-
grams that directly address major modes of transmission, including sexual activity and
injection drug use.
The idea that HIV is an exceptional disease under a set of exceptional conditions and
therefore requires an exceptional and emergency response characterizes only the past ten
years of global public health and the pandemic. It is important to recall that this apparent
exceptionalism, with its accompanying high levels of attention and funding, represents a
hard-won public policy debate in the rich donor countries. In fact, in the first twenty years of
the AIDS epidemic the response was not exceptional. AIDS was initially characterized in the
West, specifically the United States, as a disease of homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin
addicts, and Haitians (the infamous “four Hs”), none of whom had the clout to marshal the
resources required for an adequate response from a skeptical political class cloaked in moral
superiority. Most activists would posit that not one iota of the AIDS response was achieved
easily, and that it took more than half a million deaths from AIDS in the United States before
the first specific treatment was approved.
The sudden global prominence of HIV/AIDS conferred a number of lasting benefits that
went beyond simply addressing the epidemic. This new and unique syndrome brought
together unlikely allies as it allowed activists to challenge the scientific establishment’s con-
trol of the public health enterprise and called for an agreement that recognized the role of the
individual and the community and the rights and responsibilities of sexual minorities. It
advanced the cause of gay rights in the West and called for a new approach to health promo-
tion and disease control. It advanced the rights of women and young girls in Africa and Asia
and focused attention on the needs of children and orphans. It helped drive the notion that
the entire world’s population had the right to expect to participate in the gains of social
progress and medical knowledge. And finally, it was the awesome potential of the global
AIDS pandemic to cause suffering and death that most marked it for global attention and
resources.
A key question is whether the global AIDS response encourages the neglect of other health
problems. A related question is whether the singular focus on HIV/AIDS is resulting in
missed opportunities for synergy with other health-related policies, programming, and
resources. In terms of the volume of scientific and social outputs, the level of funding, the
scale and openness of attention, and the contentiousness of the discussion, HIV/AIDS is
without precedent. Some criticize the continued growth of the global HIV/AIDS enterprise:
the entrenched multilateral agencies such as UNAIDS and the Global Fund, the global
research establishments where lifetime careers can be spent, the international organizations
that provide technical assistance and support program implementation in beneficiary coun-
tries. From a recipient country perspective, one negative outcome of the massive HIV
response is the siphoning off of much available talent and resources, sometimes leaving little
capacity and resources to address other health priorities in most affected countries.
Articulate arguments can be made that AIDS funding is disproportionate to its impact.
For example, some argue that these resources can be better applied to childhood diseases
and generate greater gains in life expectancy in beneficiary populations (Over 2012). There
are proposals to redirect some donor agencies’ missions to more health generalist entities.
All these developments should be seen as inevitable given the substantial gains made against
AIDS. Broadening the response could not have been contemplated back in 2000 when AIDS
treatment emerged as a best practice.
Have there been losers in the singling out of HIV/AIDS for special attention? One could
argue that attention, and consequently funding, to maternal/child health and family plan-
ning, in terms of both priority and funding, decreased in the age of the expanded global
AIDS response. For example, all available analyses of the U.S. government’s PEPFAR pro-
gram, which was criticized in its initial phase for taking an emergency approach, suggest
that the only potential downside was the crowding out of family planning and broader
maternal/child health in the USG resource envelope, an issue that is being addressed in
phase II.
Diseases and Health Systems

As funding for AIDS increased exponentially in the last decade, a polarized debate began to
emerge about whether donor financing for HIV/AIDS programs was strengthening or weak-
ening national health systems (Oomman et al. 2008). This concern was not new, but ampli-
fied because of the sheer scale of AIDS programs. Many observers have examined the
potential impact of the magnitude of funding on weak health systems, asking if AIDS money
was in fact making governments and the private sector better able to deliver a broad range of
high-quality health services, or if it was weakening health systems by establishing AIDS-
specific systems that were intensely focused on combating a single disease.
A pioneering set of country case studies examined the interaction between AIDS pro-
grams and the health system (Oomman, Bernstein, and Rosenzweig 2008). They suggested
that large funding inflows were perhaps shifting components of the health system, diverting
attention and resources from existing programs to AIDS programs. Skilled health workers
and managers who otherwise would be deployed managing and implementing other types
of health programs were attracted to AIDS programs by salary “‘top-ups’” and better work-
ing conditions. Supply chains that bring antiretrovirals (ARVs) and other AIDS program
supplies were prioritized over those for other essential drugs. Information was systemati-
cally provided to donors, but not necessarily to national health information systems or local
governments. Soon, others heavily involved with the scale-up of HIV/AIDS programs in
Africa challenged these early observations. Over time, as the evidence base grew, researchers
reported more positive observations about HIV/AIDS funding and its effects on the health
system (De Cock, El-Sadr, and Adhanom Ghebreyesus 2011).
In fact, evidence now suggests that targeting HIV/AIDS for specific development assist-
ance has had positive spillover effects on other health priorities and systems. Country health
systems have been strengthened, not weakened, by the AIDS effort, with procurement and
supply chain, laboratory and surveillance infrastructure, and clinical services benefiting
most. El-Sadr et al. (2012) argues that PEPFAR investments have catalyzed improvements in
health systems in recipient countries. Moving forward, these gains can be expanded as the
HIV response matures and directs efforts to embed HIV within the agreed health priorities
of countries and states. This longer-term vision should occupy the next five to ten years and
see country governments assume greater fiscal control of their country health portfolios and
focus on long-term gains.
The definitive answer to the question of whether HIV/AIDS has had an overall positive or
negative impact on health systems will remain elusive until rigorous cost–benefit and impact
evaluations are conducted. In the meantime, program implementers are acutely aware of the
benefits they have seen from AIDS financing; yet key questions remain about the cost and
sustainability of vertically funded programs, and the choices that countries make as donor
funding commitments for AIDS and global health shrink.
Future of Health as Development
This chapter developed a historical understanding of the concept and practice of “targeting
disease” to shape investments in health. We did this by looking back at three key diseases
targeted for intervention—smallpox, polio, and HIV—and the heated debates that ensue
when a disease appears to be prioritized over other important health conditions and other
equitable, sustainable development priorities. Three issues emerge from this reflection that
will be important for the future of global health as development.
Finite Resources and Critical Choices

Clearly, communicable diseases like HIV, TB, and malaria are here to stay and will con-
tinue to demand a major portion of resources for global health into the future. At the same
time, new and emerging infections will require global cooperation, often as emergency
responses, as for example with H1N1 influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS). In an era of climate change and growing population we are seeing the creation of a
global incubator for the rapid emergence of previously rare global health events, including
highly pathogenic influenzas, zoonoses, and resistant bacterial infections. New infectious
diseases will often require a targeted globally cooperative response, particularly when the
biology and transmission of the infectious agent have not been fully described. As all three
cases above show, the response to new and important human infections will almost cer-
tainly require a targeted response early in the life cycle of the disease, transitioning to a
health systems and more sustainable response as more is learned about the disease and
how to manage it. Occasionally a new disease can be controlled or eradicated early in its
emergence, like SARS, which is unlikely to have more than a sporadic incidence in the
future. Yet given the conditions necessary, eradication will be the exception rather than
the norm.
The world is also facing a global pandemic of non-communicable chronic diseases
(NCDs), such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, the collective burden of which now
threatens to exceed the impact of infectious diseases for the first time. In 2011, the United
Nations General Assembly convened a special session on NCDs. Just as the previous special
session on HIV/AIDS helped spur a global response, advocates are working toward a similar
movement to fight the impact of NCDs, capturing the attention of the very same players who
championed the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Resources for global health are unlikely to grow even as the list of priorities gets longer
and advocates get louder. Critical decisions about how to prioritize a long list of health
challenges will dominate the next decade of health. Policy-makers struggle with a finite
amount of available resources and face diminishing gains from efficiencies in health spend-
ing. They must weigh competing criteria for decision making, including considerations of cost-
effectiveness, ethics, equity, politics, and diplomacy. Meanwhile practitioners face demands
to integrate programs meaningfully to achieve greater synergies among, and greater efficiency
and effectiveness within, health interventions. In addition, there is increasing pressure to
consider the health impacts of environmental degradation, climate change, and increasing
population density in the least resourced parts of the world.
In an era of continuing economic slowdown and uncertainty, there is little appetite for
grand schemes and investments, particularly in health, which is often seen by governments
as a net consumer of resources. The cancellation of Round 11 by the Global Fund to Fight
AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is a resounding example of pulling back from prior com-
mitments by donor countries as their own economies contract and hard choices need to be
made. Yet the lesson of smallpox eradication is that investments in health abroad can be in
the enlightened self-interest of developed countries. Though the campaign’s success was not
guaranteed, stakeholders and country partners still invested heavily and the payback was
incalculable. It is estimated that the United States recouped its investment in the global
smallpox campaign within two years as vaccination of its own population became unneces-
sary (Levine et al. 2004). This argument will be easier to make for polio, but much harder for
HIV/AIDS or NCDs. Without eradication in sight for the latter two, global cooperation
agencies and country governments, both donors and recipients of development assistance,
are faced with growing and unsustainable costs.
Long-term Impact on Health Systems

Taking responses to scale for maximum impact for existing health priorities often requires
transitioning from a targeted approach to a health system response and sometimes even a
multi-sectoral response, as demonstrated by the polio and AIDS scenarios. Targeted
approaches can lead to eradication, as for smallpox, if all conditions needed for disease erad-
ication are fulfilled. However, the confluence of all requisite conditions is unlikely for most
diseases today. Nonetheless, a targeted approach can still have short-term successes for dis-
eases like polio and HIV, but this requires a shift from donor-led to country-led management
of a health systems approach (for example, routine immunization for polio, management of
chronic disease for AIDS) for an even greater impact in the long term.
The cases above show that targeted programs can have significant positive effects on
health systems in a country and leave behind more robust surveillance systems and labora-
tories, as well as improved clinical skills and training of health care personnel. These posi-
tive effects may initially appear to benefit the disease they are targeting, such as an
AIDS-specific health information system or supply chain. A future challenge is to identify
and measure whether these early disease-specific effects also provide “hidden” benefits for
the health system at large to respond to other priorities. In the case of the smallpox cam-
paign, for example, the expanded program of immunization for childhood vaccinations
certainly benefited countries well beyond the eradication of the disease. Such learning will
be critical for decision-makers who take calculated risks as they address emerging health
challenges.
The broadening of global health priorities (existing and emerging infectious diseases
including HIV and non-communicable chronic diseases, maternal and child health, nutri-
tion, reproductive health, and family planning) and the responses they require will pose
enormous challenges that go beyond single diseases, sectors, governments, or single-issue
agencies such as UNAIDS. Major constraints exist, including resource, market, and demand
constraints, to bringing programmatic responses to scale in response to current and emerg-
ing health priorities requiring expensive investments in systems for health, as well as other
sectors such as education and finance.
Agendas, Accountability, and Ownership

As countries and donors debate how to reach universal health coverage goals (The Lancet 2012),
it is unclear how this effort will help build the response structure required to tackle a range of
existing global health challenges and establish responsive systems for threat reduction.
At the outset of this chapter we asked why it is that, even today, donors’ development dol-
lars largely target the “big three” infectious diseases: HIV, TB, and malaria. Even when
donors attempt to put a unifying overlay on a disjointed health assistance portfolio, it may
not work. Consider the recent case of the United States Global Health Initiative (GHI).
Despite a visionary strategy to build a streamlined approach guided by key principles of
country ownership and programmatic integration, the GHI has met with spectacular failure
(and the pressure on several donors increased because of the global financial crisis) (Oom-
man and Silverman 2012). Examining the conditions that led to this reveals several complex
problems: the tension between political and program accountability, funding silos, disease-
specific offices, warring implementing agencies, and a failure of health diplomacy. But the
biggest impediment to the systemic response is the U.S. accountability structures for foreign
assistance that force targeted programming in global health even when it isn’t necessarily the
most efficient and effective approach.
Similarly, for the next largest health donor, the United Kingdom, the pendulum swings
with every funding cycle or change of government between more basket funding and sector-
wide approaches, to project-based implementation seeking “value for money.” The fact is
that most international aid provided by donors is heavily influenced by political decisions (at
home and in receiving countries) and not necessarily by evidence of need or burden of dis-
ease. If aid were always expected to succeed (and this is increasingly the pressure on several
donors because of the global financial crisis), then only countries with good policies and
robust systems would receive aid in the first place, and this is clearly not the case. When a
donor would like to strengthen its ties with recipient countries that have weak or dysfunc-
tional health service delivery systems, it makes sense for the donor to target specific diseases
through multilateral and bilateral efforts to produce short-term results, push for value-
for-money decisions, and ultimately maximize aid effectiveness for health. This push for
greater donor accountability creates a tension with the increasing rhetoric about country
ownership and how countries must begin to contribute domestic resources for health and
take charge of their health delivery systems.
Country ownership of health services delivery is vital. Ideally, donors are helping to sup-
port the aims and objectives of countries that have articulated and are implementing plans to
address their health priority conditions and commitments. Country ownership is seen as a
requisite for sustainability and for delivering results. This does seem to be axiomatic, but begs
the question of precisely what is being owned. Even if all service delivery is left to country
mechanisms, enormous analytical gaps exist in recipient countries in the design and formula-
tion of health programs based on evidence, understanding the roles of the public and private
markets in health, building demand and assuring supply, and maintaining quality and equita-
ble distribution of services. Such gaps should form the basis for ongoing technical assistance
from donors, yet servicing long-term objectives seems beyond the scope of donor support
focused on implementing projects focused on attributing short-term results. Donors may
well be nostalgic for the promotion of targeted approaches to emergencies like HIV/AIDS,
where donor accountability and attribution are easier to report back to political operatives.
While this chapter has primarily focused on health and development from a donors’ per-
spective, countries that are beginning to take charge of their health systems will increasingly
turn to countries like Brazil as a role model. No longer a recipient of donor assistance, Brazil
has strategically targeted diseases (both infectious and chronic) as a component of a larger
decentralized entitlement health system funded by federal, state, and local taxes. Looking
ahead, global health will continue to be a core component of development. Similarly, target-
ing diseases will remain an important development concept, especially for new and emerg-
ing health challenges, but one that should be applied appropriately and for lasting impact.
Invariably, targeted approaches require strong and functioning health systems to “walk that
last mile” toward lasting development impact.
References
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Conference, Washington, DC, July 23.
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Changers: Why did the Scale-Up of HIV Treatment Work Despite Weak Health Systems?”
Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, 57(S2) (August): S61–3.
El-Sadr, Wafaa M., Charles B. Holmes, Peter Mugyenyi, Harsha Thirumurthy, Tedd Eller-
brock, Robert Ferris et al. (2012). “Scale-Up of HIV Treatment through PEPFAR: A Historic
Public Health Achievement,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, 60(S3)
(August): S96–104.
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Angeles: University of California Press.
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dation). Seattle, WA: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (<http://www.gatesfoundation.
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Eradicating a Worldwide Killer. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
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to AIDS in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: International Assistance from Donor Gov-
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nity on AIDS and Health Systems,” HIV/AIDS Monitor Report. Washington, DC: Center
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i n novation a n d
tech nol ogy
This section addresses how thinking about innovation and technology have evolved
within international development. At first glance, these topics can appear out of place as
the developing world tends to be characterized by the absence of these attributes, while the
success of developed countries is popularly attributed to their technological prowess. Yet
there is a rich tradition of thinking about how to harness technology for the benefit of
developing countries. Following the Second World War, many newly independent devel-
oping countries attempted to reduce their reliance on outside production and jump start
their own process of technological progress. At the same time, many developing countries
face distinct climates, diseases, and conditions to which outside technology is not always
well suited. Despite being far from the global hubs of science, developing countries argua-
bly require an ability to address their own problems by creating homegrown and adapting
outside technology.
The first decades of development in the 1960s and 1970s were a period of tremendous
optimism over the promise of science, as demonstrated by a series of UN conferences
which sought to both foster local science and mobilize part of the global science efforts
toward development goals. In contrast, later decades would see deep cuts to higher edu-
cation and research in developing countries under structural adjustment programs. Iron-
ically, the response of OECD countries to the recession, most recently in the late 2000s,
was greater investment in innovation and technology, seen as vital to their own future
development. Thus thinking on innovation and development has been schizophrenic, an
unaffordable luxury for some countries and an indispensable strategy for others. This
duality is now breaking down as parts of the developing world contribute a rising share of
world research activity, and many more have inserted themselves into global value chains.
At the same time, constraints on foreign aid budgets have heightened demand for evi-
dence of “what works” in development and inspired interest in new ways of encouraging
innovation.
Looking back, there have been three critical shifts in thinking: an appreciation for inno-
vation encouraged by incentives within the economy; increasing interest in setting an
agenda for technology; and a move from funding inputs to rewarding demonstrated
outcomes.
Endogenous Theory of Economic Growth
Previous generations of thinkers explained economic growth as the accumulation of capital,

land, and labor. Yet some growth stems from improvements in how such factors are con-
verted into production through improvements in technology or organization (Helpman
2004). With the realization that part of economic growth lay in such advances, there was
increasing attention to the role of scientific progress and new technologies in enabling
growth. Polanyi (1962) described “the republic of science” as a world onto itself apart from
markets and society. Scientific communities were seen as self-organizing in that each mem-
ber adjusts, or optimizes, how they invest their skills and time based on the work published
by others. Rather than the market principles of price, consumer surplus, and efficiency, this
coordination was achieved through the principles of plausibility, accuracy, and originality.
Yet investments in innovation and technology also respond to perceived profit oppor-
tunities. Firms that produce new products or use new processes can earn monopoly
rents, profits over and above the costs of production. To remain competitive, other firms
are forced to learn and adapt these improvements within their own operations. When
they do, a new equilibrium is realized, ending the period of monopoly rents for the lead-
ing firm (Grossman and Helpman 1991). Investments in innovation and technology vary
between industries. Some firms must invest in new designs to get the next generation of
products to the market, as there is little demand for old products. For example, tablet
computers have reduced the demand for scientific calculators, which earlier displaced
slide rules. Firms engaged in aerospace, pharmaceuticals, and information technology
must keep up with their competitors. Yet the pressure is somewhat less intense for firms
engaged in forestry, health care, or food services.
Exogenous Agenda Setting
Knowledge is also a public good. The market is expected to under-invest in research due to
indivisibility, uncertainty, and externalities associated with the creation of new knowledge
(Arrow 1962). Some benefits accrue, not to the firms that underwrite research, but to others
that copy or use the knowledge derived from it (Helpman 2004). Firms have an incentive to
invest in near-market research, yet little incentive to invest in research that cannot be easily
captured or utilized. Thus the state has a role to play correcting market failure, funding
research that is valuable to the economy and society, but for which the market does not pro-
vide an incentive.
Historically, the state has been a strong supporter of research. Such investments could be
characterized as an expression of national prestige for being at the forefront of world knowl-
edge. Looking at the United States, Slaughter and Rhoades (1996) describe research funding
policy up to the 1980s as an era of Cold War science under a Keynesian welfare state. The
policy narrative used to justify research funding was based on winning battles against com-
munism and specific diseases. Although the National Science Foundation continued to
548 innovation and technology
respond to curiosity-driven research, the majority of science funding was directed through
mission-oriented agencies.
Innovation came to be appreciated as evolutionary. Historical decisions to fund one
direction over another can open or close future opportunities to advance knowledge.
The implication is that different investments can lead in fundamentally different direc-
tions, thus firms and governments need some means of determining which direction is
more desirable. Over time, influence over the innovation agenda shifted from inside the
scientific community and expert opinion (endogenous) into the realm of business strat-
egy and public policy decision (exogenous). This shift has been strengthened by changes
in policy instruments and institutional arrangements used to fund innovation and
technology.
Funding Inputs or Rewarding Outcomes
Firms and governments face pressure to rationalize their expenditures, which requires
them to know more about the effectiveness and efficiency of the activities they fund. As
the UNESCO (2010) assessment of world science notes: “in a context of shrinking public
funds, politicians and decision-makers sometimes question whether the . . . research
they support is relevant to current public issues, and regret the lack of evidence to
inform their policy decisions. In brief, they wonder whether they ‘get value for money’.”
A new governance of innovation and technology has emerged that is characterized by
market-oriented funding and goals negotiated among policy-makers, stakeholders, and
research “consumers.” Whitley and Gläser (2007) note that OECD countries have
increased ex-post evaluation of how funded research contributes to strategic objectives.
Funders must demonstrate the value of their work, not only in terms of scientific excel-
lence in the eyes of peers, but in terms of its cost-effectiveness, as well as its utility,
impact, and relevance to others.
Generic calls to demonstrate “value for money” gloss over potentially incommensurable
ways of understanding the utility of innovation and technology. Research can be perceived
as a production process and assessed according to the quantity and quality of its outputs. Yet
society is arguably more concerned about getting a cure for cancer than having a large
number of articles written about it. Rip (2003) suggests there is already a move away from a
narrow focus on quality, economy, efficiency, and effectiveness, toward a new interest in the
appropriateness of past actions, performance improvement, and strategy development. It is
notoriously difficult to demonstrate a return on investment when dealing with complex
problems. There is not a simple linear pathway from spending to outcome for many develop-
ment challenges, such as reducing hunger or improving public health. Instead, the pathways
through which innovation and technology can affect change are varied and intricate. What
works in one context cannot necessarily be applied in another; for example technologies
such as vaccination are less effective in resource-poor settings that lack electricity and refrig-
erators, or when people are simply unaware of the benefits or suspicious of the risks
involved.
Looking Ahead
The chapters in this section provide different perspectives on a renewed interest in applying
innovation and technology to international development, as a motor of economic growth
and addressing the needs of the poorest members of society. Michele Di Maio (Chapter 32)
reflects on the rise, fall, and return of industrial policy over time, noting variation between
different regions of the developing world and how contemporary opportunities differ from
past decades. José E. Cassiolato, Marcelo de Matos, and Helena Lastres (Chapter 33) trace the
origins and evolution of innovation theory, distinguishing between a narrow perspective of
science and technology, and a broad perspective of economic growth. Bo Göransson, Judith
Sutz, and Rodrigo Arocena (Chapter 34) identify historic ideas on the role of universities,
and contrast two models of the university: as a marketplace of skills and innovation for
industry, and as contributing to development by solving social challenges. David Brook,
Peter Singer, and Caitlyn MacMaster (Chapter 35) describe an evolution in financial mecha-
nisms, moving from grants to stimulate ideas, to prizes and entrepreneurial approaches
intended to encourage and scale innovation. Finally, Ronaldo Lemos and Joana Ferraz
(Chapter 36) examine the recent history of information and communication technologies
for development (ICT4D), which has turned to new business models, defining how connec-
tivity empowers poor people, and new challenges of protecting rights and freedoms.
References
Arrow, K. (1962). “The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing,” Review of Economic
Studies, 29: 155–73.
Grossman, G. M. and E. Helpman (1991). Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Helpman, E. (2004). The Mystery of Economic Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Polanyi, M. (1962). “The Republic of Science.” Minerva, 1: 54–73.
Rip, A. (2003). “Societal Challenges for R&D Evaluation,” in P. Shapira and S. Kuhlmann
(eds.), Learning from Science and Technology Policy Evaluation. Cheltenham, UK: Edward
Elgar.
Slaughter, S. and G. Rhoades (1996). “The Emergence of a Competitiveness Research and
Development Policy Coalition and the Commercialization of Academic Science and Tech-
nology,” Science, Technology and Human Values, 21: 303–39.
UNESCO (2010). World Social Science Report. Paris, France: UNESCO.
Whitley, R. and J. Gläser (2007). The Changing Governance of the Sciences: The Advent of
Research Evaluation Systems. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
chapter 32
i n dustr i a l policy
michele di maio1
Introduction
Industrial policy is one of the most controversial issues in development economics. There
are several reasons for this. First, there is no agreement on the exact definition of industrial
policy. This is obviously quite problematic, because the accepted definition determines the
answers to such important questions as whether the use of industrial policy is theoretically
justified, what its objectives should be, which measures should be considered part of it, and
what its effects have been in both developed and developing countries. Second, the theoreti-
cal justification of industrial policy—at least in its most basic version—is based on the exist-
ence of some type of market failure. This implies that industrial policy needs to be analyzed
in the context of models of imperfect competition and incomplete markets, and thus requires
a set of mathematical instruments that, until quite recently, were not common among econo-
mists. Third, the analysis of industrial policy is at the crossroads of different research fields,
including economic history, development economics, and political science. Finally, and not
surprisingly, it is a highly sensitive political topic.
The last decade has witnessed renewed interest in the use of industrial policy as an instru-
ment to favor structural change and foster economic growth and development. This is espe-
cially true with regard to developing countries. Interestingly, the emerging discussion now
focuses on how industrial policy should be designed rather than whether it should be used
(Rodrik 2004; Aghion 2012).
This change of perspective is quite impressive considering that twenty years ago the term
“industrial policy” was virtually absent from political and economic discourse and develop-
ment strategy documents. There are two main reasons for this change. The first is the criti-
cism that has been growing in the last decade against the Washington Consensus approach,
motivated by its quite disappointing results as a strategy for economic development. The
second is that the debate concerning the pros and cons of industrial policy is now far less
ideological than in the past. In fact, new issues (as well as old ones) are at the center of the
current debate, but the discussion is now better informed because of the availability of more
extensive empirical evidence and improved theoretical analysis.
industrial policy 551
This chapter is intended to provide a concise but comprehensive discussion of the concept
of industrial policy. The chapter focuses on the history, characteristics, results, and evolution
of industrial policy in developing countries. The chapter begins by comparing the different
possible definitions before describing how approaches changed over time: the early Devel-
opmental State as a golden age; the Washington Consensus era abandonment; and the cur-
rent return of industrial policy. The chapter then considers the performance of industrial
policy in different regions and countries, and describes how external conditions have
changed in the last decade and shaped the characteristics of the new industrial policy.
Defining Industrial Policy
There are several possible definitions for industrial policy. It can be safely argued that part of
the disagreement among economists and policy-makers regarding its pros and cons is indeed
due to a lack of clarity about its definition. This is why the starting point of any discussion
must be—or should be—a discussion of what is meant by industrial policy. More specifically,
what are its objectives and what measures are part of it? Some scholars associate industrial
policy with the set of government policies directed to developing the manufacturing sector
only. For instance, the World Bank (1993) considers it as “government efforts to alter the
industrial structure to promote productivity-based growth,” and Pack (2000) defines it as
including “actions designed to target specific sectors to increase their productivity and their
relative importance within manufacturing.”
Other definitions include a broader set of objectives, such as enhancing productivity,
competitiveness, and overall economic growth. For instance, according to Pack and Saggi
(2007), industrial policy is “any type of selective intervention or government policy that
attempts to alter the structure of production toward sectors that are expected to offer better
prospects for economic growth than would occur in the absence of such intervention.”
According to Curzon Price (1981), it comprises “any government measure to promote or pre-
vent structural change.” Since one important cause of structural change is international
trade, industrial policy is sometimes referred to as policies to “defy” the country compara-
tive advantage and develop its “latent” advantages (Amsden 2001; Chang 2002). It should be
noted that these definitions also include measures that are not specifically (or only) directed
to industry or manufacturing. Industrial policy may in fact be directed to other sectors which
the government expects to have high growth potential, such as non-traditional agricultural
products or high-value service activities like software development and tourism (Rodrik
2007; Altenburg 2011). Finally, industrial policy is sometimes given the more ambitious
objective of shaping structural change in ways that are socially inclusive and environmen-
tally sustainable (UNIDO 2011).
The more general the objective, the larger the set of measures that are considered part of
industrial policy. For instance, according to Cimoli, Dosi, and Stiglitz (2009: 107–43), indus-
trial policy includes targeted industrial support as well as policies related to trade, regula-
tion, innovation and technology, education and skill formation, and sectoral competitiveness.
The various combinations of these measures characterize the different industrial policy
packages. It follows that each industrial policy model could be ideally located on a continuum
552 michele di maio
ranging from hard to soft, where the hard end includes interventions that distort prices
while the soft end includes interventions that deal with coordination problems (Harrison
and Rodríguez-Clare 2010). Somehow different is the approach of Rodrik (2007), who
defines industrial policy as a process involving a “dialogue” between the state and the private
sector to generate information for identifying and removing the binding constraints to
development.
While it is important to acknowledge these different possible definitions, this chapter con-
siders industrial policy as framed by the peculiar role of the manufacturing sector within
development.2 Thus, industrial policy is the set of government measures—targeted at spe-
cific industries or firms—intended to support the development and upgrading of industrial
output. This definition of industrial policy includes the large set of policies described by
Cimoli, Dosi, and Stiglitz (2009).
Arguments For and Against
The economic literature on the justification, limits, and effects of industrial policy (IP) is
quite extensive. Therefore, this section will briefly present only the main arguments. The the-
oretical justification for IP is based on the fulfillment of three conditions (Harrison and
Rodríguez-Clare 2010): some market failure is present; the firm/sector is potentially com-
petitive in the international markets; and the discounted future benefits of intervention
exceed the costs of the distortion. There are two main arguments against the use of IP in
developing countries. The first is that, even in the presence of highly imperfect markets, there
is no reason to suppose that the government has better access to information with respect to
the market. Since government information is necessarily limited, good selectivity is impos-
sible, which implies—for instance—that the “picking winners” strategy is doomed to fail
(see, e.g., Pack and Saggi 2007). A second argument against IP comes from the literature on
rent-seeking and corruption (see, e.g., Krueger 1974, 1990). The basic idea is that since any
government measure (e.g., import licences, investment permits, etc.) creates rents, firms find
it profitable to (legally or not) invest their resources to obtain them. This is a wasteful activity
that also distorts the allocation of resources because it makes competition between firms
unfair.
In particular, economic theory has shown that government intervention is optimal in the
presence of one of the following market failures. The first is the existence of an informational
externality related to the difference between the private and the social benefit in exploring
the profitability of a new activity (see Hausmann and Rodrik 2003). The (partial) socializa-
tion of investment risk through government intervention makes private and social returns
converge. The second is a situation of investment coordination failure,3 which emerges
when—because of a lack of required investments in related actives—private sector invest-
ment is sub-optimal. The third is the existence of a positive (demand, production or technol-
ogy) externality.
The mainstream approach mantains that the optimal industrial policy should be deter-
mined by comparing the magnitude of market failures and government failures. A different
perspective on this issue is the view that the debate on the pros and cons of industrial policy
should go beyond the discussion about the respective roles of the State and the Market. In fact
it is crucial to acknowledge that industrial policy has a very specific domain of intervention,
namely, industry and manufacturing. Thus, the justification of IP can be found in the fact that
manufacturing has a special role in the development process: it is a historical regularity that
sustained economic growth is associated with industrialization, in terms of growth in manu-
facturing employment and value added (Maddison 2001; Szirmai 2011). The strategic role of
manufacturing in modern economic growth is usually ascribed to the presence of increasing
returns and technological spillover effects, high capital intensity, strong and numerous for-
ward and backward linkages, high elasticity of demand, and higher employment potential
with respect to the other sectors. These factors have been used—in a variety of combinations—
to justify industrialization, considered as a necessary stage of economic development. The
next section discusses the characteristics and the historical evolution of industrial policy as
the instrument used by the governments of developing countries to achieve industrialization.
Industrial Policy in Historical Perspective
Industrial policy has a long history. Governments of both developed and developing coun-
tries have widely adopted targeted interventions to support industrialization. For instance,
governments played an active supporting role in the industrialization of the UK, the U.S.,
Germany, and Japan during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Landes 1970). Follow-
ing the end of the Second World War, governments of newly independent countries started
to intervene in the economy to favor industrialization as a strategy to spur their catching-up
process. Government intervention took different forms, from complete economy-wide plans
to various combinations of trade policies, production subsides, direct credit allocation, and
use of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In this, developing countries were actually doing
what developed countries did during their development process (Reinert 1999).
This section provides a brief historical overview of the experiences of developing coun-
tries in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa during the last fifty years. The section begins by
describing some aspects of industrial policy during the Developmental State period, in par-
ticular its content in the different countries, the results flowing from it, and why these results
varied widely. Next, we discuss how the Washington Consensus approach influenced the use
of industrial policy in developing countries.
The Developmental State Period

The literature on the historical experiences of developing countries with industrial policy is
extremely vast.4 Therefore, this chapter can provide only a brief description of the actual
content of industrial policy in those countries, emphasizing similarities and differences
while recalling that countries have sometimes implemented similar measures in very differ-
ent ways. In the following, measures are grouped according to the domains of intervention
included in our definition of IP (see Section “Defining industrial policy”). While this catego-
rization provides clarity, it should be noted that industrial policy is something more than
and different from the sum of the government interventions in the different domains.
554 michele di maio
Trade Policy, Import Substitution, and Export Promotion

Trade policy affects the degree of international competition to which firms are exposed. This
contributes to the profitability of different production activities and thus plays an important
role in influencing firms’ investment decisions. Trade policy was a key part of the import
substitution industrialization (ISI) pursued by several countries between the 1950s and
1970s. There are several reasons why ISI policies were popular. The first and most important
is that industrialization was believed to be necessary for development and that infant domes-
tic industries needed (temporary) protection. The idea was that free trade would increase the
economy’s dependence on the export of commodities that were expected to suffer declining
prices over time (Prebisch 1950).
While initially the use of a protectionist trade policy was commonplace, some countries
soon started differentiating their strategies. In South Korea import protection was already
coupled with export promotion in the 1960s. Import protection was high, prolonged, and
selective, but at the same time, export performance was used as the disciplinary device for
both firms and bureaucrats (Amsden 1989). Firms were given subsidies and the right to sell
in the protected domestic market under the commitment to export. In Taiwan the govern-
ment extensively used tariffs and quantitative restrictions, while exporters were given pref-
erential tax treatment and access to credit on favorable terms. Latin American governments
largely used protectionist trade policies as part of their ISI strategy, but they were not cou-
pled with incentive schemes to promote export and domestic competition.
The implementation of active export policies has been—with the partial exception of
Brazil—much more limited. Immediately after independence, African countries also started
a process of industrialization through import substitution. In most of the cases, governments
offered protection to domestic firms with little discrimination between activities, no time
limit, and no requirements of international competitiveness (Mkandawire 2001).
Targeted Sectoral Measures, Development Banks, and Fiscal Incentives

A basic assumption of the ISI strategy was that some sectors were strategic for the economic
development of the country. This was the justification for a number of measures that govern-
ments provided to targeted sectors. While almost any government has selectively supported
targeted sectors, the degree of selectivity and the degree of direct State intervention have
been very different. For instance, India followed the example of the USSR and adopted a
strategy based on massive public investments in heavy industry, the state-imposed coordi-
nation of investment decisions in both the public and the private sectors, and the bringing of
certain strategic industries and firms under public ownership (Singh 1995). In East Asia, on
the other hand, it was common for governments to identify priority sectors to be selectively
supported but, in contrast to what happened in many countries, the economic initiative
remained mostly private sector-led.
Control of the financial sector was another key aspect of the Developmental State approach
to development. In many cases, the State nationalized the banks and other financial institu-
tions and created national development banks to influence the private sector investment
decisions (Soludo, Ogbu, and Chang 2004). The development bank provided discretionary
credit lending to specific sectors and firms, playing a crucial role in funding technological
accumulation and export growth (giving exporting firms access to long-term subsidized
capital) (Amsden 2001). Governments used development banks to condition the firms’
behavior by providing loans conditional on the fulfillment of certain requirements that were
sometimes even firm-specific. These conditions were particularly severe in South Korea and
Taiwan (Amsden 1989; Rodrik 1995; Lall 2003), while they were much less clear and demand-
ing in Latin American countries.
Competition and Regulation Policies

Governments have used several measures to influence the market structure of their domes-
tic economy. For instance, in South Korea, beginning in the 1960s the government reduced
domestic competition for selected firms in exchange for their commitment to export (see
Amsden 1989). In India, the government used a strict licence system to regulate the entry
into selected sectors to avoid large firms competing with small ones in the same market. The
objective was to preserve some market share for small household firms and avoid rising eco-
nomic inequality associated with industrialization (Kapur, this volume). In other cases, gov-
ernments intervened to reduce monopolistic situations so as to decrease costs (of inputs and
services) for manufacturing firms and favor their competitiveness in international markets.
Innovation and Technology Policies

The role of the State in the knowledge accumulation process has been preeminent in many
countries (Katz 2000; Cassiolato, de Matos, and Lastres, this volume). Governments made
an effort to stimulate the domestic production of technological knowledge (Alcorta and
Peres 1998). The commitment of governments to technological development has been par-
ticularly strong in the East Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore).
From the early 1960s, the South Korean government supported domestic technological
upgrading in several ways. The import of technology was strongly subsidized and public
funds to finance domestic technological innovation were created. Similarly, in Taiwan the
import and diffusion of advanced technologies among domestic firms was subsidized, and
science parks and technology clusters were created to improve technology accumulation.
Governments of East Asian Tigers acted as venture capitalists and pioneers, especially in
high-technology sectors such as informatics, semiconductors, and telecommunications,
when the private sector was unable to develop the necessary capabilities. In fact, accumula-
tion of technological capabilities in East Asia was also stimulated by high-quality govern-
ment demand (for South Korea, see Amsden 1989; for India, see Singh 1995).
Education and Skill Formation Policies

Education and skill formation policies are a necessary complement to technology and inno-
vation policies. For instance, education policies were crucial in the experiences of Germany
and Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. Similarly, they have been a fundamental part
of the development strategy of latecomers after the Second World War. But the experiences
of East Asia and Latin America have been considerably different in this respect. The East
Asian Tigers invested heavily in education and technical training, implementing numerous
556 michele di maio
public policies with the objective of improving the scientific education indicators and creat-
ing an education system strongly biased in favor of technical degrees (Kim 1993). The Indian
government’s intervention in supplying high-quality education (especially engineering) has
been a fundamental ingredient of its industrial policy. Latin American governments tried to
support high skill formation as part of their ISI strategy, with Brazil among the most active in
this area. While the general education level increased, the improvement in technical and sci-
entific education in the region was much more modest than in East Asia.
The Results of Industrial Policy during the Developmental

State Period
The debate on the effects of IP during the Developmental State period is still open. The rea-
son is that IP is predicated to be the cause of both impressive successes and spectacular fail-
ures. While there are theoretical arguments in favor of it, the critical question remains: Does
industrial policy work in practice?
This question is not easy to answer, given the high heterogeneity among the different
regional and national experiences. In some cases, the government played a direct leading
role in the industrialization process. There was widespread public ownership of industry:
public investment was extensive and a number of firms were nationalized. In other cases, the
government merely provided incentives to the private sector, which acted as the prime
engine of the industrialization process. Furthermore, the same policies have been used by
different countries in very different ways.
Analysis of the effectiveness of industrial policy can be grouped into three categories
(Rodrik 2007; Harrison and Rodríguez-Clare 2010). The first group of studies focuses on the
analysis of one specific industry that has received some kind of support. Most of these stud-
ies analyze the effect of protectionist trade policies, and generally show that protection leads
to higher growth but that the net welfare effects are negative (see, for example, Head 1994;
Luzio and Greenstein 1995).
A second group analyzes whether (more) supported industries exhibit faster growth. Here
also, most of the studies have focused on trade protection. The evidence is mixed5 and no
study is able to show a causal link between protection and economic results. In general, trade
protection seems to have been granted to protect a special group or to generate tariff reve-
nues rather than as part of an industrialization strategy (see Lee 1996; Goldberg and Maggi
1999). At the same time, the historical experiences of the East Asian Tigers clearly show that
trade protection is not per se harmful to growth. On the contrary, one of the keys for the suc-
cess of these countries has been the mix between openness and protection (e.g., opening
some markets to international competition while keeping others closed) (Amsden 1989).
Finally, a third group of studies attempts to evaluate the effects of IP using the cross-
country approach. Again, most of the studies have focused on trade policy. Interestingly,
some of these studies find a positive correlation between import tariffs and economic growth
across countries during the late nineteenth century (O’Rourke 2000; Chang 2002)—as
occurred in the U.S.—which emerged in the nineteenth century as economic leaders in con-
junction with high domestic tariffs.
In an attempt to summarize the evidence, it would be fair to say that the results of IP
under the Developmental State are mixed. While the results were remarkable for East Asian
countries,6 they were mixed in Latin American countries and were almost everywhere a
failure in Africa. This said, there are few doubts that government intervention has been c rucial
for most of today’s developed countries during their economic takeoff. For instance, it is
rather difficult to identify cases of current export successes that did not involve government
support at some early stage. Among these, the most notable are POSCO in South Korea,
EMBRAER in Brazil, the salmon industry in Chile, and the ICT revolution in India, with the
first two being clear examples of import substitution under public ownership, the third a case
of the success of a quasi-public agency acting as a venture fund, and the last—at least in part—
the result of decades of investment in high education (Singh 1995; Rodrik 2007). Still, beside
these successful cases, there are numerous—and in some cases enormous—failures.
Why Results Differ across Countries

At the end of the 1970s, the divergence in the growth rates between East Asia, Latin America,
and Africa began to increase significantly. The orthodox view explains it as the result of two
different development strategies: a successful, market-friendly, export-led model in East
Asia as opposed to a failing, state-led ISI strategy in Latin America and Africa. In this
account, the role of the State in the “Asian Miracle” is very marginal: the government set the
rules to favor export growth and allowed the markets to work freely. Those economies were
then able to automatically take off. Selective industrial policy was absent, and other types of
government interventions—when in place—were if anything an obstacle to growth (World
Bank 1993; Pack and Saggi 2007). Instead, Latin American countries had poor economic
performance because they implemented the ISI strategy and used industrial policy exten-
sively to support their industrialization process. This is the view that has long prevailed in
the profession.
An alternative view argues that the Developmental State was common to all three regions.
The reason industrialization results have been so different is that East Asia adopted a differ-
ent model of the Developmental State with respect to other developing countries and it mod-
ifed that over time. In fact, different countries have implemented similar policies in radically
different ways. It is now a shared view—emerging from the vast literature on the East Asian
Tigers—that the recipe for their success was the effective combination of incentives with dis-
cipline (Amsden 2001; Hausmann and Rodrik 2003). The former were provided through
subsidies and protection, while the latter was obtained through direct and indirect govern-
ment control of economic activity (for instance, using export performance as a selection and
monitoring device for both entrepreneurs and bureaucrats). Another peculiarity of the
Development State in East Asia was its “embedded autonomy” (Evans 1995). It was a “strong
State” and thus able to promote industrialization because it was (at least partially) autono-
mous from social forces that might oppose industrial policy. At the same time, the State cre-
ated some beneficial interactions with the entrepreneurial elite that allowed it to promote
industrialization.
According to Lall (2003), the main characteristics of the East Asian economic model are:
strict selectivity and time-limited government intervention; the temporary use of public
enterprises to enter risky sectors; massive investment in skill creation and infrastructure;
centralization of strategic industrial decisions in competent authorities; and highly selective
use of foreign direct investment.
558 michele di maio
The first element is particularly important. Governments in East Asia provided stable and
predictable incentive schemes and were able to withdraw support whenever they wished. As
in any other country, industrial policy did create inefficient firms; yet here, unlike what hap-
pened elsewhere, the State was able to withdraw support whenever a firm’s performance was
not satisfactory. The selecting devices for receiving targeted support were the exporting per-
formance and the domestic competition. Finally, it should be acknowledged that while there
are similarities, there are also important differences between the experiences of the different
East Asian Tigers. For instance, government intervention was widespread in South Korea
and Taiwan, and much less relevant in Singapore and Hong Kong. Moreover, while both
South Korea and Taiwan invested heavily in the development of domestic innovation capa-
bilities, for Singapore and Hong Kong the main technology policy was always to attract for-
eign direct investment (see Lall 2000).
The Developmental State was much less successful in Latin America. The industrializa-
tion strategy and the specific industrial policy adopted were indeed very different from the
ones in East Asia: this difference can be summarized by saying that firms in Latin America
received incentives similar to those provided to firms in East Asia, but they faced much less
discipline. An interesting example is how regulation and competition policies modified the
domestic market structure. These policies were common to many developing countries but
their results were quite different in the two regions. While in East Asia these policies created
an environment favorable to the exploitation of economies of scale and increased firms’ effi-
ciency, in Latin America they mostly only generated a protected domestic market for ineffi-
cient local firms. Other relevant differences between the two models can be summarized as
follows: Latin America adopted an “anti-export” version of the ISI strategy; there was a lack
of government capabilities; and investments in education, science, and technology innova-
tion were much more limited than in East Asia.
In Africa, attempts at industrialization generally fared poorly. While there are some suc-
cess stories (such as Mauritius, Botswana, Madagascar, and Kenya), in most cases ISI strat-
egy was a failure. UNCTAD (2007) identifies two possible interpretations. The first argues
that the Developmental State could not succeed because of the inability of the African
States to design and implement an effective industrial policy. In contrast, the second inter-
pretation emphasizes that the Developmental State collapsed because of the inability of the
ISI to adjust to changes in external conditions. To these one can add the political dimension.
Robinson (2009) argues that industrial policy has been successful only when those with
power wanted industrialization to succeed, or have been forced to act in this way by the
incentives generated by political institutions. Apparently, these conditions were not always
met in Africa.
The Debt Crisis and the Washington Consensus

The process of differentiation between the three regions reached its climax in the 1980s.
While East Asia continued its rapid growth, Latin America entered the “lost decade” caused
by the external debt crisis, and Africa entered a long period of economic difficulties.7 At the
beginning of the 1990s, Latin America had become the laboratory for the implementation of
the most orthodox version of the Washington Consensus policies (see Stallings and Peres
2000), while in much of Africa, Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were in place.
This was a dramatic change for the two regions. The implementation of the Washington
Consensus in Latin America was characterized by economic reforms—including trade
liberalization—that eliminated the ISI apparatus and drastically reduced the measures to
support industrialization. Something very similar happened in Africa, where through the
SAPs the World Bank exhibited its “deep-rooted anti-industrial-policy position”: one of the
objectives of structural adjustment was indeed to eliminate any selective industrial policy
measures (Mkandawire and Soludo 1999). While IP was eliminated from the political and
economic discourse in both regions, governments nonetheless continued to implement it
under other names (Melo 2001). In the meantime, the rules of the game and the economic
environment changed, posing new challenges to the industrialization attempts of develop-
ing countries.
New Rules, Competitors, and Challenges
To better understand the current difficulties of developing countries in their attempt to

industrialize, one must first consider how the world economy has evolved over the last three
decades. There are two differences which are most relevant with respect to the past: new
rules of the game and a new international division of labor.
The rules of world trade have changed significantly. The growing number of multilateral,
bilateral, and regional trade agreements has increasingly restricted the policy space available
for using trade policy as an instrument to promote industrial development, especially for
non-Least Developed Countries (non-LDC). For example, protectionist trade policies are
now prohibited by the World Trade Organization (WTO) for all non-LDCs. The WTO rules
are also progressively forcing countries to reduce export subsidies (and also the establish-
ment of export processing zones) and subsidies for the use of domestic (rather than
imported) inputs. Local content requirements and quantitative restrictions on imports are
now banned too (Tussie and Quiliconi, this volume).
These changes have caused some concern, because trade policy—including import pro-
tection and export promotion measures—was a fundamental instrument of industrial policy
during the Developmental State period.8 In practice, developing countries are nowadays not
allowed to use the measures employed by advanced economies during their industrializa-
tion period.9
While the rules have changed significantly, this does not mean that trade policy can no
longer be used. The WTO rules still allow all countries to use trade policy interventions in
the form of selective subsidies to promote domestic research and development (R&D),
regional development, and environment-friendly activities. Moreover, governments can
selectively promote science and technology activities, in particular by subsidizing private
and public R&D. This indicates that there is still some room for policies to support industri-
alization, but governments should design industrial policy, particularly trade policy, so as to
take the new constraints explicitly into account.
A second important change concerns the characteristics of the global economic environ-
ment, particularly a new international division of labor. The level of competition in global
markets has increased enormously with the emergence of new world-level economic powers
such as China, India, and Brazil. As world leaders in labor-intensive manufacturing, these
560 michele di maio
countries have significantly reduced the market for other emerging countries traditionally
specialized in those products. This new competitive environment requires that industrial
policy include a different set of instruments and measures from the ones used in the past.
Since industrialization can no longer be expected to be obtained through infant industry
protection or nationalization of foreign firms, IP should be designed to support diversifica-
tion and production upgrading of firms. Indeed, the new international division of labor
obliges firms from developing countries to meet increasingly stringent standard and quality
requirements in order to participate in global value chains. It is clear that to achieve this
objective, an updated IP is required.
The world economy has dramatically changed since the Developmental State period, and
since the decades of the Washington Consensus. The main issue is no longer to understand if
and how “old” policies will fit the “new” world. The magnitude of the changes that have taken
place in these decades has created the need for a new approach to industrial policy.
Elements of the New Approach
The concept and application of industrial policy have evolved over the last two decades.
Recently the literature has moved from discussing whether or not governments should use
industrial policy to discussing how to design and implement it effectively. There is an increas-
ing consensus among scholars on the elements that should characterize this new approach to
industrial policy (Rodrik 2007; Lin and Chang 2009; Di Maio 2009; Asche, Neuerburg, and
Menegatti 2011).
Public–Private Dialogue
The dialogue between the government and the private sector is crucial in order to identify
distortions, bottlenecks, and weaknesses to be addressed by IP. The central role of the private
sector in the design and implementation of IP suggests the need for a proper consideration
of its specific characteristics. Dealing effectively with the private sector implies the acknowl-
edgment of its heterogeneity within and between countries. After having put much effort
into learning about the strengths and weaknesses of governments, we should now learn more
about the private sector, which ultimately is the target/recipient of IP. It follows that a highly
tailored assistance to entrepreneurs is needed in an increasingly complex environment
where the challenges are context-specific, country-specific, and even firm-specific.
Awareness and Information

To be effective, industrial policy needs to provide a set of monetary and non-monetary incen-
tives to induce firms to enter new sectors and improve their current production. To this end,
the first step is to make entrepreneurs aware of the availability of support measures, their con-
tent, and the way to access them. It is not uncommon for industrial policy to fail simply
because local entrepreneurs are unaware of its existence. It is also crucial that its results—even
if negative—be made public, in order to make credible the commitment of a government that
has declared itself willing to support the manufacturing sector. In particular, it is important
that any positive results of IP be properly disseminated, in order to provide a signal to entre-
preneurs that it may be useful to apply for the support measures despite the cost.
Coordination
Industrial policy includes measures belonging to different domains of intervention that can-
not be considered in isolation: complementarities need to be taken into account. It matters
not only what measure is implemented, but in what context and in what policy mix. It follows
that a comprehensive policy framework is needed to implement IP effectively. While this
consideration may appear obvious, it should be noted that policy coordination across gov-
ernmental agencies often faces enormous challenges in developing countries because of
political economy considerations and lack of human and financial resources and capabilities.
Transparency and Accountability

Industrial policy should be clear as to which specific measures are included and who is
responsible for what. This serves two purposes: it reduces the possibility of rent-seeking
activities, and it clarifies responsibilities as well as incentives for bureaucrats. Industrial pol-
icy has a strong selective component that can be justified only if the process behind its design
and implementation is transparent and the government is considered responsible for it.
Evaluation
A crucial component of a successful industrial policy is a monitoring and evaluation mecha-
nism. The evaluation of policy measures can be very complicated because it is difficult to
decide what has to be measured and how to measure it. Yet there is no doubt that policy
evaluation is crucial, because it provides information that can be used to improve the poli-
cies. Without evaluation, there is no mechanism for adjusting and correcting the policies in
response to changing circumstances.
Industrial Policy as a Process

Industrial policy is not only a set of measures, but a process through which the government
learns which policy mix is optimal given the current and expected future economic situation
(see Rodrik 2007). This is why, while the past and current experiences of other countries can
provide some insights, each country must find its own way in designing its industrial policy.
The dynamic nature of the determining optimal policy implies that its content and objectives
need to be continuously re-evaluated and updated—considering the results obtained—
under the constraints provided by the available resources and capabilities.
While these are general elements that should characterize IP, the new approach also
explicitly recognizes that policies cannot abstract from the current economic situation of the
specific country—in other words, from its production structure. This obviously means that
IP should be designed to consider the available capabilities both in the government and in
562 michele di maio
the private sector. As a minimizing failure rule (safety rule), current available capabilities
should guide the type and extent of IP to be carried out. In addition, IP should be modeled in
accordance with the characteristics of entrepreneurship in the specific country. To be suc-
cessful, the new approach needs to consider all these elements together.
Conclusion
After a long hiatus, IP is making its way back onto developing countries’ agenda. In recent
years, a large and increasing agreement is emerging that strengthening industry, particularly
manufacturing, is the condition required to benefit from world trade and foster economic
growth and development. This renewed interest in industrial policy follows from that, and
IP is once again being viewed as a potentially effective instrument in inducing structural
change and the growth of manufacturing.
Industrial policy is back but the world economy and the rules of the game have changed.
This implies that a new approach is needed. The recent literature agrees that there is no single
recipe for the optimal industrial policy. Rather, the emerging consensus is that effective
industrial policy needs to be a mix of common practices and country-specific measures in
which past experiences and domestic experimentation are both essential components.
While the economic literature on IP is vast, there is still much to be learned in terms of
both theory and empirics. One aspect concerning theory that needs to be further explored is
the political economy of industrial policy. The history of a country, its economic characteris-
tics, and the political environment all determine what type of industrial policy is feasible and
possible to implement. While some contributions have already opened this Pandora’s box,
there is still much to learn about how the political equilibrium and other country-specific
characteristics interact with industrial policy. As for the empirics, a promising approach is
the use of randomized controlled experiments. Even if there are still very few such analyses,
this approach—if coupled with the precious knowledge coming from detailed case studies
and cross-country comparative analysis—could significantly improve our understanding of
the characteristics of an effective industrial policy. This would be a very important achieve-
ment since, now more than ever, a better understanding of the theory and empirics of IP
would contribute to designing better strategies for development.
Notes
1. I extend my sincere thanks to the editors, contributors, and Philipp Neuerburg for useful
comments on a previous version of the chapter.
2. Szirmai (2011) provides empirical evidence on the fundamental role of the manufacturing
sector in the process of development.
3. Rodrik (2004) notes that direct support is not always necessary to solve this type of market
failure.
4. Key references include Rodrik (1995, 2004, 2007); Amsden (2001); Wade (2003); Soludo,
Ogbu, and Chang (2004); Cimoli, Dosi, and Stiglitz (2009); Lin and Chang (2009).
5. It is very instructive to see how different are the conclusions reached by Krueger and
Tuncer (1982) and Harrison (1994).
6. There is an extensive literature suggesting that the Developmental State has been quite suc-
cessful in inducing industrialization in East Asia, where the level of industrialization in the
1950s was lower than in Latin America (Amsden 1989, 2001; Wade 2003).
7. On the origins and causes of the African debt crisis, see UNCTAD (2007).
8. Similarly, the TRIPS agreement is making it increasingly difficult for developing countries
to access advanced technology since it forbids copying and reverse engineering, two activi-
ties that have been important for technology accumulation in developing countries during
the Developmental State period (see, e.g., the South Korean case) (Amsden 2000).
9. Note that these concerns may be somewhat misplaced. In fact the evidence on the positive
effect of trade restrictions on manufacturing growth is at best mixed. For instance, the
results of protectionist trade policy per se on domestic technological accumulation has in
general been quite poor in most developing countries (Rodrik 2004).
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chapter 33
i n novation systems a n d
dev el opm en t
josé eduardo cassiolato, marcelo g. pessoa
de matos, and helena m. m. lastres
Introduction
From the 1950s to the 1970s the central preoccupation of the international research and pol-
icy agenda was to deal with the challenges posed by underdevelopment. During this period,
structuralism was one of the main theoretical frameworks shaping the debate on the issue.
Though there are many differences within this line of thought, its contributors did agree
about the significant differences between countries. Some authors went even further, argu-
ing that structural inequalities in economic and geopolitical relations were the main cause of
underdevelopment. Other consensual points were that government intervention would be
required to promote the structural changes necessary to overcome backwardness, and that
knowledge and policies specific to the different realities would be needed.
One of the key authors of the Latin American structuralist school, Celso Furtado, argued
that true development—not the economic growth that arises from mere modernization of
elites—exists when there is a social project behind it. Only if there is a predominance of
forces fighting for effective improvement of living conditions of the population will growth
turn into development. For Furtado, the essence of development lies in the transformation
of national economies where its structural complexity is manifested in a diversity of social
and economic forms. Such transformation refers to structural changes in the internal rela-
tions of the economic and social system that are triggered by capital accumulation and tech-
nological innovations (Furtado 1961: 103).
The development agenda’s emphasis on the connections between structural change, social
conditions, and innovation changed dramatically in the late 1970s as a crisis—which com-
bined stagnation, inflation, and unemployment—arose in developed countries and spread
throughout the world. This had a parallel with the diffusion of orthodox monetary-based eco-
nomic thinking, which became the hegemonic paradigm throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
The leading proponents of what Toye (1987) has called the counter-revolution in development
theory and policy introduced a radical neo-liberal agenda in which “development practically
innovation systems and development 567
disappears as a specific question, [remaining] only as the welfare achieved by the elimination
of obstacles to market functioning” (Arocena and Sutz 2005: 16). The basic premise was that
underdevelopment is simply the result of bad allocation of resources and that it is caused vir-
tually exclusively by government intervention (distortion of prices and over-dimensioned
public sectors). This reduced the complex problem of underdevelopment to a matter of sim-
ply following some basic economic “recipes” (get the prices right, get the property rights right,
get the institutions right, get the governance right) based on emulating Anglo-American
institutions throughout the world (Chang 2002). Recent efforts to articulate mainstream eco-
nomic theory with some structuralist elements have also fallen short. Besides maintaining a
perspective of static comparative advantages,1 it does not demonstrate a significant under-
standing about the knowledge, technology, and processes involved in structural change.2
Significant difficulties remained in understanding the characteristics and changes of the
present accumulation regime, marked by the growing intensity and complexity of knowledge
and its increasing incorporation in goods and services, together with the acceleration of the
process of globalization and “financerization.” These limitations are even stronger with respect
to understanding the challenges and opportunities faced by less developed countries (LDCs)
and the resulting policy prescriptions. Most critical is the fact that thirty years of liberal policy
experimentation led to a more divided world, with the gap between rich and poor widening.
In the same timeframe of the last thirty years, a fruitful alternative to the neo-liberal consen-
sus was unfolding internationally, benefiting also from many insights provided by the develop-
ment structuralist literature. It emphasized the role of innovation as an engine of economic
growth and the long-run cyclical character of technical change. Freeman (1982) pointed out the
importance that Smith, Marx, and Schumpeter attached to innovation and accentuated its
systemic and national character. He also stressed the crucial role of government policies in
coping with the uncertainties associated with the upsurge of a new techno-economic paradigm
and the very limited circumstances under which free trade could promote development.
Since then the innovation systems (IS) framework—a comprehensive understanding of
the processes by which societies and economies learn and acquire capabilities both to pro-
duce and to innovate—has been increasingly used for analyzing and orienting industrial and
technological development. Today, research and policy activities explicitly focusing on inno-
vation systems can be found in most countries.
This chapter provides a discussion of the connection between development and the IS frame-
work. The following sections summarize how the concept of innovation systems evolved
over thirty years, examine the connections between the IS framework and development
thinking, and present an overview of applying the IS framework to address development
challenges.
Innovation Systems: The Evolution

of the Concept
From Innovation to Innovation Systems

Innovations are increasingly recognized as central driving forces of the transformation of
economic structures and of development. Building upon the analysis of Adam Smith and
568 josé eduardo cassiolato et al.
Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter explicitly incorporated innovation as a central variable in

economic analysis. In fact, technology and technical change were important parts of the
post-war debate on development. Schumpeter’s concept of development contributed to this
debate with two central ideas: the connection of technology with production, and the dis-
ruptive character of development.
The first idea relates innovation with economic agents, leading to the generation of new
products and processes or the establishment of new markets. The second idea encompasses
the understanding that the evolution of the economic system is marked by the continuous
destruction of old structures and the creation of new ones. This idea was further developed
by many scholars, showing how great transformations of the world economy over centuries
were related to new modes of production and the diffusion of technologies, such as the steam
engine, telegraph, electricity, and information and communication technologies (ICTs).
Building upon the pioneering analysis of Kondratiev, the concepts of technological para-
digm (Dosi 1982) and tech-economic paradigm (Freeman and Perez 1986) emphasize the
disruptive character of such technologies and the opportunities presented by the resulting
change in economic context.
The capacity to create, imitate, use, and modify innovations came to be seen as a determi-
nant of successful development for both firms and countries. The emphasis on the promo-
tion of industrialization is, in fact, directly related to the benefits and capacities that are
expected to be incorporated in the economic system of less developed countries. Based on
the recognition of the importance of innovations, a substantial literature has emerged,
building upon the concept of innovation systems. Though it originated in economics, this
framework benefited from the insights of many social sciences, including sociology, geogra-
phy, and history.
The starting point was the understanding, which emerged in the 1980s, that innovation is
systemic, involving interaction among agents, rather than a linear process involving discrete
steps. Innovation does not rely on the performance of individual firms, but on how they inter-
act with each other. Indeed, the number of firms and other organizations is far less important
than their habits and practices with respect to learning and investment. As innovation is par-
tially tacit, embedded in people’s lived experience, organizational routines, and professional
relationships; thus, learning by doing matters as much as searching for outside technology.
The national level matters, as a country’s development trajectory shapes its system of innova-
tion, and firms are embedded within a confluence of economic, social, and political factors.
An innovation system refers to a group of firms and other actors who implement new
products, new processes, and new forms of organization. This definition focuses on innova-
tion as an interactive process, occurring among and between firms and other actors, embed-
ded in a socio-economic and political context. Hence, the most fundamental characteristic
of an innovation system is the interaction among actors. The concept of national innovation
systems (NIS) was introduced by Freeman (1982) and Lundvall (1988). Since the 1990s, the
concept has been applied in developed and developing countries.
Narrow and Broad Approaches to Innovation Systems

With the advent of globalization, some have argued that the national character of innovation
has become less relevant. In order to counter argue, the distinction between two definitions
of national innovation systems is recalled.
In a narrow approach, the national innovation system is regarded as a follow-up to earlier

analyses of national science and technology (S&T) policy (Nelson 1992). The key issue is to
map indicators of national specialization and performance regarding innovation, research
and development (R&D) efforts, and S&T organizations. The issues raised are typically
related almost exclusively to explicit science policy. The analysis may include markets
for knowledge—intellectual property rights and the venture capital aspects of financial
markets—but hardly the broader set of institutions, in particular overall government poli-
cies, financing, and education and learning organizations.
In contrast, a broad approach to national innovation systems (Lundvall 1985) includes
these additional dimensions. Early on, Freeman (1982) argued that not only was the macr-
oeconomic performance of countries tied to innovation, but that factors beyond the realm of
S&T influenced the innovative performance of firms; he noted the limited relevance of short-
term competitiveness strategies—such as manipulating wages and exchange rates—and the
importance of government’s promoting a coherent approach to industry, science, technol-
ogy, and innovation. Freeman’s early study of Japan (1988) takes into account the role of
firms, education and research organizations, government, financing, and other actors that
influence the acquisition, use, and diffusion of innovations.
Thus, focus on interactive learning and on the localized nature of the generation, assimila-
tion, and diffusion of innovation is in opposition to the idea that national boundaries are
being loosened and that there is a tendency to a sort of “techno-globalism.” Innovation is
context specific. Acquiring foreign technology cannot substitute for local efforts, as a lot of
local knowledge is needed to select, buy (or copy), use, and transform technologies.
Building upon the IS Framework

A number of contributions have helped refine the idea of innovations systems. First is the
recognition that macroeconomic conditions influence the dynamics of innovation. This was
already present in the work of the OECD Expert Group on Science, Technology and Com-
petitiveness, which met between 1980 and 1983, that pointed out the effect of financial mar-
kets, education systems, and nationally determined institutions on industry competitiveness
and international specialization.
Second, a broader understanding of the innovation process cautions against overemphasiz-
ing R&D and encourages policy-makers to take a far-reaching perspective on the opportuni-
ties for learning. A major source of innovation relates to interactive learning that takes place
among production, sales, and technological development, and that involves non-price ele-
ments of power, trust, and loyalty (Lundvall 1992).
Third, historical processes account for differences in socio-economic capabilities and dif-
ferent development trajectories. Institutional evolution creates systems of innovation with
very specific local features and dynamics. The recognition that innovation is embedded in
specific contexts reaffirms the importance of capturing the specificity of different actors and
the type and quality of relationships, and of understanding the role of institutions in its broad
sense—as informal and formal norms and rules (Johnson 1992).
Economic performance can be explained by how new technological systems come for-
ward and co-evolve with and reshape existing institutions. This co-evolution is shaped by
history and the social, political, and cultural dimensions that are specific to each reality. Both
Freeman and Lundvall favor a method of “reasoned history” rather than quantitative analy-
sis based on abstract models. These authors argue that national institutions (both formal and
informal) determine how people relate to each other, how they learn and use their knowl-
edge, and the rate and direction of innovative activities (Johnson 1992).
Fourth, innovation requires trust in these institutions. The level of trust determines the
degree of learning that can take place. Beyond formal and legal arrangements, trust is influ-
enced by the level of social cohesion and solidarity, education and training opportunities,
labor market and corporate laws, contract laws, arbitration institutions and collective bar-
gaining, etc. These are all historically determined, and analysis of innovation systems has to
understand their national specificities, their international differences, and how they affect
development paths of different national innovation systems (Lundvall 2007).
Innovation Systems and Development

Thinking
Some of the most important conceptual pillars of innovation theory are rooted in interna-
tional development (Freeman 1982; Johnson, Edquist, and Lundvall 2003). Reinert (1996)
even suggests that one can find explicit connections to a discussion about development cen-
tered on the role of technology and innovation in a systemic way in the Renaissance eco-
nomics debate, while other insights come from the development debates during the
twentieth century.
The “Renaissance canon” of the seventeenth century already emphasized that the funda-
mental causes of economic welfare are immaterial production factors, namely, humans’ pro-
ductive creativity and morality. Antonio Serra (1613) pointed out that the difference between
the wealth and poverty of cities and countryside, and between cities of the period, could be
explained in terms of the different “qualities” of economic activities, the presence or absence
of diverse occupations, and the capacity to initiate “virtuous circles” or positive feedback
mechanisms. Once the focus was on production based on human creativity, emphasis was
put on incentives for education, science, and entrepreneurship (Reinert 1996).
Lundvall (2007) notes that a major inspiration for the IS concept was the work of the nine-
teenth-century German economist Friedrich List on the “National System of Production.”
List discussed the opportunities for promoting development in countries lagging behind the
dominant country at his time. He highlighted the capacity to acquire, use, transform, and
create knowledge (mental capital) and its articulation for productive purposes (material
capital). The systemic perspective was present not only in the articulation of knowledge and
productive structures, but in the consideration of the role of the government and of institu-
tions, which evolve along a specific historical process (List 1841).
Joseph Schumpeter, steeped in the tradition of the German Historical School of econom-
ics, put innovation in the center of economic analysis and stressed the disruptive character of
development. These notions shaped subsequent contributions by Prebisch (1949), Singer
(1950), and Myrdal (1958) on the long-term deterioration of terms of trade for primary prod-
ucts and of the distribution of gains between developed and developing countries. Their work
constituted what became known as the “triple alliance” on the discussion of terms of trade.3
Many studies have similarly argued that technical change plays a central role in explaining the
evolution of capitalism and in determining which hierarchies of regions and countries are
formed. Furtado (1961), for instance, established a direct relation between economic develop-
ment and technological change, pointing out that the growth of an economy is based on the
accumulation of knowledge, understanding development within a systemic, historically
determined, view. These contributions have a close correspondence with Myrdal’s (1958)
proposition that contexts and institutions matter, positive and negative feedbacks have cumu-
lative causation, and cycles may be virtuous or vicious. Also central to this thinking is
Hirschman’s (1958) point that interdependencies among different activities are important.
A significant milestone was the joint effort, at the University of Sussex in the late 1960s, of
Chris Freeman at the Science Policy Research Unit and Hans Singer at the Institute of Devel-
opment Studies. Their contributions combined the discussions on poverty, self-reliance, and
the role of science and technology. The synthesis of this endeavor is the Sussex Manifesto
(Singer et al. 1970), prepared for the debates of the UN Second Development Decade. This
document proposed that developing countries should have their own scientific and techno-
logical capability, in order not only to increase production but to improve their capacity to
produce.
Inspired by these ideas, a literature emerged in the 1970s and 1980s about how firms in the
less developed world acquire and develop technological capabilities (Katz 1987; Ernst, Gani-
atsos, and Mytelka 1998). Key concepts of these contributions were the notions of techno-
logical capabilities and learning. Several empirical studies have shown how less developed
countries have managed to develop skills, leading to more “efficient” production, at least in
the short term. These studies focused mostly on the knowledge and skills required for pro-
duction (where shop floor experience and “learning by doing” play an important role) and
for investment, as well as adaptive engineering and organizational arrangements required
for the continuous updating of product design and performance features (Dahlman, Ross-
Larson, and Westphal 1987). A limitation of these studies was that they were circumscribed
by the connection of technology with production.
Over the same period, Latin American authors stimulated by the structuralist approach
developed a number of firm-level studies. This work not only showed successful stories of
technological up-grading, but noted that a learning approach to technology ignored key ele-
ments, such as the role of institutions, the macro-economy, and conflicts over power. For
example, the S&T Policy Instruments Project (Sagasti 1978) found that implicit policies (gen-
eral macroeconomic, industrial, and trade policies) had a much deeper effect on innovation
strategies by firms than explicit ones. Such implicit policies inhibited technological develop-
ment by firms (Herrera 1975). This work also pointed out that by concentrating on learning
processes within the firm, the technological capabilities literature ignored external econo-
mies associated with the capacity to generate innovations.
There was a surge in Latin America of work on innovation deriving from the need to
address paradigmatic changes and problems and options deriving from the diffusion of the
information technologies. Building on Furtado’s (1958) study of the industrial revolution,
authors like Herrera (1975) and Perez (1983) analyzed the opportunities and challenges asso-
ciated with the introduction of radical changes. It was only then that the literature started to
integrate the empirical work on learning inside firms with the contributions on new tech-
nologies and systems of innovation. The role of government policies in orienting the speed
and direction of technological changes was also highlighted (Freeman and Perez 1988).
Applying the IS to Development
Since the 1980s, conceptual and empirical work have co-evolved and the concept of national
innovation systems has been adopted by international organizations (particularly the OECD,
the European Commission, and UNCTAD) as a tool for policy making. More recently, the
U.S. Academy of Science began to use it, and Sweden created a new central government insti-
tution, VINNOVA, which stands for Systems of Innovation Authority (Lundvall 2007). A set
of empirical studies began to apply the innovation systems perspective to development anal-
yses. These studies start with the country characteristics and address specific challenges,
opportunities, and hurdles for their development. Such efforts have consolidated the IS
framework. Drawing on work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they offered important
inputs for its enrichment, stressing aspects that proved especially relevant for less developed
countries. Such work contributed five advances in our understanding of innovation systems
and development, which are described below.
From Catch-up to Unique Development Paths

There is a frequent misleading perspective in a broad set of literature on the concept of
catch-up that suggests a fundamental difference in the innovation systems of developed and
developing countries. It focuses on the evolution and “shaping” of innovation systems in the
former and “construction” or “creation” in the latter. As discussed above, the IS concept was
inspired in part by development thinking and its emphasis on how countries could over-
come underdevelopment. An important aspect is the recognition of asymmetries in (and the
dual character of) the international economic and technological development process.
It is therefore unrealistic to expect a linear process of catch-up, in the sense of an acceler-
ated process of constructing and strengthening similar institutional and productive struc-
tures to those of a leading country—thus following the same path as the leader. The only
dimension in which an effective “reduction of the leader’s advantage” is proposed is in the
capacity to acquire, use, transform, and create knowledge, applying it for productive pur-
poses. This relates to the substantive challenge of “borrowing” and adapting technologies
that the technological lead countries control, through a combination of reverse engineering,
licencing, sending scholars abroad, inviting foreign firms and experts, and engaging in inter-
national scientific collaboration (Lundvall 2007). The institutional setup could be adapted,
redirected, and even enriched, but necessarily based on its specific characteristics, deter-
mined by its historical evolution process. Thus, the resulting institutional, scientific, techno-
logical, and productive setup that would allow a country to catch up with the leaders would
necessarily be specific and unique.
Underdevelopment is not a phase in a country’s linear development, but a result of struc-
tural and historical elements in a global context, in a certain sense complementary to the
existence of developed countries (Furtado 1961). This perspective calls for the construction
of a unique path that takes into account the specific natural, social, and cultural contexts.
Development is not a matter of “creation” or benchmarking innovation systems, as there is
no linear catch-up path to be followed. Every country has different institutions and more or
less developed scientific, technological, and productive capabilities in different areas. Even
in the poorest countries there are productive activities, formal or informal structures and
processes of knowledge generation and diffusion, and institutional and political setups. In
any country one can find innovations, even if only incremental. Thus, every country has an
innovation system.
Such considerations are even more relevant after five years of deep international crisis,
which underline the limitations of catch-up policy based on modes of production that make
extensive use of natural resources.
There are at least two important corollaries to this discussion: (i) there is no inevitable
trend from any given stage of progress to another supposedly superior, and (ii) development
has to be understood as a historical process specific to each country and not as a universal
process. National and local conditions may lead to completely different paths and to a grow-
ing diversity instead of the standardization and convergence suggested by the more radical
theses about the influence of globalization on national and sub-national systems. Therefore,
the importance of elaborating and answering questions about the type of development being
pursued, about its sustainability, and about how innovation systems are geared toward sus-
tainability should not be overlooked.
The Broader Context

The IS framework recognizes that the evolution of any economic system depends to a large
extent on its place in the hierarchy and power structure of the world economy. It also takes
into account the micro, meso, and macro dimensions and their linkages as important for the
understanding of a country’s performance. From this derives the following conclusions: that
macroeconomic systems contain and condition the microeconomic decisions that form the
standards of financing, corporate governance, international trade, competition, and techni-
cal change; and that innovation strategies (and outcomes) depend on and reflect macroeco-
nomic regimes and geopolitical forms of insertion in the world economy.
Macroeconomic instability and vulnerability can hinder learning and the creation and
diffusion of innovations. Problems such as high external debt and high interest rates con-
strain technological and industrial development. The “implicit” policies related to macro
economic contexts in developing countries are of much greater importance than specific
innovation policies (Herrera 1975; Sagasti 1978; Coutinho 2003).
Knowledge, Learning, and Innovation

Besides the complex processes of knowledge generation, diffusion, and use, the innovation
system framework stresses the capabilities among organizations to generate, diffuse, and use
knowledge. Studies focusing on less developed countries, regions, and localities underline the
importance of understanding learning and innovation efforts in all kinds of organizations,
even those far behind the technological frontier. A broad set of studies focused on “traditional
sectors,” such as the clothing and furniture industries and agriculture. From a development
perspective, knowledge and innovation processes with far-reaching impacts are not the only
ones worthy of consideration: in countries with little economic dynamism, centered on
traditional activities, even minor transformations of production processes, organizational
aspects, product variety, or elements that enable access to new or broader markets may have
c onsiderable impact. Such modest innovations, commonly overlooked and ignored in official
S&T indicators, translate into a substantial increase in the ability to produce and compete on a
sustained basis, generating income and jobs and enhancing living standards. Innovation
includes any element of novelty that is new to the agent that introduces it. A broad search for
elements of novelty can reveal much innovation occurring in places where standard indica-
tors would suggest that very little is going on (Cassiolato and Lastres 1999). This has inspired
recent attention to “grassroots” or “below the radar” innovation.
Directly related to this discussion is the emphasis on accumulating capabilities and knowl-
edge for sustained competitiveness. This emphasis stands in clear opposition to the supposed
comparative advantages of developing countries, such as low-price products, low labor cost,
and the intense use of natural resources (Fajnzylber 1988). Countries that depend on the
import of existing technologies need substantial learning efforts in order to absorb and effec-
tively use these technologies. The capacity to learn (having access to the means and opportu-
nities) turns out to be much more important for inclusion than the access to ICTs. Thus,
overcoming the “learning and knowledge divide” constitutes a much more fundamental
challenge for policy action than targeting the “digital divide” (Arocena and Sutz 2003). Once
more, empirical investigation in developing countries reveals a diversity of learning based
on the very use of knowledge that results in modified technologies, adapting them through
minor modifications and combinations to address specific problems and needs (Cassiolato,
Lastres, and Maciel 2003).
Such innovation often relies in part on knowledge that is not directly linked to the formal
education and S&T system. Important transformations and the key elements for the sus-
tained use of limited resources often derive from knowledge that is rooted in a specific terri-
tory and that relates to specific conditions and cultural habits and practices. This perception
gave rise to considerable research efforts focused on the use of “traditional” or “indigenous”
knowledge and its articulation with more formalized and technological knowledge (Lastres,
Cassiolato, and Maciel 2003).4
This broader and systemic understanding of knowledge and innovation also has clear
advantages for less developed countries and encourages policy-makers to consider opportu-
nities for learning and innovation in any productive activity, not just in sectors considered
dependent on advanced technology (Mytelka and Farinelli 2003). As innovation is essen-
tially a context-specific and socially determined process (Freeman 1988), acquiring technol-
ogy from abroad cannot substitute for local effort. A lot of local knowledge is required to
select, buy (or copy), transform, and use technology. Such findings have helped broaden the
scope of S&T policy, but there is still a long way to go.
Addressing Specific Development Challenges

The IS framework is also useful for addressing specific development challenges, such as envi-
ronmental sustainability, social development, education, housing, health, and infrastructure
(sanitary, transport, communication). In order to tackle such challenges it is necessary to
search for convergence and interaction among many different actors with different interests,
power positions, and capabilities. It has been suggested that the evolution of innovation sys-
tems should be oriented toward specific development challenges. This may have implications
for policy choices related, for example, to the priority given to certain technologies (high-tech
and with pervasive impacts) or types of institutions, such as the creation of “world class”
niches and firms.
A more focalized approach argues for targeting action toward innovation intended to
advance social and environmental outcomes, such as adequate provision of food, health,
education, and housing systems. These issues have been studied and targeted in policy action
under the headers of social and environmental innovations. A framework for analyzing
these types of innovations stresses the importance of close interaction with the people who
stand to benefit from the outcomes: in this view, empowering and engaging intended benefi-
ciaries is fundamental. Successful cases involve people as protagonists in user innovation,
drawing on their experience and knowledge to design solutions according to their needs.
For example, participation by poor people has proven critical for diffusing soil conservation
techniques, capturing rainwater in semi-arid areas, and using ICTs in basic education. Con-
sidering the broad and diversified set of actors, institutional setups, and knowledge types
involved in understanding and addressing these development challenges, a systemic
approach is useful.
The characteristics of the productive agents—their formal or informal character and their
size—can also be seen as critical for promoting socio-economic development. Thus, much
research has specifically addressed issues like informality, inclusion and exclusion, and the
challenges faced by small enterprises. The threats and obstacles faced by these agents, and
their integration into the economy to help them move away from subsistence toward sus-
tained competitiveness, are a major challenge for policy (Freeman 2000).5
Emphasis on the Territory and Interaction

The issues discussed underline the importance of understanding the social process that
facilitates innovation within a specific territory (the definition of which extends beyond
geography and considers social, economic, and political factors). This territorial dimension
is particularly important for addressing development issues.
First, the experience of many developing countries—Brazil is an outstanding example—
showed that aggregate or average levels of social development, output, income, performance
in specific sectors, or technological fields hide huge imbalances. The historical trajectory of
many developing countries led to a great heterogeneity of the productive and social struc-
tures. In large countries like Brazil, India, and Mexico, one can find both advanced and very
archaic production and innovation systems within the same sector or technology field.6 Local
areas that are less dynamic in economic terms often present considerable challenges related to
social development. More generally, every productive activity has to be understood within
that particular location’s specific social, cultural, institutional, and natural context.
In this context, a main challenge of the innovation system framework is understanding
how specific structures evolved, which are the specific challenges and potentialities, and how
specific policy initiatives could foster the learning and innovation processes and induce a
dynamic and sustainable local development process. The needs are specific, and so must the
initiatives be. In many cases job and income generation on a sustained basis, preventing the
disruption of social structures and poverty, may be the most important goal for public policy.
Second, most learning occurs locally. Each agent possesses a specific and limited set of
knowledge, and new knowledge is generated and diffused via interaction among different
kinds of networks. Even if the new information and communication technologies enable
greater codification and anonymous diffusion of knowledge, an ample set of empirical find-
ings stresses that tacit knowledge is fundamentally important. Diffusion requires a close,
essentially personal, interaction among organizations and people.
Research and policy efforts addressing the issues cited above have focused on the local
dimension and so-called local (or regional) innovation systems. Different conceptual and
analytical frameworks have emerged for analyzing productive and innovative activities in
the local dimension (e.g., industrial districts, clusters, and milieu innovateur).7 For example,
case studies of the textile and clothing and electronics industries in Taiwan and Korea con-
firmed that inter-firm linkages, including subcontracting arrangements, were crucial chan-
nels of technological learning—in some cases, even more important than foreign direct
investment (Gee and Kuo 1998). In Africa, Djeflat (2003) analyzes the local flows of knowl-
edge in Maghreb countries and the incentives that support innovation among small and
medium-sized enterprises, and Baskaran and Muchie (2005) discuss the role of regional eco-
nomic poles for development in South Africa. In Latin America several initiatives incorpo-
rating the notion of IS have been introduced, covering industries such as aerospace,
biotechnology, automobile, software, textiles/apparel, agro-industry, tourism, footwear, and
music and other creative industries (see, e.g., López and Lugones 1999; Vargas Alfaro 2000;
Segura-Bonilla 2000; Cassiolato, Lastres, and Maciel 2003).
Since 1997 the Brazilian research network RedeSist (Resarch Network on Local Innovation
and Production Systems) has focused on innovation systems in the context of a large develop-
ing country. Seeking to apply the IS framework to this reality and combining it with the Latin
American development thinking led to the consolidation of the conceptual and analytical
framework of Local Innovation and Production Systems (Cassiolato, Lastres, and Maciel 2003).
This framework has been applied to the analysis of over two hundred innovation and produc-
tion systems in different regions of Mercosur countries to capture dynamic evolution of sys-
tems in advanced (such as aircraft production) and traditional manufacturing (textiles and
clothing) and in agriculture and services (including audiovisual), as well as in informal activi-
ties and traditional knowledge and technologies that affect local production and development.
These studies have focused primarily on knowledge and learning processes for capacity
building, and the link between innovation and development challenges. They stress that the
specific territory in which production, learning, and innovation take place constitutes a key
unit of analysis, as each territory or country faces specific challenges and takes a very specific
development path. Further, they suggest that there is not necessarily a contradiction among
economic, technological, and social/environmental goals and that a systemic perspective is
essential to envisage the potential convergence of these goals and to guide policy action in
that direction.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that the innovation system (IS) approach represents a powerful
instrument for understanding and orienting policies to promote learning, innovation, and
competence building processes in all countries, including so-called less developed countries.
The chapter has articulated some advances and advantages of this approach: it positions
innovation and learning—understood as systemic, specific, and cumulative processes—as
central elements of development; it sheds new light on how organizations generate, assimi-
late, and diffuse knowledge; and it encourages consideration of how different actors are
linked across agriculture, extractive industries, manufacturing, and services.
As discussed above, in Latin America and especially in Brazil, the convergence of this new
way of understanding production and innovation with the knowledge accumulated by the
structuralist school has contributed to extending the list of arguments in favor of a systemic
approach—notably by considering inequality as a main cause of underdevelopment and stress-
ing the role of government intervention in this respect, and by highlighting the need to develop
and use contextualized knowledge and policy models capable of dealing with the specific
realities of different countries and regions. It is important to orient the innovation systems to
attend to development needs: addressing capabilities to enhance food security and nutrition;
to improve access to housing, education, health, and culture; and to promote the expansion
of substantive freedoms, that is, participation in public life and political processes (Sen 1999).
A closer look at the performance of Brazil in the last ten years reveals important facts and
tendencies capable of inspiring and invigorating the innovation and innovation policy debate.
Particularly relevant are the outcomes of the “Brazil Without Misery” anti-poverty plan.8
With the per capita income of the poorest 20 percent of the population rising by more
than 8 percent per year, the country has been able to reduce extreme poverty by half in five
years (from 17.5 percent in 2003 to 8.4 percent in 2009). A significant part of these transfor-
mations is due to a significant increase in the minimum wage and a better implementation of
public transfers, especially the Bolsa Família cash transfer program; however, the productive
insertion of the low-income population was even more instrumental in increasing per capita
income. Expanding and improving public services such as health care, education, and hous-
ing has also contributed to the recent transformations (Brazil 2011).
The results of the Brazil Without Misery plan reinforce two main arguments of this chap-
ter. First, in order to achieve development it is necessary to tackle inequalities, and therefore
that objective should be at the center of the research and policy agendas. This requires wid-
ening the perception of innovation systems, understanding that innovation is not restricted
to a group of “advanced” actors, activities, and regions of the world. This will probably shed
light on the group of activities capable of mobilizing productive inclusion and improving
essential public goods and services. Second, the above results underline the need to over-
come the trap of ignoring territories and contexts and dissociating economic from social
development, in both research and policy programs—hence the importance of understand-
ing production and innovation systems centered in activities such as health, sanitation, etc.
However, the adoption of the innovation system framework is not without its problems.
Many initiatives are based on a distortion of the original concept, which reflects remnants of
the linear innovation model and the narrow definitions of innovation as synonymous with
formal science and technology. This has led to highly problematic attempts to subordinate all
academic scientific work to a very limited economic logic. Calling attention to the usual
resistance and misuse of new and more advanced concepts, Reinert and Reinert (2003) warn
that “by integrating some Schumpeterian variable to mainstream economics we may not
arrive at the root causes of development. We risk applying a thin Schumpeterian icing on
what is essentially a profoundly neoclassical way of thinking.” Time, history, geopolitics, and
specific territorial conditions are fundamental to the analysis of how production and inno-
vation capabilities are acquired, used, and diffused.
It is worth mentioning the challenges of working with new concepts, particularly those
aiming to capture and evaluate intangible resources or involving high levels of inequality
and informality. The complexity inherent in the requirement to include simultaneously
many different dimensions, actors, and institutions would puzzle the uninformed analyst.
Reductions have to be made, but their implications have to be considered.
As argued in this chapter, innovation is essentially a social process. If the main develop-
ment constraint of a region or a country is misery eradication, innovation has a very relevant
role in the provision of possible solutions. This of course requires focusing on production
and innovation systems capable of contributing to new forms of inclusive, cohesive, and sus-
tainable development.
There are both challenges and significant opportunities to the development and use of
more advanced approaches to understanding and orienting innovation. Facing them will
lead to new avenues of possibilities, from broadening and refining concepts and methodolo-
gies to transforming them into more advanced and useful instruments. By discussing expe-
riences already in place, we hope this chapter will contribute to expanding our knowledge
about innovation and its role in development.
Notes
1. Using the examples of Japan and South Korea in the past and of China today, Rodrik (2011)
criticizes the so-called new structural economics in this regard.
2. As pointed out by Stiglitz (2011) in a critique of the new structural economics, “focusing
on absorbing and adapting, and eventually producing knowledge, provides markedly dif-
ferent perspectives on development strategies than those provided by the neoclassical
model” which center on increasing capital and the efficient allocation of resources.
3. All three authors played an important part in the setting up of the UN. Prebisch became
Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, Myrdal became
Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, and in 1947 Singer joined
the Economics Department of the UN on a provisional assignment that lasted 22 years.
4. Muchie (2007) and Adeoti and Adeoti (2010), for example, discuss the importance of such
knowledge for the transformation of agriculture in Africa.
5. These discussions converge with those proposed by Berry (this volume), underlining
equality and inclusiveness as central guidelines for promoting human satisfaction in a
broad sense.
6. Some critics may argue that most of these structures do not actually constitute a system.
This relates to the mistaken view of an innovation system as an object. It is a rather a
framework of analysis. Wherever goods or services are produced, there will be a system
around them comprising different activities and actors, particularly those associated with
the acquisition of raw material, machinery, and other types of input. These systems range
from extremely simple, modest, or disjointed to highly complex and articulated.
7. Though some authors suggest that these concepts are equivalent to the local IS concept,
we claim that the IS framework offers a broader and more comprehensive tool for under-
standing links with an entire system and the interactive learning processes.
8. In June 2011, President Dilma Roussef announced a new multibillion-dollar anti-poverty

plan called Brasil Sem Miséria (“Brazil Without Misery”) designed to eliminate dire pov-
erty in the next four years.
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chapter 34
u n i v ersitie s a n d
high er education
i n dev el opm en t
rodrigo arocena, bo göransson,
and judith sutz
Introduction
Universities and higher education are increasingly seen as critical for economic growth
and development. The tendency to regard academic institutions as important carriers of
knowledge and social stability is not a new phenomenon, but it is after the turn of this cen-
tury in particular that universities are being considered an indispensable vehicle for eco-
nomic and social progress. In this chapter we discuss how contemporary perceptions of
the role of universities have been interpreted by and incorporated into theories of
development.
First, we trace the historical roots of the modern university and describe how it has evolved
into the present-day institution. The next section summarizes ongoing transformational
trends in response to external and internal pressures for universities to evolve toward higher
efficiency and societal relevance. After examining the implications of these transformations
for development theory, we discuss the emergence of new models for university–society
interactions. We then examine the prospects for universities, particularly in the South, to
evolve toward developmental universities as an alternative to a narrower interpretation of
universities primarily as providers of market-driven knowledge production. In the final sec-
tion, we outline what signifies a developmental university and provide an example of a pro-
gram toward this end.
universities and higher education in development 583
A Brief History of the University
Historically, universities have never been totally separate from the rest of society, or at least
not from the demands of the rulers and governments endowing financial support for their
operation. The precursors to the modern university, the medieval cathedral schools and
monastic schools of Europe, were dedicated to the study of religious thought. As such, they
provided education for a clergy supporting the secular state. Venturing beyond the ecclesias-
tical sphere, the medieval universities arose from a desire to apply knowledge and improve
the functioning of society by educating students in law, medicine, and theology, but not so
much through the creation of new knowledge as through the application and reproduction
of tried and tested truths. The early medieval universities’ emphasis was thus more on repro-
ducing existing knowledge and maintaining the status quo than on creating new knowledge
for the advancement of society.
Briefly recalling some main changes and continuities in the evolution of universities from
medieval times helps the understanding of present trends and conflicts. According to Müller
(1996), four successive stages can be distinguished in a long and complicated history: the
university of faith, the university of reason, the university of discovery, and the university of
calculation.
A fundamental structural change occurred when “the university of faith transformed
itself into the university of reason” (Müller 1996: 15). The change came to be called the Aca-
demic Revolution; it is usually symbolized by the foundation of the University of Berlin in
1810. The University of Berlin, which was based on the ideals of Wilhelm von Humboldt, is
seen as the eponymous modern institution of higher education. It was the emergence of the
Humboldtian ideal of Bildung (German for “education” or “personal development”) that
firmly established the notion that education should be integrated with the task of research.
Von Humboldt’s main idea was that research is as important and legitimate a role for the uni-
versity as teaching, and that both would benefit if jointly performed. The “Humboldtian
project” is the joint practice of teaching and research (Clark 1997). It shaped the classic “idea
of University” in Germany, and gave rise to the so-called research university characterized
by the combination of those two roles.
The consequences of such a change were enormous, including the institutionalization of
research and the emergence of the professional scientist (Ben-David 1984). Academic com-
munities with shared interests and purposes expanded. Moreover, technological research
found its ways into the academic realm, augmenting the interactions and related benefits
between scientific knowledge and techniques. The Humboldtian university thus prescribed
that teachers also be researchers in their efforts to instill Bildung in shaping the student’s
character and perception of the world. The concepts of research and Bildung were thus indis-
solubly linked (Anderson 2004). The cornerstone of university governance, academic free-
dom, further guaranteed the researchers the right to formulate their research agenda free
from external pressure and based on personal interests. In other words, new scientific knowl-
edge emerged as a result of a peer-guided process within the academic community that pro-
vided indirect benefit to the development of society. With the rise of the nation-state in
Europe, higher education came increasingly under the auspices of the state, and modern
governance structures began to emerge, prompting some scholars to proclaim that “the
584 rodrigo arocena, bo göransson, and judith sutz
niversity is a European institution; indeed, it is the European institution par excellence”

u
(Rüegg 1992: xix).
The academic freedom and autonomy of the universities did not mean that universities
engaged only in obscure and self-oriented research, as they sometimes were caricatured.
Universities have always maintained certain ties with influential parts of society. Tacit
demands from funding institutions or through public debates could influence the choice of
the area of investigation. In Victorian England, for example, social commentary and debates
prompted an inquiry into the causes of poverty, eventually leading to the foundation of sys-
tematic empirical research in political economy. Public opinion at the time was divided as to
whether economic growth and social justice were incompatible. Theories forwarded by eco-
nomic thinkers such as Adam Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus were interpreted by some
to imply that economic injustice was inherent in the system, leading critics of capitalism like
Karl Marx to conclude that social inclusion could not be achieved within the present eco-
nomic system.
Many of these theories were hampered by a lack of solid empirical observation on the
effects of economic growth over time, and it fell to a new breed of political economists to pro-
vide it. Prompted by the public discourse, economists like Alfred Marshall and Beatrice and
Sydney Webb helped establish the academic inquiry into the actions of economic agents and
the distributive effects of economic growth. The latter two went on to co-found one of today’s
most prestigious universities, the London School of Economics and Political Sciences.
A further example from the nineteenth century of society’s expectations of the academy is
the establishment of land-grant universities in the United States. Created in the second half
of the nineteenth century, the land-grant universities were tasked with a new mission: to
promote development and fight poverty in rural areas by complementing the more abstract
liberal arts of the existing university system with practical knowledge and research in sub-
jects pertinent to the rural population, such as agriculture and mechanics. The land-grant
universities were an important innovation in technological teaching at tertiary level; soon
their “research centers became a second component” of them and in “the early 1900s, state
extension activities became another component of the land-grant colleges” (Rogers 1995:
358). Thus, collaborating with regional economic development was included as a new role.
With a different meaning, “extension” also appeared as a role of universities in Latin
America during the first decades of the twentieth century. It was defined as a third mission
centered in cultural diffusion and technical assistance oriented to deprived groups; exten-
sion should be carried out in close connection with teaching and research; its aim was to
engage students, graduates, and universities as such in social transformation. In Latin Amer-
ica from the 1920s to the 1980s, prevailing ideas and relevant changes concerning higher
education converged with the search for alternative routes to autonomous development.
Such processes shaped a specific Latin American “idea of University.”
Also in other regions of the South, the emergence of national higher educational systems
has been central for national education efforts and for the shaping of post-colonial nation
building. In Africa, national universities were established after independence with a man-
date to confront poverty and underdevelopment. The new universities could generally not
live up to expectations and were long characterized as providing education for an elite few,
with marginal impact on development (Mosha 1986). Also, countries in Asia struggled to
fulfill their objective of addressing local needs. For countries following the Soviet model of
separating education and research institutions, the evolution toward increased relevance has
been particularly challenging. Universities in countries like China and Vietnam have only
recently combined education and research to address third mission issues.
The wide use of the expression “third mission” or “third role”—adding to the two original
ones, teaching and research, coming from the Humboldtian tradition—is quite recent. It can
be seen as a consequence of the growing direct impact of new knowledge in productive activ-
ities. The emphasis on discovery and invention as explicit tasks for universities was greatly
fostered during the last century by major events with immense impacts in economic activi-
ties. Computer sciences and the new genetic technologies emerged in universities. As
research became more relevant, the “mission of the university began to be described in such
terms as expanding the frontiers of knowledge and penetrating the hitherto unknown”; in
this context, the “university of discovery” flowered in the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury (Müller 1996: 16–17).
Changing modes of knowledge production (Gibbons et al. 1994) started to be discussed:
should university research be shaped mainly by academy or by negotiations with external
actors? In a similar vein, the concept of post-academic science (Ziman 2000) was proposed
to describe the transformation of academic ethos, from the ideal Mertonian rules to rules
that express the process of knowledge privatization.1 A shift was seen in the perception, par-
ticularly by governments, of the mission of universities. Discussions and changing percep-
tions were fostered by a central fact: at the end of the century many universities became
direct producers of goods and services for end users (Sutz 1997).
Growing attention came to be paid to the concept of a “third role” of universities, mainly
associated with economic growth. According to Etzkowitz (1990, 1997, 2003), capitalization
of knowledge is a new mission besides teaching and research, and the university character-
ized by assuming such a mission should be termed the “entrepreneurial university.” This the-
ory, carefully elaborated and based on several case studies, is at the same time a description, a
prediction, and a prescription: it asserts that the rise of the entrepreneurial university is an
empirically testable phenomenon, that its consolidation will be a main trend in the future,
and that fostering it should be a fundamental goal of policies for higher education. In this
sense, the theory of the entrepreneurial university is a distinguished member of the prevail-
ing approach, which at the same time gives priority to a “third role” of universities and iden-
tifies it with direct collaboration with firms.
It is worthwhile stressing that similar descriptions and predictions of the evolution of
universities can generate widely different normative evaluations. The fourth stage in
Müller’s view is a reality akin to the entrepreneurial university: clearly thinking about the
North, although he does not say it explicitly, he characterizes the emerging university of
calculation as:
a huge, expensive institution, highly functional in terms of training and continuing innova-
tion in science and technology, no longer committed to learning per se not to character
development, and representing a convenient aggregation of talents more like a marketplace
of research and training than an intellectual community. A further implication of such an
institutional evolution is that participants in its activities would not necessarily share any
common set of values beyond the economic imperative of producing well enough to be com-
pensated, and vice versa. If this forecast is justified then the university of calculation would
play no institutional role based on its own set of values in the public affairs of society. (Müller
1996: 21)
If that is the prevailing trend, an alternative is clearly needed, both in the South and in
the North.
Ongoing Transformation
Alternatives to Müller’s “university of calculation” must be discussed in the context of main

changes within universities and in their relations with society at large. They include an
increase in the number of tertiary students, that roughly can be seen as a shift from an elitist
to a mass (though quite stratified) higher education system; new curricula focused on tailor-
made study programs, problem-based learning, an increased focus on entrepreneurship,
and life-long learning activities; increased collaboration with external partners; increased
dependence on external funding such that different universities and disciplines have quite
different possibilities of accessing resources; and a changing governance structure, fostered
at least since the 1990s with an emphasis on top-down management, external representation
on boards, productivity measurements, and activity-based financing.
Of these, the significance of the rapid expansion of higher education cannot be overempha-
sized. The higher education system has been deeply affected by the massification of the univer-
sities in the North from the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century, and later for transition
economies and other countries. As an example, enrollment in higher education in China
expanded from 3.4 million students in 1998 to over 21 million in 2010, a six-fold increase in just
over a decade (China Statistical Yearbook 2012). Such massive expansions have brought with
them a host of new demands and new realities for the university system to deal with.
The impressive growth of the higher education system has been accompanied by an
equally remarkable change in the gender balance. Women’s enrollment in higher education
has expanded rapidly, and today more women than men are enrolled in higher education
around the world. According to UNESCO (2010), the gender balance in enrollment in higher
education has shifted from men, who historically have comprised the overwhelming share of
students, to women, who today have an advantage in terms of level of participation. In the
Americas and Europe, the figure is as high as 25 percent greater participation by women.
While a number of countries in Africa and Asia have yet to achieve gender parity in enroll-
ment, they have nevertheless experienced a steady increase in female enrollment.
What explains this rather rapid change? UNESCO (2010) notes that affirmative action
policy or legislation mandating women’s participation in higher education remains relatively
rare. Instead, this phenomenon seems to reflect changing values and attitudes toward the
role and aspirations of women in society, stemming in part from global social movements
that emerged in the 1960s.
However, almost all over the world, higher enrollment and graduation levels on the part of
women have not led to a leveling in their career prospects. In many countries, the rise of
women’s enrollment is more pronounced at the undergraduate and master’s level, but has
not translated into greater participation at the doctoral level, nor in the formal research and
development (R&D) workforce (UNESCO 2010: 77). To some extent this gap may simply
reflect the time lag needed for a new generation of women to progress through the education
system. Yet there is no doubt that substantial barriers to women’s achieving higher degrees
and employment exist. At the same time, enrollment rates also suggest both different alter-
natives in the labor force for men and women, and potential new barriers that discourage
men from pursuing higher education (UNESCO 2010: 71).
The demands on universities for greater relevance for society have grown over time as
increasing public funding has turned universities into institutions open to everyone, not
only the privileged few. The growing demand is the result of mounting external and internal
pressures on universities to redefine themselves in an increasingly integrated, competitive,
and globalizing world and to take on a multitude of new challenges, including outreach func-
tions and technology transfer activities.
With the demise of the linear model of innovation (the notion that technological
progress and innovation expand in a linear relationship from basic research to industrial
applications), universities are charged with taking on a more active role in technological
development and university–industry relationships. Research policy measures to support
this development have been enacted in a number of countries, most famously through the
Bay—Dole act in the U.S. in 1980, which granted universities the intellectual property
rights to inventions resulting from federal government-funded research. Moreover, uni-
versities are under pressure to provide industry with an increasingly specialized work-
force, to comply with the students’ demand for relevance in education and good prospects
for finding a job after graduation, while at the same time addressing pressing social, medi-
cal, and other ills. This has prompted scholars like Burton Clark to declare that the univer-
sity as an institution is facing a crisis where demand outruns the capacity of the universities
to respond (Clark 1998).
How have the universities responded to these challenges? The reaction from universities
to the call for more relevant and deeper interactions with society differs considerably
between countries. Modern universities have evolved to include all three tasks of universi-
ties (education, research, and “third mission”), but how they do it is path dependent and
does not follow any “best cases” or standard models (Science and Public Policy 2009). A com-
mon trend appears to be that in countries devoting a high share of resources to R&D, the
third mission of universities is narrowly interpreted to mean transfer of technology from
university to industry. Conversely, in countries with fewer resources available for R&D, the
third mission is more likely to include a broader societal involvement (Göransson and
Brundenius 2011). Thus, the more money a country spends on R&D, the more the universi-
ties tend to become focused on industrial development and competitiveness, much in line
with Müller’s characterization of the “university of calculation” discussed above.
New models are being proposed for guiding the evolution of universities, such as Triple
Helix models involving private–public partnerships, the creation of entrepreneurial or spe-
cialized universities, large-scale excellence-driven environments, or the concept of develop-
mental universities, more in tune with supporting the social and economic development of a
country. Pioneering work by Rosenberg and Nelson (1994) shows that entrepreneurial man-
agers in various industries tend to value more the advance of knowledge in scientific fields
than the concrete university research results obtained in the same fields. In a Humboldtian
perspective, linking teaching with cultivating knowledge helps to develop creative thinking
and problem-solving capabilities.
The innovation potential of a firm is based on its “absorptive capacities” to recognize the
value of external information, assimilate it, and use it; such capacities are highly dependent
on knowledge previously accumulated by the firm; accumulating advanced and sophisti-

cated knowledge requires an internal team of scientists and technologists who are at the same
time highly competent in a variety of fields and well acquainted with the different aspects of
the firm and its external relations (Cohen and Levinthal 1990: 128, 135).
Thus, innovation studies offer some clues to gauge the contribution of universities to eco-
nomic development, suggesting that at least as important as their direct involvement in solv-
ing problems of immediate interest for firms is that universities provide high-level teaching,
which requires performing high-level research. That holds also in the South. Twenty years
ago, the engineers who had created in Uruguay an unexpectedly efficient set of professional
electronics firms asserted that their high-level training in basic sciences was fundamental to
their success as entrepreneurs, because it developed their capabilities and self-reliance for
problem solving, that is, for innovating (Sutz 1986).
The preceding overview of the role universities really play in innovation activities tends to
be corroborated by innovation surveys. Such surveys have an important feature: they offer
an overall view of the innovative behavior of the productive sectors of a country. Although
they do not fully capture the complexity of the special relations that some sectors—pharma-
ceuticals, for instance—hold with universities, they do provide a global picture of the inter-
actions that firms in all sectors maintain with external knowledge and information providers.
In spite of several differences, surveys tend to show three similarities between countries: (i)
firms are much more engaged in expenditures devoted to internal R&D than to external
R&D; (ii) firms rely heavily on clients and suppliers, as well as on internal sources, for inno-
vation-related information; (iii) only a very small proportion of firms consider universities
important as a source of innovation-related information. For some business sectors, particu-
larly those more science-based, and in specific settings that have a special tradition of academy–
industry interactions, the picture depicted above may not be accurate. The “open innovation”
model, with its emphasis on business collaboration with universities as well as with other
firms, works well there, but in general terms, recent literature confirms the trend already
mentioned.
Universities in Development Theories
The role of universities and higher education in economic growth and development is his-
torically closely connected with how science and technology are perceived in society. As dis-
cussed above, the Humboldtian ideal of seeking knowledge for its own sake and for personal
development was long the norm in academia. New knowledge was basically a luxury item
produced in the proverbial ivory tower. Accordingly, universities were perceived as playing
only a marginal or indirect role in economic growth and development. Even with later rec-
ognition of the importance of knowledge production, scientific progress was long conspicu-
ously absent from mainstream economic growth models or was considered an exogenous
factor taking place outside the models. In neoclassical economic theory, the role of technol-
ogy in economic growth emerged late as an explicit topic of interest.
Mainstream economics has primarily been interested in problems associated with mak-
ing optimal use of given resources at any point in time, not with dynamic adjustments
caused by the application of new knowledge. The allocative mechanisms and the static effi-
ciency of the economic system have thus tended to attract more attention than the struc-
tural changes and dynamic performance. This is perhaps surprising given that the writings
of classical economists in the nineteenth century, as well as pioneering research in innova-
tion-based economics by Joseph Schumpeter, pointed to the importance of technological
change in economic growth. As early as the 1950s, Robert Solow demonstrated in economic
models that the production factors of capital and labor accounted for only a small part of
total economic expansion, and that technological progress was in fact driving economic
growth (Solow 1956).
Further exploration in the following decades revealed the necessity to open up the “black
box of technology,” in Rosenberg’s terminology (Rosenberg 1982), and saw the emergence of
the field of evolutionary economics, which treated technological change as a logical outcome
of an evolutionary process (Nelson and Winter 1982). It was not until the 1990s that techno-
logical progress entered mainstream economic mathematical models as an endogenous
factor in economic growth, in the new growth theory proposed by Robert Lucas (1988) and
Paul Romer (1990).
So what does this mean for how universities and the knowledge they produced were
regarded in development theory? The inability of economic models to explore the origins of
growth obviously has had practical implications for development agencies and policy diffu-
sion organizations in their strategies on universities and competence building in developing
countries. According to the prevailing economic development theories, should the limited
resources available be allocated to long-term capacity building in higher education, or would
alternative strategies be more efficient?
In terms of understanding the role of science in development, the dominant paradigm
since the Second World War has been the modernization theory. This theory has in different
ways guided the strategies pursued by international organizations and the donor commu-
nity, and thus the conditions in which universities in developing countries were to function
and evolve. The modernization theory widely held the view that, although the application of
science was instrumental in development, universities and higher education in developing
countries could not function as a credible source of new technology; they were either not
sufficiently advanced or were disconnected from society. Instead of building local capacity
through higher education and research, the required knowledge could preferably be
imported from more advanced countries. Higher education was not perceived as particu-
larly relevant to solving the pressing needs of the developing world.
In its extreme, this view culminated in drastic and crippling cutbacks to the higher educa-
tion system, particularly in Africa, under Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s and
1990s that required fiscal contraction for the reduction of public sector deficits. Since that
time, higher education in Africa has recovered in quantitative terms, with tertiary enroll-
ment expanding at a pace higher than the world average, but the achievements are again
threatened by the failure of governments to maintain adequate funding. A World Bank
report concluded that in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), “public expenditure per tertiary student
has fallen from USD 6,800 in 1980 to USD 1,200 in 2002, and recently averaged just USD 981
in 33 low-income SSA countries” (World Bank 2009: xxvii).
Not all observers agreed that fostering science and technology capabilities in developing
countries should be low on the priority list. From the 1960s on, a growing body of scholars
argued that the only viable long-term solution to addressing a broad range of pressing
roblems in developing countries would be to enhance the indigenous capacity for techno-
p
logical development (see, e.g., Moravcsik 1966). While recognizing that the immediate need
for technology developed in the North was at odds with the need to create an indigenous sci-
ence and technology infrastructure, it was still argued that the only sustainable solution
would be to strike a balance between the imminent short-term need and the long-term goal
of building a science and technology capacity (Moravcsik 1987). Consequently, the donor
community should complement its technological upgrading strategies through imports with
efforts to reform science education curricula and strengthen the emerging research commu-
nity at universities and research centers.
In the new millennium, much of this has indeed happened. The donor community has
responded with increasing support to capacity building at universities and research centers
in an effort to enhance the relevance of local science-based knowledge production. The
World Bank—which in the late 1990s restructured itself into a “knowledge bank”—is now
emphasizing knowledge and learning (World Bank 2002), and most donor organizations
offer support to universities and research projects in developing countries. This inflow of
funds is a considerable source of revenue for universities and research centers. In Tanzania,
over 50 percent of funds for research come from donor sources, and in Mozambique that
share is over 70 percent. While this development undoubtedly reflects a much-needed injec-
tion of research funds, the resulting dependency also raises issues of who determines the
research agenda.
For universities in developing countries, it is often still an uphill battle. Competence build-
ing is costly and takes a long time, often without any tangible or immediate results. As in the
North, pressure for relevance and high quality is increasing from funders and society at large.
Carden (2009) identifies a number of features that effectively hinder universities from pro-
ducing relevant and timely research results for evidence-based policy making and weaken
the links between the university researchers and policy-makers: there is high staff turnover
and brain drain in research organizations, policy-makers lack confidence in their own
researchers, researchers in development often lack hard data, Southern countries too seldom
share research among themselves, demand for research can be low, and researchers some-
times must construct their own research-to-action machinery.
Addressing these issues is a formidable task for the political as well as the academic system
in developing countries, but history shows that it can be done and that investment in higher
education and research can yield high dividends for development and economic growth.
The Developmental Role of Universities
As we have seen, the search for a new third role of universities is progressing in different
directions. A most constructive idea is the notion that in an emerging knowledge-based and
innovation-driven economy, with its lights and shadows, universities can greatly contribute
to the betterment of human life. In a developmental context, such an idea is underscored by
the changing nature of some indications of underdevelopment, notably those related to the
rising impact of the learning divides. Possibilities for learning at an advanced level expand
quickly in the North, where, for example, the majority of young people access tertiary
e ducation, and important opportunities exist for working in knowledge-demanding con-

texts, thus fostering learning by using in problem-solving what has already been learnt. That
is far from being the prevailing situation in the South, so capability building is hampered, a
phenomenon that greatly contributes to the persistence of underdevelopment.
In such a context, development—normatively characterized by the expansion of freedoms
and the betterment of human life—demands the overcoming of the learning divides. That
points to two main tasks. The first is the extension to the majority of the population of the
possibilities of acquiring capabilities by accessing various types of life-long higher educa-
tion, closely connected with work. The second main task is to extend the opportunities of
using and improving capabilities by upgrading the knowledge content and problem-solving
demands of every productive activity, including the so-called traditional sectors, in order to
improve competitiveness, particularly in sectors related to the attention of social needs.
Thus, the developmental university can be defined, in a first approximation, by a commit-
ment to development as its third role (Arocena, Gregersen, and Sutz 2010).
A more precise characterization can be proposed. As already recalled, the Humboldtian
project is not exactly defined by the adoption of research as a second role of universities, but
by the joint practice of the fundamental missions of teaching and research. As suggested by
the evidence previously discussed, performing those missions is essential for the contribu-
tion of universities to innovative activities. Thus, the developmental university is character-
ized, in a neo-Humboldtian perspective, by the joint practice of three missions: teaching,
research, and cooperation for development with other institutions and collective actors. That
means that developmental universities can only exist in active partnerships with external
stakeholders. It also implies that the developmental role of universities demands more and
better teaching and research, not less.
Compared with so-called developed countries, most other countries are more or less poor
in terms of access to and use of knowledge. One relevant cause among others for the persist-
ence of that situation in the South is the weakness of market demand for knowledge
addressed to endogenous sources, combined with a preference for seeking knowledge from
abroad. Since production and use of knowledge are increasingly intertwined, it is increas-
ingly difficult to use imported knowledge without hampering the endogenous generation of
knowledge. Knowledge is not a commodity that can be bought and put to work with little
additional effort. To put knowledge to work successfully, a strong local knowledge base needs
to be created and nurtured. Without it, the world’s information riches are out of reach, and
therefore become meaningless and of little value. One relevant consequence of such situa-
tions is the generally weak use of knowledge for coping with the problems of deprived sec-
tors, which are frequently highly context-dependent. This means that quite specific research
and innovation is required to solve them. This situation can be seen as the core of the prob-
lem of knowledge for development. Giving priority to the needs of deprived people is one of
the ways to cope with such problems. It leads to thinking of innovation policies as social pol-
icies. It means that fostering socially relevant knowledge demand should be a fundamental
aim of developing policies in general. The contribution of universities to fostering and meet-
ing such demand can be seen as a main clue for strengthening their developmental role.
The Humboldtian notion was both an ideal type à la Weber and a normative project. Real
universities are heterogeneous and ever-changing organisms, where the combination of a
high level of teaching and research is seldom the only game in town; but approximations to
the ideal type could be found in practice and the project was to enhance them. Something
similar happens with the notion we are discussing: it would be a good thing if relevant traits
aligned with the idea of the developmental university were detected and fostered in existing
universities.
If a trend toward the emergence of developmental universities can be detected, the best
traditions of universities as learning communities that share some values are not doomed to
vanish, as will happen if the forecast of the “university of calculation” is justified.
Developmental universities ought to achieve a fine tuning between traditions that are
worth keeping and new features that are worth taking on board, between long-term com-
mitments to knowledge and immediate involvements with society. That cannot be achieved
in isolation or by imposition: it can only grow out of multiple and respectful dialogues within
universities, and between universities and widespread social actors.
In empirical terms, the developmental university in the South is first of all a set of ques-
tions. In what ways and to what extent are specific universities fulfilling their mission by
making connections with the main tasks of development? How are they changing their inter-
nal structure in connections with such missions? How are they interacting with external
stakeholders?
Expanding the Developmental Role

of Universities
The above stated general questions lead us to consider a number of issues of descriptive and
prescriptive interest, because they can be seen both as indicators of what is really happening
and as goals for policies. Let us mention some of those issues, stressing in each case some
aspects that can be seen as indicators of how “developmental” a given university is becoming,
so they deserve special attention both from researchers and policy-makers.
Closing the Enrollment Gap

Ten years ago the World Bank (2002) pointed to the damage for development stemming
from the “enrollment gap” due to the different rates of increase in tertiary enrollment
between North and South. To close this gap, the generalization of advanced life-long educa-
tion is needed. Almost by definition, permanent education has to be permanently connected
with working activities. In connection with this issue, at least three aspects deserve close
examination:
(1) How can universities cooperate with other institutions and agencies to create a wide
and diversified system of tertiary education that offers learning opportunities to the
majority of the population?
(2) What efforts are being made, at practical and theoretical levels, to cope with the
fundamental challenge posed by life-long education: offering advanced education to
people of different ages and backgrounds?
(3) To what extent does tertiary education employ the human and material resources
available in the best ways for socially useful production?
Commitment to Solving Social and Productive Problems

Teaching can and must foster the acquaintance of students with social and productive prob-
lems of the region where the university is located. In public universities, when enrollment is
free or tuition is very low, the privilege of access to advanced education should go hand in
hand with social duties; these could be implemented by a “social duty” of the university,
where students and graduates could cooperate in the socially valuable use of their specific
capabilities. Those are ways of systematizing the connections of teaching with the third
mission, understood as “extension.” In order to connect them with research, specific prob-
lems of productive sectors and those derived from the social situation should be considered
in defining research agendas, in ways that foster all capabilities and do not give the humani-
ties and social sciences a second-rate treatment. Neo-Humboldtian projects should be eval-
uated according to the different ways the university cooperates with external actors to open
new opportunities for using advanced capabilities, which was stressed is a main task for
development.
Adapting the Evaluation System to Development Imperatives

The research agenda of the university is a main indicator of its true role in society. What is
researched and what is not researched there reflects a complex web of interests, power, and
voice, both within the academic community and coming from the “external” world. Even if
in many cases indirectly, the universities’ research agendas shape to a great extent the possi-
bilities, direction, and scope of innovation. In the South, the latter presents some important
specific challenges. There are problems that are not researched in the North but are of great
significance in the South: while some of these problems have been researched in the South
and suitable solutions found, some problems—for example, several “diseases of the poor”—
have not been researched nor solutions found, either in the North or in the South. On the
other hand, there are problems that have been researched and solved in the North that also
provide suitable solutions for the South: this is the type of innovation whose diffusion occurs
through the diverse mechanisms of technology transfer.
But many of the solutions/innovations found in the advanced industrialized countries
(AICs) are not applicable to the same kind of problems in the developing countries (DCs),
typically because they are unaffordable there. Table 34.1 presents a taxonomy of situations in
this context.
So, in order to address the lack of research and/or the non-suitability of existing results,
several issues of great importance for development should enter the pipeline of academic
research. The content of such a pipeline emerges from academic research agendas, which are
shaped by different factors, including the academic reward system. The evaluation of aca-
demic work follows more or less common criteria and procedures around the world. The
justification for using similar criteria in widely different contexts has its merits: it is intended
to assure suitable and consistent standards of quality for academic work.
However, this formal homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. One of the most seri-
ous relates to evaluations heavily biased toward publication in international journals, thus
shifting the research agendas of the South toward the study of problems highly ranked in the
research agendas of the North, although priorities in many cases are different. This is why
Table 34.1 A scarcity-induced innovation framework

Problems for which solutions Problems for which solutions have
have been found in AICs not been sought or found in AICs
Problems for which solutions The vast majority of solutions Solutions to problems arising
suitable for DCs conditions exist acquired through technology mainly in DCs and developed
transfer locally
Problems for which solutions “Canonical” solutions exist, but No solutions (yet), typically health
suitable for DCs conditions do for various scarcity reasons they issues such as vaccines against
not exist are not suitable for DCs malaria
conditions
Source: Srinivas and Sutz (2008).
promoting the developmental university includes changing the academic evaluation system
to encourage dedication to local needs. High-quality research devoted to problems of local
relevance, regardless of their international acceptance or impact, should be rewarded by
monetary or career-advancing means. That requires avoiding both international isolation
and subordination; as well, discussing different approaches and seeking cooperation at the
international level should both be promoted. Strong research groups identify their own
problems and are able to cooperate with other groups in solving those and other problems.
One indicator of success for research groups in developmental universities is their capability
to foster international cooperation with an agenda that includes issues and approaches stem-
ming from the South.
Example of a Program Inspired by the Notion of a

Developmental University
Thinking of innovation policies as social policies implies a radical shift not only in the inno-
vation policy agenda, but in the research agenda. In Uruguay, the research council of the
public university attempted to foster such a shift through a call for research projects that
would contribute to social inclusion by addressing problems that prevent marginalized peo-
ple from achieving a better quality of life (defined by actors outside the academic realm), and
that involved commitment from others to implement the results of the project. Three rounds
of the call were made, leading to thirty projects.
Researchers found the program difficult to grasp, as they were accustomed to working
from the supply side, that is, they tended to identify “their” own problems. This program
required them to work from the demand side, on problems identified by others. This led to
two difficulties, the first of which was to transform needs into demands. When an actor
voices a problem (in Hirschman’s sense), it becomes a demand and it becomes visible, even
though it may be a non-effective demand in economic terms. Several problems of social
inclusion do not have a voice or the actors able to voice them are weak or isolated, making
it particularly difficult to detect demand. The second difficulty relates to demarcation
(Alzugaray, Mederos, and Sutz 2012). Not all the problems related to social inclusion are
suited for research: only those that require new knowledge to find a solution are eligible. But
quite often the following question arises: Is new knowledge necessary to solve an identified
problem, or is the solution already known?—in which case what is needed is for the problem
to be prioritized in the policy agenda.
Some projects failed to achieve the academic results sought: this was a research failure.
Other projects represented a program failure: they should not have been supported in the
first place. Learning from these experiences, successive calls were modified to make the
requirements more precise and to try to eliminate confusion.
Some successes were notable. A first group can be labeled “new research results available,”
such as cheap artificial skin made from collagen-rich bovine tendon, and an alternative strat-
egy to communicate health messages to very deprived teenagers and young women. A sec-
ond group consists of “new research results that are in use,” such as software to analyze digital
images of the brain with the aim of detecting epilepsy. The user of the software was a pediat-
ric surgeon working in the university public hospital.
A third group is “capacity for future inclusion.” It is unrealistic to expect to solve complex
social problems in one step. Yet some projects served as laboratories for gaining experience
in dealing with social problems, which later contributed to policy. For example, a team sup-
ported in 2003 that evaluated the nutritional impact of the food given to children in public
schools subsequently helped shape the Uruguayan government’s National Social Emergency
Plan.
Such programs offer lessons on how to stimulate more meaningful dialogues between
communities (or those that act on their behalf) suffering from different forms of social exclu-
sion. The lessons include an assessment of the difficulties involved in scaling up the program
into a demand-side innovation policy at the national level. One difficulty is the weakness or
non-existence of research units in different spheres of public policies or public enterprises,
which considerably complicates the detection of such demand. Another difficulty is the iso-
lation of the different research and innovation support programs at the national level. The
consequence is that projects cannot easily evolve, for instance starting at the research stage
in the university and continuing at a development and scaling-up stage through a different
national program.
Conclusion
Promoting research in support of development—understood as a process whose aims are

the expansion of freedoms and the betterment of human life—shapes a mission for universi-
ties. Such a mission, as this chapter has argued, is particularly important in developing coun-
tries, given that new knowledge and innovation are needed to find solutions to issues that
hinder the social inclusion of vast parts of the population.
This mission need not be seen as opposed or contradictory to the contribution to expand-
ing knowledge or interacting with productive actors to enhance their economic perform-
ance. Cooperating with development requires first-rate knowledge production capabilities
to address problems of social exclusion, given that new heuristics are often needed to solve
them. Cooperation with productive actors, besides its intrinsic merits, is also needed to
f oster development and social inclusion. This is so because solutions need to be developed at
scale in order to be realized and implemented, something only productive actors can do.
Universities are accustomed to rewarding the advancement of knowledge. In recent times
several mechanisms have been devised to reward the university–productive actors relation-
ships or, moreover, those university actors who become directly entrepreneurial. In contrast,
the academic reward system has done little so far to recognize research devoted to fostering
development. A different metric is indeed needed, given that academic papers in this area
will probably not be produced at the usual rate, and patentable results will hardly follow from
these R&D efforts. However, promoting research in order to cooperate with development
can be highly rewarding both in intellectual terms and in social terms.
The conjecture that developmental universities may exist as communities with some
shared values and a specific role in society is partly based on another conjecture: that many
researchers really want to be as socially useful as possible. Studies of academic diasporas
have shown that the motives for returning to their home country for people able to get a very
good university position abroad often relate to a feeling of social usefulness. Such a feeling is
also valuable for university people who work in the challenging conditions of developing
countries. Social usefulness, though, is related not only to individual will but to the institu-
tional building of conditions that allow people to put their knowledge at the service of social
goals. This is a main justification as well as a main challenge for developmental universities.
Note
1. The Mertonian rules, known by their acronym CUDOS (communalism, universalism,
disinterestedness, originality, and [organized] skepticism), refer to the ethical norms the
academic community should follow while pursuing its task of advancing knowledge
(Merton 1973).
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chapter 35
i n novation for
dev el opm en t
david brook, caitlyn macmaster,
and peter a. singer
Introduction
The twentieth century saw vast scientific and technological innovations that improved the
quality of life around the world. Twentieth-century medical advances included vaccines
against yellow fever and polio, Banting and Best’s 1921 discovery of insulin, Fleming’s 1928
discovery of penicillin, and the first heart transplant in 1967. These and many other discover-
ies transformed medicine and health care, extending and improving lives and bringing ben-
efits unimaginable in the previous century (Conway and Waage 2010: 5). The health and
nutrition of rapidly growing populations benefited, in turn, from the agricultural revolution
that started in Mexico in the 1940s and spread to other countries and continents, increasing
crop yields fourfold over twenty-five years through irrigation, fertilization, and changes in
tilling and harvesting practices (Sonnenfeld 1992). More recently, the development of
information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the Internet have fostered
increased communication, knowledge sharing, and opportunities for education and inter-
national collaboration. Innovation, science, and technology—and the entrepreneurialism
that sees these breakthroughs adopted into mainstream use—have had profound impacts on
development and standards of living around the world, and the pace of discovery shows no
signs of slowing.
Given the historical importance of innovation in advancing development objectives such
as improved health, quality of life, and economic outcomes, the past decade has seen an even
greater emphasis placed on developing and testing new strategies to support and accelerate
innovations that address critical development challenges. Over the past three decades think-
ing has evolved from seeing such advances as spontaneous and exogenous to seeing innova-
tion as something to be consciously fostered and directed toward the achievement of
particular goals and outcomes. This shift, in turn, has led to the development of a broad range
600 david brook, caitlyn macmaster, and peter a. singer
of mechanisms including traditional grant funding to support new ideas and emerging strat-
egies to enable the development of products and services that drive outcomes and impacts.
This change has been driven arguably both by the scope of current development challenges—
which will require far more resources than are available through public development
funding—and by downward pressure on development funding as a result of a worldwide
economic slowdown and shifting national priorities. Ultimately, many of these strategies aim
to mobilize private finance and effort to entrain additional funding for development pur-
poses and to shift risk away from governments.
In this chapter, we briefly review the history of innovation for development, then provide
an overview of a range of potential strategies to support innovation for development, with a
particular focus on the recent Grand Challenge approach, arguing that it provides a schema
or framework that can bring together and align a broad range of mechanisms for financing
innovations.
Throughout this chapter, we use the following definition of innovation: “the introduction
of new approaches, methods, processes, inputs, resources, and other elements—based in large
measure on the results of recent or older scientific and technological research—into produc-
tion and services activities” (Sagasti 2004: 8). Innovation may involve the creation of new
technologies or processes, the development of novel combinations of existing technologies, or
the development of new uses or applications for existing technologies to achieve a particular
outcome (Conway and Waage 2010). It is important to emphasize that this is a broad definition
of innovation, which could include changes in policy, practice, cultural norms, society, or
business delivery models, or some combination of these. The recognition of the importance of
combining different types of innovation in specific contexts has been called Appropriate Inno-
vation and Integrated Innovation (Conway and Waage 2010; Singer and Brook 2010).
A Brief History of Science, Technology,

and Innovation for Development
Perceptions of the importance of science, technology, and innovation in international devel-

opment have fluctuated over recent decades from a predominantly optimistic view in the
1950s and 1960s to a more skeptical perspective in the 1980s and 1990s because of a perceived
lack of results from earlier efforts (Sagasti 2004: 79–80). The early twenty-first century, in
turn, is witnessing a renewed emphasis on innovation for development and a commensurate
surge in programs and funding for science, technology, and innovation.
The history of innovation for development is closely linked with the history of the concept
of development more broadly. One of the first references to innovation for development was
in U.S. President Harry Truman’s inaugural address in 1949, which called on Americans to
“embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and indus-
trial progress available for the improvement and growth of under developed areas,” a com-
ment that has been hailed as “the foundation stone for the whole modern development
enterprise” (Muirhead and Harpelle 2010: 4). Over the following two decades international
development was focused on encouraging economic growth, a goal which became virtually
synonymous with “development” during this time.
innovation for development 601
Most development planners in the 1950s and 1960s believed that the North’s development
experiences were directly transferable to the South and that developing countries could
achieve prosperity by following the planners’ prescriptions. During these decades, develop-
ment theory emphasized a linear innovation model, in which scientific discovery led to tech-
nology development and, ultimately, to the increased production of goods and services
(Sagasti 2004: 80). In these models, innovation was viewed as being an exogenous constant
that arose spontaneously over time.
By the late 1950s development planners acknowledged the important role that science and
technology played in the welfare of developed nations. This is reflected in Nobel laureate
Robert Solow’s seminal 1957 paper, which demonstrated that over the previous four decades
technological advancement had contributed more than 87 percent of gross output per per-
son, while increased financial investment explained only 12 percent (Conway and Waage
2010: xiv).
The notion of directing exogenous science and innovation efforts toward challenges of the
developing world first emerged in 1961 at the United Nations Scientific Advisory Committee
and was the rationale behind the 1963 convening in Geneva of the first United Nations Con-
ference on Science and Technology for the Benefit of Less-Developed Nations. The Commit-
tee’s 1961 report, entitled Science and Technology for Development, influenced global thinking
on development: the final declaration from the Geneva conference argued, “Science and
technology provide short cuts to development and can help to reduce the gap between rich
and poor countries” (Sagasti 2004: 102). Low- and middle-income country delegates to the
1963 conference pushed for a new UN agency specifically mandated to address the applica-
tion of science to development; however, as the proponents lacked the finances to support
and influence the development of such an agency, the idea was rejected by then-Secretary
General U Thant and UN senior management (Muirhead and Harpelle 2010: 25). Instead,
the UN established a subcommittee on science and technology.
The 1970 report of the United Nations Advisory Committee on the Application of Science
and Technology (ACAST), World Plan of Action on Science and Technology for Development,
proposed that 5 percent of developed countries’ research and development expenditures
should be targeted toward issues of concern to poor nations1 (Sagasti 2004: 104). It was in
this environment that the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)—created in
1970 through the unanimous approval of the Canadian Parliament—was conceived and
established, with the mandate to assist the global South in developing endogenous scientific
and technological capacity. Although the U.S.-based Rockefeller and Ford Foundations had
already pursued programs in support of research “by Southerners for Southerners,” IDRC
was the first public-sector organization created to do so. IDRC was considered a great suc-
cess, as highlighted in the 1982 comprehensive audit by the Auditor General, which lauded
the IDRC for its role as catalyst, adviser, and supporter of research in the developing world
(Muirhead and Harpelle 2010: 2).
The prevailing development paradigm of the mid-1970s to mid-1980s emphasized science
and technology policy implementation. In 1979, a second UN Conference on Science and
Technology for Development (CSTD) convened in Vienna; it emphasized the importance of
endogenous science and technology capabilities in development, and thus established a
United Nations Financing System for Science and Technology for Development (UNF-
SSTD), with voluntary contributions expected to reach US$250 million annually. In the con-
frontational international political climate of the early 1980s (at the height of the Cold War),
these contributions did not materialize and the UNFSSTD was replaced by an interim fund
for science and technology within the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
(Sagasti 2004: 105). The interim fund never amassed more than a fraction of the amount
envisioned at the Vienna Conference and was ultimately dismantled in the early 1990s.
On the heels of the Washington Consensus and the growing popularity of economic neo-
liberalism, international development in the late 1980s and early 1990s was characterized by
a deemphasizing of science and technology policies and an emerging emphasis on the free
play of market forces. Economic crises in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia
led to decreased government revenues and reduced domestic spending on science and tech-
nology. Despite this generally bleak outlook, however, on the occasion of the tenth anniver-
sary of the Vienna Conference, the members of the UN ACAST issued a forward-looking
declaration intended to revitalize international cooperation in science and technology for
development: “We have never had so much power to influence the course of civilization, to
shape the way our species will evolve, and to create an ever-expanding range of opportuni-
ties for human betterment—but we remain unwilling or unable to use this new-found power
to achieve our full potential as human beings.” The declaration closed with a call to action,
encouraging the development in the 1990s of “a multiplicity of innovative approaches to
bilateral, regional and global cooperation in science and technology for development”
(Sagasti 2004: 107). This call to action has gone largely unheeded.
The late 1990s witnessed a return of strategic planning to the forefront of development
theory and practice, with the revival of centralized national development strategies that
emphasized competitiveness and innovation systems (Sagasti 2004: 81, 84). This era of inno-
vation for development saw a re-emerging emphasis on scientific capacity building in low-
and middle-income countries through both grants to support basic research (the creation of
new ideas) and investments in scientific infrastructure. Examples of these kinds of funding
mechanisms include a range of traditional granting programs through development agen-
cies and institutions, and infrastructure investments by the same institutions such as the
Biosciences eastern and central Africa (BecA) laboratory hub in Nairobi.
The focus on capacity building had shifted, however, by the early 2000s as is evident in the
targeted problem-solving approach of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Sci-
ence and innovation have been hailed as playing “an important role in accelerating progress
toward the MDGs” (Conway and Waage 2010: 90). A task force was struck to identify and
describe approaches for effectively applying science, technology, and innovation to achiev-
ing the goals. The task force report (Juma and Yee-Cheong 2005) emphasizes the importance
of: infrastructure as the foundation for technology; investment in science and technology
education; business activities in science, technology and innovation; and the development of
governance mechanisms for global technologies.
In the early part of the twenty-first century, a variety of new organizations, institutions, and
programs emerged that made use of a problem-solving approach: they include the Global
Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the
President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and many others. At the same time, a series of
global economic crises led to a decrease in public funding for development and, looking for-
ward, it is considered “unlikely” that official development assistance will dominate transfers to
developing countries in the twenty-first century as it did in the previous half century (Sagasti
2004: 109; Conway and Waage 2010: 76). These organizations developed and employed a range
of new mechanisms to encourage innovation in development, including product development
partnerships, impact first investments, innovation prizes, advanced market commitments,

pay-for-performance, and social impact bonds. All of these mechanisms shift from a previous
focus on the exploration of new ideas and support for scientific infrastructure to an emerging
focus on the development of products and services and, ultimately, on impacts and outcomes.
These mechanisms are described in more detail later in this chapter.
A final mechanism that has played a particularly significant role in shaping both policy
and investments in innovation for development since the turn of the century is the Grand
Challenge approach. Although this approach does not in and of itself address the twin chal-
lenges identified in the previous paragraph, it can serve as an operating system through
which to align and enable a broad range of mechanisms to encourage innovation that can
engage and entrain additional funding and resources from the private and not-for-profit sec-
tors. The following section of this chapter takes an in-depth look at this approach.
The Grand Challenge Approach
The idea of a “Grand Challenge” originated with Dr David Hilbert in the early twentieth cen-
tury (Varmus et al. 2003). Working in the field of mathematics, Dr Hilbert identified twenty-
three significant problems that, when solved, were expected to significantly advance the
field. There are several different working definitions of grand challenge, all of which focus on
identifying a specific critical barrier whose removal would have significant impact.
This approach was revived by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which, in 2003, under-
took an extensive process to identify a set of Grand Challenges in Global Health. These
included challenges like developing needle-free delivery systems, preparing vaccines that do
not require refrigeration, creating a full range of optimal, bioavailable nutrients in a single
staple plant species, and many others. The Foundation also conducted a global competition
to fund world-leading groups of scientists to address these challenges. Over 1,500 letters of
intent and over 400 full proposals were submitted, and in June 2005 the Foundation
announced a commitment to fund $450 million in specific projects, in partnership with the
Wellcome Trust and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation has continued to refine its approach by introducing the Grand Challenges
Explorations program in 2008, which uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process to
fund innovative and transformative ideas.
Another example of a “challenge” approach to innovation for development was the set of
Challenge Programs developed by CGIAR in the late 1990s. The focus of these programs was
to drive collaborative research and implementation across the entire agricultural value chain,
from research to on-the-ground implementation of innovations. Projects brought together
researchers with suppliers and manufacturers and end market users. Some of the lessons from
this program include the longer timeframe to impact for innovations in agriculture and, at
least qualitatively, the utility of the innovation platform approach that emerged from initia-
tives like the Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Program (Lynam, Harmsen, and Sachdeva 2010).
Building on the original Grand Challenges in Global Health, a group of global health
researchers and innovators led by Dr Abdallah Daar undertook a structured process to iden-
tify a set of grand challenges in non-communicable disease, which were announced in 2007
in the journal Nature (Daar et al. 2007). This led to the creation of the Global Alliance for
Chronic Disease, an initiative that brings together six of the world’s largest health research
agencies to coordinate research investments to address these challenges. Working with the
National Institute of Mental Health in the U.S., the Alliance undertook a further exploration
of grand challenges in global mental health (Collins et al. 2011). More recently, the approach
was adopted by others, including Grand Challenges Canada and the United States’ Agency
for International Development. The former is similarly focused on global health and has
identified challenges in point-of-care diagnostics, maternal and child survival, the cognitive
development of newborns, and mental health. The latter has expanded beyond the health
sector to address the reading skills of primary school students as well as access to electrical
energy within rural agriculture.
In 2010, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation took a look back at the first five years of its
Grand Challenges in Global Health. One of the key lessons learned was that innovations of
the kind that were supported are a longer-term proposition that will take upwards of ten to
fifteen years to bring to commercial scale (McNeil 2010). Overall, the approach was deemed
to be successful at bringing focus, attention, and resources to scientific approaches to saving
lives. At the same time, however, there was recognition of the importance of accelerating the
timeline to impact for new ideas and innovations. This is where early adoption of an Inte-
grated Innovation perspective and a strong emphasis on entrepreneurship—which has his-
torically been neglected in development work (see Naudé, this volume)—can facilitate faster
timelines to uptake, adoption, and scale.
At its core, the Grand Challenge approach is a mechanism to mine the intellectual capac-
ity of innovators from across disciplines and sectors for transformative and bold ideas to
solve global health challenges; support the validation and refinement of these bold ideas into
practical and implementable innovations; and catalyze the engagement of partners from
across sectors to sustainably take these innovations to scale. This latter point emphasizes the
importance of entrepreneurship as part of an integrated approach to development; despite
its historical relegation to the sidelines of the development arena, entrepreneurship is critical
to getting innovations to market and enacted into policy.
One of the recognized strengths of the Grand Challenge approach is its ability to capture
the imagination and interest of a far broader audience than typically focuses on development
challenges. The approach is guided by five core principles:
Focus—strategic and well-articulated grand challenges serve to focus research efforts

•
and to capture the imagination and engage the world’s best researchers.
• Best ideas—projects are selected based on public, transparent calls for proposals
seeking the best ideas.
• Collaboration—funders, investigators, and other stakeholders actively collaborate
to accelerate process and integrate advances to ensure these advances serve those
most in need.
• Impact—projects are selected not only for scientific excellence, but for the likeli-
hood of their achieving the desired impact, and they are milestone-driven and
actively managed to that end.
• Global Access—projects and investigators make global access commitments to ensure
the fruits of their research are available to those most in need.
The Grand Challenge approach can also serve as a governance model that enables a broad
spectrum of public, private, and not-for-profit organizations to organize and align their con-
tributions to address and overcome a specific challenge in a coherent manner. A good exam-
ple of this is the Saving Lives at Birth program. This program is a partnership between three
national development agencies (USAID, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the
UK Department for International Development), a private foundation (the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation), and a not-for-profit organization (Grand Challenges Canada). Rather
than launching five separate funding programs with five different application processes, the
Saving Lives at Birth program allowed these diverse funding bodies to come together and
agree on a single challenge, a single request for proposals, and a single, integrated commu-
nity of innovators to address the challenge.
Although the Grand Challenge approach is traditionally associated with grants, in recent
years its proponents have realized that even in broad partnerships like Saving Lives at Birth,
the partner organizations are not going to be able to scale and solve these challenges by them-
selves. Instead, there is an increasing focus on capturing the imagination and interest of, and
ultimately catalyzing action by, others outside the traditional development community,
including the private and not-for-profit sectors and other academic disciplines not tradi-
tionally associated with development.
Building on this recognition, the Grand Challenge approach could go beyond simply pro-
viding grants to stimulate ideas: it could provide a structure through which to engage, coor-
dinate, and align a broad range of partners and mechanisms to encourage innovation and
promote entrepreneurship in seeing that these innovations are scaled and implemented. The
remainder of this chapter provides an overview of the financial mechanisms that have
emerged over the past decade, and concludes with a discussion of the potential of this model
to align these mechanisms.
Financial Mechanisms to Support

Innovation
As outlined in the historical overview earlier in this chapter, over the past decade a number
of strategies for enabling and supporting innovation for development have (re)emerged,
including: grants, product development partnerships, impact-first investments, innovation
prizes, advanced market commitments, pay-for-performance, and social impact bonds.
Grants
By far the most common mechanism for enabling innovation for development is the provi-
sion of grants, often through peer-reviewed academic competitions conducted by national
development agencies or major international not-for-profit organizations. Grants are pri-
marily targeted at the development of new ideas and concepts and the creation of new scien-
tific infrastructure, although they can extend their support through to the proof-of-concept/
validation of the new idea. For the most part, grants are focused on scientific excellence
through curiosity-driven research. More recently, some development innovation grants have
focused on funding innovations that are further upstream, with a focus on proof-of-concept.
Examples of the use of grants to support innovation for development include the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Exploration grants, Saving Lives at Birth
grants, and Canadian International Food Security Research grants.
The strength of this mechanism is that it can lead to the development and/or proof-
of-concept for new ideas to address a broad array of issues and challenges. Its primary weak-
ness is the need to provide up-front funding for all of the innovation that takes place, with no
guarantee of results.
More broadly, traditional mechanisms to encourage innovation provide few incentives
for researchers to validate their ideas, ensure that they are translated into products or serv-
ices, and take them to scale so that they can make a lasting impact. Instead, while traditional
incentives for researchers—including the need to publish, requirements for tenure and
career advancement, and many others—provide strong motivation to develop new ideas,
they provide few or even negative incentives to take the ideas to scale through public or pri-
vate channels. Further, the cost of taking an idea to scale can be orders of magnitude higher
than that of developing and validating that idea, particularly in areas like vaccine and drug
development. In short, grants typically perpetuate the neglect of entrepreneurial aspects of
development projects.
Product Development Partnerships

Having recognized some of the limitations of traditional grant-based mechanisms, this new
model emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. The purpose of these partnerships was
to overcome barriers to investments in research and development—including high capital
costs, low potential returns on investment and a high risk of failure—to address health chal-
lenges in the developing world.
Product development partnerships are structured to bring together a broad range of stake-
holders, including innovators and public- and private-sector organizations and institutions.
Funding is generally provided through grants from public-sector partners to offset some of
the barriers identified above. These grants, however, are targeted not at the creation of novel
ideas but rather at the development and implementation of new products and/or services.
Private-sector and academic/research partners, in turn, make in-kind investments of time
and, potentially, intellectual property (Grace 2010). To date, product development partner-
ships have been successful at developing new health technologies and beginning to move
these technologies toward commercialization. It remains to be seen whether these products
will have an impact in the marketplace leading to improved health outcomes in the
longer term.
Impact-first Investments
Impact-first investment funds are another mechanism to fund the development of new or
improved products and services. In general, impact-first funds are investment funds where
some or all of the returns are forgone in exchange for tangible social benefits such as
improved health. Probably the most well-known example of an impact-first investment fund
is the Acumen Fund, which provides patient capital to support investments in critical areas
including water, health, housing, and energy. Impact-first investment funds make invest-
ments through loans and/or equity placements rather than through grants.
The strength of the impact-first investment model is that it helps to bridge the gap between
potentially transformative new ideas and the resources necessary to take those ideas to scale
where they will have significant impact. Because of the concessional nature of the invest-
ments made through these funds, companies have the opportunity to develop new products
and services that can have transformational social impacts that would not attract investment
on the basis of their projected financial returns alone.
A weakness of the impact-first investing model is that it can be very difficult to quantify
and assess the value of social outcomes. As such, a significant portion of an impact-first
investment fund’s capital can be consumed in ensuring that potential projects can have the
intended impact and in measuring the impact once the investment is made.
Innovation Prizes
Innovation prizes comprise a third mechanism that focuses on providing incentives to
develop innovative products or approaches. The concept of awarding a prize as a driver
for innovation is almost three hundred years old. Arguably the first such innovation prize
was that offered by the British Government in 1714 for the development of a methodology
to accurately determine a ship’s longitude (Rosenberg 2012). The concept of innovation
prizes has been used over time to spur such disparate innovations as canning (as a solu-
tion to the need to preserve food) and the design of a trap for cane toads in Australia
(Love 2008). The basic concept of an innovation prize is to provide a significant financial
reward for the first innovator or team of innovators to achieve a tightly defined target.
Prizes are, by definition, intended to reward problem solving and not capacity building.
They often focus on proof-of-concept without an explicit need or focus on taking to scale
the solutions that emerge. Innovation prizes are an example of a demand-pull mecha-
nism, giving innovators an incentive to focus their resources to solve the challenge and
win the prize.
The use of prize competitions to spur innovation has enjoyed a renaissance over the past
decade, with McKinsey (2009) reporting that $250 million in new prizes had been estab-
lished between 2000 and 2007. Examples of innovation prizes include the Google Lunar X
PRIZE, the Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize from the U.S. Department of Energy, and the
Night Rover Challenge from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. More
recently the concept of innovation prizes has been popularized by the X Prize Foundation,
which conducts prize competitions in four areas: Education and Global Development,
Energy and Environment, Life Sciences, and Exploration (Ocean and Deep Space). They
focus on two types of competitions: X Prizes of over $10 million given to the first team to
achieve a specific goal that has the possibility of impacting individuals around the world, and
Challenge awards of up to $2.5 million for the solution to a well-defined technical problem
that currently has no clear path to a solution.
There is also increasing interest in the public sector in the use of innovation prizes. For
example, in the United States, the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 pro-
vided government agencies with authority to use prize competitions to advance their core
mandates and drive innovation. This Act built on the previous “challenge.gov” website as a
single portal for innovators to access information about innovation prizes. As of March 2012,
forty agencies had posted more than 150 prizes on this site.
The main benefit of the prize mechanism is that it can drive significantly more innovative
activity than a similar investment in a grant. The weakness of this mechanism is that by their
nature, prizes require tightly defined specifications that clearly articulate when and under
what conditions the prize will be awarded. As such, it is very difficult for a prize strategy to
drive novel thinking in areas where the desired outcomes cannot be readily articulated or
measured. There can also be significant challenges around sustainability, since only the first
successful approach is rewarded; the efficiency and effectiveness of the first successful inno-
vation is not necessarily the best overall.
Advanced Market Commitments

Advanced Market Commitments (AMCs) are a financial tool designed to address a specific
and pressing market failure associated with the perceived level of risk and profitability of
developing and marketing innovative products and services to low- and middle-income
countries. AMCs provide a guaranteed purchaser and purchase price for a product that is
supplied at a sharply discounted rate to low-income countries and communities. AMCs
bridge problem solving and capacity building, offering a guaranteed market for a product
that addresses a specific problem, but provide funding support for the uptake of that product
only by subsidizing the sale of that product in low-income countries. In the same way, AMCs
also bridge supply-push (by providing incentives for the development of new products) and
demand-pull (by delivering the incentive only in the context of the rollout of the product in
low-income countries).
For example, traditionally it takes between ten and fifteen years after their introduction in
high-income countries for new vaccines to reach children in low- and middle-income coun-
tries. This means that children in these countries face unnecessary health risks that could be
addressed through earlier access to these vaccines. Further, there are no vaccines for some of
the most prevalent childhood diseases in low- and middle-income countries, including
malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS. To address this challenge, five countries (Canada,
Italy, Norway, Russia, and the United Kingdom) working in conjunction with the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation committed $1.5 billion through an Advanced Market Commit-
ment to purchase pneumococcal vaccines, providing manufacturers with the necessary
financial certainty to invest in vaccine development and new manufacturing facilities. The
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation estimates that by 2030 this single AMC could save as many
as seven million lives.
A similar mechanism called AgResults was launched at the 2012 G20 meeting in Los
Cabos, Mexico to help address issues around global food security. This initiative aims to
“pull” innovation and leverage private resources to promote food security and agricultural
productivity, particularly among smallholders.
As with the Innovation Prize model, the strength of this mechanism is that it can leverage
significant external/private sector resources to develop products and services by ensuring
that there is a guaranteed market for the product or service once it is developed. The weak-
ness of this mechanism is that it is unlikely to spur new ideas or to attract transformative
ideas from outside of the sector, as there is no return on investment for higher-risk but
potentially transformative ideas that do not succeed.
Pay-for-performance
Pay-for-performance mechanisms, sometimes called cash-on-delivery, are another strategy
to drive innovation for development with an emphasis on outcomes. Again, the fundamen-
tal concept of pay-for-performance programs is simple: rather than funding a prescriptive
methodology that is intended to achieve a specific result (and evaluating the methodology
on process outcomes), this model makes payments in return for specific defined outcomes,
without bias as to the specific process or methodology through which the results are
achieved. This strategy focuses expressly on problem-solving, with payments made only for
the implementation of successful solutions, and is another example of a demand-pull model.
It is agnostic to proof-of-concept or scale, as the parameters for payment can be established
to favor one or both.
An example of a pay-for-performance mechanism is a program run by the Global Alli-
ance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) to encourage the immunization of children in
fifty-three countries through a three-dose series of DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus).
Through this plan, for every child who is immunized above the baseline, the government of
that child’s country receives a $20 payment. Through this plan, governments receive a fixed
allocation of funds for the first two years of the program, with the pay-for-performance com-
ponent coming into effect in the third year of implementation (Rosenberg 2011).
Effective pay-for-performance mechanisms are dependent on three core factors: a clear base-
line against which to measure (and reward) progress; clear and agreed metrics; and effective,
accurate, reliable, and affordable methodologies through which to measure results in rela-
tion to these core metrics. One concern that has been expressed about pay-for-performance
programs is that they can distort the behavior of recipients such that they focus exclusively,
and potentially detrimentally, on those indicators that will be used to judge performance.
Another concern is that there is a strong bias toward the reporting of positive impacts, given
that these impacts are the direct basis for performance payments.
Early evaluations of the impact of pay-for-performance incentives are promising, as sug-
gested by a recent study in The Lancet: “Financial incentives aimed at patients and individual
providers are effective over the short term for ‘simple and distinct, well-defined behavioral
goals’” (Montagu and Yamey 2011). This same study cites a survey undertaken in 2005 by
Paulin Basinga and colleagues to determine the impact of pay-for-performance programs to
increase the number of facility-based deliveries in two districts in Rwanda. Although they
are cautious about overstating the impact of the results of this study, the authors conclude
that it “provides a welcome piece of good news, showing that pay-for-performance can
increase the uptake of maternal and child health services” (Montagu and Yamey 2011).
Finally, much research remains to be undertaken to understand the interactions between
pay-for-performance programs and pre-existing programs and incentives and other motiva-
tions (Miller et al. 2011). An important strength of this model is that it helps to move products and
solutions closer to scale in terms of impact. Its primary challenge is that it depends on clear
and measurable metrics, and it is critical to understand from the outset what is being meas-
ured and why; in many cases, such metrics are ill-defined or inconsistent across jurisdictions.
Social Impact Bonds

A final model that has emerged to spur innovation in development is social impact bonds.
This model, pioneered by Sir Ronald Cohen in the UK and similar to the pay-for per-
formance model, pays directly for outcomes but shifts the financial risk (and benefits) of
the program onto third parties. At their core, social impact bonds are a vehicle through
which to leverage private capital to address pressing challenges. Social impact bonds are
focused on problem-solving at scale by providing a strong demand-pull incentive for
results.
A social impact bond is a formal contract between a government or other payer, pri-
vate investors, and service delivery organizations (including not-for-profits, charities,
and social enterprises). It is a financial mechanism where investors make an up-front
investment to support an innovative social program or service and receive returns based
on the outcomes of that program or service. The funds to pay for the returns are derived
from the funds that the government would otherwise have paid in the absence of that
outcome. The four elements of a social impact bond are: a contract is negotiated wherein
the government agrees to pay a rate of return on invested capital for improved social out-
comes based on a clearly defined baseline and performance metrics; based on the con-
tract, an intermediary raises upfront capital from investors to invest in social service
delivery organizations; the social service delivery organization(s) use(s) this capital to
fund the programs to deliver the desired outcomes; and based on the degree to which the
social outcome is achieved, the government pays investors as negotiated in the original
contract.
The first social impact bond was launched in September 2010 at Peterborough Prison in
the UK by an organization called Social Finance UK. Essentially, this social impact bond
funds rehabilitation services for short-sentence prisoners released from the prison, with the
aim of reducing re-offending. It is currently in the process of evaluating its anticipated out-
comes. The anticipated benefits of such bonds include: shifting the focus to outcome from
inputs (i.e. government spending); the capacity to leverage private capital for social purpose;
and shifting risk from government to private investors.
Although there is a high degree of interest in social impact bonds across a number of juris-
dictions, several commentators have urged caution as this type of financial innovation is still
in its very early stages and, as such, should be approached and implemented cautiously
(Palmer 2012). It is worth noting that social impact bonds are not really “bonds” in the tradi-
tional financial sense, in that that they do not offer a fixed return to investors over a fixed
period of time. While such bond contracts operate over a specified period of time, the finan-
cial returns that investors will receive vary according to the success that is achieved in rela-
tion to the social outcome(s) specified in the contract. In this way, social impact bonds can
better be considered a variation on a pay-for-performance model, albeit one in which the
risk and reward are shared between the delivery organization and the private-sector
investors.
Because of their comparative novelty, social impact bonds have yet to be implemented in
the development sector. One of the primary barriers to doing so is the need to identify a
“payer” who would make payments upon the validation of performance outcomes. It has
been posited that this role could be played by large multilateral organizations, aid agencies,
or private foundations interested in the social outcomes that are produced.
While each of the financial mechanisms outlined in this section has its respective strengths
and weaknesses, individually, none of them has the scope to enable the entire innovation
process, from new ideas through proof-of-concept and the production of new products and
services to sustainable scale. The final section of this chapter outlines a potential model that
expands the traditional Grand Challenge approach to capture and align each of these mech-
anisms in a single coherent model.
A Holistic Model of Innovation

for Development
As outlined earlier in this chapter, the continuum of innovation for development activities
can be thought of as moving through three areas of focus, as follows. First, ideas and infra-
structure for articulating, testing, and modeling specific concepts or groups of concepts that
can impact on a single or multiple aspects of the problem, and funding new scientific equip-
ment, human resources, and facilities. The end point of this stage is the proof-of-concept of
new or modified ideas to address the problem or challenge. Second, products and services—
this can be thought of as the process of converting ideas into specific social, business, or sci-
entific techniques or technologies. The end product is a technique or technology, or set
thereof, that is ready for deployment in the market. Third, outcomes and impacts focused on
bringing a solution to scale where it can have the greatest and most transformative effect.
This can include but is not limited to the marketing and manufacturing of the product or the
dissemination of new ideas through media such as journals or various social media technol-
ogies. Entrepreneurial spirit is critical to success at this stage and is therefore an imperative
part of innovation for development.
Traditionally, programs or strategies to enable innovation for development have focused
on a single mechanism within this continuum. There is an increasing realization, however,
that it is critical to think of and plan for scale, even during the very early stages of the innova-
tion process. To do so requires a focus not only on scientific innovation (e.g. new products or
services), but also on innovation in the social (e.g., enhanced health systems or adaptations
for local culture) and business spheres (e.g. cost-effective local manufacturing and delivery
strategies). This strategy of combining scientific, social, and business innovation to drive
impact has been called Integrated Innovation (Singer and Brook 2010).
Similarly, by aligning different strategies for funding development innovation it should be
possible to leverage the strengths of each individual mechanism to form a coherent and com-
prehensive process, to drive impact and lasting change. The potential for the Grand Chal-
lenge approach is to align these seemingly disparate financial mechanisms (Figure 35.1).
Rather than pursuing any single mechanism, future systems might align multiple funding
streams in the expectation of a greater likelihood of identifying meaningful solutions to
tackle a critical development problem and a greater likelihood of these solutions’ being taken
to scale. The power of such a model is its ability to harness each of the financial mechanisms
to deliver on the element(s) of the innovation continuum to which it is best suited, bearing in
mind that in reality the mechanisms often spill over to both earlier and later elements of this
continuum.
IDEAS & PRODUCTS & OUTCOMES

INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES AND IMPACTS
2. Product Development
Partnerships
3. Impact First 6. Pay-for-

Investment Performance
1. Grand Challenge
Grants
7. Social Impact
4. Innovation Prizes
Bonds
5. Advanced Market
Commitments
figure 35.1 Aligning funding mechanisms to encourage “Innovation for Development”
Note
1. “However, with the minor exception of a few fields such as medical research and health
care, the mobilization of developed country scientists for focus on the problems of the
developing world has not been very successful” (Sagasti 2004: 104).
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chapter 36
i n for m ation a n d
com m u n ication
tech nol ogie s for
dev el opm en t
ronaldo lemos and joana varon ferraz
Introduction
The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the developing world
has raised many questions and debates. Where do ICTs stand compared to other develop-
ment priorities? What roles do the state and market play in their deployment? How can one
assess the development impact of ICTs projects? Are these impacts scalable or sustainable?
What comes next once ICTs are readily available to all people? And how are these technolo-
gies connected to policy making?
To approach these questions, this chapter briefly describes the field of Information and
Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and maps key debates surround-
ing it. The concepts and dynamics of ICT4D theory are described through an analysis of
empirical experiences, examining their relation with the state and the market, and the con-
ditions under which they become an infrastructure for innovation. These examples include
telecentres, LAN houses, mobile devices, and their appropriation and use by the poor.
Emphasis is placed on how the use of ICTs can emerge spontaneously in an open and uncon-
trolled context, rather than out of an ideological position in favor of provision through either
the state or markets. This is followed by a discussion of current trends, including access to
ICTs through markets, the growing number of devices affordable to the poor, and the bene-
fits of ICTs in terms of empowering wider social transformation. While the state has an
important role, new business arrangements are also promoting access to ICTs in the devel-
oping world. As connectivity expands, practical examples of the impact of ICTs emerge, both
in connection with economic opportunity and with the exercise of basic civil rights.
information and communication technologies for development 615
Looking forward, the future of ICT4D involves threats to Internet rights and the
freedoms connected to the deployment of ICTs. Are the practices and policies related to
ICTs leading to democracy and public access to knowledge, or are they leading to increased
surveillance and control? This field is evolving beyond the debates described above, to
encompass questions on internet governance and policies that foster or threat online rights
and freedoms.
Emergence and Evolution of ICT4D
The debate about the importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
in the context of development studies dates back to the mid-twentieth century, yet exploded
in the 1990s when the G7/81 began to address the governance of cyberspace and electronic
commerce. At the time, the main issues were the norms for interconnecting networks, rights
to access such networks, and taxation of goods and services delivered through the web (Hart
2004). But as criticism from anti-globalization movements increased, pressure against the
G8 governance became stronger, reaching a peak in 1999 during the World Trade Organiza-
tion (WTO) meetings in Seattle. One of the main complaints was the lack of space in the
decision-making processes for non-G8 countries and the international institutions that were
supposedly more representative of their interests. In response to such pressure, the G8 estab-
lished a Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT Force) in 2000. The goal was to bring together
forty-three teams composed by government, private sector, non-profit, and international
organizations from both developing and developed countries to debate the “digital divide.”
The idea, as put by Castells (1999) was that ICTs represented an opportunity for countries to
leapfrog stages of economic growth, yet could further disadvantage those economies unable
to adapt to the new technologies. DOT Force meetings were held in Tokyo, Cape Town,
Siena, Dubai, Berlin, Davos, Berlin, Cairo, and Naples.
In 2000, the same year that the DOT Force was established, the G8 adopted the Okinawa
Charter on Global Information Society which argued in favour of the potential for ICTs to
transform economies and societies, and in which the G8 committed to address the digital
divide. This commitment carried over into the United Nations’ Millennium Development
Goals, which expressly included the role of ICTs as target 8f: “make available the benefits of
new technologies, especially information and communication.” From that moment on, sev-
eral international organizations addressed access to ICTs, including the OECD, the World
Bank, the International Labour Organization, and other UN agencies.
In 2001, the G8 DOT Force released the report Digital Opportunities for All, focusing on
access in terms of connectivity and human capacity. In November of the same year, the UN
Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, established an ICT task force in response to a request from
the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). As a multi-stakeholder initiative under the
umbrella of the UN, developing countries considered this forum more legitimate than the
G8 DOT Force. The goal of the UN ICT Task Force was to provide policy advice to govern-
ment and international organizations for bridging the digital divide, through partnerships
within the UN system and other stakeholders, from states, to private sector and donors, in
order to “lend a truly global dimension to the multitude of efforts to bridge the global digital
616 ronaldo lemos and joana varon ferraz
divide, foster digital opportunity and thus firmly put ICT at the service of development for
all.”2 The UN ICT Task Force had an important role in the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS). Established by the UN General Assembly, through resolution 56/163, the
WSIS recognized the urgent need to harness the potential of knowledge and technology, and
to find ways to put this potential to the service of development. This summit convened twice,
in Geneva in 2003 and, interestingly, in Tunis in 2005, the country which six years later
captured world attention at the start of the Arab Spring.
The idea of using ICTs to advance development goals consolidated under the acronym of
ICT4D. In accordance with the international debate, many organizations in the private, pub-
lic, and third sectors became part of the discussion and implemented projects based on the
assumption that access to technologies would have a positive impact on development.
ICT4D activities were carried by the World Bank, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Canada’s International Development Research Centre, the Open Society Foundation, and
private companies (including Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco). While developed countries rely
on high-tech infrastructure and human expertise to innovate in the field of ICTs, emerging
and developing economies are falling far behind. Figures from the International Telecom-
munications Union (ITU) show that in 2011 two-thirds of households in the developed world
had access to the Internet, while in the developing world the figure was less than one in six
households. Overcoming this “digital divide” was therefore the main concern in the begin-
ning of the debates regarding ICT4D.
Yet as technology evolved, the strategies and theories to deal with this challenge shifted.
Initially, the central policy idea was to provide access to low-income populations through
“telecentres,” government-funded public spaces where people could have access to comput-
ers and the Internet. The telecentre approach inspired a number of programs and generated
passionate discussion, yet this first wave of ICT4D was criticized in terms of sustainability,
scalability, and lack of evaluation. Criticism also arose in connection to programmes aiming
to giving laptops to the poor, as such devices were costly and relied on communication and
power infrastructure than was often not available. Richard Heeks (2008) labels this initial
phase of projects as “ICT4D 1.0” analogous to the first generation of web services.
From the mid-2000s, telecentres began to lose ground as mobile phones became more
prevalent within ICT4D debates, and soon became the new symbol for providing access to
low-income populations. In contrast to telecentres, mobile phones depend on lower infra-
structure costs than landline broadband connections. Also, private markets for mobile
telephony seem to thrive in almost any context, even when states fail to foster competition,
meaning that mobile telephony is capable of reaching a larger portion of the population.
This change in focus to mobile phones reflected an increasing perception that markets had
a role in providing access to ICTs. Though influenced by public policy, the spread of mobile
phones were the result of market forces. This example illustrates conflicting views in the
ICT4D field and development theories. On one side, a market-oriented approach argued
that a search for profit would lead to the spread of ICTs. On the other side, the market was
seen to have insufficient incentive to provide ICTs to the poor and other action was
required.
Nevertheless, new criticism soon emerged towards advocates of the mobile phone as the
new means of achieving digital inclusion. Notably having a mobile is not equivalent to being
connected to the Internet. In many countries, the majority of mobile phones work as pre-
paid accounts which have limited connection to the Internet. Therefore, it is important to
consider what kind of access is possible through these devices, which tend to have a restricted
set of features and are not a perfect substitute for desktop or laptop computers. In short,
mobile phones have mitigated, but did not resolve, the digital divide.
Yet ICTs continued to change at a fast pace leading to tablet computers and increasingly an
“internet of things” which allows various objects (such as video players, cameras, and vend-
ing machines) to be connected online with their own address. Such technologies have imme-
diate and direct consequences for the assumptions underpinning ICT4D. Accordingly,
projects increasingly consider the different levels of technology available in a particular con-
text, even where such availability does not correspond to the ideal connectivity reached in a
developed country.
ICT4D also increasingly paid attention to the availability of broadband infrastructure, a
resource seldom available in much of the developing world. Access to broadband once again
raises the role of state and market in deploying the necessary infrastructure. Many broad-
band plans work under the assumption that market forces have failed to provide the invest-
ment to expand infrastructure or foster competition. Mainly because the private sector
usually finds adequate incentives for investing in certain areas, such as those densely popu-
lated and with attractive markets, but find little incentive to expand service to rural areas,
smaller cities, and less populated areas. Facing this situation, a number of countries invested
in broadband plans as part of the stimuli packages adopted after the financial crisis in
2008. Thus, in the early 2010s, many countries had some sort of broadband plan including
Argentina, Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Malaysia,
Mexico, Nigeria, Romania, South Africa, and Uganda.
Recently the literature has gone in new directions, moving from “bridging the digital
divide” towards “impact assessment.” Recent work responds to criticism based on the per-
ceived lack of sustainability, scalability, and evaluation. In short, the goal has shifted from
promoting access to ICTs, to a focus on the consequences of such access. Richard Heeks
(2008) describes “ICT4D 2.0” as a renewed focus on:
Readiness—having the policies and infrastructure to make ICT availability possible;

•
Availability—rolling out ICTs to the poor to help them become users;
•
Uptake—implementing and applying ICT to make it useful, taking into account
•
demand and usage; and
Impact—using ICTs to make the greatest developmental impact, in terms of efficiency,
•
effectiveness, and equity.
As ICT4D struggled to evaluate the relation between connectivity and development, numer-
ous methods for measuring impact were introduced. For instance, Heeks and Molla (2009)
developed an overview of different frameworks that could be used for impact assessment of
ICT4D projects, classifying then into six categories: Generic: frameworks used to assess a
variety of different types of projects (e.g. cost–benefit analysis); Discipline-specific: an inte-
grated perspective drawing on computer science, information systems, and developmental
studies; Issue-specific: focused on a particular development goal (e.g. gender); Application-
Specific: centered on a particular approach (e.g. telecentres); and Sector-Specific: assessment
centered on an individual development sector. The relative strengths and weaknesses of each
framework are still being assessed.
The struggle for impact assessment has even led some Western donors to view ICTs as a
luxury, something to strive for once basic needs are met. In contrast, some advocate ICT4D
on moral grounds, claiming that access is a matter of fairness. For example, Weigel and Wald-
burger (2004) argue that “[f]or the poor, the real issue is not whether ICT are desirable
because the technology is already part of their broader context. The issue is whether we
accept that the poor should, in addition to the existing deprivation of income, food and
health service, etc. also be further deprived of new opportunities to improve their liveli-
hoods.” Indeed, there is a clash of views regarding the importance of ICT for development;
this divergence of opinions has been present in the literature, even questioning the existence
of ICT4D as a research field.
Key Debates within ICT4D
If the emergence of ICT4D in the past few years has become an ineluctable force, with var-
ious practical consequences to academia, international organizations, NGOs, and the pri-
vate sector, the debate about the efficiency, validity, and existence of the field is a lively one.
While proponents see ICT4D as a crucial component of development, critics see it as a fad
or distraction from development priorities. In the words of Bill Gates3 “[t]he world’s poor-
est two billion people desperately need healthcare, not laptops.” His words raise, rather
bluntly, the question of what is the priority of ICTs compared to other needs of the poor.
This view stresses the fact that uncritical enthusiasm for ICT4D creates expectations of
“leapfrogging” over development obstacles, diverting attention from other factors that are
needed for development to occur (Estherhuysen 2009). Besides this clash of priorities,
critics tend to add that there is an abundance of case studies, and intensive debates about
how to measure the impact of ICTs over development, but so far little consensus. Propo-
nents tend to ascribe a positive value to technology, with academic inquiry making
only modest contributions to determining priorities or assessing the impact of ICT4D
initiatives.
In summary, the main criticism of ICT4D is that it can be an isolated field, which
ascribes a positive value to technology, without fully establishing the links to develop-
ment, and little academic critique informing its agenda. It is important to assess the pri-
ority and value of ICT4D initiatives (Oura 2009). Besides this fundamental argument,
there are also specific critiques based on implementing projects. These points are also
raised by some enthusiasts, willing to improve upon experiences in the field, improving
their sustainability and scale, and refining the role of the state. In terms of sustainability
and scalability, projects can lead to obscure relationships between business suppliers and
government, and many projects have ended up dependent on continuous public or donor
funding to continue their activities. Such projects are clearly unsustainable and have
tended to be implemented in a top-down fashion, rather than relying on bottom-up
experimentation.
In terms of the approach to technology, connectivity has ambiguous implications. The
consequences of investing in any type of connectivity need to be examined from a variety of
perspectives. The adopted technology must give people chances to use them in ways that
help them to escape from poverty and to make improvements in their lives (Mansell 2006).
In addition, there has been an unhelpful dichotomy between productivity and leisure, or
work and play. ICT4D has tended to focus on the former, ignoring that “play” has been inte-
gral to the dissemination of ICTs. Similarly ICT4D has tended to focus on modern electron-
ics, ignoring traditional media, such as radio and television, even though these technologies
are widely used by poor people. There is also an assumption that market-led expansion of
products and services, particularly in mobile telephony, are solving the problems that gov-
ernments and international organizations have failed to adequately address. This is a sim-
plistic view that sees ICT access as a by-product of liberalization and privatization, which
ignores the role of the state in policy reform that drive markets to expand, for instance in
fostering National Broadband Plans.
Despite critiques, strong arguments remain for considering ICTs in development. Eco-
nomic, social, and political life in the twenty-first century will be increasingly digital and
those without access to ICTs will be increasingly excluded. The lack of access to ICT ampli-
fies present inequality. There is a complex re-adaptation of old power relations into the dig-
ital era, posing a significant threat to the ability to develop in the knowledge economy, where
information is the primary resource. While a lack of ICTs could widen the inequality gap
around the world, access to them can contribute to narrowing it.
ICTs can enable greater participation in economic and civic life, permitting the creation
of “smart” systems that allow for more efficient use of scarce resources, access to education,
and health care through distance learning or telemedicine, or mechanisms that enable rural
enterprises to connect with new markets. Yet ICTs are not an end in development policies
themselves. They are an opportunity for development, but not a panacea. Rather ICTs are
tied to fundamental issues at the heart of development, such as infrastructure ownership
and governance. ICTs have become a strategic field worldwide, not only for business pur-
poses, but also leading to initiatives intensively focused on the public interest, such as
e-government, e-health, and distance education. For example, the Chinese government
views ICTs not as a luxury or consumable good, but as a form of infrastructure capable of
generating efficiency and positive externalities to all social systems. In the words of Jia
Zemin (2009), “One might prophesize that the ubiquitous network [of ICTs] will become a
general infrastructure, just like power grids and pipelines, merged into people’s daily lives
and work, and become a key platform for economic, political, cultural, and various other
social activities.”
At one level, realizing ICT4D in practice requires the four prerequisites of computing,
connectivity, content, and (human) capacity (Tongia, Subrahmanian, and Arunchallam
2005). At another level ICT4D is intrinsically linked to broader issues such as infrastructure,
governance, transparency, and an understanding of local needs and aspirations. ICT4D also
raises important issues that normally are not at the core of development debates, including
concerns about how to foster innovation, the transformation of the public sphere, and the
promotion of linguistic diversity, privacy, and freedom of expression. The debate is no longer
about privileging ICTs above other development priorities, but how ICTs can further devel-
opment goals more generally. Ultimately, the consequences of connectivity depend on
whether they aid people to escape from poverty and improve their lives.
The following section analyses empirical examples of a mix of state-led, market-led, and
bottom-up initiatives, to highlight examples of new approaches to the role of state, sustaina-
bility, and scalability.
Looking ahead to New Debates
New Business Models for Enhancing Connectivity

Beyond a shift from telecentres to mobile phones, other relevant models have emerged in
the past decade, such as the “LAN house” phenomenon in Brazil.4 Originally created to
allow people to play multiplayer games, LAN houses work as cybercafés and have prolifer-
ated in poor communities, including favela slums. Charging a small fee, generally between
US$0.70 to $1.0 per hour, LAN houses have become the main internet access point for low-
income families. Far from being a marginal phenomenon, in 2011 they were used by over
thirty-two million Brazilians, 46 percent of whom had incomes below $300 per month
(Fukuyama 2012).
The LAN house phenomenon is partially an accidental side effect of the federal program
“Computers for All.” Rather than simply distributing computers to poor people, this pro-
gram created credit lines that allowed low-income families to purchase computers by paying
small instalments every month for a few years (approximately US$25 per month). The result
was an entrepreneurial wave since 2002, in which people bought a handful of computers and
opened shop for others to play games. These new entrepreneurs soon contracted broadband
connections and resold them “retail” through their computer terminals, charging by the
hour in both cases. Interestingly, LAN houses began to offer assistance with government
procedures, banking services (such as the payment of utility bills), searching for employ-
ment, and even partnered with local schools that lacked access to computers.
LAN houses illustrate new avenues for ICT4D, emerging spontaneously as people appro-
priate consumer technology in new and creative ways. They result from entrepreneurial
activities by and for the poor, expanding connectivity without direct government or donor
support. LAN houses began to face competition as smartphones and home computers
became more affordable, but they remained important public spaces for their communities,
acting as meeting places and offering services of interest. According to CETIC (2010) most
people use LAN houses to connect with other people, as the most popular uses include email
and communicating with friends and relatives. Other popular uses include leisure—playing
games and following sports—work, research, and searching for jobs.
As mentioned above, ICT4D debates often disregard the connections between work and
play. They assume ICTs must be used for “serious” content, directly related to top-down ini-
tiatives deemed important to the poor. Nevertheless, low-income populations have their
own ideas about how to use ICTs when they are deployed autonomously, driven by demand.
The poor use ICTs not only to access websites, but to connect with other people, which is
itself an important capability in the context of development.
Within a bottom-up approach to technology, LAN houses can act as a locus for the multi-
plication of initiatives. For instance, in Cidade de Deus—a slum in Rio de Janeiro during
2012—the “melhora comunidade” project created an online research tool for LAN house
owners, enabling a rapid feedback on public policies and to capture policy demands from the
population.5 The project spread widely through social networking among youth at the LAN
houses, and captured the youth perception of social changes and their demand for policies in
that particular community. The platform was developed in an open source format and could
be used and modified by anyone with some knowledge in programming in order to imple-
ment other surveys. Thus it is an example of the usage of open technologies with a clear
impact on the possibilities of scalability.
Tablets and Mobile Phones

A symbol of the first generation of ICT4D projects is the One Laptop per Child (OLPC),
championed by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. The project sought to
design and build a low-cost connected device—originally a laptop, and then a tablet—and
gather a number of governments to purchase them, so that the economies of scale would
bring down prices further. By 2011, over 2.4 million XO laptops had been supplied, which
while an impressive feat in itself, it remained modest compared to the potential population
of users. What kept the OLPC from reaching scale? One of the reasons is price. Originally
designed to cost US$100, by 2011 prices were still above US$200. Moreover the OLPC pur-
sued a top-down approach offering a single product for all users, and that product has expe-
rienced issues related to usability, technical support, security, content filtering, and privacy.
Lee Felsenstein, who played a lead role in developing the first mass-produced portable com-
puters, argues that OLPC design and distribution were disconnected from local needs.
Warschauer and Ames (2010) agree, noting that the production, distribution, and use of mil-
lions of educational computers must be sensitive to specific local demands. In sum, the
OLPC experience suggests that no one single technical solution is able to improve life in the
developing world. Instead different communities may adopt different mixes of technologies.
Indeed the late 2000s saw the emergence of a new generation of cheap ICT consumer
products without any state subsidies. While only a small percentage of the global population
can afford to buy top-tier globally-branded products, low-income populations are purchas-
ing cheaper ICT products, designed by less popular brands that cater to their needs and real-
ity. One example is low-cost tablets priced below US$70 that run on open-source operating
systems. Another example is low-cost smartphones with limited internet connection that
are sold for less than US$20. These affordable products are not merely copycats, but can con-
tain features valued by low-income consumers, such as built-in television and radio receiv-
ers. Others are capable of using multiple SIM cards simultaneously, allowing the user to
switch between phone carriers, thus enjoying price promotions, and selecting the carrier
with the cheapest price at a given moment. These are features highly valued by low-income
people, and are often missing both from top-tier consumer products and from top-down
ICT4D projects.
By designing products based on the preferences of poor populations, markets innovate
and tap into latent consumer demand. Increasingly the most effective products may be those
designed in the developing world itself, driven by users’ needs. This illustrates exciting pos-
sibilities for future work, based on cooperation between technology companies and innova-
tion centers in the developing world. Access to ICTs has increased dramatically, with 5.3
billion mobile phones by 2011, many of them in the hands of poor people. Yet this has hap-
pened not as a result of top-down ICT4D initiatives, but due to complex economic, govern-
ance, and regulatory forces. Given this access, and as the prices of consumer products
continues to decrease, new avenues open for ICT4D to examine how their use enhances
freedoms and creates a vibrant public sphere.
Impacts on Civic Life

Besides examples for narrowing the digital divide, there have been a series of ground-
breaking initiatives in the developing world that use ICTs to foster democracy and provide
access to public services, civic rights, and human rights which would have been difficult to
achieve without ICTs.
For instance, in late 2007, Kenya was drawn into a disastrous humanitarian crisis after
accusations of electoral manipulation. Ethnic-based violence erupted, resulting in the deaths
of over thirty unarmed civilians. The creative usage of the Internet was crucial in overcom-
ing this situation as civil society mobilized to produce a web platform called Ushahidi that
allowed the public to report the location of violence via email or mobile text messages. This
information was used to generate online maps of the unfolding crisis. Since then, such “activ-
ist mapping” has proved successful in tracking attacks on immigrants in South Africa, vio-
lence in eastern Congo, medicine shortages in East Africa, monitoring elections in India,
and distributing humanitarian aid in Haiti.
Web-based activism was also instrumental in Indian anti-corruption legislation, or the
Jan Lokpal bill. A broad social media response arose in support of a hunger strike by pro-
reform activist, Anna Hazare. From an initial 500,000 mentions through top social network-
ing sites, two days later this number had shot up to nine million. The resulting public pressure
forced the government to include civil society in redrafting the anti-corruption bill.
In Brazil, civil society mounted an online petition against draft legislation on cybercrime.
The “Mega Não” movement collected over 165,000 signatures and distributed information
on the threats it posed to privacy and internet freedom. This pressure resulted in the House
of Deputies delaying the bill and opening debate about which legislation would be most
appropriate for the country. Subsequently, a civil rights bill for the Internet, or Marco Civil da
Internet, was written based on principles contributed by the online public. The full text of
this new bill was open for line-by-line comment from the public. Related blog posts, tweets,
institutional and individual contributions, and published articles in the traditional media,
were all sent to the Ministry of Justice, and made available on the consultation website to
promote and enrich the online debate.6 The result was crowd-sourced legislation establish-
ing rights and obligations for the internet in Brazil.
While such initiatives are promising and only a few highlights among many others on the
go, they are threatened by other trends in internet policy and telecommunication regula-
tions, pointing to an important aspect to be incorporated into future debate.
Rights and Freedoms

According to Amartya Sen’s capability approach (1999) development means advancing
human well-being and freedom. Conversely, poverty is seen as a deprivation of basic capa-
bilities, rather than merely as low income. Thus, enhancing substantive freedoms and pro-
viding individuals with the capability of exercising choices is integral to development. The
examples previously mentioned, of new business models for addressing connectivity and
positive impacts of ICTs to civic life, show how the usage of ICTs can build capacities and
create societies where individual potential can be realized. Thus ICTs can have a positive
impact on development.
Sen’s approach also emphasizes the importance of political freedoms, economic facilities,
social opportunities, transparency, and other factors that allow individuals to make choices
free from the interference of others. As ICTs emerge, political debates concerning their use
and development has circled back somewhat to the initial debates of the 1990s, focusing on
policy proposals with international scope regarding network management, cybersecurity,
electronic commerce, and intellectual property rights. Emerging and developing economies
are therefore facing a double challenge: while they are constantly chasing affordable access to
telecom infrastructure, they also need to seek greater technical expertise so they could estab-
lish their own position in the global political debates regarding ICT policies. Approaches
taken in international forums can influence innovation and online freedoms, such as the
right to privacy, freedom of speech, and access to the network, potentially to the detriment of
using ICTs for development.
For instance, the Convention on Cybercrimes within the Council of Europe has already
become an instrument for political pressure to establish severe intermediary liability laws,
even over countries that are not signatories. Holding internet service providers liable for users’
content without safeguards means to establish arbitrary and non-transparent mechanisms to
filter, block, and remove content, sometimes taking down entire domains, interfering with the
internet’s end-to-end architecture. This Convention and other proposals have been used to
criminalize legitimate expressions and disconnect users on the pretext of preventing the
transmission of illegal information, copyright violations, drug trafficking, and cyber-attacks.
These debates on ICT policies are even reaching technical forums, with the same potential
to harm rights and freedoms. That was the case of the latest and very polemical meeting to
review the international telecommunications regulations (ITRs) at the World Conference
on International Telecommunications held in 2012. This meeting centered on debate over
the scope of the treaty, with some proponents arguing to expand the treaty to encompass
content issues, in addition to questions of network infrastructure. Content goes far beyond
the goal of the ITRs, envisioned to guarantee the interoperability of international telecom-
munication services. Additionally, the decision-making process within the International
Telecommunication Union is based on member states and does not enable a multi-
stakeholder debate. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, cautioned
“some attendees would push for a UN agency to ‘run the internet’ rather than leaving it to
groups already doing a good job.”7
During the conference, many member states pushed for debating issues of internet gov-
ernance, such as cybersecurity, under the new ITRs. Such an approach would disregard the
best practice fostered in other international forums that act according to a multi-stakeholder
approach, such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This is problematic in terms of procedure and
content. Mainly because proposals under debate were setting forward provisions that could
fragment the Internet and even justify blocking and filtering practices performed by author-
itarian governments, severely restricting freedom of expression and privacy rights. Fortu-
nately, these proposals did not move forward because of the strong opposition from
developed countries, such as the U.S. and the UK, interested in maintaining a free and open
market for their IT companies, yet citing human rights concerns to support their view. Ironi-
cally, these same countries push for the strong enforcement of intellectual property and
cybersecurity provisions in other forums and political contexts, such as the Budapest Con-
vention or bilateral trade agreements.
Such efforts can impose new regulations on ICTs in disregard to their potential contribu-
tion to development, as has already happened in the case of intellectual property. As Ha-Joon
Chang (2002) argues, there is a need for a greater awareness of history, as Western countries
themselves treated intellectual property less rigorously when they were at earlier stages of
their own development. Chang argues that almost all rich countries made use of subsidies
and tariff protection at some point to develop their industries. Developing countries may
benefit from other kinds of arrangements, with flexibility in intellectual property protection.
For instance, South Korea fostered a catching-up process that enabled the country to occupy
a prominent position in the world economy in part through reverse engineering of outside
technology. Developing countries advocate for ICT policies consistent with their stage of
development, as international decisions ultimately affect the potential for implementing and
scaling up ICT4D.
Access to Content
Once ICTs are deployed and the infrastructure is in place, there remains the question of what
content is available for access? The answer leads to consideration of the current state of the
intellectual property debate, and the different perspectives regarding access to knowledge.
An important milestone was the 2007 adoption of a Development Agenda in the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Initially proposed by Brazil and Argentina, the
original document argued that “intellectual property protection cannot be seen as an end in
itself, nor can the harmonization of intellectual property laws leading to higher protection
standards in all countries, irrespective of their levels of development.” The Development
Agenda consists of forty-five recommendations to the member states. Part of the Agenda
addresses technology transfer, ICTs and access to knowledge in the development context,
within which recommendation 27 calls for “facilitating intellectual property-related aspects
of ICT for growth and development.”
The Development Agenda represents a refocusing of the intellectual property debate,
from promoting stronger protection everywhere, to considering how the rules surrounding
intellectual property affect the incentives for local creativity. The World Trade Organization
agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) promotes the
former, with harmonization of intellectual property law. This approach has been critiqued as
ultimately promoting a flow of resources to developed countries, as a result of increased roy-
alty payments in regard to copyrights and patents. In contrast, the Development Agenda
seeks to promote a more balanced system, which requires proponents to demonstrate the
need for stronger intellectual property regimes. The issue has a direct impact on the lives of
underprivileged populations, as ICTs become more accessible, an unbalanced intellectual
property rights system can create new divides, this time in terms of access to content rather
than access to technology per se.
ICT4D increasingly looks to promote local content, and the infrastructure needed to
access that content. Developing countries pay higher prices for internet connection than
developed countries due to the costs of information exchange. Developing countries tend to
pull more content from abroad that they provide to the world, creating an imbalance in inter-
net traffic. Consequently local service providers tend to lack “peering” agreements that facil-
itate low-cost data exchange in developed countries. The smaller the customer base, the less
content developing countries create and host on local servers. In many cases, even the con-
tent created in the developing countries is hosted on the servers in a developed country. The
more a user in developing countries needs to access content hosted in North America,
Europe, or other developed regions, the more expensive internet access becomes locally.
Furthermore, access to broadband content, such as streaming videos or using social net-
works, is gaining traction and represents a growing share of the total internet traffic in devel-
oping countries. Therefore connection costs related to the exchange of traffic tend to increase.
This suggests a role for ICT4D to inform public policy through data-driven analysis of con-
tent demand on connectivity prices.
Privacy, Cybercrime, and Expression

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights ensure every citizen’s right to seek, receive, and impart information. Like-
wise, the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society8 addresses these rights, reaffirming a
“commitment to the freedom to seek, receive, impart and use information, in particular, for
the creation, accumulation and dissemination of knowledge.”
Freedom of expression relies on the free flow of information. Yet this flow is threatened by
well-intentioned efforts to address copyright infringement and the transmission of illegal
information (such as hate speech or child exploitation). Several governments have proposed
that internet intermediaries filter, block, or remove online content, deactivate users’ accounts,
and hand over their subscribers’ information. Draft legislation in the United States included
provisions to seize website domains while the UK Digital Economy Act included provisions
for blocking entire websites. In Europe, the Court of Justice ruled that an injunction issued
to an internet service provider to undertake filtering for potential copyright infringement
was not proportional and violated fundamental human rights.
Such subjects are also debated in developing countries. The challenge is to strike a balance
between security, privacy, and freedom of expression. In Venezuela, radio and television leg-
islation9 already restricted the broadcast of messages that “may constitute media manipula-
tions aimed at creating social unrest or disturbing public order.” Amendments proposed in
2010 would have further restricted access to websites that distributed messages or informa-
tion that sought to “discredit legitimately constituted authorities.” Congress proposed to cre-
ate a single access point to handle, and presumably monitor, all traffic originating in and sent
to Venezuela (Varon et al. 2012). Access providers would be required to establish mecha-
nisms capable of restricting the dissemination of messages, access to portals, and disclosure
of information related to the actions subject to the regulations. In Mexico, similar provisions
appeared in a bill that proposed to monitor and regulate the use of social networks in the
country. Under the draft legislation, the mere exchange of information that helps others vio-
late the law would be considered a crime. Proponents sought to create an online police force
to monitor and hamper drug cartels using the net. Yet the Mexican public feared the pro-
posed law would merely lead to increased government surveillance. In Colombia, draft leg-
islation to regulate the Internet would allow service providers to remove or block access to
content preventively in the event someone claimed that such content violated copyright.
These and other efforts to police the Internet pose serious threats to citizens’ rights of privacy
and freedom of expression. Thus ICT4D is increasingly interrelated to issues of internet
governance.
Prospective Paths for ICT4D
The past decade has been marked by unrealistic expectations that ICTs offered automatic
gains in all sectors, from e-government and e-health, to telework and distance education.
Technology does not automatically result in development. Instead results emerge with a fine
tuning of implementation and building a local capacity that sees ICTs not as “taken for
granted” products, but as the infrastructure for other services. In this sense, the choices
made at an early stage, and the regulatory framework, do matter. Certain regulatory
frameworks can lead to market entrenchment and reduced competition, saddling countries
with specific—soon outdated—technologies. In contrast, the right mix of policy and market
forces can foster a flexible environment open to future technologies.
In the coming years, ICT4D is likely to move from the theoretical perspective that
dominated the last decade to a more positive perspective based on real-world experience
(Heffernan et al. 2012). Considering that ICTs are a reality for many low-income popula-
tions, it is important to evaluate their impact. Such evaluations will prove more valuable
if it leaves behind the controlled context of ICT4D projects, and explores spontaneous
use by the poor, in an open and uncontrolled context. Thus, a path forward for ICT4D is
to focus on the conditions that enable such adoption. Governments, non-government
organizations and donor agencies create incentives for ICT design and adoption and
these must be grounded in local needs and reality. However, there are new obstacles
ahead. In spite of the importance of ICTs to promote positive externalities, lower transac-
tion costs, provide new ways for people to live, work, foster political organization, and
pursue democracy, the last few years has seen an increase in ICTs being used as a form of
political repression, manipulation, and control. Practices such as internet filtering and
surveillance are a growing concern in developing countries where basic civil rights may
be weak or seldom enforced.
Therefore, besides encouraging ongoing local experimentation, a good ICT policy will
help support fundamental internet principles in order to maintain an innovation friendly
environment in the web and respect users’ rights. These become important tasks of ICT4D
when market forces have provided universal access. Developing countries in particular stand
to gain much from the implementation of principles such as net neutrality,10 from fostering a
free and open source software market, pursuing balanced intellectual property regimes,
open licensing, and general-purpose computing.
Accordingly, moving forward, ICT4D must address the following issues directly con-
nected with the idea of development in a broader sense:
Impact assessment—As noted by Richard Heeks (2010), the emphasis in the ICT4D litera-
ture has shifted from “readiness” to “impact.” Another aspect of the move towards impact is
that ICTs, especially mobile phones, are now readily available in many developing countries
encompassing a significant proportion of low-income populations. Accordingly, further
research about impact assessment can take place from a practical perspective, under real-
world conditions, rather than from a theoretical project perspective. ICTs affect a much
broader group than those who are directly connected through them. Positive impacts include
entrepreneurship and job creation, as well as a vibrant public sphere and greater social con-
nection. This broader perspective on the impacts of ICTs reflects the findings by Jensen
(2007) that South Indian fishermen benefit from the presence of mobile phones, even when
they personally did not own one.
Policy-making after access—What next for ICT4D when the technologies have become
available to most people? Market forces can play a significant role in expanding access, at
times aided by efforts to encourage local design efforts, such as the Aakash tablet in India,
that take into consideration the local infrastructure and needs. This suggests a role for
developing countries in fostering a diversity of solutions rather than a one-size-fits-all
approach. Furthermore, intellectual property rights will play a significant role in a world
where ICTs become accessible to the poor. The Development Agenda at WIPO has initi-
ated new debate about the links between intellectual property regimes, ICTs, and develop-
ment. Arguments in favor of more balanced intellectual property regimes gain new
importance, given that much of the positive impact expected from ICTs lies in the promise
of facilitating access to knowledge and information. Investigating new opportunities for
development at the intersection of ICTs and intellectual property is one of the tasks for
ICT4D in the years to come.
Infrastructure and governance—ICT4D needs to examine policy for net neutrality, infra-
structure governance, and content. Depending on how infrastructure is governed and regu-
lated, it can result in higher costs of data exchange. New efforts might promote local content
and servers, rather than relying on those located in developed countries. Similarly there are
opportunities for optimizing network architecture so local users do not rely on internet
exchange points (IXPs) located in developed countries.
Freedom, privacy, and filtering—With the spread of ICTs in developing countries, includ-
ing mobile phone networks, cybercafés, computers, and tablets, the threat of ICTs being used
for surveillance is real. Accordingly, ICT4D is increasingly concerned not with the issue of
access, but with the concrete and direct impact of ICTs in promoting local development. The
Arab Spring is only a recent demonstration of the impact of ICTs in political movements and
public participation. Long discussed in theory, proposals for using ICTs to improve repre-
sentative democracy are increasingly applied in practice. Examples include the use of social
networks in the debates for a new constitution in Iceland, and crowd-sourced legislation in
Brazil. The misuse of ICTs for the purposes of political persecution, surveillance, and limit-
ing speech deviate from this goal.
Notes
1. The policy debate began in the earlier 1990s; the G7 became the G8 in 1997 with the addi-
tion of Russia to the group.
2. <www.unicttf.org/about/>.
3. Helmore and McKie (2000).
4. LAN stands for Local Area Network.
5. Accessible at <http://www.melhoracomunidade.com.br>.
6. <http://culturadigital.br/marcocivil/>.
7. <www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20594779>.
8. The Tunis Agenda was a consensus statement drafted at the World Summit on the Infor-
mation Society in 2005. The document also called for the creation of the Internet Govern-
ance Forum and a new multi-stakeholder governance structure for the Internet.

9. Ley de Responsabilidad Social en Radio y Televisión.
10. According to Tim Wu, professor at Columbia University that popularized a proposal for
a rule on net neutrality: “Network neutrality is best defined as a network design princi-
ple. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all
content, sites, and platforms equally.”
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pa rt 3
E X PE R I E NC E S
Geographic Diversity
Development is ultimately about what actually happens to people and places. Having cov-
ered theories and approaches to development, and its key constituent concepts, we now turn
to the experiences of selected countries and regions. In doing so, dilemmas abound. Regions
(that is, collections of contiguous countries) harbor a variety of structures and cultures, while
some countries are “regions” in themselves. And what of countries that were once develop-
ing, like the UK and Germany? In keeping with the post-war orientation of this volume, the
truly historical episodes of development have been excluded from detailed treatment in this
section. Instead, reference is made in other chapters in this book to the historical experience
of the industrial revolution and after, to the extent that it helps illustrate a point being made
about the contemporary development discourse.
We are mindful of the artifact of the nation-state. It is only one of several “cuts” that might
be made to understand development. Part 2 of this volume covers one such cut, by sector and
concept. The section that follows this one covers actors in development. Countries and regions
are a central manner in which we understand development. Three broad categories are cov-
ered in this section—countries deemed to be successful developers (East Asia and Chile);
countries where the lack of adequate development is a puzzle (the Middle East and sub-Saharan
Africa); and countries too big to not be studied (Brazil, China, India, and South Africa).
This form of organization prompts a reflection on national identity and the development
experience. The emergence of cross-regional groupings like the BRICs and the G20 has
encouraged us all to think about the world in non-traditional ways. The jury is out on
whether either of these groups will have a lasting effect on national or global policy making
but the broader point that country experiences need not mirror that of the average of the
region in which it is situated is an important one often forgotten in the development field,
particularly among funders and lenders. It seems intuitively apparent that Chile and South
Africa, for example, have about as much in common in terms of their recent history and
632 geographic diversity
f undamentals as they do with their neighbors. Some sub-Saharan African countries might
fit the analysis used to understand oil-rich Middle Eastern states, and not all countries in the
Middle East are oil-rich.
A focus on the country and region also highlights an important theme running through-
out this volume, the importance of history, politics, society, and economics, jointly, in
understanding development. This section of the book harks back to the debates some years
ago around “area studies” in many universities and think tanks. On the one hand, it should
be self-evident that every country and region has its own particular identity shaped by his-
tory and culture, and therefore it should be studied on its own terms. On the other hand,
rational choice theory attributes a core common set of values and motivations to individu-
als and policy-makers.1 What country experiences demonstrate is that even with rational
behavior, initial conditions and shocks to the system vary so much across countries that the
final outcome is seldom pre-ordained, much less predictable from study of a seemingly
similar episode elsewhere. Rather, we must be content enquiring into conundra (such as
the curse of mineral wealth) that seem to repeat themselves, and the broad lessons that the
answers might contain. Staying with the example of the curse of mineral wealth, is the
answer to corruption in government a fund containing the proceeds of the sale of minerals,
run with significant levels of external oversight? In all corrupt countries? For all sorts of
mineral wealth? For how long?
Organization of this Section
This section starts with an examination by Simon S. C. Tay (Chapter 37) of the East Asian
experience. Widely dubbed a “miracle,” the experience is just as widely critiqued for not
being applicable elsewhere in the world, and for the over-statement of the achievements and
down-playing of the negatives. There is no ex ante reason to have assumed, say in 1950, that
this is the region that would grow the fastest. The countries in it are natural resource-poor,
distant from Western markets, multi-ethnic and (with the exception of Korea) tropical. Like
the proverbial blind men feeling an elephant, outside observers have mostly drawn lessons
that feed into their pre-conceived notions of the role of the State, markets, and democracy.
Tay allows that this will always remain contested territory. Although he does not say as much,
with this degree of uncertainty about what happened and why, it follows that lessons for
other parts of the world should be drawn with great care if at all. Instead, Tay argues for the
pragmatic nature of governance and resilience of systems in the region. As a result, the region
weathered the financial crisis of 1997 with aplomb, and has chosen to strengthen regional
cooperation as a result. The current global crisis, when global value chains are much more
entrenched than they were even in 1997, poses another test to the Asian model, as do other of
its consequences that will inevitably kick in as incomes grow—the quality of the environ-
ment (and awareness of and demand among residents for higher quality), inequality, and
more responsive forms of government.
Starting with a lower base of standards of living and at a more recent time (the late 1970s
as opposed to East Asia’s 1950s), China’s development experience appears to follow an
“Asian” pattern. Xue Lan and Ling Chen (Chapter 38) show that after the centralized and
experiences 633
ideology-focused era that ended in 1978, China’s development policies have been pragmatic
ones, leading to both spectacular success in reducing income poverty and troubling social
and environmental outcomes. How the political system reacts to this and changes as a result
is also open to conjecture. The emergence of a “Beijing Consensus” and China’s role on the
world stage has yet to unfold. If ever there were a story “to be continued,” China is it.
Renato Galvão Flôres (Chapter 39) describes eighty years of Brazilian history, covering three
periods: the first beginning in 1930 with Getúlio Vargas, the second in 1964 with the military
coup, and the third in 1985 with the return to civilian rule. Specific attention is paid to the admin-
istrations of Collor–Itamar and the Cardoso–Lula, as both periods represented substantial
shifts in government priorities. What emerges is not so much an intentional, long-term pursuit
of development, but rather a succession of measures intended to solve specific short-term prob-
lems, such as: increasing exports, improving the balance of trade, controlling public debt, fight-
ing inflation, enhancing industrial productivity, and reducing poverty and inequality.
If the East Asian countries represent a form of success that might not be easily replicated
elsewhere in the world, might Chile provide a model more amenable to follow? Ernesto
Ottone and Carlos Vergara (Chapter 40) describe the social democratic path that Chile has
followed since emerging from dictatorship in 1990. Like the case of South Africa detailed by
Mthuli Ncube, Abebe Shimeles, and Audrey Verdier-Chouchane (Chapter 41), the story is
one of explicit attempts to enhance growth with equity while locking in freedom and democ-
racy. The irony is that in each case the social and economic policies that were implemented,
while contentious in terms of their costs and benefits, have still resulted in widening ineq-
uity. But as the authors suggest, the counter-factual might have resulted in worse outcomes,
and almost certainly jeopardized the emergent democratic state. If the Washington Consen-
sus is not being replaced by a Beijing Consensus, it is because of the existence of several
models of mixed success, of which Chile and South Africa are a part.
An Indian model might not be far behind. After over four decades of a Hindu growth rate
(3.5 percent in the aggregate, 1.3 percent per capita) the reforms triggered by the economic
crisis of 1991 eventually generated “India Shining” rates of growth where a decline to 6 percent
in 2011 is seen as a slowdown. But poverty and other social indicators have not improved as
expected, and inequality of all sorts has increased. Devesh Kapur (Chapter 42) places the
burden of performance entirely on its public institutions. If these do not rise to the challenge
of meeting the expectations of the poor and recently poor, then its famed democracy will
have failed a key test, the provision of good governance.
The East Asian miracle and “India Shining” have given way to a new phrase heard
increasingly in global policy circles, that of Africa Rising. Olu Ajakaiye and Afeikhena
Jerome (Chapter 43) cover the large and diverse region of sub-Saharan Africa. They con-
firm the platform on which a renaissance is occurring—abundant natural resources, more
democracies than ever before, less civil conflict, smarter governments, and the existence of
local role models to complement and temper the abundant external advice the continent
has received. But the authors’ cautions are noteworthy. Growth has not been accompanied
by a diversification of the economic structure; it is still (therefore) driven by primary com-
modity exports. Patterns of employment are accordingly narrow, and sub-Saharan Africa
as a whole is unlikely to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. But the chapter ends
on an appropriately hopeful note. The conditions for sustained growth and development
are stronger now than they ever have been in the post-independence era. If government
structures are agile, then Africa will continue its rise.
634 geographic diversity
The final chapter in this section by Ahmed Galal and Hoda Selim (Chapter 44) addresses
development in the Arab region. Although the most obvious dichotomy here is between
the oil-rich states and the others, their core thesis is that both groups of countries suffer a
common set of problems rooted in poor political institutions which pre-date the discovery
of oil. Given their circumstances, the non-oil countries’ governments have performed
better than those of the oil-rich countries. But neither group may be termed success
stories. The Arab Spring might change this dynamic but at the time of writing it is not clear
how the interplay between the traditional (if deposed) elites, the Islamic parties, and the
secularists will turn out.
Note
1. For basic treatments of the approach see Michael Allingham (2002), Choice Theory, A
Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, and Kenneth J. Arrow’s entry
on “Economic Theory and the Hypothesis of Rationality” in The New Palgrave: A Diction-
ary of Economics (1987), London: Palgrave Macmillan.
chapter 37
th e asi a n model of
dev el opm en t: from cr ise s
to tr a nsfor m ation
simon s. c. tay
Introduction
The rise of Asia has captured the imagination of policy-makers, businesses, and the public
around the world. Even after 2008, in the wake of the global financial crisis, the region has
largely continued to grow despite the downturn in Europe and the United States. This phe-
nomenon of growth has driven the search for explanatory theories, as well as prescriptions
for policies to foster development in other developing regions with slower or non-existent
growth. In this context, some Asians have allowed pride in their progress to swell to asser-
tions that Asia’s rise is predestined and irresistible, and that the region will go on to quite
rapidly surpass the West. The claim is based not only on current trajectories of continuing
growth in the region; there is also talk about millennia of Asian history and civilization sug-
gesting an inevitable rebalancing of the global system. In this view, the modern period of
European colonialism is something of an aberration that temporarily shackled Asia and
placed even the giants of China and India on the sidelines.
This chapter is founded on significantly different premises. While I join many in believing
that Asia has shown real progress from the Second World War to the present, markedly in
the fifteen years after 1997, this chapter seeks to critically evaluate the idea of the Asian model
of development, the ways that this model might seem to differ from others, and then con-
sider its omissions and further development needs. In this regard, this chapter approaches
with skepticism the idea that Asia’s rise is somehow predestined. The chapter reviews the
developmental experience in Asia, especially the “tiger” economies, and considers periods
of crisis, specifically the 1997–8 Asian crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis. It then con-
siders the patterns of development that are emerging in the wake of the crisis, as Asia seeks
ways to sustain growth and deal with social, institutional, and other challenges to its further
progress. These include the efforts to increase and deepen Asian regional economic and
financial cooperation.
636 simon s. c. tay
The chapter suggests that while its precise content remains contested, an Asian model of
development has informed debate about government policy. This chapter argues that in
response to the 1997–8 Asian crisis, Asian governments effectively upgraded and changed
this first Asian model not only by focusing on national level reforms, but by expending con-
siderable efforts to build intra-Asian economic interdependence and a wider sense of region-
alism. However, this post-crisis Asian model of development and regionalism is now under
stress following the global financial crisis, and for both internal and external reasons it must
again transform itself. There are consistent questions about the role of the state and markets,
and the degree of openness and liberalization that have fostered growth and development. In
some ways, this can be seen as a philological discussion about liberalization, both economi-
cally and in systems of governance.
The Rise of Asia
The so-called “tiger” economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, while
different from each other and from others in Asia, were an early exemplar of Asia’s rise in
challenging the starkly state-centric and state-controlled systems at the time. The examples
provided by these “tiger” economies have played a role in re-thinking and re-directing eco-
nomic opening efforts across Asia, especially in China, across Southeast Asia, and to some
degree in India.
From this perspective, what may be called the Asian model of development is not millen-
nia old but has emerged in the last two to three decades. It is not historically preordained but
rather is dependent on policy and actions by government, corporations, and others. Asia’s
model of development has been re-prioritized and re-shaped in the face of geopolitical and
geo-economic events; it has been pragmatic, rather than based on a fixed and unchanging
ideology.
Asia’s economic rise has already gone through a number of challenges and changes, espe-
cially the regional crisis of 1997–8. It is also coming to a juncture of further transformation,
driven not only by economic exigencies in the wake of the global financial crisis, but also by
social and political factors arising from the region’s rise. These have affected what we may
identify as the Asian model of development: not only the practices and policies of develop-
ment, but also the theory of what elements constitute and measure development, the role of
the state in development, and the resilience and sustainability of Asia’s rise.
Discussing an Asian model is significant not only to Asians, but to emerging economies in
other regions. Proponents of Asian development inevitably differentiate it from the model of
Western development, which has been increasingly questioned in the wake of the global
financial crisis.
Post Global Financial Crisis

The crisis that began at the end of 2008 in the United States had global implications. The
aftermath of the crisis continues to impact growth and amplify social and political tensions
in the U.S. and Europe, as witnessed in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and protests
against austerity measures in several countries. Asia has not been unaffected, but most Asian
the asian model of development: from crises to transformation 637
economies have continued to grow even as growth rates in the United States and Europe
have slowed or even reversed.
When markets first slumped in 2008, Beijing was alarmed by the potential drop in trade
due to reduced demand from the West. But China’s GDP growth still reached 9.6 percent in
2008, and has remained around that point since (World Bank 2012). Similarly, although
India’s GDP growth rate slid to 4.9 percent in 2008, by 2009 the country’s growth had
recovered to around the 9 percent mark. The story of growth amidst the global crisis has
raised Indonesia to prominence. In recent years, Indonesia’s annual GDP growth has
remained stable around the 6 percent mark, only slipping to 4.6 percent in 2009 before
returning to previous levels. Notably, Indonesia’s economic performance was relatively unaf-
fected by Europe’s sovereign debt crisis in 2011, thanks to strong domestic consumption
combined with macro-economic stability and booms in commodity and resource exports.
Some smaller Asian economies also continued to do well. Bangladesh has shed long-held
stereotypes to emerge as one of Asia’s fastest growing economies, maintaining an annual
GDP growth rate of around 6 percent throughout this period. Cambodia’s economy has been
similarly impressive.
Other Asians, including Japan, South Korea, and some countries in the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have been more seriously affected by the global down-
turn. According to World Bank data, Thailand’s GDP growth rate dropped from 5 percent in
2007 to 2.5 percent in 2008, while Singapore’s GDP growth rate fell from 9.0 percent in 2007
to 1.7 percent in 2008. That said, most of these economies had largely recovered by 2010,
thanks to links with others in Asia, especially China.
From these facts, several questions arise about future development. Will Asia’s rise con-
tinue, and will the main drivers originate within its own region rather than in Western and
global markets? Will Asia rise to overtake the West and usurp its position in the global order?
Are there key elements in the rise of Asia that should be better integrated into our ideas
about how countries develop, and our definitions of what constitutes “development?”
Former Singaporean ambassador Kishore Mahbubani is one of the key proponents of the
“Asian rise” school of thought. Having earlier championed the “Asian Values” debate in the
1990s, he asserts in his 2008 book, The New Asian Hemisphere, that in the wake of the 2008
global financial crisis the West will have to give up its domination of global institutions like
the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: “Any illusion that the Western econo-
mies are better prepared to handle great crises has vanished. This, in turn, has accelerated the
end of the Western domination of world history” (Mahbubani 2008: xi).
At the other end of the scale, there are some who anticipate that Asia’s rise will end,
whether gradually in what many call the “Middle Income Country” trap, or else precipitately
as countries collapse. The predicted factors are often economic mismanagement with under-
lying politics and governance malfeasance. American commentator Gordon Chang, author
of The Coming Collapse of China (2001), predicts that worsening demographics and rising
wages will make China uncompetitive, and popular uprisings coupled with a weakening Com-
munist Party will bring the country down in the near term (Chang 2011).
Along the spectrum of discussion between seeing Asia’s irresistible rise and its impending
collapse, there are many other positions. Most recognize the rise of Asia, but some believe
the U.S. will remain ahead for the foreseeable future. Two such authors are Fareed Zakaria in
The Post-American World (2008) and Parag Khanna in The Second World: Empires and Influ-
ence in the New Global Order (2008). My own book, Asia Alone: The Dangerous Post-Crisis
638 simon s. c. tay
Divide from America (Tay 2010), takes Asia’s rise to be real and substantial. However, it is
questionable whether there has been an irresistible shift of power from the West to Asia.
I also recognize that there are many challenges to this process, and it is not assured that
Asian governments will always make the right decisions and changes, so there will be ebbs
and flows, and indeed plateaus and backsliding.
This chapter argues that Asia’s current rise must address economic, socio-political, and
environmental challenges if it is to be sustained. Recognizing the challenges tempers the
urge to see Asia’s development as predestined or smooth. Rather, we should recognize that
Asia’s future, even if on a good trajectory, will be a period of change with both positive and
negative dimensions. Perhaps the best place to start this argument is not at the global finan-
cial crisis of 2008 but at the preceding crisis of 1997.
Rise 2.0: From Miracle to Crisis and Back Again

The devaluation of the Thai baht in July 1997 triggered similar, competitive devaluations in
several other Asian economies. The problems quickly spilled over from the financial sector
to the real economy and then to the political dimension. The starkest example of this was the
downfall of Suharto’s government in Indonesia. It is humbling to re-read literature about the
region from before the 1997–8 Asian crisis. Humility is due from the Asians who touted their
own system and provocatively suggested that their models of soft authoritarian
government—based on “Asian values”—were better than those of the West. Clearly those
views were devalued together with their currencies. Similar humility must be sought from
international bodies and non-Asians who did not detect the crisis.
Prior to 1997, the rapid industrialization of Asia was viewed as a blueprint for other devel-
oping countries. On closer examination, there were as many differences in East Asian econo-
mies as there were similarities. Nevertheless, much of the literature in this period espoused
an East Asian model. In 1993, the World Bank released The East Asian Miracle, identifying
eight high-performing Asian economies: Japan; the four newly industrialized countries
(NICs) of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore; and the three second-genera-
tion Southeast Asian NICs of Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. The World Bank praised
these countries as models of neo-liberal development, though even at the time, critics ques-
tioned this characterization of Asian economies. Many industries in Asia were supported by
heavy government intervention, public ownership of banking and industry, high levels of
domestic tariff and non-tariff barriers, patent and copyright infringements, and other poli-
cies at odds with the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank.
One influential book of this period was Robert Wade’s Governing the Market: Economic
Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (1990), which offers a dif-
ferent view. Wade describes the economic success of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong
Kong, and Singapore by what he refers to as Governed Market theory. This combines strong
government control with market elements, and encourages capital accumulation and invest-
ment through state intervention, such as redistribution of land, controls on domestic and
cross-border credit, and stabilization of exchange and interest rates. The state also promotes
exports by providing assistance to domestic industries, encouraging technology acquisition,
and modulating the impact of foreign competition.
Wade (1990) acknowledged that history, geography, and other specific circumstances
contributed to the success of such strategies in East Asia, but he argued that the Asian
example of exercising tight control over trade and finance through government policy was a
better strategy for developing countries to follow, rather than adopting ad hoc liberalization.
However, the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis dealt a strong blow to benign views about the role
of the state in development. In the calls against “crony capitalism,” government intervention
and protectionism in Asia were discredited as negative, rent-seeking behavior. The Governed
Market model was re-evaluated as little more than statism. After 1997, development ortho-
doxy became pessimistic regarding the East Asian “developmental state.” The neo-liberal
model prevailed, and a number of previously successful Asian countries had to accept IMF
recommendations and economic reforms.
In the years since the Asian financial crisis, some theorists have argued that Asian govern-
ments were not to blame for the region’s troubles. Rather than the crisis being caused by a
failure to follow neo-liberal prescriptions, some blame neo-liberalism itself for harming
Asian economies, for instance by applying too much pressure to rapidly liberalize capital
flows. But in the immediate aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, most accepted the dogma
of the Washington Consensus (Rodrik 2001). However, from 1997 to 2008, Asia managed to
recover from the downturn and grew strongly, outstripping Western growth rates (albeit
from a lower starting base). This growth included not only the so-called Asian miracle states
and China (which had stood outside of the Asian crisis), but also India as a large new factor
with its own impressive rates of growth, and countries such as Bangladesh and Mongolia.
These strong and widening patterns of economic growth have reinforced the sentiment
among many that there is something special about Asia. Nonetheless, there have been shifts
from the pre-Asian crisis paradigms and regional patterns. The pre-crisis Asian model has
often been likened to a “flying geese” pattern, with Japan in the front, followed by the “tiger”
economies in the second row. The post-crisis Asian model has focused on China as an emerg-
ing center for region-wide trade and investment, and includes many more economies,
making it less symmetrical, more diffuse, and less certain.
Although Asian countries began trading more with each other following the 1997 crisis,
exports to the West and Japan were also important to recovery. According to the ASEAN
Secretariat, total exports of countries in the ten-member group regained an upward trend
within two years after the financial crisis in 1997, reaching a peak in 2000 when ASEAN’s
total exports were valued at $408 billion, based largely on trade links with the U.S., Europe,
and Japan (ASEAN 2010).
Globalization allowed firms to move more of their production to Asia and source more
parts of their supply chain from Asian producers. This effectively created a pan-Asian pro-
duction base, centered on China but with inputs from many other countries before final
assembly and shipment from China to developed countries. Underlying this, a system arose
that underwrote the deficits of the U.S. from the surpluses of Asia. Chinese, Japanese, and
other Asians bought U.S. treasury bonds, which helped ease credit and feed American
growth up to 2008.
Thus neo-liberal medicines were taken, but the state hand in Asia did not disappear entirely.
The state role in the economy is overt in China. Through holding companies, state-owned but
market-responsive and often listed companies are major engines in the economies of Singa-
pore and Malaysia. Influential and powerful elites figure in the economies of Thailand, India,
and Indonesia. There have been changes—for instance, efforts to clean up corruption and the
640 simon s. c. tay
worst practices of crony capitalism in South Korea—but in many countries the relationship
between government and corporate elites remains intact. Wade’s (1990) analysis of a “gov-
erned markets” approach has not been explicitly reinstated. Yet while the role of the state is
under greater market discipline and under increased scrutiny given new norms, that role has
persisted. Moreover, the legitimization of that role is evident in how many Asian governments
have utilized various macro- and micro-policy tools to restart growth post-1997, allowing
many to stave off collapse in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Another understated aspect of current thinking about Asian growth is the degree to which
values and culture can be said to play a part. There has been no widespread revival of “Asian
values” in the sense the term was first used in the early 1990s. But the Asian rise school has
gone beyond mere confidence to near hubris. Some commentators criticize the West for hav-
ing come to this point of crisis, and also allege hypocrisy in the differences in the IMF’s
response to the Eurozone crisis compared to the earlier 1997–8 Asian crisis.
Less International, More Regional

From this perspective, something (though not much) changed in the Asian model of devel-
opment between 1997 and 2008. Beneath the mantle of the Washington Consensus and
neo-liberalism, more markets were opened, but the role of the state and the underlying polit-
ical economy continued to have many differences from the Western system. Moreover, the
export-led nature of growth continued. The financial crisis that began in the West in late
2008 was followed in 2011 by sovereign debt problems in the Eurozone. In 2011, many Euro-
peans hoped that Asians would mobilize their considerable reserves to buy European bonds
and open up to investments. The Asian response was less than forthcoming, with then Chi-
nese Premier Wen Jiabao saying European “countries must first put their own house in
order” and not rely on Asia (Lim 2011). However, Asia is not unaffected by troubles in West-
ern economies. Asia probably has enough momentum and regional drivers to ride out slow
growth in the West, but prolonged and deeper recession in the West holds substantial risks
for Asia. Falling exports to the West could force firms in Asia to cut jobs and capital expendi-
ture. This could then combine negatively with falling asset prices and capital outflows.
The events of 2008 and 2011 prove Asians cannot rely on traditional Western markets as a
destination for Asian exports. Instead, Asian countries must rebalance export-driven growth
with domestic demand-led growth. Boosting Asian demand will make growth more self-
sustaining. The painful experience of the 1997–8 Asian financial crisis also taught Asian
countries to build their own barriers to withstand financial stress, rather than relying solely
on multilateral institutions. Many Asians do not view the IMF favorably, associating it with
the harsh reforms imposed after 1997, measures that are now viewed as being more harmful
than beneficial. Asians are also conscious of the fact that their current vote share in the IMF
does not fully reflect their economic strength; the IMF’s governance system, quotas, voting
rights, and procedures have changed little since its establishment in 1944. Recent calls to
reform the Bretton Woods Institutions reflect a period of change in the global system. The
trend is for emerging economies to seek representation in these international institutions,
aiming to influence policies in the IMF and World Bank, rather than be merely passively
impacted. There will be contestation over the future roles for these global financial institu-
tions, and the question of who leads them will be a rallying point.
But this transition in global multilateral arrangements has not been the main focus for
Asians. Instead, Asians have tended to work out cooperation at the regional rather than glo-
bal level. One example of such a regional mechanism is the Chiang Mai Initiative, a multilat-
eral currency swap arrangement among ASEAN + 3, consisting of the ten ASEAN members
plus China, Japan, and South Korea. The initiative grew from a series of bilateral swap
arrangements and was formalized in 2010 with a foreign exchange reserves pool worth $120
billion, accessible by participating central banks to counter financial shocks. In 2012, coun-
tries agreed to expand the pool to $240 billion. An independent surveillance unit under the
Chiang Mai Initiative, the ASEAN + 3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), was also
created in 2012 to monitor the economic situations of countries in the grouping, and is tasked
with providing objective assessments and recommendations in the event a country requests
a currency swap.
This regional architecture remains relatively new and untested, but it demonstrates how
Asians have taken steps to greatly strengthen their own capacity to prevent or manage future
financial crises. It is notable that China and Japan have come to a kind of working compact.
After some debate, the funding for the Chiang Mai Initiative has been shared between the
two giants, with South Korea and ASEAN assuming smaller shares. In the symbolically
important question of the leadership of AMRO, China and Japan have also accepted a com-
promise to share the appointment for the first three-year term.
In trade, a number of agreements have been reached amongst Asians. For instance, the
ASEAN–China Free Trade Area (ACFTA), which came into effect in January 2010, is the
world’s largest Free Trade Area by population size. Following the 2008 global financial crisis,
trade with China made up 11.6 percent of ASEAN’s total trade in 2009, up from just 3.5 per-
cent in 1998 during the Asian financial crisis. ASEAN–China trade is rapidly growing, and
talks have begun for an ASEAN-Hong Kong FTA. Other trade agreements also link ASEAN
to its other major partners besides China—Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, and New
Zealand (the ASEAN + 6 grouping). However, Northeast Asians—China, Japan, and South
Korea—lack agreements among themselves, despite the considerable volume of trade
between them and the depth of their real economic integration. There has been talk of a tri-
lateral Northeast Asian FTA, but this has not yet materialized. Moreover, Asia has yet to
reach an agreement to cover the entire Asia-Pacific region. ASEAN has proposed a Regional
Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) at the ASEAN + 6 level, but talks are still in
their early stages.
It is significant that much of these concerted efforts to institutionalize regional interde-
pendence is centered on ASEAN, a grouping of ten small to medium-sized states (with the
exception of Indonesia, which is a G20 member). This is counter-intuitive, as ASEAN is
neither a major political-security power nor a large single economy. Yet in many ways
ASEAN’s centrality in Asian regionalism is not in spite of these limits but because of them.
Given differences among other Asian powers (especially in Sino-Japanese relations, but
also Sino-Indian), ASEAN provides neutral non-threatening diplomacy to increase
exchange and develop trust. As a group, the ten ASEAN member states have developed
norms and practices for dialogue and cooperation that have been useful in the broader
regional context.
Yet ASEAN-led regionalism in Asia faces many limits. Looking at the many FTAs in
Asia, studies suggest that the actual utilization rates of ASEAN’s FTAs have lagged signifi-
cantly compared to the utilization of FTAs in other regions, such as the North American
642 simon s. c. tay
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). One reason cited is that the administrative costs of using
FTAs in ASEAN are high, for instance because of cumbersome procedures for obtaining a
certificate of origin (Hayakawa et al. 2009). Therefore, some critics have denigrated
ASEAN-led agreements as mainly political. Similar concerns are leveled at ASEAN’s tar-
get of creating an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), which aims to make the group-
ing a single market and production base by 2015. Many question whether ASEAN can
achieve its integration targets in the specified timeframe, given that the grouping has
already experienced delays in ratification of ASEAN-wide agreements and putting them
into practice in national law.
To be fair, ASEAN countries have signed a wide range of agreements covering various
aspects of integration and connectivity, from customs facilitation to Mutual Recognition
Agreements (MRAs) on the flow of services and skilled labor. Infrastructure development
has received particular attention. Under the ASEAN Plan of Action on Energy Cooperation
(APAEC) 2010–2015, ASEAN has made considerable progress in connecting sub-regional
electricity grids with the eventual aim of unifying the region in an ASEAN Power Grid. Plans
are also in the works for a Trans-ASEAN Gas Pipeline, with cooperation also focusing on
areas such as renewable energy. Such efforts can be seen as modest but incremental steps
toward a new regional economy. The ASEAN Secretariat has also consistently recommended
increased engagement with the private sector to encourage the goals of integration and con-
nectivity. However, private firms are unlikely to treat ASEAN as a single entity or market
until the right policies and legislation are put in place, with proper enforcement to make
doing business consistent and predictable.
Thus, while Asians have generally put more effort and reliance into regional (rather than
global) institutions, these institutions remain quite rudimentary, without a strong and
permanent institutionalization or clear and autonomous powers.
A New Agenda?
In the argument of this chapter thus far, the so-called Asian model of development has
changed somewhat in the wake of the Asian crisis. In some respects, like the role of the State,
pre-crisis elements have persisted. In others, like the role of China and the emergence of
regional institutions, new factors are to be noted. Yet even as the region has been relatively
less affected by the global financial crisis, Asians are now re-thinking their model of develop-
ment for the future. Consensus is indeed emerging that this model needs to be transformed
and the nature and scale of these changes potentially go further than anything seen in the
wake of the Asian crisis.
The changes that many now prescribe for Asian development relate to: (1) growing inter-
nal and intra-Asian demand; (2) ensuring environmental and social sustainability; (3) deal-
ing with demographic trends and migration; (4) increasing intra-Asian investment; (5)
addressing inequality; (6) exploring new markets; and (7) facilitating regionalism. These
areas will be discussed in the following sub-sections.
Internal and Intra-Asian Demand

Many Asians acknowledge that the region must grow its own intra-Asian market and
encourage internal demand. Growth in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, traditional destinations
for Asian exports, has yet to return to the levels reached before the 2008 crisis and the 2011
sovereign debt problems in the Eurozone have further dampened prospects. Currently,
much of Asia’s economic success relies on global value chains, but these are susceptible to
shocks from a steep drop in final goods demanded by developed countries. However, there is
potential for Asian companies to move up the value chain, not just by running factories and
production lines for the world’s multinational corporations (MNCs), but by creating new
products, diversifying destinations for final goods, and creating more domestic demand.
An Asian middle class is emerging which, depending upon definitions, constitutes between
500 million and over a billion people.1 According to the Asian Development Bank, developing
Asia’s middle class has increased rapidly in size and purchasing power over the past two decades
and Asia-wide consumption may reach $32 trillion by 2030, making up 43 percent of worldwide
consumption (ADB 2010). As this middle class rises, companies may increasingly produce for
Asians, rather than just in Asia. Even though this middle class currently has lower income and
spending relative to the Western middle class, it may someday assume the role in the world
economy currently occupied by the U.S. and European middle classes as global consumers.
Rebalancing Asia’s economy to promote consumer spending will require policies to shift.
It is commonly stated that Asia saves while the West spends. Maintaining high public savings
has been deliberate government policy in many Asian countries, possibly rooted in tradi-
tional Asian principles of frugality. But after decades of locking away high savings, Asians
may need to spend more, both in public spending and consumer spending. Changing
ingrained habits in Asia will be difficult. Many in government still believe strong reserve
positions are necessary. According to IMF figures, as of September 2012 Japan had over $1.3
trillion in official reserve assets, while South Korea had around $317 billion and India had
$290 billion. China does not report international reserve figures to the IMF, but a March
2012 statement by the People’s Bank of China said the country’s foreign exchange reserves
stood at $3.31 trillion, the world’s largest (Bloomberg 2012). Even if Asian governments can
be convinced to spend their savings, there are few instruments or pipelines to get Asian sav-
ings directly to Asian borrowers. At present, Asia’s financial systems still have only a limited
capacity to allocate savings to those who need capital. Much of Asia’s public reserves are
locked in the United States as treasury bonds or other instruments, holding them captive to
the value of the U.S. dollar. Similarly, without more productive outlets, private savings in Asia
are flooding into assets such as housing, creating artificial bubbles. Many Asian households
still keep a large part of their wealth in real estate, gold, and other non-financial assets. Many
do not have bank accounts because they lack access to banks, or simply do not trust them.
Thus Asian countries must consider ways to harness savings to fund necessary investments,
ultimately boosting Asian demand to make growth in the region more self-sustaining. Asians
should consider creating bonds to provide for investment in areas such as infrastructure and
education. Public bonds could also potentially provide some discipline to government
spending. Governments also need to create deeper and more effective financial markets,
unlocking savings and directing them to firms that need capital to yield higher returns. Aside
from domestic policy, cross-border cooperation must also be considered, especially among
the smaller economies of Asia.
644 simon s. c. tay
Environmental and Social Sustainability

Asian countries must also deal with the consequences of rapid economic growth. In particu-
lar, many Asians are now conscious of the need to protect the environment. Rapid growth
means rising energy demands, competition for increasingly limited resources, and huge
strains on the environment. As a whole, Asia is presently consuming more than what is sus-
tainable. Urbanization has also brought issues of traffic congestion and overcrowding. Many
Asian cities have passed the three million mark and face major environmental challenges.
With rapid industrialization, pollution has become an everyday nuisance in many cities.
Governments recognize that bringing back blue skies can bolster a city’s competitiveness in
attracting talent. However, Asian countries seeking to be green face a tough balancing act, as
environmental regulations could inadvertently serve as constraints or trade barriers, mak-
ing developing countries uncompetitive. The biggest challenge for countries in the region is
to find ways to address environmental concerns without being disadvantaged economically.
Investment in key sectors is needed to kick start a greener economy.
With extreme weather patterns being observed all across Asia, carbon emissions have
taken center stage in the discourse on air pollution, with the spotlight on China and India
as the major carbon emitters. However, the focus on carbon emissions has led to a neglect
of other pollutants. This has proven to be an oversight, as levels of airborne pollutants
other than carbon emissions in many Asian cities have spiked, causing respiratory a ilments
to skyrocket and even grounding flights because of poor visibility. Often in response to
popular demand, many national and regional governments have recently taken on the
challenging task of bringing down the surging levels of air pollution in Asia’s rapidly devel-
oping cities.
Southeast Asia faces a yearly haze caused by forest fires, caused mainly by slash-and-burn
practices to make way for farms and plantations. In 1997–8, raging forest fires coupled with
the El Niño phenomenon created a massive respiratory attack on the region which tran-
scended country borders. Spurred on by these fires, Southeast Asian countries signed the
ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution in 2002. A select group of ASEAN
countries have also made positive moves to resolve this issue in the region. Since 2002, a
Ministerial Steering Committee has explored a myriad of initiatives to combat the decade-
long forest fire problem, ranging from village-based workshops to multilateral talks, as well
as arranging for provincial authorities to work directly with other ASEAN member states.
Even with such concerted efforts, many issues with regard to governance and implementa-
tion continue to hamper efforts to resolve the haze and forest fire problems. This is a reflec-
tion of the obstacles to regional and international cooperation in addressing cross-boundary
environmental sustainability issues in Asia.
In addition to environmental concerns, another key dimension of sustainability is the
social factor. There is much more awareness today of a widening gap between rich and poor
and the emergence of two faces of Asian growth. The first face is of a small segment of the
population benefiting from the economic boom. The second is of a large segment with low
wages, little or no social services, and limited or no prospect of social mobility. For some,
Asia is a middle class purgatory, with salaries unable to meet the rising costs of living. The
worst off are those with few or no skills to allow them to participate in the modern economy.
Rising income inequality is a danger to Asia’s sustained progress. Economic disparities in
Asia are starker than in the developed world. According to the Asian Development Bank
(ADB)’s Outlook 2012, Asia’s Gini coefficient, which has long been used as a common meas-
ure of inequality, increased from 39 in the early 1990s to 46 in the late 2000s (ADB 2012).
Although Asia has not yet seen widespread protest movements like the Arab Spring or
Occupy Wall Street, the prospect cannot be ignored. Recent years have seen some unrest in
parts of China, while Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines have also faced
domestic protests. Governments across the region are grappling with new expectations from
citizens. In Myanmar, once a pariah state, the current civilian government has freed many
political prisoners and allowed pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi to lead her National
League for Democracy party to victory in parliamentary by-elections. Thailand, Malaysia,
and Singapore have also seen changes that pave the way for greater participation and more
complex politics. If Beijing cannot maintain domestic stability in China, the impacts will be
outsized across the region. If governments cannot keep inflation down, problems may flare
up not only in the streets of Beijing but in Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur as well. If protests break
out in Asian cities, government use of force may be tougher than some think legitimate, as
seen in the crackdown on the opposition demonstrations in Malaysia. Protests may be
exploited by rival elite groups in attempts to unsettle each other, as witnessed in Thailand.
Violence and casualties can therefore spiral, as we have seen across European capitals
between 2008 and 2011.
Demographic Changes and Migration

As Asia grows, it faces demographic and migration challenges which it will have to over-
come. Some Asian countries, such as Indonesia, have young populations. Others, like
Singapore, face an aging population, with the percentage of citizens over 65 set to double to
20 percent by 2020. Changes in the age structure of Asian populations will affect labor s upply
per capita and national savings rates. Systems of support for the elderly in the region are still
underdeveloped, with most being supported by family groups. With current trends, coun-
tries with an aging population face the prospect of increasing dependency as the young are
still experiencing low levels of income. At the same time, Singapore and other East Asian
countries depend highly on foreign labor. In Singapore, the government has been criticized
for allowing too many foreigners into the country, especially during the 2008 financial crisis,
while Thailand has been criticized by international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) for its treatment of migrant workers in terms of wages, benefits, and freedom of
movement. Foreign workers are often viewed primarily as cheap economic stop-gaps rather
than legitimate stakeholders in the economy. China has similar tensions regarding domestic
(rather than foreign) migration, with workers from rural areas complaining of exploitation
in urban centers, causing riots in 2011.
Short-term migration for the purposes of employment also has societal effects on the
migrants’ home countries. In Indonesia and the Philippines, children are being raised by
grandparents and relatives while their parents work overseas. There are also concerns in
these countries over the welfare of foreign workers. Remittances from overseas workers
make up a large percentage of GDP for several Asian countries. Notably, the Philippines
received over $21 billion in remittances as of 2010–11, some 12 percent of the country’s GDP
(World Bank 2011). However, the 2008 crisis weakened foreign labor employment for Asians
in Western countries. After 2008, this was offset by surging remittances from the Gulf.
646 simon s. c. tay
owever, the 2011 beheading of an Indonesian maid convicted of murdering her employer in
H
Saudi Arabia has caused Southeast Asian countries to rethink sending domestic workers to
the Middle East. Economic uncertainty and unrest in the region have also made the Middle
East a less attractive destination for Asian workers.
Intra-Asian Investment
The ADB estimates that between 2010 and 2020, ASEAN countries will require $60 billion
a year in infrastructure investment, covering a wide range of needs such as energy, transport,
and sanitation. In 2010, ASEAN leaders issued a Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity
(MPAC), with the goal of building closer connections in infrastructure, capital, labor, goods,
and services. However, there is a perceived high risk in infrastructure investment, which
discourages private finance for such projects. Multilateral institutions also cannot lend
enough to cover the costs.
The ASEAN Infrastructure Fund (AIF) is an example of efforts to address this issue.
Launched in May 2012, the fund has an initial equity of $485.2 million, $150 million of which
comes from the ADB, while the remaining $335.2 million comes from nine ASEAN members
(excluding Myanmar). The scheme aims to translate regional savings into investments,
encouraging Asians to invest in their own future. The fund is intended to involve the private
sector by financing select public–private partnerships. In the long term, the fund’s total lend-
ing commitment through 2020 is expected to be some $4 billion, with the eventual aim of
leveraging more than $13 billion (ADB 2011).
China has also made an attempt to reach out to its neighbors through regional financing
arrangements. The China–ASEAN Investment Cooperation Fund (CAF) was announced by
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in 2009. CAF is a private equity fund for the development of
infrastructure, energy, and natural resources in the region. CAF made its first investment at
the end of 2010, and eventually aims to provide $10 billion in financing. The ASEAN China
Investment Fund (ACIF) has also been operating since 2004, focusing on support for small
and medium enterprises. The ACIF’s capital is more modest, but its wide range of backers
includes the ADB, the China Development Bank, the Japan Asia Investment Company, and
the United Overseas Bank of Singapore.
Such new regional financing initiatives are highly significant, because they demonstrate
how Asian countries are taking charge of their own development rather than relying on glo-
bal arrangements. Asian regional financing allows countries to pool economic resiliency,
contributing to overall sustainable growth for the region.
Addressing Inequality, Leveling Up

As noted, Asian countries need to construct policies to provide better wages, as well as basic
welfare and health care services. These should act as a safety net as well as a springboard for
social protection. Those in the informal economy are most at risk, and these people consti-
tute the majority of the population in developing Asia, which poses a challenge for tradi-
tional models of social security. They are usually among the poorest in their country’s
population and are least likely to be able to contribute to the taxes that fund the state’s provi-
sion of social protection. They are also least able to purchase their own forms of protection or
to build up savings that might provide them with a degree of resilience in times of crisis. To
move toward inclusive growth, more opportunities must be created for people to move up
the social ladder. This will also help control migration and curb brain drain.
As wages in Asia rise in light of the region’s development, the skills and productivity of
workers must also increase if countries are to remain economically competitive. Many Asian
countries have grown based on lower costs in the region for manufacturing and services. But
as Asia’s middle class grows, policy-makers must find ways to achieve a new economic
balance.
In October 2011, Thailand’s newly elected government approved an increase in the mini-
mum wage, to be rolled out over two years. Increasing Thailand’s minimum wage was an
election promise of the Pheu Thai Party, leader of the ruling coalition. The eventual aim is to
increase the daily minimum wage to 300 baht ($9.70) nationwide, up from as low as 159 baht
($5.10) in some provinces. However, this move has come under fire from opposition critics,
who argue it will damage Thailand’s competitiveness, as the country is still recovering from
the severe flooding that occurred in 2011.
Throughout the region, there is great concern among policy-makers that a rise in wages
could cause companies to cut jobs or move to other countries where labor costs are lower. At
the same time, it is also clear that there are both practical and ethical pressures to improve
the employment conditions of workers. Governments and the private sector are becoming
increasingly aware of what could be termed the “Foxconn Dilemma,” referring to the high-
profile case of poor conditions at the Chinese factories supplying electronics giant Apple.
Social cohesion and political compromise will be key factors in avoiding such scenarios.
For some countries, religion or nationalist institutions can provide such cohesion. Asia’s
elites and ordinary citizens must be prepared to cooperate and indeed make sacrifices. Such
elements are neither unknown nor alien to Asia. During the 1997–8 Asian crisis, many work-
ers in Singapore and elsewhere were not summarily laid off but instead cooperated with
companies by staying at home until economic conditions improved. In 1997–8, following the
example of the country’s monks, many Thais made donations of gold to the Bank of Thai-
land. Where finances allow, Asians should construct policies to provide better wages, as well
as safety nets of basic welfare and health care. The political imperative is to close the stark gap
between the haves and the have-nots. Asset bubbles in housing and inflation in basic
commodities like food and energy have been testing governments to make growth more
inclusive. Although a huge amount of capital is coming into regional markets, most of it is
going into short-term portfolios, not long-term investment. Across Asia, ways must be found
to invest and ensure citizens participate in and gain from growth.
Exploring New Markets

Even as Asians strengthen domestic policies and explore intra-Asian regional cooperation, it
is critical that Asians continue to look beyond their neighborhood. In the long term, growth
will need to be bolstered by links to new markets, notably in Latin America, the Middle East,
and Africa.
The Forum for East Asia-Latin America Cooperation (FEALAC) is an association of
thirty-four countries from East Asia and Latin America, serving as a regular official dialogue
channel. FEALAC was initiated by then Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in 1998,
648 simon s. c. tay
and adopted by member countries in 2001. FEALAC aims to improve political ties between
member states, and also tap the potential of cooperation in trade, investment, technology,
and people-to-people exchange. At present, most trade between the two regions consists of
Asians buying Latin American commodities, while Latin Americans buy Asian manufac-
tured goods, but there is a great deal of interest on both sides in furthering and deepening
economic links. Individually, Asian countries have signed bilateral FTAs with several states
in Latin America. Countries in both regions are also participating in wider-reaching multi-
lateral agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the prospective extension of an
existing free trade deal to eventually include Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New
Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. Japan has signaled it will join the
negotiations, while Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan have also
expressed interest.
Similar to Asia’s links with Latin America through FEALAC, Asian countries have a simi-
lar forum with Middle Eastern states, the Asia-Middle East Dialogue (AMED). This forum
covers some forty-nine countries in Asia and the Middle East, plus the Palestinian National
Authority. AMED has been meeting since 2005, with the inaugural dialogue in Singapore.
Interesting possibilities have arisen in recent years as prosperous oil-rich M iddle Eastern
states have sought to tap Asian expertise in urban development and policy making. Singa-
pore planners and consultants have led major initiatives in the Middle East, such as the $27
billion Saadiyat Island Project in Abu Dhabi, a new cultural hub for the United Arab
Emirates.
Ties between Asia and Africa are also growing stronger. According to the African Devel-
opment Bank, in 2008, total trade between Africa and China reached $100 billion, while for-
eign direct investment from China to Africa amounted to $5.4 billion. In January 2012, the
African Union opened its new headquarters in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, a
$200-million tower complex funded by Beijing as a gift to African countries. But beyond
China, there is a great deal of untapped potential for other Asian states to deepen relations
with their emerging counterparts in Africa. Moreover, Africa is often seen simply as a source
of resources or a destination for infrastructure investment, but African countries should also
be viewed as rising markets in their own right.
Facilitating Regionalism while Remaining Open

As the economies of Asian countries mature, they are facing familiar challenges: for instance,
pressure to increase wages and yet remain competitive. If Asian policy-makers can get the
balance right, Asia’s new regional economy will be more self-sustaining, with healthy finance
mechanisms and strong consumer spending. Economic activity in the region is already
reflecting the changing global climate. As Asian countries grow and develop, they will need
to balance their own interests with those of larger powers exerting influence over the region.
The U.S.–China relationship may be the most prominent one in Asia, but other Asian coun-
tries are not passive actors vis-à-vis Washington and Beijing. It also remains to be seen
whether countries within ASEAN will be able to find coherence and balance as part of a
more tightly integrated grouping, or go their own way. Although ASEAN has ambitious goals
regarding regional integration, it remains a diverse grouping with no common security or
foreign policy, unlike the European Union. But ASEAN has banded together before to deal
with conflicts, like the occupation of Cambodia and the Vietnam War. In the interests of eco-
nomic stability, it may now again be timely for members to harmonize their policies.
However, even as Asian countries build stronger intra-Asian ties and a higher-quality
regional economy, it is important that the region remain open, not just to existing ties with
developed countries but also to opportunities with new partners, such as countries in the
Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. In the same way that Asians are working more
closely with each other, there is great potential for cooperation among developing or emerg-
ing regions—what used to be referred to as South–South partnerships.
While developed countries will remain important partners, Asia needs to find ways to
decrease its dependency on trade and investment links with Western countries and work
more with its neighbors in the region or new partners further afield. Ultimately, Asian coun-
tries can play a greater role in their own development, and in the development of their peers,
rather than relying on the West or global institutions.
Note
1. The ADB defines “middle class” as per capita consumption of $2–$20 per day, and
“developing Asia” as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, People’s Republic of
China, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Lao People’s Democratic
Republic, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan,

Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
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chapter 38
chi na
lan xue and ling chen
Introduction
It has been more than thirty years since China adopted a policy of “reform and opening” in
1978, which led to rapid economic growth and social development that lifted millions of
people out of poverty. Chinese society has also changed from a relatively rural and closed, to
a rapidly urbanizing and open society. In addition, China’s governance system transitioned
from one that is primarily based on individual will and charisma, to one that is increasingly
institutionalized and strives to achieve efficiency and professionalism. Debates have raged as
to what accounts for China’s success and what lessons can be drawn, on whether a “Beijing
Consensus” offers an alternative to the “Washington Consensus.” This chapter looks beyond
ideological debate and provides a richer account of the development process that reflects
upon the mistakes and pitfalls of China’s experience. It focuses on the role of government
both as managing the evolution of an economic system, and as adaptive learning in the arena
of public policy. The chapter ends by identifying challenges and prospects for China’s future
development.
An Overview of Development
The rapid change in every aspect of China’s economy and society makes it hard to see a clear
pattern of change. This section provides a “before and after” look at China’s economy and
government in order to provide a benchmark for later discussion.
The Legacy of Central Planning

The Chinese success story comes after 1978, when China abandoned the planned economy
system. But the legacy of the central planning period is complicated. On one hand, it saw
China rapidly create a basic framework and foundation for education, science, technology,
652 lan xue and ling chen
and industry. Public health services were extended to the bulk of the population, and the
quantity and quality of China’s human capital was greatly improved. On the other hand, the
planned economy—and the system of centralized authority that it embodied—deprived
the grassroots of initiative, and occasionally led the country in disastrous directions. In
this sense, the planned economy laid the basis for later success in market reforms, while also
creating the need for comprehensive reform.
After its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China adopted a central planning
economic system in an effort to emulate the Soviet Union. A large share of the country’s
economic output was directed and controlled by the state, which set production goals,
controlled prices, and allocated resources throughout most of the economy. During the
1950s, all of China’s individual household farms were collectivized into large communes,
and industrial and commercial enterprises were transformed into public enterprises. It
was taken for granted that a socialist country would make public ownership the founda-
tion of its economic system, and private enterprise and foreign invested firms were nearly
non-existent.
To support the country’s rapid industrialization, the central government invested
heavily in physical and human capital from the 1950s to 1970s. A public health care sys-
tem, covering most of the population—urban and rural—was established for the first
time, with a tremendous impact on public health. From 1950 to 1982, life expectancy rose
from forty-two years to sixty-six years, while child mortality plummeted by 75 percent,
from 146 per thousand live births to 36 per thousand live births (Wang and Mason 2008),
leading to a doubling of the population (from 552 million to just over one billion). The
quality of human resources also increased, as the illiteracy rate dropped substantially
from 34 percent in 1964 to only 4 percent in 2010. Meanwhile a highly centralized science
and technology system was established, starting in the 1950s, with scientists, researchers,
and engineers organized to serve various national goals, laying the cornerstone of China’s
military and industrial development.
By 1978, centrally-controlled, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) produced nearly three-
quarters of industrial production. Since the government aimed to make China’s economy
relatively self-sufficient, foreign trade was generally restricted to those goods that could not
be produced domestically. Government policies kept the economy relatively stagnant and
inefficient due to a lack of profit incentives for firms and farmers, the absence of competi-
tion, and the widespread distortions which were caused by unrealistic price and production
goals. China’s standard of living was substantially lower than that of many other developing
countries at the time.
From 1966 to 1976, the Cultural Revolution swept the country,1 as millions of people
were persecuted in violent conflicts and suffered a wide range of abuses. The country’s
political system was paralyzed and the economy was pushed to the brink of total col-
lapse. Most people suffered tremendously from the constant political movements and
yearned for stability and a better material life. The emerging leadership after the Cul-
tural Revolution, led by Deng Xiaoping, was a group of vanguards who had experienced
the era of central planning system and the disaster of the “Great Leap Forward.”2 They
recognized the limits of the planned economy—after thirty years of unsuccessful exper-
iments and ten years of chaos—and as a result were much more practical than their
predecessors.
china 653
Major Outcomes since 1978

China has undergone a fundamental economic transformation over the past thirty years;
among the more salient features of this reform era are: rapid growth, structural change, pri-
vatization, and improved living standards.
Rapid Growth
China’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010 was twenty times that of 1978, and the official
annual GDP growth rate during 1978–2010 was around 10 percent. By 2011, China’s overall
GDP was second only to the United States, yet the per capita GDP, even though it exceeded
US$4,700, still fell short of the US $7,500 average for upper-middle-income countries.
Industrial Structure Change

China experienced rapid structural change, most prominently in the transformation of
employment. While 70 percent of China’s workforce was engaged in agriculture in 1978, this
figure had fallen to 37 percent by 2010. The shift from low-productivity agriculture to more
productive industries and services provided a crucial driving force for rapid economic growth.
At the same time, high investment stimulated rapid growth of the capital stock, which in turn
created a large number of employment opportunities in non-agricultural sectors. Investment
in national infrastructure included a network of expressways, electrified railroads, an electric-
ity grid, and a modern electronic communications infrastructure. By 2010, China had a total
of 32,700 kilometers of electrified railway and 74,000 kilometers of expressway, connecting
the country and allowing people to ride between Shanghai and Beijing in less than five hours
by high-speed rail.
Increased Privatization
The ownership structure of the economy also changed dramatically with the government’s
effort to develop the private sector. In 1978, public ownership took up 99 percent of GDP,
which decreased to 30 percent in 2008. While the private sector has become the main force
to boost China’s economy, the state-owned sector remains dominant in some of the most
important industries, including infrastructure, energy, and telecommunication. After 1978,
China’s economy accelerated its integration into the global economy, with foreign direct
investment’s share of GDP peaking at 5.7 percent in 1994 and the international trade share of
GDP peaked at 70 percent in 2006. As a result, China became the “world’s factory” manufac-
turing a wide range of goods.
Improved Living Standards

Despite a strict family planning policy since 1980, the total population exceeded 1.3 billion by
the end of 2010, up 40 percent from 1978. Nonetheless the rate of population growth
decreased from 12 percent in 1978 to less than 5 percent in 2010. Citizens’ living standards
rose rapidly, with a substantial rise in incomes for both urban and rural areas. According to
the domestic poverty standard, the number of people living below the poverty line in rural
areas fell to several million in 2010, compared to approximately 250 million in 1978.
Domestic Reform and Global

Integration
The enormous changes that transformed China since the beginning of the reform era have
their origin in the evolution of the economic system. The transition from a planned to a mar-
ket economy was not the outcome of a blueprint, or a pre-determined step-by-step process,
but an evolutionary process driven by the interaction between government and enterprise,
and between institutional incentives and individual behavior. This type of incremental
reform has been labeled as “crossing the river by groping for stepping stones.” This section,
analyzes three stages of the post-1978 development process, and provides an account of the
political and social rationales behind it.
Decentralization and Opening up (1978–93)

Beginning in late 1978, China launched a series of major economic reforms which started in
the agriculture sector. The central government allowed farmers to sell a portion of their crops
on the free market after fulfilling state grain quota obligations, and local governments began
to sign long-term leasing contracts of farmland with local farmers. Therefore, vast numbers
of agricultural workers became available for non-agricultural employment, especially in
township and village enterprises (TVEs) which grew rapidly to meet pent up demand for
consumer goods. Reform in this period can be characterized as an evolutionary process of
administrative and fiscal decentralization to local governments and enterprises. Local offi-
cials gained greater autonomy over the local economy, including the power to set prices, to
invest with self-raised funds, and to restructure their firms and issue licenses to newly estab-
lished firms. More importantly, authority over state-owned enterprises devolved to local
governments at the provincial, municipality, and county levels. By 1985, the state-owned
industrial enterprises controlled by the central government accounted for only 20 percent of
the total industrial output at or above the township level, while provincial and municipality
governments controlled 45 percent and county governments 35 percent (Qian and Xu 1993).
This administrative decentralization was also accompanied by a fiscal contracting system
between central and local governments. Although fiscal contracting schemes varied across
both regions and time, the main idea was that provincial governments contracted with cen-
tral government on the amount of fiscal revenue to be remitted for the next year(s), while
they could keep the rest. This system was maintained until the end of 1993 (Montinola, Qian,
and Weingast 1995). Fiscal decentralization provided powerful incentives for local authori-
ties to seek revenue in order to pay for their expenditure responsibilities (Oi 1992; Wong
1992; Walder 1995). With decentralization, local governments now had an incentive to
develop local economies and to step up their efforts in revenue collection. At the same time,
china 655
local government also started many local state-owned enterprises, as well as TVEs. There-
fore, as economic control of various enterprises was given to provincial and local govern-
ments, these firms were generally allowed to operate and compete in the market rather than
under the direction and guidance of state planning.
Opening up to the outside world began in the earliest stage of economic reform. New forms
of trade started in Guangdong province and gradually spread nation-wide. The huge gap in
technology and living standards gave local governments a strong incentive to import produc-
tion lines and initiate cooperation and joint ventures with foreign companies. In this way, new
and used production lines for automobiles, integrated circuits, and color televisions were
imported. Because many of these products were not previously available in China, there was
relatively little business risk in making industrial investment, yet—as competition between
regions intensified and regions followed similar development strategies—investment became
excessive and led to surplus capacity. Under these conditions, local protectionism reared its
head, national market integration was obstructed, and bad investments led to an increase in
non-performing loans in the banking system (Yang 2004; Naughton 2007). It became essen-
tial to make fundamental choices about the strategy of China’s market reform.
In addition, during the 1980s, Special Economic Zones and Coastal Open Cities3 became
an important symbol of reform in which governments adopted preferential tax, land, and
trading policies for foreign firms and joint ventures. By watching and participating in this
activity, Chinese enterprises learned modern market practices and gained management
experience, especially on entering the international market. With the local economy domi-
nated by local government-owned enterprises, regional competition for the foreign direct
investment (FDI) was not yet a big story during the 1980s and early 1990s, since FDI was
highly concentrated in a few pilot cities and competition for such investment from other
regions was minor.
Market Institutions and Integration (1994–2001)

By the mid-1990s, reforms based on decentralization lost impetus, creating momentum for
reforms based on a more complete system of markets and property rights. What followed
was an astonishing period of radical and comprehensive institutional reforms between 1994
and 2001. Wu Jinglian (2010) sees this as the beginning of the comprehensive reform that
created the basis for a market economy, while Naughton (2007) argues that the 1990s reforms
represented a move in the direction of a competitive market economy with a “level playing
field.” As China became a more competitive society, there were also social costs to bear, not
the least of which was a widening gap between the winners and losers of market competi-
tion. For example, Huang Yasheng (2010) sees 1993 as the beginning of policies that favored
government and corporate interests at the expense of ordinary citizens.
From the mid-1990s, China carried out a series of reforms for a normal market economy,
such as price reform, tax and budgetary reform, foreign trade, banking, SOEs, and entry
into the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Qian and Wu 2003). As a result FDI increased,
inter-regional trade barriers declined, and a much more integrated domestic and global
market emerged.
The transition toward a market economy was also forcing government policy-makers to
adapt. Two parallel tax collection systems were built up during the tax reform in 1994, which
dramatically enhanced the fiscal centralization of the central government, and disrupted the
decentralized incentive bases of the locals. Many local governments began to divest from
SOEs they owned. A large-scale restructuring of these public enterprises was inevitable
(Li, Li, and Zhang 2000). By the end of 1996, 70 percent of small SOEs were privatized in
pioneering provinces and half were restructured in other provinces (Cao, Qian, and Weingast
1999). In 1978, nearly four-fifths of the total industrial output in China came from SOEs. By
1997, the SOEs’ share had shrunk to slightly more than a quarter. As SOE and TVE reform gained
pace in the late 1990s, about twenty-five million SOE and collective employees were laid-off
from 1998 to 2002 and most local SOEs and TVEs were privatized by the late 1990s (Qian 2002).
As most state-owned firms were privatized, central and local governments could no longer
extract resources from bankrupt SOEs and TVEs. The role of government in economic
development gradually changed from the shareholder of state-owned or collective enter-
prises to a tax collector from the market. Local governments became keen on cultivating
new local tax bases by attracting private investment, especially manufacturing investment
from overseas. Local officials eagerly courted foreign as well as domestic investors to invest
in the thousands of industrial parks that have mushroomed across the country. By the end of
2003, China has more than 3,800 local “development zones” or “industrial parks,” of which
only 6 percent were approved by the central government. This change of attitude and behav-
ior on the part of local governments brought about a new form of local development in the
mid-1990s. Land development and competition for investment—both driven by local
government—became a major driver of China’s national economic growth. At the same
time, it has helped to produce an extremely pro-business environment, resulting in over-
investment in manufacturing capacity and lax environmental and labor regulations.
This period of reform culminated with China’s entry into the WTO, committing the coun-
try to a new level of openness and a set of globally-accepted norms and practices. At the same
time, following a policy of “exchanging market access for technology transfer,” Chinese firms
began to accumulate experience and participate in international production networks in
sectors such as automobiles, communications equipment, home appliances, and computers.
China became the “world’s factory,” and foreign trade increased from 24 percent of GDP in
1994 to 44 percent in 2001. However, China continued to lag behind in product design, devel-
opment, and technological innovation.
Innovation and Harmony (2002–present)

Lately China has begun to reap the benefits of the 1990s reforms, gaining a surge of rapid
growth in GDP. A well-funded central government shifted its attention to economic and
social issues, while local development trends were much more difficult to change. After entry
into the WTO, to the surprise of many, most industries survived in the expected onslaught of
foreign competition. Growth peaked in 2007, when GDP grew by 14 percent, an economic
success that once again changed the relationship between government and the economy. The
central government was now well-funded as tax reform ensured that the central govern-
ment’s financial needs were met. The remaining central government enterprises were
restructured and rationalized under the State Council’s State-owned Assets Supervision and
Administration Commission (SASAC). Helped by their monopolistic market positions,
large SOEs began to generate healthy profits that further improved the central government’s
financial position.
china 657
At the same time, powerful interest groups were created, including those associated with
the newly profitable central state enterprises. In some respects, the successes of reform and
opening-up created a new systemic inertia (Xue and Chen 2010). Many new interest groups
rely on the early reform-oriented policies and resist any new changes that might hurt their
interests; thus slowing the pace of reform. In addition, the dramatic disruption in the social
fabric owing to the 1990s reforms also reached an alarming level that called for a new focus
on social policy. When Hu Jintao became party leader in 2002, he began to push a broad
array of policies designed to improve social security, protect the disadvantaged, improve liv-
ing conditions in rural areas, and improve the environment. This agenda sought to follow a
“scientific approach to development” in order to build a harmonious society.
The most dramatic set of policies were those in rural areas for which the central govern-
ment assumed budgetary responsibility, with transfers to fund primary education and sig-
nificant contributions to a new rural health insurance program.4 At the same time, the
agricultural tax was abolished and grain growers received new support to increase the profit-
ability of farming.
Social policies in the urban areas also saw major change as the State Council established
the legal rights of migrants to live and work in cities, and for their children to be educated in
urban areas. A new Labor Contract Law came into effect in 2008 to provide new protection
for workers, improving workplace safety, with a special focus on coal mines. Great efforts
have also been taken to address the problem of the environment, with the 11th Five Year Plan
(2006–10) aiming to reduce emissions and energy intensity by 20 percent. There is some evi-
dence that China is reaching a “Lewis turning point” (Cai, Meng, and Bai 2008), with the
central government attempting to shift to a new economic model propelled by knowledge
and innovation rather than cheap labor, resource depletion, and environmental pollu-
tion. Such a transition requires not only a more skilled work force, but also a better market
environment that fosters innovation. The government set out to build an innovation-based
country in 2006, and introduced reforms to science and technology policy in 2011 aimed at
putting enterprises at the center of a national innovation system.
Local governments in a difficult position were left out of the robust fiscal increase that the
central government enjoyed. Local governments plunged into land development and infra-
structure investment, but also struggled with “unfunded mandates” from central government.
During the global financial crisis (2008–9), local governments were encouraged to initiate
ambitious local spending plans, which often included the issuance of local government debt.
In comparison to previous periods when the incentives for central and local governments
were compatible, this period saw different incentives for central versus local government.
Central leaders took advantage of the healthy financial situation to address long-deferred
social issues and put further economic reforms on the back burner, while local officials turned
their attention to local economic growth and gaining resources to run their “pet” projects.
Governance since 1978
Most studies on China’s development over the last thirty years focus on economic reform
and rapid growth, neglecting changes in the country’s governance. This is partly due to the
fact that, until the early 2000s, many reforms in the public sector were either bundled with
economic reform or perceived as being for the sake of economic development. While the
transformation of China’s governance system is far from complete, the interaction between
economic reform and governance reform has characterized development processes over the
past thirty years. The following discussion briefly describes China’s governance system and
pre-reform conditions, then identifies three aspects of change: political stability, gradual
government reform, and adaptive learning.
Governance and Pre-reform Conditions

At the national level, the central government comprises five major subsystems: the National
People’s Congress (legislation); the State Council (administration); the Central Military
Commission (defense); the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate
(judicial). The CCP retains its control of the entire system through the Politburo of the Cen-
tral Party Committee and the relevant party organs, and recommends leaders to all other
subsystems. This governance system is duplicated at the provincial, municipal, and county
levels. The system functioned relatively well in the early years after 1949, however, as Mao
Zedong became increasingly authoritarian, the system ceased to function normally, leading
to the disastrous “Great Leap Forward” and the Cultural Revolution.
Deng Xiaoping felt strongly that major reforms were urgently needed to bring China out
of political and economic crisis, yet his leadership faced several challenges. The first was to
maintain political stability when the Party faced attacks from both Mao loyalists and those
calling for a Western-style democracy. A second was the challenge of reconciling economic
reform with classical Communist doctrine, and a third challenge was ensuring succession in
the leadership. Deng and his colleagues were all in their seventies or older when the Cultural
Revolution ended, raising questions regarding the future transition of power to a younger
generation.
There are many interpretations of how China responded to these challenges. Some credit
China’s success to one party rule (Yu 2002; Hu, Wang, and Zhou 2009), while others point to
political patronage networks created at different stages of transition (Naughton 2008). In
contrast, this chapter argues that political stability, gradual government reform, and adap-
tive learning combined in the evolution of China’s governance system over the last thirty
plus years, and allowed for “taking bold initiatives and then scrambling to adjust to the con-
sequences and keep the effort moving forward” (Lieberthal 2004). In particular, China’s
gradual approach toward governance reform manifested itself differently when compared
with reform in the economic system. With reform of the economic system, the fundamental
structure of the economy changed gradually from a central planning system to a market-
based system, yet political reform left the governmental architecture largely intact while
changing the subsystems within it.
Maintaining Stability
To address the three above-mentioned challenges, Deng Xiaoping wasted no time in rehabili-
tating thousands of cadres which had been persecuted, shifting society’s focus from political
movements to economic development. However, debates and tension soon began to rise
between those who insisted that China should stick to Mao Zedong’s approach, and those
china 659
who felt that China needed to reflect on the what had led to the Cultural Revolution and
engage in fundamental political reform. Such differences existed both inside and outside the
Party. A clear direction and strategy was needed. In March 1979, Deng Xiaoping articulated
the “four cardinal principles,” calling for adherence to the socialist road, to the people’s demo-
cratic dictatorship, to the leadership of the Communist Party, and to Marxism-Leninism and
the thoughts of Mao Zedong. These four principles struck a balance between the two sides
and indicated that China was not interested in the kind of open political debates, such as
“Glasnost,” that later became a signature of political reform in the former Soviet Union. Deng
intended to maintain political stability. These principles reaffirmed the leadership of the Party
and helped it to stay focused on economic development during the “primary stage of social-
ism” which was expected to last more than fifty years. The principles also set boundaries for
debates and decisions about the directions of reform in later years.
To address the second challenge, namely, reconciling the potential contradictions between
a reform agenda and Mao/Communist doctrines, Deng advocated “seeking truth from facts”
which allowed unconventional thought and bold experimentation. A new conceptual frame-
work would be created every several years, including the concept of the Socialist Market
Economy (1993),5 the Three Represents (1997),6 and the Scientific Development Perspective
(2003).7 While the effectiveness of these frameworks varied, they represented an earnest
effort by the Party to keep pace with the progress of society.
The third challenge related to the issue of succession. The failures of Mao Zedong in select-
ing his successors made Deng Xiaoping keenly aware of this problem, and he began to build
a stable and predictable succession, including placing limits on the power of the core leader,
the selection and grooming of two successors, retiring leaders of his generation, and enhanc-
ing the importance of institutions and procedures (Lieberthal 2004). While such efforts did
not ensure smooth transitions for Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang in the 1980s, it paid off for
the transition to Hu Jintao in 2002 and to Xi Jinping in 2012. Recently new experiments have
improved institutions and procedures, particularly a vote for the top leaders in the Politburo
of CCP by its Central Committee members starting in 2007, which contributed to the selec-
tion of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang as the core of the new leadership in 2012. Succession at
lower levels is largely the responsibility of the Party’s organizational departments which are
in charge of selecting, fostering, and appointing/recommending party and government offi-
cials. This institutional arrangement has allowed the party to maintain a firm control over
the country. In the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping promoted several criteria in the selection of
party and government officials, including age, professionalism, education, and loyalty to the
party. Under these criteria, a major turnover of political elites in the 1980s and 1990s brought
in many younger, better-educated, and more reform-minded officials. More recently, the
selection and appointment process has been further institutionalized along with reform of
the civil servant structure.
Gradual Reforms in Government

While China’s leadership chose to maintain political stability, gradual reforms in the govern-
ment continued. These were driven by the need for government function, organizations, and
behavior to fit with the new market-based economic system; pressure from local govern-
ments for more authority and resources; and integration into the global system following
entry into the WTO. The Chinese government made a great effort to restructure agencies,
streamline processes and procedures, and improve behavior to fulfill its commitment to
WTO. During the five years following 2001, nearly 3,000 pieces of legislation were abolished,
revised, or created at the central government level, and a further 200,000 pieces of legisla-
tion and regulations at the local level (Xue and Zhong 2012).
Changes in the government were carried out through public administration reforms in
1982, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, and 2008 respectively, corresponding to the terms of the National
People’s Congress. These reforms sought to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the
government by simplifying organizational structures and streamlining operations. The 1998
reform carried by Zhu Rongji abolished several ministries and reoriented the remaining
ones to focus on macro-management, policy guidance, and coordination. In the end, the
State Council shifted 280 functions from the central government agencies to state-owned
enterprises, social intermediate organizations, and local governments. It also closed fifteen
ministries, created four new ministries, and cut the size of the central government workforce
by over 47 percent (Zhang 2009).
Adaptive Learning in Policy Making

The policy-making process also underwent gradual change, starting in the late 1970s with a
loosening of control by the central government, giving greater autonomy to local govern-
ments. Subsequently, domestic and international influences led to a recentralization of
some decision-making authority so that major reform measures could be pushed through.
More recently there was a gradual involvement of the general public in the public policy
process. The decentralization and recentralization of decision power within government,
and the increased participation of the general public in the policy process, has been an
adaptive learning process of experimentation, synthesis, and institutionalization.
During the first stage of reform, China’s policy-makers followed the experimental
approach, adopting policies cautiously and incrementally (Qian and Wu 2003). For example,
Special Economic Zones were created in four coastal cities (including Shenzhen) and then
gradually extended nation-wide. While Deng Xiaoping and a small group of political elites
set up the reform agenda and tried to control the pace of reform, the result was more free-
dom and autonomy being ceded to local governments for experimentation. External advice
was sought from time to time while an internal policy research system was also established
(Wu 2010). Many reform proposals, such as the “dual track price system,” were often debated
among senior officials and scholars.
By the end of the 1980s, the consensus among the CCP leadership was shattered, with the
Party feeling a sense of crisis in the wake of the Tiananmen Square incident and the collapse
of the Soviet Union. The central government was concerned about eroding revenue and that
it had lost much of its control over the economy. These events inspired a recentralization,
with Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji reconsolidating the power of the central government in an
effort to institutionalize the policy making agencies and procedures. Decision making was
elaborately organized, and opinions from outsiders were carefully channeled and filtered by
government ministries. Although the final decisions were still made by the top leaders, con-
sensus and a balance of interests among ministries were essential for policy success. Proce-
dures were also improved, for example with the introduction of a system of public hearings
china 661
for the price of public services in the Administrative Penalties Law in 1996 (Peng, Xue, and
Kan 2004).
From 2003, the government’s focus gradually shifted from economic growth to social
development and technological innovation. Major policy decisions began to go through
expert consultation, feasibility review, and public consultation. This process created a
competitive policy–idea market (Xue and Zhu 2009) open to decision-makers and outside
stakeholders. At the same time, policy-makers became more professionally educated,
often with foreign experience, providing further impetus for the institutionalization of the
policy-making process.
A China Model?
Synthesis
Looking back at China’s development experience over the last thirty years, it is difficult not
to see China’s experience as unique and of limited potential for repetition in other develop-
ing countries. From a global perspective, China’s high rate of economic growth was not a
“miracle,” but mirrored the rapid economic growth accomplished earlier by Japan, Korea,
and Taiwan. Each of these economies grew rapidly through the change from a rural to an
urban economy, driven by high investment, and enabled by access to an expanding global
market. China was lucky since the new global production networks that started to emerge in
the 1970s allowed for entry into higher stages of the global value chain. However, external
factors alone do not explain why China was unable to capture such opportunities earlier or
why other countries were not able to seize the same opportunities. The previous discussion
identifies three key relationships that help explain China’s experience, namely the tension
between domestic reform and international opening, economic and governance reform, and
central and local governments. China’s success over the last thirty years was built on striking
a balance within each of these three areas of tension.
First, China built a virtuous cycle between domestic reform and opening up to the outside
world. As a closed society for much of its history, there were huge gaps between China and
the outside world in terms of levels of economic development, access to technology and
information, etc. While opening up provided fresh new ideas and the financing needed for
reform, the vulnerability of a closed society made it difficult for a sudden and complete open-
ing up, explaining why China’s approach was gradual: starting with select sectors in coastal
areas, learning from these experiments, and then expanding their scope. At the same time,
huge differences between how domestic and international systems worked meant reforms
were needed in order for opening up to succeed. The impact of such reforms often went
beyond the narrow scope of those areas that are needed for opening up. Consequently a
virtuous cycle was created in which the opening up required domestic reform, while further
reform reduced gaps within and outside China, creating further room for opening up.
Second, China was able to maintain a delicate balance between economic and governance
reforms. Much analysis of China’s reform process largely ignores governance, yet it was
essential that such reform influenced the ideology and operation of government. The gov-
ernment continuously adjusted its goals and structure to satisfy the increasingly diverse
demands coming from the economy and society, and in so doing, pro-actively maintained its
position as the leading force for social and economic change. The government was also
mindful of the potential threats of change to the stability of the Chinese society, and strived
to maintain the basic political structure and avoid “unnecessary” ideological debates.
Third was the careful balance between central and local governments. A great challenge in
China’s development is the inherent contradiction between a unitary governance system
and the great diversity in terms of geographic, economic, cultural, and societal conditions.
China’s reform and opening up needed the dynamism and creativity to come from the bot-
tom up, and a weakness of the central planning system was the total suffocation of local inge-
nuity. Yet local initiatives without some form of overall control could also mean chaos and
waste, and Chinese history is full of lessons on when too much local autonomy weakened
central control and let to the disintegration of the entire country. The challenge was to man-
age the central–local relationship. During most of China’s reform era over the past thirty
years, the overriding theme was of loosening up and giving more autonomy to local govern-
ment. Many successful reform measures and policies were based initially on local experi-
ments, and local efforts were the major driving force of China’s economic development. At
the same time, the central government has retained two powers that enforce its will on local
governments, namely the power over appointments and promotion of local officials, and the
control over major investments (Tsui and Wang 2000). All industrial and infrastructure
investment projects above a certain scale had to be approved by the central government,
which helped monitor local investment but also created rent-seeking behavior by central
government agencies.
Challenges
Despite the rapid rate of economic and social development in China since 1979, serious prob-
lems have emerged related to unfinished economic reforms; a growing civil society and
widespread use of social media; environmental pollution and ecological damage; and adjust-
ing to new global expectations.
Unfinished Economic Reforms

The remarkable growth of the economy over the last decades was partly due to the economic
reforms that were started in the early 1980s. Recently there have been concerns that the
reform process has stalled, or, worse, is reversing. Many of the halfway, or temporary, reform
measures have become de facto fixed institutional arrangements that are now difficult to
change, with various interests groups that are reliant on them now blocking continued
reform. To continue the economy’s healthy growth, these hurdles must be addressed and the
government must move forward with the necessary reforms in state-owned enterprises,
investment, and taxes. First, although the share of SOEs in the economy has declined to 28
percent in 2008, these enterprises still benefit from non-market based advantages and should
withdraw from competitive industries. Second, an investment-oriented development model
driven by government is unsustainable. It has not only resulted in extremely high debt
within the state’s banking system, and twisted the natural process of technological choice
and industrial development. The government should gradually withdraw from direct
china 663
e conomic activities and strengthen the function of market regulation. Third, China must
reduce the high tax burden on industry and improve the transparency of fiscal expenditure
by local governments.
Civil Society and Social Media

Despite the cautious attitude of government, civil society has grown rapidly. By the end of
2010, there were 431,000 registered non-governmental organizations in China, with over
5.4 million employees and ¥44 billion in donations (Zhang 2012). An ongoing challenge is
to give these organizations more space to address various social problems, without eroding
the authority of the government. In addition, widespread use of the Internet and the Weibo
microblog have made it much easier for the general public to gain access to, and dissemi-
nate, information. There is an increasing demand for government transparency and
accountability from the general public, who are dissatisfied with the government’s inability
to address seemingly widespread corruption. The continuing revelation of corruption
among high-level officials has severely eroded public trust in the government, and encour-
aged the use of social media tools to expose further cases of corruption. The general public
is also increasingly concerned about the widening gaps of income among various groups
and want more channels through which to express their interest in and value of the policy-
making process.
Environmental Pollution and Ecological Damage

Rapid economic growth in China was achieved at a huge price in terms of environmental
pollution and ecological damage, as loose environmental regulation made China a destina-
tion for pollution-intensive manufacturing. The annual losses incurred due to pollution
may be as high as 5–10 percent of China’s GDP, and nearly 358,000 people die from air pol-
lution annually (Xu 2011). Since the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–10), the central government
has adopted environmental indicators in its evaluation of local government officials. How-
ever, the effectiveness of such a top-down approach is limited without strong regulation
and public participation, and widespread problems with smog raise the question of whether
the ecosystem can sustain China’s continued development.
New Global Expectations

China’s rapid development has generated international concerns about geopolitical
changes, with some observers viewing the rise of China and emerging countries as a threat
to the current international order, while others see the potential for a new system of global
governance. Such debate will continue without clear answers, and Chinese leaders must
assure the international community that the country’s development will contribute to glo-
bal peace and prosperity. Additionally, Chinese leaders face rising expectations from the
international community to contribute to thorny issues of global governance, complicated
by the fact that Chinese society has become an important force in shaping the country’s
foreign policy.
Prospects
The year of 2012 was an important turning point, with the 18th Party Congress and a new
generation of leadership taking office, vowing to make China a well-off society by 2020. Few
doubt the determination of this leadership to fulfill this promise, and China has positioned
itself to make the transition to a “higher quality” growth path. Education standards have
risen dramatically, new green industries have emerged, the urban middle class is growing,
and consumer living standards are increasing. One can confidently p redict that the next five
years will see the country become more sophisticated, more prosperous, with an older popu-
lation, and a much more desirable living environment. At the same time, the challenges out-
lined above demonstrate the risks inherent in China’s development process, and China’s
development could still derail if the government fails to provide for disadvantaged prov-
inces, to curb corruption, to handle social unrest, or simply manage the complexity innate in
such a large and diverse country. To manage these risks, China must continue the path of
openness and reform Deng Xiaoping charted more than three decades ago; but this time
embracing simultaneous political, social, and economic reform.
Notes
1. The Cultural Revolution, from 1966 through 1976, sought impose Maoist orthodoxy
within the Party and enforce communism by removing capitalist, traditional, and cultural
elements from Chinese society.
2. “The Great Leap Forward,” from 1958 to 1961, aimed to transform the country from an
agrarian economy into a modern communist society through a process of rapid industri-
alization and collectivization.
3. The four Special Economic Zones (1980) and the fifteen Open Coastal areas (1984) not
only imposed lower tax rates, but enjoyed a favorable institutional and policy environ-
ment to attract foreign investment.
4. The central government funds these programs in western and most central provinces, but
requires wealthier coastal provinces to fund these same programs out of local fiscal
resources. This further redistributes benefits from higher to lower income regions.
5. The concept of a Socialist Market Economy was first proposed by Deng Xiaoping to
incorporate the market into China’s planned economy. It was formally introduced by
Jiang Zeming in 1993.
6. This ideology is credited to General Secretary Jiang Zemin and guided the CCP at its 16th
Party Congress (2002). It states that the Communist Party of China should be representa-
tive of advanced social productive forces, advanced culture, and the interests of the over-
whelming majority.
7. The Scientific Development Perspective is credited to Hu Jingtao. It was first introduced in
2003 and guided the 17th Party Congress (2007).
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chapter 39
br a zil
renato g. flÔres jr. 1
Introduction
Growth is a mystery. Economists have been struggling to unveil the determinants of this
process, yet it continues to defy and baffle their insights and theories. Since Solow’s pio-
neering paper (1956), a series of preconditions have been identified that formed the basis
for formal models from which the corresponding growth dynamics were assumed to
ensue. The myriad extensions of, and additions to, Solow’s original model testify to the
power of mathematical modelling, while other theoretical strands, like endogenous
growth, have borne out particular families of growth processes. Yet all models leave open
the broad question of what determines, causes, or makes for a supportive environment for
sustained growth.
The development narrative has produced various attempts to resolve this fundamental
question. Trade, institutions, absence of red tape, a clear regulatory framework, human
capital, technology and innovation, industrial policy, enlightened autocratic regimes capa-
ble of fostering sustainable investment, a democratic environment for business and entre-
preneurship, foreign direct investment, wise mastering of the Dutch disease, a sizeable
domestic market, quality education, and a thriving middle-class . . . the ideas are almost
endless. Ironically, each of these conditions is associated with a particular model, the experi-
ences of a handful of countries at a given point of time. Quite often, there are annoying
counter-examples, which make room for the addition of further explanations.
Thus growth remains a mystery, an elusive and seemingly random process, triggered by
unique circumstances. Hence country studies are still needed and Brazil offers an interesting
case combining both unorthodox and out-of-textbook policies and outcomes, with seem-
ingly reasonable explanations underpinning development during different periods of time.
This chapter is a modest attempt to understand the Brazilian dynamics in their entirety, iden-
tifying the main features that affect the process of growth and development.
The analysis covers more than eighty years, paying more attention to the period after 1989,
from President Collor de Mello to President Lula da Silva. Of course, this latter period can-
not be understood without an (inevitably selective) discussion of preceding times, particu-
larly the dynamics of the military regime and the dramatic periods of attempts to control
668 renato g. flÔres jr.
high inflation. Ideally, a detailed economic history would start at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, when the young Brazilian republic faced the challenge of designing country-
wide economic policies. This chapter opens with the beginning of the “modern” period when
a shrewd dictator, Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, seized power in 1930. Regulatory measures—
related to labor, industry, energy, and infrastructure—moved the economy closer to the
spirit of the times, though still far from it. Vargas’ successor, Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira,
was a pro-growth, charismatic personality who set the country on a path that was ironically
continued under the military government, which was precipitated by the temperamental
and controversial figure of Jânio da Silva Quadros.
This chapter argues that the personalities of particular Presidents, and the policies they
pursued, were critical in shaping Brazil’s development experience. This is not to discount
more classical explanations of Brazil’s growth, including factor productivity accounts and
the interplay of external and domestic markets. On these issues, the interested reader is
encouraged to consult the works of Baer (2008) and Roett (2010) which provide a didactic
view of the evolution of the Brazilian economy. In contrast, this chapter identifies forces that
shaped the behavior of different Presidents and compounded the struggle for development
within Brazilian society that is neither simple nor peaceful. If development is understood as
the intentional pursuit of a clear objective, it requires both intention and agency, and these
qualities are not easily identified in Brazil. Concentrating on the actions of different Presi-
dents is a way to somehow overcome this difficulty.
The directions of economic policy are described and assessed in general terms, rather than
through detailed statistical analysis. Figure 39.1 displays the growth trajectory over time. It
should be used as an indication of key periods covered. The chapter opens with a tour
d’horizon condensing the formative period of 1930–89 within a few pages. Next the five-year
10
Annual Growth (%)
–5
1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
figure 39.1 Brazil annual GDP growth, 1930–2011

brazil 669
period of the Collor–Itamar presidencies are examined more closely as this was a watershed
in Brazil’s development, clearly marking a break with the past. Subsequently, the Cardoso–
Lula presidencies are examined and explained to be the fortuitous product of good luck. The
conclusion is deliberately intended to be somewhat off-putting: to propose the controversial
idea that development as an intentional pursuit is not present in Brazil. This is not a Scandi-
navian country, and few African and Asian nations share the historical path which has deeply
affected Brazil’s development process. While there was undoubtedly an evolution in the
country’s circumstances over time, it requires novel instruments and concepts to be fully
understood. What emerges is not so much an intentional, long-term pursuit of development,
but rather but a succession of measures intended to solve specific short-term problems, such
as: increasing exports, improving the balance of trade, controlling public debt, fighting infla-
tion, enhancing industrial productivity, and reducing poverty and inequality.
Sixty Years of Economic Policy
From Vargas to the Military (1930–64)

The man from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, arrived in the capital on horse-
back and proved to be a savvy politician with a deep knowledge of the fractures dividing
Brazilian society. Getúlio Dornelles Vargas was acutely aware of a power struggle between
the established elite—largely land barons spread across the country and the emerging bour-
geoisie produced by the paulista industrial complex—and the new working class created by
the same industrialization spurred by São Paulo. By allotting the former to the Partido Social
Democrático (PSD), and the latter to the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB) founded in
1945, Vargas managed quite successfully for most of his rule to pit these groups against each
other to achieve a delicate and clever equilibrium which kept him in power.
A rebellious movement saw Vargas installed as a temporary President in November 1930.
He was duly elected in 1934, after nearly four years of a “provisional mandate.” His govern-
ment became a dictatorship from 1937. While he was ousted by the military in 1945, he was
re-elected in 1951 and closed his career dramatically three years later. In spite of his ability to
manipulate the divisions within Brazilian society to his favor, he overlooked the other side of
the bourgeoisie, made up of public servants, liberal professionals, and intellectuals largely
concentrated in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. This segment, which also attracted the middle
and upper levels of the military, especially the young, urban, and more cultured generation
in the Air Force, found its voice in União Democrática Nacional (UDN) and eventually con-
tributed to Vargas’ definitive fall from power.
Vargas’2 economic policy was mostly a compromise between the two groups that sup-
ported his administration. For the industrialists, he created a national development bank
(Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico, BNDE) and offered an import substitution
policy, starting in 1930 and re-emphasized several times during his nineteen years in power.
For labor, Vargas offered a minimum wage in 1940, and seminal legislation on labor relations
in 1943 in the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho. His nearly intuitive management of the
economy was strongly impacted by the Second World War, when the U.S., acting in its strate-
gic interests, forced some key features of modernization, including a major steel smelter
Volta Redonda in 1941 with Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional, the beginning of motor vehicle
manufacturing in 1942 with Fábrica Nacional de Motores, and the presence of air force bases
in the northeast.3 The country became more closely linked to Western international produc-
tion and corresponding developments in services and logistics.
The dictator returned after a six-year interregnum, now duly elected but without a reliable
majority in congress. During this second period in power, Vargas’ ever present nationalist
and populist strains were exacerbated and this time his ability to compromise was not so
successful. The former heightened U.S. suspicions towards his government, especially after
1953, when Eisenhower led the Republicans back to the White House. The economy had
become strongly dependent on the U.S., which had important investments in the country.
Vargas nationalized the energy and oil sectors, creating the state oil monopoly, Petrobrás
against the interest of the U.S. companies. Through the Instituto Brasileiro do Café, Vargas
attempted to exert supply management in the vital coffee exports, of which the U.S. was the
largest consumer. Starting in 1952, the Vargas government also exercised greater control over,
and imposed taxes on, remittances by foreign companies. State intervention in the economy,
always present since the early twentieth century, reached new levels.
On May 1, 1954, Vargas doubled the minimum wage, a move still debated by historians and
one which raised tension with the opposition during an already clear crisis in governance.
He subsequently ended his political career, committing suicide in the Presidential Palace in
the early hours of August 24th. Was his suicide an impulsive act of a strong-willed and pos-
sessive man who realized that he would never achieve the kind of encompassing control he
desired? Or was it the final gesture of a shrewd and meticulous strategist, who clearly saw
that he had plunged into a deep and complex mess—political, economic, and moral—from
which there was no way out, the best solution being to play the martyr for the sake of his
beloved people? While historians continue to debate these questions, what is clear is that
Vargas’ death and his well-crafted “letter to the Brazilian people” had the impact of solidify-
ing support for his policies for the next ten years.
A new equilibrium had been slowly nurtured, the PSD elite leaning towards the intellec-
tual and liberal UDN bourgeoisie. Both parties perceived that a new development model
was needed to liberate the economic forces in the post-war period and new world order cre-
ated under Bretton Woods. At the same time, the parties feared the somewhat haphazard
way in which Vargas had tried to increase the share of wages in total output. While the eco-
nomic record of Vargas’ final four years was not bad, the new alliance sought to foster faster
growth, setting aside the awkward and obtrusive social pact Vargas had championed.
The man behind this new alliance was Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, an extremely
gifted, affable, and charming personality elected in 1955. Kubitschek was to unleash latent
productive capacities. He worked with foreign companies to launch the Brazilian car indus-
try to generate new employment, create new industrial linkages, and new sources of tax rev-
enue. A first wave of maquillas industrialization delivered goods to the final consumer at
very high prices, due to a string of taxes attached to each step of manufacturing. Kubitschek
also encouraged foreign investment in the energy, transport, and food sectors. In June 1959,
he boldly ended negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) closing the coun-
try to the Fund’s resources.
Then, as now, Brazil’s large size was a powerful advantage. The open-minded Kubitschek
allowed the flourishing of experiments in the northeast—led by Celso Furtado—and else-
where in the country, establishing a modest network of fairly diversified production. Even if
brazil 671
most of this eventually came to supply the paulista industrial core, a domestic market was
emerging that supported the success of the import substitution idea. Construction of a new
capital city in Brasília had a major Keynesian effect and saw Kubitschek’s mandate end with
an impressive growth rate and rising life expectancy, albeit that these achievements were
plagued by escalating public debt, high inflation, and a rising imbalance in external accounts.
Industrialization had initiated a rural exodus, feeding a process of uncontrolled urbaniza-
tion that would last for decades (see Table 39.1), heightening social inequality between urban
and rural areas.
While Kubitschek had governed successfully using the industrial–labor alliance forged by
Vargas between the PSD and PTB, these political parties were increasingly at odds by the end
of his mandate. Kubitschek was a PSD member, and for some reason PSD–PTB presented
themselves as a unified ticket in the 1961 elections. The election resulted in a UDN victory for
President Jânio da Silva Quadros, sharing power with PTB Vice-President João (Jango) Gou-
lart, a former Vargas’ protégé and Minister of Labor (1952–53). This awkward arrangement
testified to the weakness of the post-Vargas social pact, which to a certain extent had persist-
ently attempted to marginalize the still powerful PTB. Although Quadros was intelligent and
extremely witty, he was unable to sustain himself as a credible President. He resigned in
August of the same year, creating a political crisis. Goulart became the President and, despite
strong opposition from the traditional elite, successfully negotiated to hold on to power after
a complex game of threats and compromises. His tenure was punctuated by strikes and an
economic crisis, and ended in a military coup in March 1964 that was widely supported by
the urban bourgeoisie and the eventual ascension of the old, conservative elite.
Military Government (1964–85)

During the two decades of military rule, the country experienced sustained growth through
five presidents, all of whom were top generals. Figure 39.1 gives a summary of the growth
rates which accounted for what came to be known as “the Brazilian miracle.” Cysne (1993)
and Skidmore (1988) provide classic discussions of economic policy making during this
period. What is less prevalent in the literature is an historical and geopolitical perspective of
how military rule in Brazil cannot be dissociated from U.S. global strategy during the Cold
War. In Latin America, this strategy was upset by the Cuban missile crisis, by widespread
agrarian movements from Mexico to Brazil, and by the election of Salvador Allende in Chile.4
Argentina and Uruguay, key neighboring countries, also experienced a shift to military rule,
aided by covert American intervention. In Brazil, the U.S. had been active in the twin crises
of the Vargas administrations, in 1945 and 1954. Rural unrest and the ensuing organized
social movements had been active since the second half of the Kubitschek mandate, and a
source of worry to the Americans. During the post-war period, the U.S. cultivated close ties
with the Brazilian army, by a variety of means, coupling training and education with several
soft power initiatives.
For several reasons, the degree of violence of the Brazilian military dictatorship—apart
from the Bleche Jahren under Garrastazu Medici (notably 1969–72)—cannot be compared to
the ones prevailing in Argentina and Uruguay. This is important because, though the social
fabric was damaged, with serious and sad ruptures at certain points, the impact of this disar-
ray on the economy was comparatively small. Growth, even if it fed inequality, contributed
Table 39.1 Growth in urbanization, 1960–80

1960 1980
Total* Urban (%) Rural (%) Total* Urban (%) Rural (%)
Brazil 70,070 44.7 55.3 119,003 67.6 32.4
North 2,562 37.4 62.6 5,880 51.6 48.4
Northeast 22,182 33.9 66.1 34,812 50.5 49.5
Centre 2,943 34.2 65.8 7,545 67.8 32.2
Southeast 30,631 57.0 43.0 51,734 82.8 17.2
South 11,753 37.1 62.9 19,031 62.4 37.6
Source: 1960 and 1980 Population Census; Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE).
* Total population in 1000s.
to maintaining a degree of social cohesion that in turn helped the economy to function and
improve over time.
The military had a clear vision of national development, one which entailed the rise of an
autonomous and powerful Brazil. They ruled with the crucial help of a technocratic elite,
largely drawn from middle- and upper-class families related to the former PSD and UDN
political parties. These were extremely bright people, honest and engaged in the “big Brazil”
pursuit. Urbanization accelerated, rural–urban migration peaked, and the government, in a
clear example of its pragmatic approach, inspired by engineering, created specialized agen-
cies to tackle the problem. At the end of the regime, at least nine conurbations had emerged,
nurturing significant portions of a marginalized population that would turn to violence and
crime, particularly in Salvador, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. Notwithstanding, there
were remarkable developments in infrastructure, notably telecommunications, energy,
housing, water, and sanitation. Improvements within the federal public service—including
the statistical, internal revenue, and social security systems—were also relevant and welfare-
increasing (see Table 39.1).
The government system was highly centralized and pursued central planning systemati-
cally, with the federation of states often existing more in rhetoric than practice. The budget-
ary process was significantly improved, and the management of federal institutions of was
greatly modernized. The economic model was based on a constant and generous inflow of
foreign capital, giving way to what came to be known as the “pharaonic” civil works, such as
the Itaipú Dam, which greatly contributed to external debt. Growth, outstanding in many
years, was achieved with high inflation, taxes, and by running deficits. The exchange rate was
managed accordingly, meaning that the U.S. dollar was constantly appreciating, and dollar
bills—hidden below the mattress—became a form of savings.
Sarney’s Economy (1985–89)

José de Ribamar Ferreira de Araújo Costa Sarney, until then a representative of the class of
political chieftains from the northern states—in his case, the borderline Amazonian state of
Maranhão—was undoubtedly the luckiest politician of his generation. Vice-president to a
President-elect who fell mortally ill just hours prior to the inauguration, Sarney became the
brazil 673
first civilian leader in two decades. The military had released their hold on power for several
reasons: an exhaustion of both their mystique and socio-economic capabilities, the renais-
sance of opposition parties, and rising demands from the excluded. Yet above all there was
failure of the economic model, with inflation sweeping the middle-class that had originally
guaranteed support to the regime. Between 1980 and 1982, annual inflation averaged around
100 percent, and in the three subsequent years it rose to above 200 percent. Thus Sarney
received an economy that, while still booming, was plagued by problems.
Sarney was a master of compromise and formed alliances in any conceivable direction
and with any existing group that might fulfill his constant goal of political survival. He soon
realized that inflation was a monster that threatened to swallow his office and career: not
only was it hurting the middle class, but it contributed to serious and ever-rising inequality.
Power had returned to the liberal-conservative elite of the old Vargas period, yet Sarney was
obliged to make a gesture to the lower classes and the segments of society kept out of power
during the past two decades. He was forced to continually arbitrate among the old elite
(including land barons), the labor class, and the São Paulo entrepreneurs and associated
intelligentsia. All kept a restive eye on the security and military community, who had just
recently left the government.
Sarney decided to rely on a group of economists based at the Catholic University at Rio de
Janeiro, who had been actively debating the dynamics of inflation. They were creative, linked
to the mainstream of economy theory, with good connections in the U.S. and beyond. These
economists were palatable to the different forces around the Sarney administration and came
to play an important part in his government. The story of this somewhat funny marriage,
and its series of inflation-abating plans, has been well-covered in the literature. Most were
short-lived, quick fixes that gave the government a brief respite to design the next experi-
ment. Brazilian society docilely endured a succession of plans, always hopeful that the most
recent one would prove successful.
As a political figure, José Sarney became one of the most intriguing examples of political
acumen in recent Brazilian history. Yet in 1987, the government was obliged to default, unable
to pay the interest on its external debt. Disarray was evident and, at the end of Sarney’s man-
date, annual inflation exceeded 1,700 percent. The fiscal monster had won (see Table 39.2).
Setting the Stage

A few salient points arise from these three time periods, spanning sixty years of economic
development. First, there was the constant of state intervention in the economy, despite brief
spells of more market-oriented conduct. The usually centralized character of the federal gov-
ernment, be it out of fear of overly strong regional opposition forces, or as a means to deal
with the considerable size of a relatively unpopulated space, helps explain this dirigiste style.
Within this reality, regional disparities were blatant. The northern society, still following the
class structure of the sugar cane economy, was more resilient to economic transformation. It
is no wonder that the revolution that brought Vargas to power was triggered by the south and
southeast of the country. The brief, more innovative spell for the northeast, under Kubitschek
with Celso Furtado at Sudene, and the road and highway network built during the military
era, were not enough to fully engage sizeable regions of the country in the industrialization
of the south and create a more balanced economy through greater connectivity.
Second, industrialization took place throughout this period,5 but the incentives for inno-
vation and the creation or adaptation of new technologies were diffuse or non-existent.
Within an economy strongly dependent on the export of a single export (coffee), at least
until the Kubitschek era, there were further barriers to altering income distribution whether
at the regional or national level. Some importation of technology did take place, but never
reached the desired levels. Export dependency on the U.S. during the post-war period, fur-
ther complicated the development project.
Third, since the late 1940s, inflation started to slowly creep into the array of problems.
During his second term, Vargas—like Argentina’s Juan Domingo Perón6—perceived infla-
tion and distribution as the key conflicts that needed to be solved. Very broadly, inflation is
the result of poor macroeconomic management. The exchange rate management associated
with a single export commodity, combined with import substitution policy and the leniency
towards inflationary growth adopted by Kubitschek and the military, compounded the origi-
nal inflationary sin. Support for the banking system, which quickly learned how to extract
formidable rents from the process, became one of the key pillars to its persistence. Inflation
had become out of control, and some form of rupture was needed.
The Collor–Itamar Period: True Transition
This period is worthy of distinction as it included two radical turns in the tiring sequence of
approaches to inflation and a presidential impeachment that is unique in Brazilian history—
entirely within democratic rules and less than ten years after the military had lost power.
Fernando Affonso Collor de Mello represents, in a rather awkward way, the earthquake that
was needed to change the course of economic policy. As with any earthquake, it caused
excessive damage, and eventually amounted to further waste of precious time, resources,
and confidence. But the bold shudder in macroeconomic management, trade and industrial
policies, and government intervention in the economy awakened the old conservative alli-
ance and part of the progressive forces needed to renew domestic policy.
Soon after Collor’s inauguration in March 1990, he unleashed a previously inconceivable
assault against inflation. Beside consistent measures to reduce the public debt, and a frontal
attack on the indexing of wages and other payments, the Collor Plan enforced a generalized
confiscation of monetary assets held by citizens in the Brazilian financial system. As men-
tioned above, the sociology of the Brazilian people, with regards to their relationship with
authority, and economic policy in particular, over the past four decades deserves to be thor-
oughly studied. The amazingly peaceful reaction of the population—despite several individ-
ual tragedies—to this most abusive, illegal, and unfair measure can only be explained by the
fatigue experienced after a decade of growing and uncontrolled inflation and misguided
attempts to address such during the Sarney administration.
The population absorbed in the best possible way the confiscation and the sudden, drastic
reduction in their income. Meanwhile President Collor, sometimes in an apocalyptic way,
abolished old structures and all sorts of bureaucratic barriers. Most of his initiatives proved
useful, including the liberalization of trade and reduction of tariffs with the General Agree-
ment on Tariffs and Trade, drastic reduction of red tape for imports, the closure of federal
brazil 675
agencies and institutes that had become the core of cartorial activities (a Portuguese word
denoting crony capitalism involving specific groups within the private sector and a few
bureaucrats who control strategic decisions in key institutions). Collor de Mello also stream-
lined the public sector, encouraged the privatization of services, and cut subsidies to pro-
tected industries. He was young, assertive, bold, and in a hurry, but without a clear
destination.
The speed of the reforms and a generalized lack of confidence following the drastic confis-
cation, soon led to an exaggerated emphasis on reducing the public debt. Faithful to the Bra-
zilian tradition of excessive reliance on public spending—enhanced during the military
period and the Sarney years—the economy entered a brutal recession aggravated by the fear
of a return to inflation. Indeed, growth was minimal following the disarray introduced by
the Collor Plan which made it impossible to stabilize prices. By the end of January 1991, infla-
tion was back and a renewed Collor II plan was produced. But the year was dominated by the
turmoil in the President’s political trajectory, triggered by accusations from his own brother.
Collor de Mello was impeached in October and, to avoid further complications, he resigned
in December, opening the way for his Vice-President, Itamar Augusto Cautiero Franco.
In spite of an adverse political climate, Collor de Mello managed to successfully convene
the UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) which produced key
conventions on biodiversity and climate change, as well as the Agenda 21 roadmap for sus-
tainable development. The conference set Brazil as a focal actor in the environmental debate,
something the country has yet to use to its full advantage.
A shrewd and cautious politician, Franco spent the year establishing his base and probing
the latitude of his government. He named Senator Fernando Henrique Cardoso as Minister
of External Relations in 1992, and then as Minister of Finance in 1993. Cardoso acknowl-
edged Collor de Mello’s achievements in restructuring of the economy, and pursued many of
the same measures, including privatization, albeit with a more moderate and gentle style.
Cardoso also retreated somewhat from trade liberalization and, with the help of key figures
from the Sarney plans, crafted a new scheme for controlling inflation. The credibility enjoyed
by Itamar Franco and the support he personally gave to all phases of the operation were deci-
sive. Launched in July 1994, Cardoso’s Plano Real (Real Plan) saw the creation of a new cur-
rency and a clear transition away from the old one. Neither prices nor wages were frozen.
New measures regarding the public debt were seriously enforced. Privatizations received a
further boost, and consumption was indirectly restrained. The new currency was accompa-
nied by an artificially high exchange rate (parity with the U.S. dollar), with a very narrow
band for flotation, and excessively high interest rates to maintain the international attrac-
tiveness of the new currency.
What explains the success of the Plano Real? One explanation is generalized weariness,
even from the financial institutions that had extracted considerable rents from high infla-
tion. A learning process undoubtedly had taken place among the pundits who had concocted
so many previous failed attempts. And the world and Brazil had changed: inflation had
become a serious nuisance to the elites, even more than to the population writ large. The suc-
cess of Plano Real gave Cardoso two mandates as President, after the end of the Itamar
period. He would pursue his reforms and correctly perceived the several measures still
needed, but would become a hostage to the instruments that guaranteed the success of his
Plan. Growth would be timid (see Table 39.2).
Table 39.2 Annual rate of inflation in Brazil for selected years

The last two years of General J. B. Figueiredo
1983 211% Inflation peaks at the end
1984 224% of the military regime
Sarney’s five-year mandate

1985 235% Inflation continues to escalate
1986 65% “Cruzado” Plan and “Cruzado” Plan II
1987 416% Bresser Plan
1988 1,038% Inflation defeats Mr Sarney
1989 1,783% Summer Plan
Collor de Mello–Itamar Franco transition

1990 1,477% Collor de Mello’s confiscation
1991 480% Broad contraction; inflation still high
1992 1,158% Collor de Mello is withdrawn
1993 2,708% Itamar Franco’s first year
1994 1,094% Plano Real
Source: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE).
The Cardoso–Lula Period
Spanning sixteen years of continuity in many areas, the Cardoso–Lula era is at first sight a
perfect example for those who place institutions and the role of government as the key
engines of growth. Blessed by the victory over inflation, and with the knowledge gained in
the Itamar government, Cardoso easily won his first presidential mandate. He was eager to
give the country a modern outlook, suitable for a globalized world where the benefits of
growth should accrue to everyone. His mandates were characterized by his personal charm
and capacity to form alliances with actual or potential opponents, coupled with his own crit-
ical reassessment of the rapid pace of the Collor-led reforms. Shrewd and open to the world,
he aimed to hitch the country to the bandwagon of the European Union, rather than to the
U.S. model, notwithstanding his good relations with President Clinton.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was an exceptionally gifted negotiator who cannot be classified as a
true leftist. He came to power after three courageous, but failed, attempts at the presidential elec-
tion. With a strong intuition and fast intellect, he had the ability to perceive the nearly optimal
path leading to the results he wanted. Rather than a being the leader of an abstract, but largely
unknown mass called the “Brazilian people,” he was truly a legitimate leader thanks both to his
personal qualities and the formidable, Stalinist-like machine built by his Partido dos Trabal-
hadores (PT). Lula represented the “other Brazil,” the opposite dimension of that part of the nation
represented by Cardoso. The auspicious, almost wonderful irony, is that Brazil needed both.
Cardoso pushed for basic structural reforms, regulatory frameworks, privatizations, and
trade liberalizations; not always to the full, nor in the most desirable way, but nearly all
brazil 677
s uccessful. He made the country and its economy more modern. Lula, in a certain way, did
the opposite. Suspicious of regulatory agencies and frameworks, cautious in his approach to
privatization, he concentrated on the dire social inequalities plaguing Brazil. Through mas-
sive, bold, and well-managed social programs, he showed Brazilians and the world that ine-
quality could be reduced at a fast pace and better living conditions for the poor were an
obtainable goal for those who held power. A less unjust Brazil emerged from his rule.
However, a thin thread ties together these two Presidents, avoiding an otherwise drastic
fracture which could have taken place, in spite of the democratic transition of power in
2003. This stability is largely a credit to Lula. The change of power—an expression that few
times had been as meaningful in Brazilian history—occurred through a transparent, dem-
ocratic process, amidst great uncertainty and relatively high tension among the financial
markets and the middle and upper classes. The economy had not fared well during C ardoso’s
final two years (see Table 39.3). Argentina’s economy had collapsed between December 2001
and February 2002, and many feared that Brazil would be next, that Lula would be the pilot
of a sinking ship. Instead, to everyone’s surprise, the new President maintained the
monetary policy of his predecessor. He displayed a new, but not radically new, rhetoric and
incorporated into his economic staff a wise combination of experts with proven technical
credentials and, more importantly, conservative tendencies. Lula thus aborted a looming
crisis, the country resumed its daily life, and Brazil achieved eighteen years of democratic
and economic continuity, something it dearly needed. The conditions for a new era had
been set.
Four Mandates
Cardoso (1995–98, 1999–2002)

Surfing on the success of Plano Real, Cardoso started his first mandate with a strong liberal
drive which aimed to open the economy to market forces. He abolished the state monopolies
in oil, telecommunications, gas, and shipping. The mining company Vale do Rio Doce was
privatized along with a number of state-owned enterprises. Cardoso further liberalized trade
and declared the country open to foreign investment. However, these steps were not without
their costs. Inflation was under control thanks to an overvalued exchange rate that progres-
sively became unsustainable, coupled with high interest rates, responsible for attracting a
sizeable portion of speculative capital. Moreover, these market opening measures were, in
overall terms, more timid than those introduced by Collor, as Cardoso struck sophisticated
compromises with the old elites, notably with the manufacturing sector.
The sudden drop in the inflation rents extracted by the banks, which were at around 4 per-
cent of GDP before the Plano Real, obliged the government to create a special program in
1995 known as Programa de Estímulo à Reestruturação e ao Fortalecimento do Sistema Finan-
ceiro Nacional (PROER). This program rescued several financial institutions, avoiding a seri-
ous collapse of the system. The volume of PROER operations amounted to roughly three
percent of GDP during 1995–7. The programme was strongly criticized by opposition p arties
and many segments of the society (Maia 2003), however the resulting streamlining of the
financial sector, along with prudential measures enforced by the Central Bank, would later
prove useful during the 2008 financial crisis. The outcome of Cardoso’s first mandate was a
timid growth rate and signs of a looming recession by 1998.
Unable to resist the temptation of a second mandate, Cardoso employed considerable per-
sonal energy in enlarging the spectrum of political commitments in order to change the leg-
islation forbidding the re-election of the President. In spite of the modest performance
indicators, the modernization drive and the control of inflation rewarded him with a second
term. In 1999, soon after his inauguration, the situation in the foreign account was close to
untenable and pressure on the Brazilian real (R$) was high. The stubborn conduct of the
Central Bank, evident since the second half of his first mandate, now underwent an internal
leadership conflict, threatening to ignite a crisis. An ill-timed, and delayed, devaluation of
the Brazilian currency cost the reserves over U.S.$40 billion dollars. The President eventu-
ally acted and replaced the Central Bank administrators, putting Arminio Fraga Neto into
the top position.
Fraga Neto is largely responsible for the success of Cardoso’s second mandate. The Presi-
dent, unfortunately, had his hands tied by the compromises he had to make to assure his re-
election and now showed a more discreet, even hesitant, economic leadership. Public debt
returned to less orthodox levels, unemployment increased, and Cardoso was unwilling or
unable to pursue much needed reforms. In contrast, Fraga Neto’s cool manner and clever
implementation of inflation targeting ensured the consistent macroeconomic management
of this period, at the price of high interest rates. Apart from the smart Central Bank policies,
perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Cardoso’s second mandate was the Fiscal Responsi-
bility Legislation (Lei de Responsabilidade Fisca) in 2000, which established clear and well-
designed guidelines for managing public funds at all levels of the federation. It is correctly
considered a major step in improving public administration in Brazil. In February 2002, the
long awaited crisis in Argentina took a dramatic final turn, with the dismantling of the Cur-
rency Board and the peso to U.S. dollar parity that had amazingly endured for a decade.
Uncertainty prevailed in the financial markets and spirits heightened with the possibility of a
Lula victory in the November elections. Volatility was pervasive and Fraga Neto again
excelled in his ability to keep the macroeconomic framework under control. As a result, Car-
doso’s departure from government was low key.
Lula da Silva (2003–6, 2007–10)

Lula started amid great tension and uncertainty regarding the path of the economy. He
retained Fraga Neto for a time, eventually appointing Henrique Meirelles, a former banker
and conservative, to the Central Bank. As noted above, Lula’s economic staff included mod-
erates and technocrats that helped calm markets and reverse expectations. This allowed the
President the latitude needed to concentrate on the social policies that would become the
imprint of his government.
It is debatable who designed the Bolsa Familia and Fome Zero programs, the former origi-
nating at the very end of Cardoso’s period. What matters is Lula’s leadership in emphasizing
the social agenda: changing the rules of the game and placing government machinery at the
service of poverty alleviation and social improvement nation-wide. This was something that
had never taken place in Brazil. It is not that the governing elites had been oblivious to the
brazil 679
ever spreading social ills, but it tended to enter the official narrative as an afterthought, to be
addressed through the spill-overs of policies to grow the economy in general. This was an
approach that targeted at most 65 percent of Brazil’s population, thus leaving the remaining
35 percent as hungry outcasts. Even Cardoso, a sociologist with serious social concerns,
largely overlooked the dire conditions of at least one-third of the country.
On the domestic front, this is the essence of Lula’s contribution. Everything gravitated
around a core mission of poverty reduction: from measures to make credit available to the
poor, to improved access to health care. At the same time, both Bolsa Familia and Fome Zero
were improved, expanded, and became increasingly efficient. A conservative macroeco-
nomic policy, secured by Meirelles’ credentials at the Central Bank, and the maintenance of
excessively high interest rates, assured a stable environment for the government and the sup-
port of the ruling financial class.
On the international front, Lula’s fine perception and emotional intelligence estab-
lished an image of a confident Brazil that was active, serious, and successful in addressing
its critical problem of stark inequality coupled with absolute poverty. Lula realized that
his victory—a union leader from the bottom rungs of society and with a modest educa-
tion—represented an achievement for Western democracy and an acceptable face for
capitalism. He conspicuously employed this engaging, symbolic image, aided by an inno-
vative and competent Foreign Minister.7 Brazil became a model experiment: the BRIC
member without nuclear weapons and the country which was acting quickly to change its
pattern of social injustice. Brazilians could take pride in their country’s standing on the
world stage.
Lula’s disproportionate emphasis on the social agenda, of course, had its toll. The regula-
tory framework for public services and infrastructure was neglected. The country’s capital
stock (ports, airports, highways) was ignored with a serious impact in subsequent years.
Few of Cardoso’s incomplete reforms progressed. At the same time, the macroeconomic
instruments whose origin lay in the Plano Real were showing signs of exhaustion. In spite of
achieving growth, interest rates were still abusive and the exchange rate was moderately
overvalued.
During Lula’s second mandate, he successfully coped with the international financial cri-
sis, thanks to the sound macroeconomic management in place for more than ten years, the
healthy status of the banking sector, and the lucky counter-cyclical moment the country was
living in when the crisis struck. Lula’s optimism, bold statements, and confident reassur-
ances played a role as well, countering accusations of vapid rhetoric and wishful optimism by
the opposition. Lula also continued to boost foreign policy, giving special weight to relations
with the African continent. However, corruption, ingrained in Brazil since at least Vargas,
did not decrease under Lula’s rule. Hopes that the federal administration would become
impeccable were soon abandoned. Perhaps worse, nominations were tightly controlled by
the political party, and unqualified affiliates were appointed to many important technical
positions.
Apart from the inflationary peak, a superficial analysis of growth during the two decades
of military and sixteen years of civilian rule might suggest that performance during the mili-
tary years; but many more dimensions are at stake. Stability was a major achievement during
the Cardoso–Lula years, but volatility is still high in both eras. The country was still far from
a mature economy.
Development to Nowhere, Change

Everywhere
In the introduction to this volume, the editors suggest that “consensus on what constitutes
development, and how to best pursue it, may well be a thing of the past.” One might go fur-
ther and argue that development does not exist at all, and that the whole concept needs to be
rephrased. The Brazilian experiment, briefly outlined in these pages, supports this argument,
and brings a new perspective to how we might think about development. What can be
learned from the eighty years of Brazilian history?
First, growth versus distribution is a false dichotomy. If one places too much emphasis on
one side, a high price is paid for having overlooked the other. Vargas and Lula seemed to have
perceived this. Vargas, as happens to nearly all dictators, even shrewd ones, tried to accom-
modate the different forces within his own personal schemes, which lacked a democratic
framework, and eventually lost credibility among a large fraction of the elite. Meanwhile
Lula was obliged to play a fireman in addressing social inequity, tipping the scale to the
distribution side of “development management.” Kubitschek and Cardoso cannot be fully
blamed for neglecting income distribution, but they certainly pushed the scales more in
favour of growth. The irony is that Kubitschek really achieved growth, while Cardoso had a
poor record on this indicator. Meanwhile, during the mandates of both presidents, the social
problems plaguing Brazilian society remained largely unresolved.
Second, public funds play an important role. This is especially so in young capitalist econ-
omies. The key issue is how to moderate, target, and measure their use. Brazil clearly “pro-
gressed” during periods of substantial public investment, unfortunately often uncontrolled,
and given the size of the country, a constant flow is needed even if only for replacement pur-
poses. The mystery is how to combine such contributions with the active participation of
private investors. The duality—alleviated, but not solved, by privatization—of an over-
stretched public sector together with unused capacity in the private sector has been pointed
out by some as a persistent Brazilian problem.8
Third, stability matters. This point may partially answer the previous question of what one
can learn from Brazil’s history albeit in a rather conservative way. The much praised virtues
of stability—political, macroeconomic, and regulatory—coupled with credibility gained
through consistent behavior by government, increased global credibility and attracted a
diversified group of agents to participate, together with the government, in the “pursuit of
development.” The Cardoso–Lula sequence is a good example of this. The miracle years,
under the military, even if more imperfect and partial, share something of this logic.
Fourth, social classes—and the divides between them—are essential for understanding a
large country with a diversified society, such as Brazil. Without entering into a simplistic
Marxist analysis of the Brazilian phenomenon, it is clear that the development narrative of
these eighty years is a narrative of class struggle; a strong and violent struggle in the way the
top elites defend their privileges and position, notwithstanding the docile behavior of the
Brazilian people. Those who held power, even the generals-presidents of the military dec-
ades, did perceived this, but few were successful at navigating around and through class
struggle. Vargas, Kubitschek, and Lula demonstrated a deeper understanding of the contra-
dictions, and achieved, in different ways and with varying degrees of success, reasonably
brazil 681
constructive pacts between classes. Lula was perhaps the most successful, but lacked a
broader and better technical staff. This aspect of the Brazilian experience is perhaps the most
relevant for understanding other large countries with complex societies, such as India, Indo-
nesia, and China.
This chapter overlooks the question of culture and education, but a couple of points might
be made here by way of explanation. It is almost a cliché to say that education plays a key role
in development with social progress (see Langoni 1973). What matters more is something
beyond formal education and that encompasses broader aspects of culture. It is not that for-
mal education, whether in natural sciences or humanities, is not vital for innovation and an
improved society, but rather it is neither necessary nor sufficient. During the decades cov-
ered, Brazil did not excel in its education policies, but was extremely innovative in agri-
business and particular industries, such as manufacturing mid-sized aircraft. Naturally,
education played a role in this, whether through the scientific staff of the state agricultural
research company, EMBRAPA, or the top engineering institute funded by the Air Force,
where EMBRAER started. But a clever mixture of Ricardo’s and Smith’s advantages, coupled
with broader cultural traits of the agrarian sector and the military, created favorable condi-
tions for innovation.
The country is also extremely creative in music, now a powerful industry and world brand.
Brazil is also well-known for the peaceful and surprisingly efficient management of colossal
popular events, such as the Rio Carnival, a reputation which likely contributed to Brazil win-
ning the right to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. These are
activities are reasonably distant from the classic understanding of formal education, yet they
matter tremendously in a narrative of development in Brazil. In contrast, Brazil has so far
missed the opportunity to become a model for sustainable development. While natural
resources are abundant, the country lacks the technical skills required for their management.
Since Collor de Mello hosted UNCED in 1992, Brazil has tried to find a path toward sustain-
able development, and Brazilian diplomacy has played a constructive role in the interna-
tional arena, often thanks to its superior matchmaker abilities. But the nation does not yet
fully qualify as a model of sustainability.
The four considerations above unavoidably draw attention to the regional differences
within the country. Often it is almost silly to speak of “Brazil” as a single entity, given the
multiple realities encompassed by the name. Over the twentieth century, having occupied a
vast land, new territorial tensions emerged, coupled with varied geographic patterns of
development. This obliges any analyst to be careful in making broad statements about a
country that is discovering and asserting, in increasingly affirmative and modern ways, its
multiple regional identities.
In synthesis, what has the sturm und drang of these eighty years led to? Is there a trend or
tendency to be discovered in the kind of economy and social structure that has emerged?
Rather than continuity, the succession of policies and measures described above speaks to
several staggering efforts to solve specific problems, and orient the economy to partial, ulti-
mately short-term targets, including increasing exports, improving the balance of trade,
controlling public debt, fighting inflation, enhancing industrial productivity, and reducing
poverty and inequality. Yet development and an encompassing social project are nowhere to
be found. This does not mean that accomplishments and change, sometimes substantial,
have not taken place. However, taking into account historical context, is Brazilian society
fairer in 2011 than it was in 1931? Very likely, yes, but proving this is not easy.
Brazil is now a democratic capitalist society, but this statement is as vague as saying that
China is a socialist republic undergoing a capitalist experiment. Only sound and specific
knowledge of procedures, proceedings, cultural traits, structural assets, shortcomings, and
of the daily functioning of institutions and the varied economic agents, can shed light on
such omnibus statements. Change took place everywhere during these eighty years. If, like
in physics, dynamics is what matters, the overall direction is probably positive. But the situa-
tion is more complex: explanations need simultaneously a broader and deeper view. And
this is what makes the study of Brazil so attractive.
Notes
1. The author is indebted to Timothy Hobson for his invaluable assistance.
2. Throughout the text, the name of the President is used interchangeably to refer to the
historical facts and dealings of the personas well as for the policies, measures, or apprais-
als related to his or her respective mandate.
3. On U.S. military presence in Brazil, see Conn and Fairchild (1989: 302–30).
4. It is also interesting to point out the anti-U.S. incidents in the Panama Canal in 1964,
which eventually led to the handing of canal to local authorities in 2000; as well as a wave
of protests in Asian countries, including the Philippines and Vietnam.
5. A comprehensive account of such is found in Malan et al. (1977).
6. The two dictators—Vargas in Brazil and Perón in Argentina—reflect distinct contexts,
but is nonetheless a common comparison. Both undoubtedly shared certain sensitivities,
including a desire to increase the portion of GDP dedicated to wages.
7. Lula’s Foreign Minister, Ambassador Celso Amorim, was ranked among the 100 Global
Thinkers for 2010, by Foreign Policy magazine.
8. Ignácio Rangel (1914–94) was one of the pioneers of this interpretation.
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Notas Técnicas do Banco Central do Brasil, 38. Brasília: Banco Central do Brasil.
Malan, Pedro Sampaio, Regis Bonelli, Marcelo de Paiva Abreu, and José Eduardo de Carvalho
Pereira (1977) “Política econômica externa e industrialização no Brasil, 1939–52,” Relatório
de Pesquisa 36. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada.
Roett, Riordan (2010) The New Brazil. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Skidmore, Thomas E. (1988) The Policies of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964–85. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Solow, Robert Merton (1956) “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics, 70: 65–94.
chapter 40
chil e
ernesto ottone and carlos vergara
Introduction
Chile has a long and solid tradition of democracy, and has shared in the social and economic
development experienced by the countries of the southern cone of South America. In the
midst of the Cold War, Chileans elected a socialist president despite strong opposition at
home and abroad. The nation was dramatically divided and faced difficulties in both eco-
nomic growth and social development. Democracy was interrupted by a military coup in
September 1973, and a dictatorship ruled the country until March 1990. The economic poli-
cies of the Pinochet régime were shaped by students of Milton Friedman from the Chicago
School of neo-liberal thinking on development. A plebiscite in 1988 rejected the Pinochet
leadership, leading the way for presidential and parliamentary elections. In returning to
democratic rule, Chileans had to change their former political alliances, breaking through
old roadblocks to form a new majority coalition known as Concertación por la Democracia.
This coalition defeated the Pinochet leadership at the ballot box, but then needed to offer the
country a new model of development built around a vision that balanced economic out-
comes with social development.
By and large, Latin America is a middle-income continent whose self-image, particularly
in Chile, has often been defined by the idea of being “backward.”1 Chileans regard themselves
as similar to Europeans, at least prior to the financial crisis, except that they were at an earlier
point on the development path and seemingly destined to remain behind. Overall, Chileans
see themselves in the middle of, not at the head of nor last in, the class, occupying a diffuse
space between the world’s poorest nations and the reality of the developed countries.
Chile is a country of mixed ethnic heritage, defined by international organizations as upper
middle income; however, because of unequal income distribution, a higher proportion of its
population lives in conditions of poverty than would be expected at this income level. But it
is also a country that for centuries has struggled to emerge from its backwardness and has
eagerly sought a path leading to development. In its two centuries as an independent nation,
Chile has explored different paths, but beyond short-lived prosperity brought about by cer-
tain cycles of the economy, the country has not been able definitively to overcome its back-
ward status, and sustained development has remained elusive.
684 ernesto ottone and carlos vergara
“Development” is not only a concept but a particular relationship between state, market,
and society. It is also, ultimately, a set of measurable results in economic, political, and social
variables. This chapter analyzes Chile in terms of the concept, process, and results of devel-
opment. At times, the concept of development has been synonymous with economic growth,
measured in per capita GDP. Yet a society can also be considered developed when its people
experience well-being. As Amartya Sen (1999) has suggested, having a place in society means
that even those with low income can lead a decent life and enjoy opportunities to shape their
future. One can describe an evolution in thinking about development as Chile, perhaps more
than any other Latin American country, experienced dramatically different models of devel-
opment within the space of a few decades, with varying effects on the country’s economic,
political, and social life.
Development Prior to the Coup

After the 1929 global economic crisis, a decrease in world trade inspired Chile and several
other Latin American countries to pursue a development model based on import substitu-
tion. This was a model of inward industrialization that sought to grow domestic industry
through a combination of protection from foreign competition and incentives for local pri-
vate investment. At the time, there was a collapse in the supply of goods and services coming
in from abroad. High tariffs and the low cost of local credit attempted to foster a domestic
business class, while the state invested directly in industries seen to be of strategic impor-
tance, such as electrical utilities and steel manufacturing.
By the 1950s, a group of intellectuals led by Raúl Prebisch,2 under the auspices of the UN
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), elaborated theories
about the causes of underdevelopment and the requirements for a transition to development.
Analyses based on the center–periphery axes3 and dependency theory argued that develop-
ment required countries to foster domestic industrial production capable of absorbing tech-
nical progress. It is worth noting that the location of ECLAC’s headquarters, in the capital of
Santiago, meant that a number of Chilean intellectuals contributed, and were very sensitive,
to ECLAC’s thinking and theories over time (see Adebajo, this volume).
Within the Latin American context, Chile experienced an early rise in the proportion of
its population living in urban centers, a feature it shared with the other southern cone coun-
tries. This means that the process of migration from the countryside to the city happened
earlier than in other developing countries, leading to public policy that attempted to inte-
grate this new population into the daily life of the city. For example, a National Health Serv-
ice, modeled after the United Kingdom system, was established in the 1950s, and a policy for
social housing and integration of the urban poor was developed in the 1960s. The country
also experienced a high and growing rate of primary school enrollment. In this sense, Chile
was an early adopter of policies and mechanisms for social inclusion. This economic and
social development placed Chile among the most advanced countries on the continent. Even
when growth was slow, wealth was concentrated, and levels of inequality and social exclusion
ran high, Chile compared relatively well with many of its neighbors in the region. However, in
the 1960s, tax revenues derived from the growth of the economy were insufficient to support
this social spending, while marginal urban sectors and excluded farm workers pressed for
greater inclusion.
chile 685
The Chilean political system was composed of various parties that, one way or another,
tended to split popular support three ways, creating persistent blocks occupying the right,
center, and left of the political spectrum. None of the three could obtain a clear majority,
resulting in a continuous impasse. With separate elections for the president and a propor-
tional parliament, the candidate chosen to lead the country at any given time could count on
support from only one-third of the legislature. The 1960s were years of reform and revolu-
tion: the Cuban revolution was beginning, the Cold War was in full swing, and students were
rioting in the streets of Europe and the United States. In this context, there was no culture of
forming political coalitions, leading each third of the political spectrum to become progres-
sively more ideologically polarized and making the effectiveness of such minority govern-
ments increasingly precarious.
The election in 1970 of Salvador Allende, a socialist leader with democratic convictions,
marked a contradiction. In the highly polarized society of the time, the political system had
become completely ineffective, with falling tax revenues and increasing demands for social
spending. Allende’s government was trapped by a model of growth and development that no
longer worked. On September 11, 1973, a military coup overthrew the government and ush-
ered in seventeen years of military dictatorship.
Development during Dictatorship

The military government violently wiped out democracy and introduced a radical change in
the country’s model of development. Import substitution or inward development was quickly
dismantled and replaced by a model of economic opening to the outside world, with com-
plete dominance of self-regulated markets and an almost complete withdrawal of the state
from its previous role in the economy. Unlike the experience in other countries, from day
one the Chilean dictatorship sought advice from a select team of young economists trained
in Chicago under Milton Friedman. The perspective these “Chicago boys” brought to eco-
nomic and development policy resonated with what would later become known as the Wash-
ington Consensus. In a sense, Chile was the first Latin American country to open its economy
to international competition, structuring an export-based production system.
Though this shift gave Chile new advantages in world trade, it came at an extremely high
social cost, forced through under the military. Union leaders were persecuted, political par-
ties were banned, freedom of expression and of assembly were circumscribed, and human
rights were systematically violated. Unsurprisingly, poverty and inequality rose precipi-
tously. The elements of protection and redistributive policy that had existed in Chile, while
modest compared to the European model, were seen as an obstacle to development, to be
replaced with the concept and practice of a “subsidiary” state. Under this approach, all
goods were to be produced by the private sector and purchased through the market. This
opened the way for the privatization of education, health, and pensions, creating a new
social divide between those who could pay to get better quality goods, and those who could
not and were forced to rely on scaled-back state provision of increasingly inferior quality
goods through a much reduced “public” system. This had devastating effects on social cohe-
sion and national identity.
The civil elite who ruled together with the military blindly believed in the benefits of this
model of development, advocating an orthodox view of self-regulated markets as the only
way to grow the economy. Social welfare and equality would come later as a complement to
such growth. In the 1980s, the idea of growth as the sole means of achieving development
was gaining traction, inspiring the belief that, as Ronald Reagan put it, “the state [was] the
problem, not the solution,”4 or that, as Margaret Thatcher stated, “there [was] no such thing
as society”5 and that the market could organize social life and find the necessary balances.
This way of thinking, of imagining the future, dominated the spirit of development under
the military dictatorship. The economic creed of the Chilean military dictatorship is well
described by Krugman (2007), who wrote that the “history of economic thought in the twen-
tieth century is a bit like the history of Christianity in the sixteenth century . . . completely
dominated by free-market orthodoxy. Heresies would occasionally pop up, but they were
always suppressed . . . classical economics said that the answer to almost all problems was to
let the forces of supply and demand do their job.”
After seventeen years of dictatorship, Chile ended up with some needed modernization,
with advantages of trade liberalization and steady growth, but at the cost of more poverty
and inequality, a shameful record of human rights violations, and the destruction of its dem-
ocratic institutions.
Development during Democracy

Chile faced two major problems with the restoration of democracy in 1990. First was the
high level of poverty, which affected nearly 40 percent of the population. Second was the
need to rebuild the foundations and institutions of democracy, restore citizens’ confidence
in their rulers, and banish the fear and terror the dictatorship had imposed. At the same
time, the government had to prove it could manage the economy, against a skeptical belief
that maintained that authoritarianism was economically efficient and political parties were
not (Meller 2005; Ottone and Vergara 2006; Boeninger 2007).
The relationship between the worlds of academia and politics proved vital. Not only did
ideas from academia enter into policy making, but numerous individuals moved from
academia into politics, becoming relevant leaders in rebuilding democracy and develop-
ment (Puryear 1994). Over the years of dictatorship, many academics were forced into exile,
continuing their studies in North America, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere, learning how
social and economic policy was pursued in different locations and acquiring new visions of
development. Many of the intellectuals who entered politics drew inspiration from the work
of Aníbal Pinto (1959), perceiving the economic growth that Chile had achieved at the end
of the nineteenth century as an opportunity for real development that had been frustrated by
the short-sighted mentality of the oligarchy. The challenge ahead was to avoid a similar cap-
ture by the elite. Chileans were absolutely convinced that democracy and development
should go hand in hand.
The vision of development that took hold included defeating poverty, rebuilding democ-
racy, and growing the economy. This concept went beyond merely growing incomes to
ensuring that social development occurred in practice, not merely assuming that it would
inevitably follow from economic growth. This new concept postulated that development, in
addition to achieving sustained economic growth over time, had to achieve considerable
improvements in income distribution, in probity and efficiency of public spending, in foster-
ing a diverse and active citizenry, and in consolidating a culturally pluralistic society. Such
chile 687
development could not be measured by a single dimension or indicator, but required a com-
bination of factors. Increases in annual per capita income were important, but these needed
to occur alongside an increase in relative earnings in the bottom quintile, a sustained reduc-
tion in the portion of the population living in poverty, and the eradication of extreme pov-
erty. Development would be measured not only by average figures, but by the level of dignity
of the less advantaged.
Between 1990 and 2005, the Chilean government introduced major reforms in labor rela-
tions, fiscal and trade policy, infrastructure, science, education, and health. The minimum
wage was increased by 70 percent in real terms, employment insurance was introduced, and
welfare and minimum pensions were increased. In 2000, the government committed to
maintaining a 1 percent structural surplus, which proved vitally important for establishing
the confidence of international investors. Trade was enhanced through reduced import taxes
and export incentives, and most of all through entry into over twenty separate free trade
agreements with various countries in Latin America, North America, Europe, and East Asia.
As a result, trade increased sevenfold over the course of two decades.
Chile became one of the most competitive economies in Latin America, driven by new
investments in transportation. Across the country, air connections improved with invest-
ments in both new and remodeled airports, and the capacity of the Valparaiso and San
Antonio seaports was expanded. Over land, a 1,500-kilometer divided highway con-
nected La Serena to Puerto Montt, and 5,000 kilometers of improved roadways facilitated
access to and among rural communities. In the capital of Santiago, expansion of the sub-
way system and 200 kilometers of new roadways improved public transportation and
eased congestion.
Meanwhile the government invested heavily in science, technology, and innovation. Fol-
lowing 2010, Chile aspired to invest 1.5 percent of its gross domestic product in research and
development (R&D), of which half would be contributed by the private sector. However, this
proved difficult to achieve, as the private sector funded roughly one-third of the country’s
R&D, whereas in developed countries the private sector can contribute upwards of two-
thirds of R&D investment.
The educational opportunities for vulnerable families improved remarkably. In the
first five years of the millennium, Chile extended compulsory education to twelve years
of age and opened more than 2,800 new schools (equivalent to more than one per day).
By the end of 2010, fourteen million textbooks were distributed each year free of charge,
and school feeding programs had expanded to serve more than 1.4 million students each
day. The number of students pursuing higher education increased fivefold between 1990
and 2010, with more than 70 percent of students being the first in their family to study at
university.
During the same period, the public health budget more than doubled, expanding access to
quality and timely health care through improvements in hospitals, medical equipment,
training, and working conditions for medical personnel. The AUGE program (from the
Spanish Acceso Universal con Garantías Explícitas, or “Universal Access with Explicit Guar-
antees”) introduced public financing to guarantee access to treatment for the most common
illnesses, which accounted for the majority of cases of hospitalization. The program began
with the five most common illnesses and was subsequently expanded to cover forty illnesses.
This became the most ambitious reform in the health sector since the establishment of the
National Health Service in the 1950s.
Building the Coalition
Following the return to democracy, a remarkable effort was made to break through the polit-
ical impasses of the past and establish a new sense of national unity. The Chilean transition
to democracy was consolidated through a new political coalition built around a vision of
development that balanced economic outcomes with social development. This model was
based on the interaction of five pillars: (1) reaching out to the opposition to form a new polit-
ical majority, with (2) a longer-term perspective that embraced (3) globalization, (4) social
justice, and (5) expanded freedoms.
Reaching Out to the Opposition

As noted above, for much of the twentieth century Chilean politics was fragmented into
three blocks under which right-wing, center, and left-wing parties each commanded roughly
one-third of popular support. Thus, the president was often elected with less than 40 percent
of the vote, and continuously relied on a minority in parliament. Minority governments were
thus the norm, with the government of President Frei Montalva (1964–70) marking an
exception, enjoying the support of the political right motivated to oppose Allende. This trend
to minority governments had become a serious obstacle to the country’s governance.
Over the years the presidential office gradually acquired an increasing amount of power,
in particular following constitutional reforms in 1925 and again during military rule after
1973. Thus the executive branch grew more influential compared to the legislative branch of
government. A distinct presidential regime emerged, combined with a divided political
geography, an explosive combination that made it difficult to advance policy between admin-
istrations. A party that lost the crucial presidential election would take refuge in parliament,
and while it could not govern, it had enough power to block proposals and prevent the proper
functioning of government. This combination of a powerful president hobbled by a polar-
ized legislature was the antithesis of the culture of coalitions, or the construction of majori-
ties. An openness to negotiation and concession is needed to form a coalition government,
but this attitude was rather despised, as politicians on the left, center, and right all preferred
to remain committed to their minority positions. The three-way division of the political
spectrum appeared to be irreconcilable, with each faction offering a distinct vision for the
country. In this political culture, intransigence was regarded as a sign of strength, while the
search for agreement was a sign of weakness.
In the 1970 elections, two candidates proposed revolutionary visions: the Christian
Democrat, Radomiro Tomic, campaigned on a platform of a non-capitalist path of devel-
opment, while Salvador Allende outlined a Chilean road to socialism. When Allende won
with 36 percent of the vote, the governance problems that had long plagued the country’s
political system reached a breaking point. The lack of governance was evident not only
in Parliament but in the streets and in the homes of Chilean families, and combined
with the economic model that no longer worked, contributed to conditions leading to the
military coup.
The difficult task of building opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship forced previously
irreconcilable rivals to seek and build political agreements to end the dictatorship and form
chile 689
future governments. Building a majority was vital, through the essential acts of building
agreements and forming a coalition. Collectively adopting a new attitude of negotiation was
the great revolution in Chilean political culture. The product of this opposition was a politi-
cal alliance of the democratic left and the progressive center, with Social Christian roots.
This alliance became known as the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, or Coalition
of Parties for Democracy. Initially formed to defeat Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite, it
intended to offer a progressive and governable future for Chile through the formation of a
new social and political majority.
This was no tactical, short-term alliance forged merely to win an election: each party fun-
damentally evolved its positions, moving beyond a mere collection of old left and old center.
Nor was it just a marriage of convenience, where each party awaited opportunities to bring
out the arguments and weapons of the past and ultimately to displace its temporary partner:
it was a new social space in politics, built on strong, long-term convictions shared by both
parties, including beliefs in democracy, freedom, human rights, social justice, modernity,
and the need for growth. Hence, the origin of Chile’s development success over the last
twenty years was the formation of a new political consensus.
Longer-term Perspective
Just as minority governments were the norm throughout much of Chilean history, so were
medium-term visions of development. No government could risk setting objectives
beyond its own term in office; government objectives needed to be achievable within the
presidential term, as there was no guarantee of either staying in office or that their succes-
sors would continue. Thus development was pursued with a view of the country that did
not reach beyond five or six years at best. The incoming government team often held a
political orientation contrary to that of the outgoing team. The new arrivals entered the
arena convinced that those who were leaving had accomplished little, while the ones who
left took refuge in Parliament to form a relentless opposition to the new government. Thus
each successive government erased what had gone before and started afresh with its own
vision of development. What was needed was a shared strategic objective based on the vir-
tuous circle between growth and equity, combined to achieve the level of development to
which Chile aspired.
A country is primarily a moral community. It has a past and a present, and aspires to a
particular future. Having a long view and working with a strategic perspective means
placing oneself within a continuous thread running through the history of the nation,
setting a horizon, and advancing toward a shared vision. Advancing with a strategic sense
is not simply adding good public policy to what went before, but having a clear horizon
toward which these are directed. In a comparative study of the United Kingdom against
other countries, Geoff Mulgan (2005), the Blair government’s Director of Strategy, con-
cluded that countries that did well “found new ways to combine open economies and
political systems with high levels of capacity . . . they had focused on the long term and
the strategic . . . bureaucracies whose job was to look at long-term strategy and to chal-
lenge complacency.”
Working with a strategic perspective goes hand in hand with building a social and politi-
cal majority. Sharing national objectives allows a government to build on what previous
governments have achieved. An apt analogy is the construction of an apartment building: a

shared idea of design is required, including the layout of apartments, lighting, windows,
gardens, spaces for children, and facilities for the elderly. But the fourth floor is built on the
third, and the fifth on the fourth. If the first floor is repeatedly torn down and rebuilt because
of a radical disagreement over design, the second floor will never be built.
Embracing Globalization
Under the previous polarization of Chilean politics, the right was concerned with growing
the economy and the center-left was concerned with redistributing wealth. The former drew
support from entrepreneurs, while the latter spoke for the working class and the poor. The
political right felt it embodied the industrious spirit, while the political left felt that the state
should provide solutions to pressing problems. This impasse had to be broken. The coalition
needed to demonstrate that it could not only foster both growth and equity, but surpass the
growth generated during military rule. Growth of the economy became a strategic objective
of democratic governments: without growth there are no jobs, no resources for investment
in equity, and no progress. There is no development without growth, but it was equally clear
that growth alone was insufficient.
The emphasis on growth was based on the conviction that growth was, in the words of
President Lagos,
an indispensable condition in order that a society may consistently improve the standard of
living of the most disadvantaged sectors. The dilemma of growth [versus] distribution is false.
Growth without distribution, or distribution without growth, inevitably leads to social and
political crises, and to the loss of freedom. Distributing better as growth is achieved is the
only responsible and lasting way to social progress. (Lagos 2005)
This strong will to generate economic growth is one of the least understood and most con-
troversial aspects of the recent Chilean experience. It inspires respect and admiration in
many circles, yet it also inspired rejection and distrust among those nostalgic for the political
positions of the past.
This distrust stems from the political center-left adopting a goal customarily associated
with the political right. Yet the twenty years of coalition governments proved to be among
the strongest for the Chilean economy. When the coalition government assumed power in
1990, 40 percent of the population lived under the poverty line, yet within two decades the
level of poverty had declined by nearly three-quarters to just over 11 percent of the popula-
tion. During the same interval, per capita GDP increased threefold in terms of purchasing
power parity, from US$4,500 to $17,000, buoyed by internal reforms and strong perform-
ance on the world stage of Chile’s mining, aquaculture, wine production, and forestry sec-
tors. The main elements in this model of development were economic growth, reducing
poverty, and converting growth into social well-being. Engaging the global economy was
vital, as Chile is quite distant from world markets and its relatively small population (sixteen
million) means that the internal market will always be modest. In this sense, Chile stands in
contrast to Brazil or Mexico, whose larger populations provide a stronger internal motor for
growth. If the internal market is not large enough to support a growing economy, one must
turn to external markets. In this sense, globalization was seen as a great opportunity rather
than a cultural menace to national traditions.
chile 691
One interpretation of the Chilean experience attributes such success to the legacy of policy
introduced during the previous military regime. Yet this argument has been discredited by
Manuel Castells, a renowned sociologist, who notes that democratic Chile represents a funda-
mentally different model. Castells (2005) describes the military leadership as pursuing a
“model of development that excludes most of the population from the benefits of growth by
means of the authoritarian and uncontrolled exercise of the power of the state, while prioritiz-
ing the market mechanisms over the values of society, without applying policies to correct ine-
qualities and privileges of the social and economic elites.” In contrast, Castells characterizes the
coalition as pursuing “a development model . . . that, while maintaining market mechanisms as
an essential way of allocating resources, implements public policies aimed at the inclusion of
the entire population to the benefits of growth.” This model includes redistribution and public
policy intended to improve education, health, and housing for the least privileged members of
society. This model also establishes mechanisms for consulting and negotiating with different
stakeholders in society.
Another change with respect to the past is in terms of globalization. Many people tended
to perceive globalization as more of a threat than an opportunity, presenting dangers to cul-
tural identity, domestic producers, and sovereignty. Yet as a small, open economy located on
the confines of the world, Chile needed to be open to the opportunities available. The only
way to achieve sustained growth was to go out to foreign markets and sell Chilean products
in other countries. Globalization was not only the world coming into Chile, but an opportu-
nity for Chile to reach out to new and larger markets.
Social Justice
The state alone is capable of distributing the benefits of growth to the entire population
through policy that provides quality public goods to those disadvantaged in the market. The
state has a political role in crafting social justice and gradually building the equity that is not
produced by markets. Politics guides where the benefits of growth will go. While this may
seem self-evident, it has not always been so. In the long hegemony stemming from Rostow
through to the Washington Consensus, Chile under military leadership was perhaps the
most extreme expression of neo-liberal thought, which saw social development as an auto-
matic complement of economic growth. The state was seen as an obstacle to such growth, a
deficiency that had to be minimized.
While the market can facilitate the distribution of resources and generate incentives for
investment, the market alone cannot solve the endemic problems of poverty and inequality
that afflict Latin America. Chileans desired a society that did not merely reproduce the ine-
qualities of the market. In the words of President Lagos (2005), the “market is made up of
consumers, unequal in their purchasing power; society and democracy are made up of the
citizens, equal in rights and duties.” Growth and distribution should happen simultaneously,
not in sequence. Growth with equity became the political essence of the coalition.
Deepening Chile’s integration into the world, fully embracing globalization and inter-
national trade, required that the country be united. Rekindling the rifts of the past was
inconsistent with the strategic objective. Thus, the government established itself as guard-
ian of the national interest in its deepest and democratic sense. This meant breaking the
old “friend/enemy” dichotomy of past politics under which anyone who opposed prevail-
ing views or thought differently was considered a target to be eliminated. Politics needed
to end the practice of negating the positions, interests, and needs of others. Forging and
consolidating national unity required a forward-looking agenda that looked beyond a
simple reorganization of fragments from the past. The country’s self-image needed to look
ahead to what could be, while acknowledging what had been. Some believed that the trau-
mas of the past could be overcome by simply turning the page or whitewashing over painful
memories; however, a society does not become more humane by denying the pain in its
past. On the contrary, doing so only serves to deny, denigrate, and degrade any sense of
national unity.
First, the country needed an honest accounting of what had occurred during the years of
dictatorship, to honor the memory of those who had suffered human rights violations. This
involved multiple initiatives to reveal the truth, the most prominent of which were the
National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation under the Aylwin government, the Mesa
de Diálogo between civilians and armed forces convened under the Frei government, and the
Commission on Torture under the Lagos government. These and other efforts sought to
restore the relationship between the armed forces and government leadership.
Second, government needed to repair its relationship with the business community. For
decades, business leaders were seen as the natural allies of the right-wing political parties
and stalwarts of the military dictatorship. The opening of new markets and business oppor-
tunities in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Asia required a sincere and efficient
public–private partnership to expand the frontiers of the Chilean economy. This unity was
also required to meet the internal clashes of the global economic crisis, to maintain the rules
of the game in difficult situations.
Expanding Freedoms
Chilean history is marked by an imbalance between order and freedom. This increased expo-
nentially during the dictatorship, with unlimited economic freedom accompanied by harsh
restrictions on all other freedoms, including the right to life. Following the return to democ-
racy, government faced a question of how to expand the horizon of freedoms and individual
rights, including freedom of expression, and the right to cultural identity and historic memory.
Film and press censorship were abolished, and legal reforms saw the introduction of divorce,
improved juvenile justice, and reforms to the inheritance law that eliminated discrimination
against children conceived outside of marriage. A new relationship, still incomplete, began to
emerge between the government and Chile’s indigenous peoples.
A pluralistic and tolerant society is not devoid of soul, cohesion, or values. On the con-
trary, pluralism requires an understanding that in the social, political, and cultural spheres
there is no single truth: democracies are built on dialogue and agreement between different
views whose sole arbiter is citizenship. The state cannot be neutral or indifferent to cultural
development. Cultural development is not an ornament of economic growth, it is at the core
of the idea of development. It defines a country, particularly a small country that sees glo-
balization as an opportunity to achieve the required levels of dignity for its people. The cul-
tural products that Chileans are capable of producing express our identity: movies, theater,
painting, music, and literature provide an imprint of Chile on the world.
The reduction in poverty from 40 percent to 11 percent also stemmed from a number of
policies dealing with employment and salaries, as well as agreements with the trade unions
chile 693
and low inflation. In particular, the “Chile Solidario” program was based on input from poor
families, and addressed their specific reality in order to improve school attendance for
children, as well as access to social nets such as cash transfers. Key to converting growth into
social well-being was the AUGE program, which provided vulnerable populations with uni-
versal access to certain health benefits. Previously there was a two-tier health care system:
one private, high-quality service accessible to one-fifth of the population, and one public,
low-quality service for the rest of Chileans. The former was funded by private payments,
including insurance premiums, while the latter was funded by tax revenues. People affected
by a catastrophic illness faced the choice of either paying for expensive treatment in the
private system or languishing on long waiting lists in the public system. In contrast, the
AUGE program established a list of forty priority diseases and guaranteed prompt access to
treatment for all citizens, regardless of income.
Results and Ongoing Challenges
Pritchett (2011) notes that Chile is one of only ten countries since the end of the Second
World War to have achieved a combination of rapid and widespread economic growth, con-
solidated democracy, and a competent bureaucracy with low corruption. The twenty-year
period since the return to democracy has been one of the most fruitful in Chile’s history in
terms of economic development, respect for freedom and human rights, social well-being,
and integration into the world. During the seventeen years of military rule, the economy
grew on average 2.4 percent annually, while after 1990 the growth rate more than doubled. By
the end of the century, the country’s GDP had doubled compared to 1989, and increased
again by one-fifth by 2005. Adjusted for purchasing power parity, per capita income increased
threefold. According to the Global Competitiveness Ranking, Chile ranked twenty-third in
the world in 2005, ahead of all other Latin American countries. In 1989, Chile had yet to sign
a single free trade agreement, yet by 2009 it had entered into twenty-four agreements, and
the total value of the country’s exports had risen from $8 to $53 billion dollars.
No other country on the continent experienced such a drastic fall in poverty levels.
According to ECLAC figures, the rate of poverty fell from almost 40 percent to just over
11 percent of the population between 1990 and 2009. The poorest fifth of the population saw
their monetary income double and their access to goods and services quadruple. The coun-
try achieved universal access to primary and secondary education, and expanded coverage
of pre-school education during the Bachelet government (2006–10). In higher education,
student enrollment rose fourfold in ten years, from 245,000 in 1990 to about one million in
2010. Seven out of ten new students were the first generation in their families to receive a
university education.
Beyond gradual advances in many areas, the key reforms in health and social security
stand out. The AUGE program under the Lagos government guaranteed free, timely, and
quality care to the entire population for the most devastating illnesses. Social security reform
under the Bachelet government not only increased the minimum pension amounts, but also
incorporated women homemakers into the pension system. Numerous indicators in the
social, housing, and infrastructure fields helped secure a high position for Chile (often first
in Latin America) in international rankings, such as the UNDP human development index
and the World Bank governance indicators.
In short, the two decades following the return to democracy transformed the country, and
witnessed continuity in the model of development across four presidential administrations.
The face of Chile had changed, commanding the dignity of its citizens and the respect of the
international community. The soundness of Chile’s development was tested in the Asian cri-
sis of 1998 and its effects on Latin America when the regional economy experienced a sharp
decline. Thanks to the fiscal surplus, the Chilean economy could implement countercyclical
policy that allowed it to continue growing, albeit at slower rates. The financial crisis of 2008
presented a second test, and while the economy suffered, it recovered quickly and the social
effects were quite minor.
While the coalition parties were finally defeated in the 2010 elections, the new center-right
government is largely building on rather than replacing the model of development already in
place. The return to democracy may well have reached its full potential, as there is not only
continuity between governments, but the promise of a “Swedish” alternation of power
between parties. Chile had come to the end of a political cycle, one defined by the restoration
of democracy and marked by reduced poverty and high economic growth. A remarkable
effort was made to break through the political impasses of the past and establish a new sense
of national unity. The Chilean transition to democracy was won peacefully, and consolidated
through economic outcomes and social development.
However, there is still a long road ahead. Inequality remains a problem throughout Latin
America. The distribution of labor income, before tax transfers, shows that the Gini index
has increased over the past twenty years. The wealthiest 10 percent of the population still
enjoys over twenty-eight times the income of the poorest 10 percent, and the gap is widen-
ing, as the growth of income per capita of the richest 10 percent was 34.6 percent and the
second richest was 25.1 percent, while the second poorest was 11.4 percent and the poorest
was just 0.7 percent. It will take much effort to reverse a long history of inequality that stems
from the colonial era and runs through to the modern era. It will require strengthening social
cohesion, the sense of belonging, for all citizens including Chile’s indigenous people (6 per-
cent of the population), respecting their diversity, and providing autonomous channels for
integrating into or coexisting with the country.
Moving forward, the key challenge to be overcome is inequality in the distribution of
income, wealth, well-being, and power. In other words, beyond merely achieving economic
growth, the country requires an economic development that enhances equality and social
cohesion, and fosters a more inclusive society. Achieving this involves renegotiating the rela-
tionships among state, market, and society, and redefining a notion of public interest based
not on an arithmetic average of individual interests but on the creation and provision of pub-
lic goods for the benefit of society as a whole.
Chile now faces a new cycle defined by the challenge of inequality, but equipped with a
new quality in its political system and new rules regarding the relationship between the state
and market. Moving forward will once again require building a new majority. As shown by
recent social movements, particularly student protests, Chile’s development is far from over,
and while access to education may have improved, there remains the challenge of providing
quality service to all. The number of students in higher education has increased fourfold
since 1990, but the system is expensive, fragmented, and of varying quality. A new reality has
chile 695
set in as the emerging middle class expresses new demands for equality. Toward this end, the
next stage of Chile’s development requires further investments in public education, health
services, and pension reform, as well as in the science and technology needed to maintain
growth. In this sense, Chile is already facing a dynamic that lies in the near future of many
Achieving higher levels of equality requires a more rapid progression among those with
lower income, which requires more and better jobs, a profound transformation of the educa-
tional system, and tax reform that provides permanent resources to finance public goods.
Renegotiating the roles of state, market, and society does not mean discarding the advantages
and virtues of markets and free competition, but does mean letting go of unrealistic expecta-
tions of what markets can deliver. If politics are the deliberations and decisions of citizens—
what Sen (2005) calls “government by discussion”—then the state has an inalienable role in
providing public policy and goods that embody the will of its citizens.
Chile is expected to soon reach a threshold where per capita GDP will exceed US$22,000.
The unresolved question facing Chile’s future is how to convert economic growth into devel-
opment to ensure that high income results in a more egalitarian society where everyone lives
better. This is the major challenge facing Chileans.
Notes
1. See the Seventh Raúl Prebisch Memorial Lecture, delivered by historian Tulio Halperin
Donghi at ECLAC, August 16, 2007 (<http://www.eclac.org/publicaciones/xml/7/33817/
RVI94Halperin.pdf>, accessed February 15, 2013).
2. Beyond Prebisch, many others contributed to this school of thought, including Celso
Furtado, Osvaldo Sunkel, Aníbal Pinto, and others. Cardoso and Faletto (1977) gave sub-
stance to the dependency theory, while José Medina Echavarría, Jorge Graciarena, and
others linked these economic processes to the social and political variables.
3. An important and influential work on this issue is Cardoso and Faletto (1977).
4. Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address on January 20, 1981, <http://www.reaganfoundation.
org/pdf/Inaugural_Address_012081.pdf>.
5. Margaret Thatcher interview September 23, 1987, <http://www.margaretthatcher.org/
speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689g>.
References
Boeninger, Edgardo (2007). Políticas Públicas en Democracia: Institucionalidad Experiencia
Chilena 1990–2006. Santiago: Uqbar.
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Enzo Faletto (1977). Dependencia y Desarrollo en América
Latina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.
Castells, Manuel (2005). Globalización, Desarrollo y Democracia: Chile en el Contexto Mundial.
Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Krugman, Paul (2007). “Who Was Milton Friedman?” The New York Review of Books, February 15
(<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/feb/15/who-was-milton-friedman/>,
Lagos, Ricardo (2005). Presidential speech delivered on May 21 (<http://www.camara.cl/

camara/media/docs/discursos/21mayo_2005.pdf, accessed February 16, 2013>).
Meller, Patricio (2005). La paradoja aparente: Equidad y eficiencia. Resolviendo el dilema. San-
tiago: Taurus.
Mulgan, Geoff (2005). “Lessons of Power,” Prospect Magazine, 110 (May 21).
Ottone, Ernesto, and Carlos Vergara (2006). Ampliando horizontes. Santiago: Random House
Mondadori.
Pinto, Aníbal (1959). Chile. Un caso de desarrollo frustrado. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria.
Pritchett, Lant (2011). “Isomorphic Mimicry: Can Camouflage be Sabotaged?” Lecture deliv-
ered at the Universidad Diego Portales, October 11 (<http://www.politicaspublicas.udp.cl/
media/publicaciones/archivos/312/Isomorphic_mimicry_-_Can_Camouflage_be_Sabotaged.
pdf>, accessed February 16, 2013).
Puryear, Jeffrey M. (1994). Thinking Politics: Intellectuals and Democracy in Chile, 1973–1988.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sen, Amartya K. (1999). Development As Freedom. New York: Knopf.
Sen, Amartya K. (2005). “How Does Development Happen?” Cato Journal, 25(3): 455–9.
chapter 41
sou th a fr ica’s qu e st for

i nclusi v e dev el opm en t
mthuli ncube, abebe shimeles, and
audrey verdier-chouchane 1
Introduction
The end of apartheid and the coming to power of the African National Congress (ANC) rede-
fined the development paradigm in South Africa. After many years of social and economic
malaise, the new government adopted a neo-liberal approach to economic development.2 As a
first step, prudent macroeconomic policies combined with political stability had positive effects
on investment and GDP growth. To foster inclusion, the government launched the Black Eco-
nomic Empowerment (BEE) program in order to address the huge racial economic inequality
inherited from the apartheid regime. Democracy, together with macroeconomic stability
helped to transform South Africa into a regional economic power with a strong influence in
Africa and around the world. In 2011, the country joined the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India,
China, and South Africa) as an emerging economy with an important regional influence.
However, neither neo-liberalism nor the BEE and a few other social protection initiatives
could address the poverty and inequality that remained entrenched to this date. In the last
two decades, South Africa has faced a very low standard of education and one of the highest
unemployment rates in the world. When it comes to racial and regional disparity, South
Africa is also one of the most unequal countries in the world. Furthermore, economists have
often pointed out the disappointing levels of growth the country has recorded since the dem-
ocratic transition. Compared to other emerging countries such as Chile and Malaysia, it
appears that South Africa’s GDP growth could have been much higher with a more inclusive
growth policy. The huge social problems that are apartheid’s legacy remain a threat to the
socio-political order. Recently, South Africa attempted to consolidate the neo-liberalism
practice with an inclusive development approach into a common framework by adopting
the New Growth Path (NGP). The challenge for the government is to accelerate a shared and
balanced growth.
The objective of this chapter is to show the interplay of ideas and experiences that have
shaped South Africa’s development path in the pre- and post-apartheid era. The chapter
opens with an overview of the change in the development paradigm and socio-economic
698 mthuli ncube, abebe shimeles, and audrey verdier-chouchane
performances from the days of apartheid to the democratic South Africa. It then focuses on
the neo-liberal shortfalls and South Africa’s challenges in achieving high and inclusive
growth, and concludes with a review of the concept of growth inclusiveness for the future of
South Africa’s social democracy.
From Apartheid to a Democratic

South Africa
South Africa’s experience confirms that development is a combination of economic, institu-

tional, and political factors. Democracy has been crucial in attracting foreign investment,
building confidence, and creating an environment conducive to growth. As argued by
Faulkner and Loewald (2008), growth trends revolved around political change. As shown in
Figure 41.1, after reaching a peak in 1980, South Africa’s economy deteriorated steadily until
the end of apartheid in 1994. The recovery in the post-apartheid period was slow, with
momentum achieved only in the mid-2000s. Recently, per capita GDP has been growing at a
rate higher than the country’s historic potential; however, most of the growth has come from
expansion in domestic demand, putting pressure on the government budget which has dete-
riorated significantly since the global economic crisis in 2008–9.
The willingness to integrate previously disadvantaged groups within the formal eco
nomy has expanded both the domestic demand and supply. The reintegration of the
country within the world economy has increased foreign investment and demand for
South African products, which in turn has boosted economic growth. In contrast, the
apartheid era clearly appears as a period of economic and social stagnation.
4000
Post-apartheid period
Pre-apartheid period
3500
3000
2500
2000
1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Year
Real per capita GDP Potential per capita GDP
figure 41.1 Trends in actual and potential per capita GDP in South Africa, 1960–2010
Source: African Development Bank statistical data portal (<http://dataportal.afdb.org>, accessed 16 August 2012).
south africa’s quest for inclusive development 699
Malaise of the Apartheid Era

Prior to 1994, South Africa went through a period of declining and volatile economic growth
and high inflation. Economic growth was driven mainly by changes in commodity prices,
notably gold and other minerals. Faulkner and Loewald (2008) demonstrate that between
1970 and 1994 investment declined, employment growth slowed, and competitiveness wors-
ened. Reflecting its opposition to the apartheid government, the international community
imposed trade and financial sanctions on the country.
Apartheid was a political system “predicated on a racially exclusive institutional frame-
work that eroded political rights and freedoms, property rights and generated high levels of
political uncertainty” (Fedderke, de Kadt, and Luiz 2001). During apartheid, black South
Africans were legally excluded from any political and economic participation. They were
discriminated against in employment, skills development, and business ownership and con-
trol, as well as in access to basic social and physical infrastructures. The social security sys-
tem was designed mainly for whites.
The result was predictable. South Africa relied for decades on natural resources to con-
tinue to grow, with little investment in human and physical resources to stay competitive and
dynamic. As a result, the economy rapidly lost its competitive edge, a loss from which it has
yet to recover fully. The historical exclusion of the majority of citizens from sharing the coun-
try’s wealth and opportunities created structural rifts that would take decades to mend. In
consequence, inequality and chronic poverty persist in the midst of wealth and prosperity.
For the ruling party, the dilemma of ensuring a successful transition without disrupting the
social, political, and economic fabric is evident; hence it will not be surprising if its quest for
an inclusive development strategy continues to be elusive.
South Africa’s Development Paradigm

After apartheid, development policy in South Africa focused on the debate over the superi-
ority of either state-controlled or market systems. Like many other developing countries,
South Africa expected that globalization and the replacement of traditional industries by
modern sectors would become a panacea for economic development. In consequence, and
in line with its neo-liberal approach to economic policy, South Africa’s government has
restrained its intervention in the economy so as not to obstruct the free market. It was also
clear that the legacy of racial and regional disparity left by the apartheid era could not be
resolved by the market: the active involvement of the state was needed. The government took
steps to address the needs of the disadvantaged groups through improved public service
delivery (low-cost housing, water, and electricity), social safety nets, and most important,
the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) initiative, which has attracted enormous interest
on both sides of the ideological divide.
Figure 41.2 summarizes the policy orientation of the government of South Africa as it
evolved in a post-apartheid period. The recent emphasis on job creation and a much more
active engagement of the state give the redistributive strategy more a streak of a developmental
state than a neo-liberal stance. These apparently two-track approaches are discussed in turn
in the following sub-sections: the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strat-
egy was the first to implement the neo-liberal model, while some of the elements of the redis-
tributive strategy reflect a developmental state approach, particularly the BEE and the recent
New Growth Path (NGP).
Growth, Employment, and Redistribution

In 1996, the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy followed the Recon-
struction and Development Programme (RDP)3 that had been put in place in 1994, at the
end of the apartheid era. The origin of the RDP could be traced back to the labor movement
that since the 1950s had strived to institute social security and welfare programs for all
industrial workers, irrespective of race. The emergence in 1985 of the powerful Congress of
South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which brought under its umbrella close to 450,000
workers from a wide range of industries, ushered in a new phase in the struggle against
apartheid. The movement ratified the Freedom Charter introduced in 1955 by a multiracial
trade union with a strong emphasis on civil and democratic rights. By the time the ANC
came to power, it was natural for its policy to be influenced by the unions, as they had pro-
vided the core power base and support during the struggle and its immediate aftermath.
The RDP became an election manifesto and ideological reference point for the ANC that
established continuity between the Freedom Charter of 1955 and the post-apartheid world.
“The RDP originated in an attempt by labor to produce an accord that would tie a newly
elected ANC government to a labor-driven development program” (Visser 2004: 6). The
RDP’s mantra was “growth through redistribution,” which focused on meeting people’s
basic needs in such areas as employment and access to clean water, electricity, housing,
land, health, and education services.
However, as it became clear that the objectives of redistribution would not be feasible
without a growing economy and a vibrant private sector, the RDP began to lose supporters
within the policy circles. The 1994 White Paper on Reconstruction and Development was the
first official document that clearly indicated a departure from the tenets of RDP, with an
emphasis on fiscal conservatism and managing economic transformation. The pressure on
the ANC to steer the economy toward faster growth reached a turning point in early 1996,
when the country faced a currency crisis with the rand losing nearly 25 percent of its value in
a short time.
To reassure investors, both domestic and international, the ANC-led government
announced a conservative macroeconomic strategy known as Growth, Employment and
-Price deregulation -Social safety-net

Neo-liberal Developmental
-Fiscal discipline -Improved Public
Model State model
-Broad tax base service delivery
-Low marginal tax rates -Active state
-Removal of subsidies intervention in
redistribution
-Trade liberalization,
etc. -Black Economic
Empowerement
New Growth Path

(Inclusive growth)
Convergence?
figure 41.2 Evolution of growth and redistributive strategies in South Africa

Source: Authors
Redistribution (GEAR), with the emphasis this time on a neo-liberal framework. The minis-
try of RDP was abolished in March 1996 and the technocrats in government (Development
Bank of South Africa, South Africa Reserve Bank, Treasury) took charge of leading policy
reforms. The World Bank published three growth scenarios for South Africa recommending
sound economic policies and increased levels of private investment (Fallon and Pereira de
Silva 1994). In 1996, two representatives of the World Bank joined the small technical team—
which contrasted with the broad consultative approach of the RDP—in charge of drafting
the GEAR.4 This new strategy focused on macroeconomic stabilization, and trade and finan-
cial liberalization, as the means to foster economic growth, increase employment, and reduce
poverty. As a consequence, the South African government reduced fiscal deficits, lowered
inflation, maintained exchange rate stability, privatized state assets, cut the tax on company
profit, decreased barriers to trade, and liberalized capital flows. The final objective was to
achieve a 6 percent annual growth rate by 2000 by encouraging private investment.5
According to Khamfula (2004), fiscal policy has been the major success of the post-
apartheid era. Following the autonomy of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) in 1997,
there has been significant improvement in revenue collection. Moreover, within the Medium
Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), budgeting gained greater certainty for planning and
implementing policy programs in a three-year rolling framework. Fiscal restraint combined
with a strategically efficient allocation of resources led to a significant reduction of the fiscal
deficit, which remained below 3 percent of GDP from 1998–9 through 2008–9. Public debt
levels were below 40 percent of GDP. The South African government is committed to trans-
parency and good governance in allocating public resources.
However, the GEAR strategy faced several challenges. It was a single strategy—adopting
market-oriented reforms—with multiple objectives. The assumption that redistribution would
come from job creation in a context of reduced public expenditures was not realistic. The glo-
bal economic crisis in 1998, coupled with a decline in world demand for South A frica’s exports
such as gold, put an end to the GEAR strategy. Both monetary and fiscal policies had to be
relaxed. First, the exchange rate stability—which was maintained by high interest rates to avoid
capital flight—was dropped in mid-1998 in favor of the independence of the monetary policy.
In February 2000, South Africa formally adopted an inflation-targeting monetary policy
framework to hold inflation between 3 and 6 percent. On the fiscal policy side, the country
adopted a counter-cyclical fiscal policy stance in 2006. Fiscal policy has become expansionary
since 2009–10. As a result, the neo-liberal policy adopted by South Africa was not sustainable.
In 2006, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGI-SA) was adopted
as a new framework for economic and social development in South Africa.
A First Step toward Inclusive Development

The first democratic government faced the enormous challenge of having South Africa’s
development based on cohesion, inclusion, and opportunity. The ANC therefore launched
the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) initiative to rectify inequalities by giving eco-
nomic opportunities to disadvantaged groups. At inception, BEE garnered political support,
as it was widely believed that the participation of disenfranchised groups in economic
spheres grew proportionately to their numerical-political power. Thus the potential for civil
strife was expected to decline, preserving business confidence in the economically-dominant
minority (white South Africans) and eventually producing a non-racial “growth coalition”
necessary for sustainable capitalist development (Bräutigam, Rakner, and Taylor 2002).
Correspondingly, BEE is described as “a coherent socio-economic process that brings about
significant increases in the number of black people that manage, own and control the coun-
try’s economy and a way of reducing income inequalities” (Sartorius and Botha 2008).
In 1994, corporate South Africa appointed black non-executive directors and sold busi-
nesses to black empowerment groups. Financial institutions provided funding for black
people without capital to go into business. However, the BEE program was interrupted by
the global market crisis in late 1998.
The year 2003 marks a reversal of priorities in South Africa’s development approach, with
a focus on equity and social development. This change emerged with the publication of a
very critical report on socio-economic rights by the South African Human Rights Commis-
sion (SAHRC 2004). As a consequence, the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA)
was created in 2005. In 2003, BEE was replaced with the Broad-Based Black Economic
Empowerment (BBBEE) policy. Indeed, the 2001 report of the Black Economic Empower-
ment Commission6 pointed out that the BEE needed to be broader and more inclusive.
A second generation of empowerment was slower, but more meaningful. Over the years,
BEE has changed from white businesses’ efforts to increase black acquisition in small to
medium enterprises (SMEs) to a process with specific measures aimed at increasing black
equity and participation at all levels of society.
The BEE (through the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment policy) envisions the
creation and development of new enterprises that produce value-adding goods and services,
and attract new investment and employment opportunities with the aim of redistributing
wealth by transforming the ownership of companies and eliminating the racial divide. The
seven pillars of company transformation are: ownership, management control, employment
equity, skills development, preferential procurement, enterprise development, and socio-
economic development. A company’s BEE status is determined by a scorecard that quantifies
performance based on predetermined weights assigned to the seven pillars. According to
Sartorius and Botha (2008), BEE has led to a gradual increase in the black middle class, while
ownership of capital on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has, as at 2008, grown to
4 percent due to direct intervention through BEE industry charters and legislative measures.
Detractors, on the other hand, claim that the lack of any coherent definition of BEE meas-
ures distorts beneficiary groups and as a result has only served to enrich the politically con-
nected elite, and that in its current form the program is patrimonial and an instrument for
accumulating patronage (Engdahl and Hauki 2001; Boshoff and Mazibuko 2003; Andrews
2008). For Tangri and Southall (2008), the government has been too cautious in implement-
ing BEE, as ANC leaders have feared the consequences for economic growth and investment
if white business is obliged to relinquish large ownership levels to black investors. The
authors conclude that “reconciling populist goals with capitalist-led economic growth
remains problematic for ANC rulers.” Others fear that BEE measures could impede foreign
investment (Southall 2004 and 2005; Jackson, Alessandri, and Black 2005) and contribute to
a widening premium to the foreign ownership of firms. While foreign firms are exempt from
the BEE ownership provision, they are expected to comply with other elements, including
preferential procurement of inputs from Previously Disadvantaged Individual (PDI)-owned
companies. However, Mebratie and Bedi (2011) show that after accounting for firm level fixed
effects, foreign firms were not more productive than domestically owned firms in South
Africa. In other words, since foreign direct investment (FDI) is considered to disproportion-
ately favor more productive firms, and since there are no productivity premiums to foreign
ownership, compliance with BEE procurement measures is not bound to favor foreign firms
vis-à-vis domestic firms. As a conclusion, the outcomes of the BEE program have been
mitigated, and have generated a lot of controversy.
The Geopolitical Transformation of South Africa

South Africa’s strong geopolitical position sits in stark contrast to the enormous internal
socioeconomic challenges the country faces. Since the democratic transition, South Africa
has displayed remarkable socio-political stability, which has resulted in a strong influence in
Africa and internationally. South Africa has the most advanced and diversified economy in
Africa, and its geographical position grants it a privileged role as the gateway to sub-Saharan
Africa. Trade liberalization in particular has been at the forefront of the country’s post-
apartheid economic strategy, reflecting a commitment to outward-stimulated development.
South Africa also accounts for a significant proportion of global foreign trade, even if its
share has recently declined (Kappel 2010).
South Africa’s key role in economic cooperation and regional integration initiatives is
underpinned by the size of its economy (the largest in Africa) and positive growth spillovers
to the rest of the continent. Through its membership in various regional and sub-regional
groupings, the country supports efforts to deepen economic integration in Southern Africa
and the continent. Economic integration has accelerated among the Southern African Devel-
opment Community (SADC), the East African Community (EAC), and the Common Market
for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), covering twenty-six countries with a market of
around 600 million inhabitants and a GDP of about US$1 trillion. The establishment of the
Grand Free Trade Area (FTA) is expected to be launched at the end of 2013 (AfDB et al. 2012).
In 2011, South Africa ascended to the position of leading emerging economy, adding an
“S” to the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) group. South Africa is the smallest of the
BRICS in terms of population (about 49 million in 2010) and land area (1.22 million square
kilometers) but it ranked third in 2011, ahead of China and India, in terms of nominal per
capita GDP (US$8,342 at purchasing power parity/PPP).
South Africa is also the only meaningful economic power in the Southern Africa region
and in Africa (Kappel 2010). It exercises leadership with respect to investment, trade, mone-
tary integration, and institutional influence. Within the Common Monetary Area (CMA),
the South African Reserve Bank influences the foreign exchange regulations and the mone-
tary policy of its member states. Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland have a fixed currency to
the South African rand. The CMA is also allied with the Southern African Customs Union
(SACU), with the exception of Botswana, the only SACU member that is not part of the
CMA. South Africa businesses clearly dominate the fifteen member states of the Southern
African Development Community (SADC).
South Africa also took the lead in resolving conflicts in many countries, proving itself as
an advocate of peace and stability in the region. It was much easier for the policy-makers to
build regional integration than to deal with domestic issues.
The evolving geopolitical position of South Africa has fed into domestic policy stances
primarily through business climate improvements. Since the end of apartheid, South Africa’s
growth strategy has focused on increasing both domestic and foreign private investment.
Nowadays, South Africa’s private business regulatory climate is one of the most conducive in
Africa. The 2012 Doing Business report (World Bank and IFC 2012) ranks South Africa the
35th easiest country to do business globally.
The Challenges of Post-apartheid Strategies
Following the 1994 democratic transition, South Africa’s pattern of growth has not affected
racial and regional disparity significantly. The GEAR strategy was not acceptable to the trade
unions, which favored the BEE because it involved a very tight fiscal policy and a reduction
in social expenditures. For example, while significant achievements have been made in areas
such as access to basic water supply, improvement in service delivery remains a priority in
South Africa. The quality of health care and education is extremely heterogeneous across
provinces. Primary and secondary schools often fail to provide useful employment skills,
thereby prolonging the severe skills gap inherited from apartheid and hampering economic
development and the reduction of unemployment. The gap between disadvantaged (black)
and advantaged (white) schools persists, with dramatic differences in repetition and drop-
out rates. In addition, important provincial disparities persist in terms of the availability of
medical staff and the quality of health care services. A further problem is that most urban
black South Africans are highly concentrated in suburban townships, far from economic
opportunities. High transport costs and crime inhibit job searching in townships. Skills
development is a high priority.
The Shortfall of Neo-liberalism as a Development Strategy

Some of the weaknesses of the neo-liberal model of economic policy have been discussed
extensively.7 Since the RDP was abandoned in favor of the neo-liberal policy, serious clashes
have taken place between the government, the South African Communist Party (SACP),
and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The former called for social
security programs and a coherent industrial policy to create and maintain jobs, while the lat-
ter requested the end of the privatization process, which it blamed for creating unemploy-
ment. In the neo-liberal discourse, economic growth was given primacy, with the benefits
spreading gradually to the whole society through a trickle-down process. However, the
growing gap in income between social groups, the slow pace of growth, and growing public
dissatisfaction and frustration prompted South African policy-makers to adopt new priori-
ties, new consultations, and new decision-making mechanisms.
Disappointing Socio-economic Performances

Before 1994, separate and mostly unequal education services contributed to the creation of
large urban communities with no schooling or a very low level of education. On human capi-
tal development, South Africa is sometimes far above average regional values (Table 41.1).
Table 41.1 Selected social indicators in Southern Africa

Net Primary Under 5 Maternal Adult HIV Human
enrollment ratios mortality (per mortality (per prevalence rate Development
(%), 2006/10 1000), 2010 100,000), 2008 (aged 15–49), 2009 Index, 2011
Angola N/A 192.5 610 2.0 0.486
Botswana 86.9 44.3 190 24.8 0.633
Lesotho 73.1 96.2 530 23.6 0.450
Madagascar 98.5 92.8 440 0.2 0.480
Malawi 90.8 110.8 510 11.0 0.400
Mauritius 94.0 17.0 36 1.0 0.728
Mozambique 92.3 140.2 550 11.5 0.322
Namibia 89.1 43.1 180 13.1 0.625
South Africa 84.7 60.5 410 17.8 0.619
Swaziland 82.8 88.1 420 25.9 0.522
Zambia 90.7 146.5 470 13.5 0.430
Source: AfDB Database (2011) and UNDP online.
South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, close to 40 percent
if discouraged workers are included (Rodrik 2006b). The unemployment rate has increased
significantly since the democratic transition and has particularly affected the young,
unskilled, and black populations and those living in homelands and in remote areas. Rural
unemployment rates are higher than urban ones. For Rodrik (2006b), the situation is due to
the shrinkage of the non-mineral tradable sector since the early 1990s and the weakness of
export-oriented manufacturing, which have reduced the demand for unskilled workers.
Dani Rodrik was part of the Harvard team of economists in charge of assessing the ASGI-
SA policies put in place in 2006. It was an interesting attempt to bring global thinking to the
heart of South African policy making. At that time, the Harvard economists were concerned
about the rapid increase of the trade deficit due to the surge of imports, particularly if exports
didn’t grow and commodity prices declined. Therefore, they recommended the strengthen-
ing and diversification of the non-commodity tradable sector such as manufacturing by
using a stable and competitive exchange rate. However, once again macroeconomic stability
was favored over the strategic objectives of creating jobs and reducing inequality and
poverty.
In opposition to the neo-liberal macroeconomic policies, South Africa’s labor law has
been quasi-corporatist. The National Economic Development and Labour Council (NED-
LAC), which is a corporatist institution, was created to discuss public policies. A debate over
a considerable degree of rigidity in labor laws and in hiring and firing workers is currently
ongoing. While firms are reluctant to hire workers without enough flexibility to fire them,
the minimum wage for nineteen-year-old workers and the ratio of minimum wage to value
added is almost three times the average for other BRICS countries (AfDB et al. 2012).
Given the importance of labor income in total household income, unemployment
across regions and different socio-economic groups is strongly correlated with the
0.8
70.4%
0.7
62.9%
0.6
52.9%
48.7%
0.5
41.3%
0.4 34.6%
32.5%
28.4%
0.3 26.3%
0.2
0.1 3.8%
0.3%
0
g
ed
te
n
g
k
ra
lac
in
de
de
lin
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sia
io
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Fe
So
figure 41.3 Poverty (headcount) in South Africa, with a poverty line of US$3 in 2005
Source: Duclos and Verdier-Chouchane (2011).
g eographic and socio-economic distribution of income and poverty (Duclos and Verdier-
Chouchane 2011). Poverty levels in South Africa have remained high since the advent of
democracy (Figure 41.3).
South Africa’s relatively sophisticated formal economy coexists with a large infor-
mal economy such as near-subsistence agriculture. The country further suffers from
large socio-economic inequalities in incomes, mostly resulting from the apartheid
regime. These disparities manifest themselves geographically and racially, in the form
of a high unemployment rate, widespread poverty, high rates of crime and insecurity,
and a high degree of economic informality. Most of the economic activity takes place
around the province of Gauteng, where Johannesburg and Pretoria are located.
Poverty varies significantly across regions, while the Gini coefficient, reflecting the
degree of inequality, is high in all regions. The political and economic oppression of
the blacks has indeed skewed the country’s poverty profile along racial lines (Duclos
and Verdier-Chouchane 2011).
The more deprived population in terms of income and wealth also has more limited
access to economic opportunities and basic services. All of this poses important challenges
for South Africa’s economic and social development. Land redistribution is an ongoing
issue. Most farmland is still owned by the white population. Land transfers have so far
been mutually agreed by buyers and sellers, but there have been hints of possible expro-
priations to attain the official objective of transferring 30 percent of farmland to black
South Africans by 2014. As of 2008, however, only between 5 and 7 percent of land had
been transferred, raising doubts about the achievability of the target. New legislation was
proposed in 2011 to replace the current willing seller–willing buyer model (AfDB et al.
2012).
Beyond the limited progress in social development, South Africa has not realized its full
potential in terms of economic growth. The absence of high levels of economic growth is a
concern in South Africa, especially when compared to Brazil, India, China, or other devel-
oping countries. The disappointing level of growth has been highlighted by many experts
and has opened the way for a renewed growth policy based on inclusiveness and human
development.
Future Path for Inclusive Development

in South Africa
As previously indicated, the gravity of weak socio-economic performances emerged dra-

matically with a very unfavorable report published by the South African Human Rights
Commission (SAHRC 2004). The report exposed faulty land rights, poor working condi-
tions, a deteriorating safety and security environment, weak economic opportunities, and
infringement of social rights, and concluded that “whether unintended or not, unfortu-
nately the outcomes of some of the programs and projects have given birth to results not
entirely different from those under the system of apartheid” (SAHRC 2004: 57). As a conse-
quence, since 2004, the government has been mandated to reverse the damage done by the
GEAR and to halve poverty and unemployment by 2014 through balanced, accelerated, and
shared growth.
Accelerated and Shared Growth

The Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGI-SA) was launched in
2006. Contrary to the GEAR, this new strategy involved a broad consultation of stakehold-
ers, members of civil society, and partners, as well as an expert review from abroad, for exam-
ple by the team of economists and social scientists based at Harvard University. Recently,
official policy has attempted to reorient government spending to fight deprivation in areas
such as access to improved health care and quality of education, provision of decent work,
sustainability of livelihoods, and development of economic and social infrastructure.
South Africa’s government is one of the few governments in the world that has committed
itself to being a developmental state. The term “developmental state” has increasingly been
used to describe governments that strive to promote social, economic, and political inclu-
siveness by relying on creative interventions where markets fail and complementing them
through partnerships where they thrive. In 2007, the ANC announced that the South Africa
developmental state will have to be undergirded by the principles of democratic govern-
ment. However, Van Eck (2010) disagrees with the notion that a developmental state can co-
exist with a democracy and prefers the concept of “social democracy” based on the
Scandinavian model. In her opinion, developmental states refer to the East Asian authoritar-
ian regimes. Three years after the implementation of the ASGI-SA, the government of South
Africa decided to go one step further toward economic inclusiveness. The idea that sound
macroeconomic policies have to be supplemented by social measures has become the new
objective of the development strategy.
Social Democracy and the New Growth Path

In his State of the Nation address, President Jacob Zuma (2009) stated,
It is my pleasure and honor to highlight the key elements of our program of action. The crea-
tion of decent work will be at the center of our economic policies and will influence our
investment attraction and job creation initiatives. In line with our undertakings, we have to
forge ahead to promote a more inclusive economy. (Zuma 2009)
President Zuma’s speech reflected the deep structural challenges the South African economy
had been confronted with in the post-apartheid world: jobless growth fuelled mainly by expan-
sion of domestic demand which coexisted with extreme inequality and a severe rate of unem-
ployment (South Africa, Ministry of Economic Development 2011). It is indeed a statement
that called for a new and bold approach to overcome the social and economic woes the new
South Africa faces. In 2010, the unemployment rate among the young was close to 40 percent
and inequality during the 2000s was one of the highest in the world: close to 40 percent of
the national income went to 10 percent of the population. South Africa’s growth in the post-
apartheid period came mainly from expansion in the services sector (often non-tradable) while
traditional sources of growth—such as agriculture, industry, and mining—became increas-
ingly less important for growth, in the process shedding thousands of jobs (Figure 41.4).
The New Growth Path (NGP) embraces the concept of the developmental state where the
government assumes a crucial role in directing resources to attain pre-defined social and
economic programs. The NGP’s priority is the creation of decent jobs in areas identified as
Value added growth decomposition

70
60
50
post-apartheid period
per cent of GDP
40
30
pre-apartheid period
20
10
0
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
Agriculture, value added (% of GDP) Industry, value added (% of GDP) Services, etc., value added (% of GDP)
figure 41.4 Growth decomposition of GDP from 1960 to 2010

Source: African Development Bank statistical data portal
(<http://dataportal.afdb.org>, accessed 16 August 2012).
“job drivers.” In this setting, public investment is expected to be directed at the promotion of
infrastructure development, improving the value chain in agriculture and mining, investing
in the green economy, and encouraging light manufacturing sectors, tourism, and other
high-level services. According to the NGP, the government would like to expand employ-
ment by five million jobs by 2020 through high GDP growth rates and improving the employ-
ment intensity of growth, which has seen a significant decline in the past decade, from 0.8 to
0.67.8 A number of policies should reduce the mismatch between the demand and supply of
labor and ensure an effective interface between employers and job seekers.
The NGP is a very ambitious framework that encompasses a wide range of sectors and
fields and reconsiders South Africa’s policies in education, skills development, labor, tech-
nology, and trade. However, the NGP, inaugurated in 2010, is still too recent to be assessed in
terms of socio-economic performance. A draft National Development Plan: Vision 2030
issued by the National Planning Commission is currently undergoing public comment.
Is the NGP a Significant Departure in ANC Policy?

The COSATU critically responded to the government in a document entitled Government’s
New Growth Path Framework: One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward,9 which concludes that
the NGP is not a “new breakthrough in economic thinking and policy. It re-states positions
that are, in one way or another, found in GEAR, the Employment Strategy Framework,
ASGI-SA and the series of Budget Statements.” More precisely, for the COSATU, the NGP
should incorporate priority industrial sectors, change in patterns of control and ownership
of the economy, and an activist role of the state, particularly with regard to employment and
direct delivery of infrastructure. The document also argues that certain conceptions on BEE
have to be reviewed as the social pact idea is problematic in the context of massive income
inequalities. One could wonder whether South Africa’s development strategy does not focus
more on form than substance.
Conclusion
South Africa’s successful transition from apartheid to full democracy in 1994 has given the
world a powerful and enduring lesson that a peaceful transition from a polarized, undemo-
cratic, and repressive regime to a democratic and cooperative social order is possible. The
country has moved from segregation, marginalization, and exclusion to cohesion, inclusion,
and opportunity. The new institutional framework provided political and property rights
and freedoms to the previously disadvantaged population, generating political stability. The
transparency and predictability of the country’s fiscal policy have been widely acclaimed.
South Africa’s economy has also undergone a rapid opening to the rest of the world. The
interactions between growth, policy, and institutions have been crucial.
The 1994 RDP was a very promising program regarding rights, justice, and poverty allevi-
ation with a focus on openness, civil liberties, and land redistribution. However, the GEAR
strategy adopted in 1996 was based on neo-liberal theory and barely mentioned poverty.
Between 1996 and 2003, only a few sporadic initiatives took social inequalities and well-
being into account. South Africa therefore reversed its priorities over the mentioned period
but came back again with some poverty and inequality reduction measures with the adop-
tion of the ASGI-SA in 2006 and the NGP in 2010.
The development path of South Africa has followed the political dynamics over very short
periods with some back and forth. The main deduction is that short-term policies and policy
reversals are not favorable to long-term structural change and development. The second
main conclusion is that despite several internal challenges, South Africa did extraordinarily
well in terms of external leadership and geopolitical transformation. Internal contradictions
between economic and social performance pledge for a new activist role of the state. Appar-
ently, the NGP is still not the ideal development strategy because it cannot fulfill this role.
South Africa’s social performance has shown deficiencies in the labor markets and very low
progress in terms of education, skills, health care improvements, and poverty and inequality
reduction. South Africa has not achieved its full economic potential. Despite modest rates of
growth, unemployment and persistent inequality continue to haunt the country. In the last dec-
ade, the sources of growth in South Africa have shifted from agriculture and mining to services,
which in relative terms are skill intensive. As a result, unemployment, particularly among the
young, stood at an alarming 40 percent, one of the highest rates in Africa and the world.
The government has recently stepped up to the challenge by introducing the NGP,
informed by the notion of a developmental state, which in some ways is a departure from its
earlier neo-liberal stance. The NGP plans to generate at least 500,000 jobs every year for the
next decade by focusing on what the government calls sectors with high employment poten-
tial such as infrastructure, agriculture, mining, industry, and tourism. The NGP also lays out
plans to reform land ownership, mineral reserve rights, business regulations, etc., to improve
efficiency of the utilization of natural resources. In its sectoral and structural focus, the NGP
is comprehensive in what can be done. Although Finance M inister Pravin Gordan’s National
Budget Speech10 in February 2012 highlights that priority programs required for implement-
ing the NGP are funded, it fails to address how this can be achieved given the fiscal implica-
tions of such a huge public investment underlying the NGP. Particularly intriguing is the
lack of a clear export promotion strategy, which seems a natural source of sustained growth
for South Africa; labor market reforms to reduce persistent high unemployment; and indus-
trial policy to improve the country’s competitiveness in the global economy.
In spite of a strong democracy, good macroeconomic performance, and clear engagement
in regional and global affairs, South Africa faces serious development challenges. Levels of
income inequality and unemployment are among the highest in the world. South Africa’s
well-developed economy coexists with an underdeveloped and marginalized economy, and
violent crime and the HIV/AIDS pandemic constitute considerable social challenges.
Notes
1. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this chapter reflect the
opinions of the authors and not those of the African Development Bank, its Board of
Directors, or the countries they represent.
2. This is close to what is popularly known as the Washington Consensus. Williamson (1989)
first used the term “Washington Consensus” to describe the reform package based on pri-
vate sector development, trade, and financial liberalization and market deregulation that
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund imposed on developing countries as
a precondition to receive aid. It has since become synonymous with neo-liberalism.
3. Details of the RDP can be found at <http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Govern_Political/
ANC_Recon.html> (accessed February 17, 2013).
4. For further details on why and how the RDP was switched to the GEAR, see Kotzé
(2000).
5. This target of 6 percent growth in GDP was finally reached in 2006.
6. The report is available online at <http://www.kznhealth.gov.za/TED/commission.pdf>
(accessed February 17, 2013).
7. Krugman (1990), Fischer (2003), Easterly (2005), and Rodrik (2006a) have extensively
discussed the basic precepts of the neo-liberal theory.
8. Employment intensity of growth or elasticity of employment with respect to growth
measures the rate of change in employment per 1 percent growth in a country’s GDP.
9. COSATU’s response is available online at <http://images.businessday.co.za/Cosatu.pdf>
(accessed February 17, 2013).
10. Pravin Gordhan’s speech is available online at <http://dchetty.co.za/2012/02/south-african-
national-budget-speech-2012-by-pravin-gordhan/> (accessed February 17, 2013).
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chapter 42
i n di a’s econom ic
dev el opm en t
devesh kapur
Introduction1
If the dizzying transformation of the Chinese economy has been the defining story of eco-
nomic development in the last three decades, economic changes in India, while considerably
less dramatic, have been no less transformative. This chapter examines growth and struc-
tural change in the Indian economy since independence (August 1947), focusing on the key
drivers and critical junctures that led to changes in economic policies and their consequences
for growth and distribution.2
It then analyzes three central puzzles of Indian economic development: (1) Why, despite a
persistent policy and intellectual concern with poverty, has India’s record on this score been
modest, with several human capital indicators that are not much better than sub-Saharan
Africa’s? (2) What explains the disjuncture between reasonably sound macroeconomic poli-
cies amidst a litany of microeconomic inefficiencies? and (3) Why did India experience only
modest growth in the early decades after independence, despite good governance, but much
more rapid rates of growth in recent decades, even as corruption has mushroomed?
The chapter concludes with some observations on the Indian State and why its health will
be critical for the country’s economic future.
Historical Legacies
The historical legacies of British colonialism are a necessary starting point to understand the
trajectory of independent India. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, India’s share of
world income was between a fifth and a quarter. Over the next 250 years—between the col-
lapse of the Mughal Empire and India’s emergence as an independent country—India’s share
dropped precipitously to just 3 percent in 1950. It dropped further to 1.7 percent (2.5 percent
india’s economic development 715
in purchasing power parity/PPP terms) in 1980 before gradually climbing to 2.6 percent
(5.5 percent in PPP terms) in 2010.
Given that this period coincided with colonial rule, there can be little doubt that policies
that favored colonial interests played an important role in this decline, which was especially
marked between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. But the precise reasons
are severely contested, ranging from the extractive nature of land revenue systems put into
place by the British, to the use of these revenues mainly for security purposes, to the manner
of India’s insertion in the global economy (favoring British manufacturers). Whether glo-
balization or weak agricultural productivity was the principal cause, the extent to which the
widening gap between India and the West was due less to India’s decline than to rapid
increases in productivity in the West (Williamson 2011), or why in the last half century of
colonial rule, despite stable property rights, free markets, and openness to trade, growth was
so anemic and whether at least some of the onus lay in India’s social institutions (Roy 2006),
was not just a matter of academic debate. It would fundamentally shape the policies of
independent India.
At the time of independence India was overwhelmingly rural, largely illiterate, and
exceedingly poor. The country lacked a bourgeoisie and a middle-class; its society was deeply
stratified and extremely heterogeneous, and the administrative apparatus was geared to
serving the controlling interests of the colonial power rather than broader development
goals. Yet, compared to many other newly emerging countries, India’s colonial legacy had
some positive features as well: substantial foreign exchange reserves (arising from its sub-
stantial contributions to the Allied war effort) and share in world trade that led India to
emerge as one of the founding members and one of the five largest shareholders of the newly
formed Bretton Woods Institutions; a meritocratic elite civil service that was rare among
bureaucracies in its integrity and competence; an integrative infrastructure in the form of
the railways; and a small but solid foundation of legal and higher education institutions.
It was hardly surprising that colonialism left deep cognitive scars on India’s nationalist
elites which fundamentally shaped the economic policies of independent India, and whose
path dependency had significant long-term effects. At the same time economic policies in
India had to be consonant and sometimes defer to the multiple political challenges facing the
leadership of independent India. As B. R. Ambedkar, the co-author of India’s constitution,
famously lamented in 1950, “Democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil
which is essentially undemocratic.”3 Although India’s political leadership inherited a territo-
rially unified country after independence, it did not inherit a nation in the classical sense of
the term. In contrast to virtually every Western democracy, nation building in India followed
the introduction of universal franchise. What made India exceptional was the constitutional
consensus that resulted in democracy as the principal tool for nation building, which meant
accommodating the political aspirations of India’s multiple nationalities, weaving them into
the fabric of a distinctly “Indian” nation, and granting universal franchise all at once (rather
than gradually). Consequently, economic policies had to accommodate these political
imperatives, whose yardstick for effectiveness went beyond efficiency and growth to under-
pinning one of the most audacious political experiments in the modern era.
A critical legacy of colonialism was a deep wariness of global economic integration, be it
international trade or private capital flows. After all, it was at the time the largest multina-
tional trading company—the East India Company, a “great money engine of the [British]
state”4—that had spearheaded the British colonial enterprise in India. While the Great
716 devesh kapur
Depression had also seemingly shown the benefits of autarchic policies, the visible success of
the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second World War was seen as vindicating the logic
of central planning in allocating scarce investment resources as well as the need for India to
develop its own industrial and technological base. While the political underpinnings of the
Soviet model were unacceptable in India, the Fabian socialist policies of the post-war Labor
government in the UK, where many of India’s nationalist leaders had been educated,
appeared to offer a more humane alternative.
The lessons of the Bengal famine of 1943, in which millions of people died because of the
colonial government’s inaction, further underlined the limitations of market forces in
addressing the acute poverty and deprivations of the majority of the country’s population.
For all these reasons it was almost inevitable that the Indian State would seek not only to
occupy the “commanding heights” of the Indian economy, but to camp out in the lower
valleys where the Indian masses lived and toiled.
Growth and Structural Change
The economic model that India chose to follow was therefore not surprising: an Import-
Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model that was relatively autarchic, with planning and
bureaucratic controls rather than markets as the principal tool of resource allocation. The
historical legacy, the prevailing gestalt, poorly developed global and domestic markets—all
pointed in this direction.
Prior to independence, economic growth in India was meager. Per capita incomes had
stagnated over the last half century of British rule (1900–50), although there was some struc-
tural transformation with the development of the cotton and jute textile industries. At the
time of independence India was an overwhelmingly impoverished country, not just in
income terms but also in human capital, with the literacy rate just above 18 percent and life
expectancy barely 32 years in 1951. Six decades later the literacy rate had increased to 74 per-
cent and life expectancy had more than doubled, to just under 67 years in 2011. In the first
three decades after independence (1950–80), India’s average annual rate of growth of GDP
was a modest 3.5 percent. In the next three decades that figure nearly doubled even as growth
volatility declined. Importantly, a decline in the population growth rate meant that per capita
income growth tripled in the latter period compared to the earlier period. If one places India’s
record against the global economy in the longue durée from 1900 to 2010, it lagged global
growth for the first eight decades and has only subsequently been growing faster than the
world average.
Initially the economy grew reasonably well until the mid-1960s; it then slowed down until
around 1980, then accelerated in each subsequent decade (Table 42.1). While agriculture was
not neglected, the thrust of the first decade and a half was on capital goods—capital-intensive
projects such as dams, power plants, and heavy industrialization—rather than consumer
goods. This created a savings and foreign exchange gap and India soon ran through its for-
eign exchange reserves, necessitating a greater reliance on foreign aid (Lewis 1962). In this
regard India undoubtedly benefited from the Cold War, with the Western alliance seeing it as
a democratic model for the countries emerging from decolonization and a counter to the
possible attractions of Communist China. While the United States was the largest donor
until the 1960s, multilateral lending became more important in subsequent decades and by
2010 the only significant bilateral source of official financial flows to India was Japan. India
would continue to face chronic foreign exchange shortages and periodic foreign exchange
crises, and it was not until 1994 that India finally accepted its Article VIII obligations (on
current account convertibility) with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The mid-1960s saw the first major shift in Indian economic strategy. With back-to-back
failures of the Indian monsoon in 1966 and 1967, India’s dependence on the United States for
food aid was seen as a national humiliation and led to a major change in agriculture policies.
The new strategy relied less on the earlier efforts at institutional change, such as land reforms
which had been only modestly successful, and more on new “green revolution” technologies,
including new seed varieties and intensive use of water, fertilizer, and pesticides. In the first
phase (mid-1960s–early 1980s), agriculture growth rates were moderate and confined to the
northwest and parts of the coastal south. Growth accelerated in the 1980s with the adoption
of the new technologies in eastern and central India, but then ebbed from the early 1990s
onwards, especially in foodgrains (Bhalla and Singh 2012). More recently, the growth in
Indian agriculture has come mainly from the non-cereal sector (horticulture, poultry, and
dairying) and cash crops, especially cotton.
The green revolution was successful in sharply raising foodgrain production from 82 mil-
lion tons in 1960 to 197 million tons three decades later. The specter of famine that had
haunted India for centuries was laid to rest. However, the law of unintended consequences
gradually began to make its presence felt as the policies that underpinned the success of the
green revolution began to have major effects on the political economy.
Distributing water required irrigation, and with canals expensive to build and maintain
(especially as dam building began to meet more and more resistance from displaced peo-
ples), tube wells proliferated, and with them the demand for highly subsidized if not free
power for farmers. This had cascading effects on India’s power sector, which continues to be
one of its biggest infrastructural constraints. And with water virtually free, overuse was inev-
itable, resulting in declining water tables across many parts of India. Similarly, with farmers
hooked on chemical fertilizers whose costs were determined by increasingly expensive
hydrocarbon feedstocks, fertilizer subsidies ballooned to about 1 percent of GDP by 2011.
Thus, despite the high rates of return on public investments in rural roads, irrigation, and
agricultural research and development (R&D), short-term electoral exigencies inexorably
pushed public spending towards input subsidies (especially fertilizer and power). Moreover,
the increased use of inputs led to greater demand for credit and, in turn, periodic political
demands for farm loan write-offs that undermined the rural credit and banking system.
Ironically, pressures arising from the political economy of agriculture grew even as the
share of agriculture declined, from two-thirds of GDP in 1950 to one-sixth in 2010. However,
agriculture’s share in employment declined much more gradually, accounting for about half
of all employment even by 2010. Thus with rural incomes stressed and rural voters continu-
ing to matter electorally, political pressure on the economy was not surprising.
On the external front, the economic and balance of payments crisis of 1966–7 precipitated
a major intervention by Western donors (especially the U.S.) and the Bretton Woods institu-
tions. As was the practice in the years preceding the breakdown of the Bretton Woods sys-
tem, India’s exchange rate regime operated as a fixed nominal exchange rate. By the end of
the 1950s and in the first half of the 1960s, mounting inflation led to an appreciation of the
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Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER), and despite severe trade and capital controls and for-
eign aid, India’s Balance of Payments (BOP) problems mounted. In June 1966, under pres-
sure from the United States and the Bretton Woods institutions, India undertook a large
nominal devaluation (36.5 percent) but because of a complex tax regime and high inflation,
the REER depreciation was only about 7 percent (Joshi and Little 1994).
The devaluation of 1966 was widely regarded as a political disaster and significantly
impacted India’s macroeconomic policies over the next two decades. India had signaled that
along with the devaluation, it would liberalize domestic industrial licensing as well as trade
policies and change tack on its agriculture policies in return for substantial increases in
external support. In the end that support did not materialize. While India drastically changed
its agriculture policies, the government, confronted with mounting economic pressures,
instituted even more stringent administrative controls on both trade and industrial licensing
and launched a wave of nationalizations (from banks to mines). State controls not only
adversely affected the economy directly but created a new political economy of rent-seeking
whose effects proved even more pernicious (Bhagwati and Srinivasan 1975).
The license-raj and autarchic policies that dominated the 1960s and 1970s, and external
shocks—including three wars (in 1962, 1965, and 1971), major droughts (especially 1966 and
1967), and the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979—all contributed to the two worst decades for the
Indian economy. While domestic savings and public-sector investment continued to gradu-
ally rise, productivity growth was negligible. By the end of the 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet
Union fundamentally undermined the intellectual legitimacy of central planning, while the
widening gap between East Asian countries (including China) and India had become pain-
fully evident. And when the balance of payments crisis of 1990–1 struck, leading India to
humiliatingly hock its gold reserves to stave off external debt default, India had little option
but to change course.
While there is little dispute that India’s economic policies changed sharply after 1991, there
is also no dispute that India’s growth rate accelerated a decade prior to that pivotal year, from
around 1980. However, there is much less agreement on the causes of growth and its sustain-
ability. One view attributes this to modest trade and investment licensing liberalization and
higher levels of public expenditure funded by a sharp increase in external and internal bor-
rowings (Panagariya 2008). Others argue that reforms in the 1980s were less pro-liberalization
than pro-business in that they helped boost profits of existing business without threatening
them with real competition (Rodrik and Subramanian 2005; Kohli 2012). But were the attitu-
dinal changes a necessary precursor to the later policy changes, and if so, why did they occur?
Yet another explanation puts the onus on the “output gap” and “credibility” of reforms
(Virmani 2004). Since the mid-1960s the Indian economy had underperformed, increasing
the gap between potential and actual GDP. The policy changes during the 1980s provided an
opportunity to catch up and in particular make better use of underutilized capital. In addition,
politically credible signals of the intent to reform failed policies gave greater confidence to
the private sector to invest, and reassured policy-makers that economic liberalization could
deliver results.
Although economic growth between the 1980s and 1990s differed little with the passage of
another decade, three facts stand out.5 First, fiscal expansion and foreign borrowing were
responsible at least in part for raising growth rates in the 1980s and the unsustainability of
this approach precipitated the balance of payments crisis at the end of the 1980s. Second, if
the post-reform period is extended into the first decade of the new millennium (which
recorded the fastest growth rates ever), the growth story is perceptibly better (and even more
on per capita terms). Third, productivity rose markedly in the post-reform era, especially in
services, whether because of access to new technologies, greater competition, or the growing
role of the private sector (Bosworth, Collins, and Virmani 2007).
But perhaps the most significant change was the transformation in India’s engagement
with the global economy.6 In 1990, India had one of the world’s most closed economies, with
a trade-to-GDP ratio lower than in 1950. The reforms instituted in 1991 aimed to move the
economy toward greater market orientation and external openness. Dismantling the
Maginot Line that had been built over four decades to safeguard India from the threat of
international trade and foreign investment was critical. From that point on, quantitative
import controls on manufactured goods were almost entirely eliminated while tariffs were
drastically cut (from 145 percent in 1990 to 9 percent in 2010), although agriculture (as in
most countries) still remains fairly highly protected (the average agricultural tariff has come
down from 134 percent in 1990 to 33 percent in 2010). Restrictions on inward and outward
foreign investment were also significantly reduced.
These changes brought about a pronounced increase in the openness of the economy,
manifest in a radical change in the structure of the balance of payments. Exports of goods
and services tripled between 1990 and 2010, from just 7 percent of GDP to 22 percent,
while imports increased even further. The decades of autarchic development policies had
resulted in a sharp drop in India’s share of world exports, from 2 percent in 1950 to barely
0.5 percent in 1990. The pendulum gradually swung the other way, and by 2010 India’s
share of global merchandise exports had tripled (to 1.5 percent) while its share of services-
climbed to 4.5 percent.
However, it must be kept in mind that over the same period China’s share of global exports
increased sixfold. The principal reason was India’s failure to rapidly expand labor-intensive
manufacturing exports (such as garments, footwear, and electronics assembly). India’s labor
laws, ostensibly meant to protect the interests of organized labor, simply discouraged indus-
tries that could harness its principal comparative advantage, an abundant supply of low-
skilled labor. Infrastructure deficiencies, weak human capital, and the high transaction costs
in starting and running a manufacturing unit in India due to innumerable bureaucratic
obstacles have further impeded labor-intensive manufacturing. As a result, unlike China,
India has not become closely integrated into global manufacturing networks (the automo-
bile sector is an exception) while it is deeply integrated into global networks in information
technology (IT)-related services.
Indeed, India emerged as an outlier among emerging markets in that it bypassed the nor-
mal sequence of economic development where low-income economies are dominated by the
primary sector (agriculture), middle-income by the secondary sector (manufacturing) and
high-income by the tertiary sector (services). In India’s case, services came to dominate the
economy even when it was still a lower middle-income country. The success of India’s serv-
ices sector is epitomized by the remarkable success of the IT sector, which rose from less than
$1 billion in 1990–1 to over $100 billion in fiscal year 2011–12 (7.5 percent GDP). With nearly
80 percent of its revenues derived from exports, the IT sector more than any other epito-
mized the goals of the historic shift of the 1991 economic reforms: a private-sector-driven
economy that was much more globally integrated.
Yet the limitations of this shift have also been evident. By the end of 2011 the IT sector pro-
vided direct employment to 2.8 million people and indirect employment to around 9 million
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people, which, while substantial, still represents only a small part of India’s burgeoning work
force of nearly half a billion people. The failure of India’s rapid growth to create substantial
numbers of jobs in the formal sector for India’s rapidly expanding labor force remains one of
the biggest weaknesses of the Indian economy.
The greater importance of trade for the Indian economy led to a considerable change in
India’s attitudes to international trade negotiations, from reluctant participant to a proactive
role. Before 2000, India had signed just one inconsequential preferential trade agreement
(with the Maldives). It negotiated another three between 2000 and 2005. With the Doha
Round stalemated, it followed up with another sixteen in the next five years, and in 2011 was
negotiating another seven agreements (including, significantly, with the EU). In contrast to
its earlier protectionist stance in the pre-reform era, from about a decade after the onset of
economic reforms, domestic business became a major lobby for greater global integration,
reflecting India’s growing self-confidence.
Capital inflows, especially non-debt capital inflows, have been the second important mecha-
nism driving India’s integration into the global economy. Inward foreign direct investment
(FDI) increased steadily throughout the 1990s, but really took off in the mid-2000s after India
partially deregulated its financial sector and started achieving GDP growth rates of 8 percent a
year. A new development was the growth of outbound FDI from India, which moved more or
less in step with inward FDI, albeit at lower levels. In 2010, inward FDI was around $25 billion
and outward FDI around $15 billion. The substantial net capital inflows compensated for the
current account deficit, allowing the country to accumulate sizable foreign exchange reserves.
International migration has been the third leg of India’s growing engagement with the
world economy, in addition to trade and capital movements.7 Outward migration from inde-
pendent India was initially driven by the large demand in the United Kingdom for unskilled
and semi-skilled workers, following the end of the Second World War. From the late 1960s
onward, two major streams of migration emerged. The first, to the Middle East, was domi-
nated by unskilled or semi-skilled temporary workers; nearly four-fifths of these labor flows
were to just three Middle Eastern countries (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and
Oman). The second stream, comprising skilled professionals, migrated to OECD countries,
especially the United States, where the Indian-born population grew from around fifty
thousand in 1970 to 1.8 million in 2010.
Unlike China, the economic effects of international migration from India have not yielded
much in the way of FDI. Instead, the Indian migrants have been an important source of
financial flows into India in the form of remittances. Remittances emerged as an important
component of the country’s balance of payments in the mid-1970s and increased dramati-
cally after the onset of economic liberalization in 1991, growing from $2.1 billion (0.7 percent
of GDP) in 1990 to $53 billion (3.1 percent of GDP) in 2010.
The fears of influential sections of Indian elites notwithstanding, greater integration into
the global economy has been transformative for the country. An important reason was the
decision of Indian policy-makers to eschew the “big bang” approach, opting instead for a
more gradual transition, especially with regard to capital account and financial sector
liberalization. As a result India has avoided the sort of major financial crisis that has engulfed
many industrialized and emerging market economies (Joshi and Kapur, forthcoming).
However, in contrast to the strong and positive effects on growth and macro-stability, the
effects of greater global integration on poverty and distribution are more ambiguous. It is
this subject that we now address.
Three Central Paradoxes
The Poverty Paradox

Independent India’s commitment to democratic politics meant that its polity had to grapple
with the harsh reality of India’s poverty: the sheer number of the poor (who were also now vot-
ers), the intensity of poverty and destitution, and a deeply stratified and hierarchical society.
Addressing the needs of vulnerable and marginalized groups in society has preoccupied intel-
lectuals and policy-makers, and informed political rhetoric in India, to a degree uncommon
among developing countries. Levels, changes, and measurement of poverty have been a major
preoccupation of (often contentious) Indian policy debates, in considerable part because the
benefits of the large array of redistributive programs deployed by the Indian state have been
linked to so-called BPL (Below Poverty Line) status.8 The puzzle is not that India’s policy has
been preoccupied with addressing poverty, but that the large number of directed poverty pro-
grams that India has put into place over the decades have yielded such modest results. Like
Sisyphus, the Indian state appears condemned repeatedly to launch poverty programs, and
then, with limited results to show for its efforts, begin the process all over again. What explains
these modest outcomes and why does the Indian State persist with these programs?
The salient features of changes in human development in India are provided in Table 42.1.
While clearly there have been improvements in all aspects (except the gender ratio), the
changes have been modest, both relative to other comparable countries and in light of India’s
rapid growth in recent years. Poverty has declined considerably, but for the most part it has
been the result of broader growth (including for example the green revolution and the accel-
eration in growth in recent decades) rather than redistributive programs targeting the poor
per se. It should be emphasized that the Indian base line for poverty is extremely low, so that
trends over time are a better indicator of progress than absolute numbers, since many mil-
lions of people just above the poverty line also have very low incomes.
There is considerable variance in outcomes of India’s poverty programs across both states
and types of programs. Self-targeting programs like the National Rural Employment Guar-
antee Scheme (which guarantees one hundred days of wage employment annually to a rural
household whose adult members undertake unskilled manual labor) have performed better
than the Public Distribution System, which has been notorious for leakages.
The mainstay of India’s anti-poverty programs have been specific purpose transfer
schemes, designed to address issues of categorical equity. Most of these schemes have been
launched by the central government, even though actual implementation is undertaken by
state and local governments. Initially these schemes focused on area development (back-
ward areas, arid areas, hilly regions), wage employment, and promoting self-employment
(by transferring a productive asset).
The first area development program, the Community Development Program, began in
the early 1950s and sought to involve the rural community in a specific location in develop-
ment. However, while the pilot projects were promising, weaknesses became evident as the
program expanded. A critical review by the Indian government in 1957 placed the blame on
the acute administrative burdens imposed by the program on ill-trained and ill-equipped
local bureaucracy. Little has changed since.
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Over the years, other types of schemes came into being, particularly new forms of trans-
fers, such as old age pensions and housing and basic services like education and health. Their
numbers grew from the 1980s as a weakening federal government sought to route funding
directly to the local level, bypassing the states. These schemes grew especially in the post-
reform era, and in part served as a compensatory mechanism for the central government to
exercise influence within states, after instruments such as industrial licencing were abolished,
and in part for intellectual and policy elites who could exercise more influence on the central
government than in the states.
Innumerable reports on and analysis of India’s poverty programs agree on seven broad
conclusions. First, the lowest level “front-line” functionaries are poorly trained and often
overburdened. Second, a large fraction of the resources in these programs is spent on the
administrative costs of the programs or are siphoned off, with their intended beneficiaries
receiving only modest amounts. Third, the mismatch between the incentives of the imple-
mentation agents on the one hand and the design and funding of these programs on the
other ensures that implementation is the Achilles’ heel of India’s poverty programs. Fourth,
the large-scale corruption in these programs stems from the discretionary power of public
functionaries. Fifth, to curb these discretionary powers a labyrinth of rules has been put into
place, which both slows work and simply redistributes the rents elsewhere. Sixth, these facts
are well-known to the state functionaries who are supposed to implement and monitor these
programs, and to the intellectuals who push for them. And finally, all this persists because
there is little accountability in the system. If anything, the accountability is perverse in that
punishment is more likely to be meted out to someone who does not participate in the hier-
archical systems of corruption than to someone who does.
Nonetheless, there have been some striking successes, with the “Kerala model” the best
known example (Drèze and Sen 2002). In general, the anti-poverty effort in the southern
and some of the northern and western states has been better than in the central and eastern
states (where the bulk of the population and the poor live). While poverty did continue to
decline in the post-1991 era, the elasticity relative to growth was less, with the lack of expan-
sion of labor-intensive manufacturing an important reason. In contrast, the demand for
skilled labor has risen, and with it the wage premium for skills, which is one reason why
income inequality has increased over this period. While pressures for redistributive policies
have grown, the large growth in government spending has had a limited impact on India’s
substantial inclusion deficit, which has deep historical roots.
At the time of independence India was a highly unequal country, and so it remains six
decades later. However, the characteristics of inequality have changed. Most accounts of ine-
quality focus on the simple Gini coefficient. In reality India simply does not capture data on
income distribution, and the Gini measures used for India are simply household expendi-
ture distributions acting as a surrogate for income distribution. The Gini based on house-
hold expenditure was 35.6 in 1951 and gradually dropped over the next two decades to 30.4 in
1960. Over the next two decades it was reasonably steady, then began climbing upwards in
the early 1990s, reaching 36.8 in 2004. By 2010 it was 30.6 in rural and 40.2 in urban India,
which implied that urban income inequality in India is probably close to levels in Latin
America, long regarded as an outlier.
With India’s population overwhelmingly rural in the early decades after independence
(82.7 percent in 1951), the critical factor affecting inequality was land ownership. This was
especially true in Eastern India, where the British land revenue system had created a small
rentier class of large landlords (zamindars) and millions of small and marginal farmers
and landless laborers. While the zamindari system was abolished, overall attempts at land
redistribution were at best modest, and reform of the land tenure system was only slightly
better. For half a century Indian intellectuals have lamented the absence of meaningful
land reform, imagining it as the magic elixir to alleviate both rural poverty and inequality.
The reality is that drastic land reforms have occurred only in the aftermath of revolutions
or external occupation, never under a democratic regime. An even harsher reality is that
there just isn’t that much arable land in India relative to its rural population. The net sown
area per rural household was less than three hectares in the 1950s and less than one hectare
six decades later. If anything, a major problem facing Indian agriculture is extreme land
fragmentation rather than land concentration. Asset inequality in land over the decades
was less about a few having a lot and more about many (namely, landless laborers) having
nothing.
The insistence on land reforms as the pathway to reduce inequality meant that policies
that could have done much more to help cultivators and small peasants—such as rights of
tenants on lands they had been cultivating (the states of Kerala and West Bengal were excep-
tions), transparent and low transaction land registration, and titling—were largely ignored.
But most egregiously, the only other viable instrument for addressing the roots of inequality
in India, namely, a sound and egalitarian primary education and primary health system, was
given short shrift.
Under the Indian Constitution, primary education and public health are state subjects.
Consequently it is not surprising that in the early decades the federal government left this
issue to the states. Since the politics of most states was dominated by upper-caste males, it
has been argued that they had little interest in educating the lower castes and women (who
formed the majority of the population), preferring to maintain their historical social advan-
tages (Weiner 1990). However, over time the iron law of numbers inherent in universal fran-
chise led to the middle and lower castes’ capturing power in most states; yet even this did not
lead to a reorientation of priorities. India has had powerful women politicians, but there is
little evidence that they gave greater emphasis to girls’ education. The fact that the state of
Kerala is an outlier on social indicators and has had a strong Left tradition may lead one to
conclude that political ideology was the key. However, the communists held power in West
Bengal for twice as long as in Kerala and the record there is much weaker, while the small
northern state of Himachal Pradesh, where the Left never had a presence, has a record
second only to Kerala. The major impetus for a substantial increase in central government
spending on primary education came in 2001, with the launch of a multi-billion-dollar edu-
cation Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program for universal elementary education, and in 2009,
when the right to primary education was given constitutional status with the passage of the
Right to Education Act.
These efforts notwithstanding, India has a long way to go in fulfilling this most basic
instrument of empowerment and social mobility. While the quantitative goals of enrollment
have been reached, the quality of education is still severely deficient. The principal reason for
this lies in the multiple weaknesses of the country’s basic administrative systems. Despite
reams of evidence that public teachers and health workers have very high absenteeism rates
(despite being paid substantially more than their private-sector counterparts), Indian intel-
lectuals and politicians are reluctant to press for firing them—the interests of powerful public
unions are better protected than those of powerless children.
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It is arguable, however, that the inequalities that matter for the daily lived experience of
most people in India are not changes in the Gini but rather the complex and deep social
inequalities that have been a pernicious feature of Indian society, with gender and caste
being salient examples. The former has been most manifest in intra-household inequality.
While the Indian constitution and subsequent legislation have sought to eliminate gender-
based discrimination in matters such as inheritance, divorce, sexual discrimination in the
workplace, etc., social institutions have proved tenaciously resistant to change. While on
some indicators (such as education) the male–female gap has been narrowing, on others
(such as employment) this is less the case. The most troubling aspect has been the decline
in sex ratio, falling from 972 females per 1,000 males in 1901 to 933 in 2001, before slightly
recovering to 940 in 2011. More disturbing is the decline in the child-sex ratio, from 945 in
1991 to 927 in 2001 to 914 in the 2011 census—an indication of how, despite being illegal,
son-preferences have been amplified with new wealth and technologies that allow sex-
selective abortions.
The biggest change in inequality in India has been a more subtle but profound change,
namely, a significant decline in the deep social inequities that were a hallmark of the
stratified and hierarchical Indian caste system. At the time of independence, large parts
of rural India were feudal in character, with labor relationships akin to serfdom. Many
of the specific features that characterized these stratified social relationships, such as
commensality (rules of purity and pollution), the correspondence between caste and
occupation, servility, and social exclusion, have considerably weakened in recent years,
although they have by no means been eliminated. While multiple causal factors—the
direct and indirect effects of economic growth (the latter manifest in significant circula-
tory migration), the ascendency of lower caste political parties, technological change,
and lagged effects of prior public investments—make precise attribution difficult, it
does point to the wrenching role of markets in driving social change. Finally, there is
strong evidence of convergence in human capital (years of schooling, life expectancy)
and occupations across social groups, an indicator of gradually improving inter-genera-
tional mobility.
The Macro Paradox

The Indian state’s noteworthy record in macroeconomic management has long been recog-
nized, whether compared with other developing countries or weak performance in micro-
economic policies and ground level implementation. Thus for much of the period prior to
the 1991 reforms India’s record was the most “conservative” (among seventeen countries
studied) with respect to inflation, monetary policy, and external debt (Joshi and Little 1994).
India’s superior inflation record (at least until the 1990s) owed much to the political aversion
to inflation institutionalized by democracy, given the negative impact on the large number of
poor voters (largely because the poor do not have access to financial instruments to protect
themselves against inflation) and the relatively low levels of income inequality in India. Thus,
instead of an independent central bank and monetary targeting, democratic politics has
anchored and reined in inflationary expectations.
Despite the lack of conventional statutory independence, the Indian central bank (RBI)
has competently conducted monetary policy, albeit within the mandate laid out by the
government. Exchange rate management, once the bête noire of Indian macropolicies, has
also improved considerably and is an important reason why India has weathered major
global crises better than in the past.
The reasons are several. First, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system depoliticized
exchange rate policy in that it allowed the central bank to intervene in ways that led to a
gradual depreciation of the rupee (compared to the earlier fixed exchange rate system where
the IMF’s involvement was inevitable and hence political fodder). Second, an important fac-
tor that had undermined the RBI’s role in exchange rate management was India’s economic
model. With macroeconomic policy in India yoked to planning, adherence to the fixed
exchange rate was necessary (from the narrow perspective of the planned model) because
any change in its level would have upset the careful balance that was part of a plan’s design
(Khatkhate 2004). As the role of centralized planning ebbed, so did the importance of a fixed
exchange rate. Finally, as trade’s importance in the Indian economy grew, so did the impor-
tance of exchange rate management, since it affected both the competitiveness of India’s bur-
geoning exports (and hence business interests) and inflation (through higher-priced
imports), whose adverse effects on India’s poor are well-known.
If the Indian state’s handling of exchange rate policies has been reasonably adept, this is
also true (albeit to a lesser extent) on one side of the fiscal ledger, namely, tax revenues. As a
fraction of GDP, tax revenues increased slowly but steadily from 1950 to 1990 and then
declined somewhat in the 1990s before again increasing after 2000 to nearly 15 percent of
GDP in 2010–11 (Table 42.1). The increase in the first four decades was due mainly to increases
in indirect taxes (such as excise and trade taxes), which have more distortionary effects.
India’s complex fiscal federalism, with assignments of tax powers and tax sharing arrange-
ments at different levels of government, has influenced the incentives for revenue mobiliza-
tion and made it difficult to enact and implement comprehensive tax reforms. Selectivity and
discretion, both in designing the structure and in implementing the tax system, contributed
to erosion of the tax base and created powerful special interest groups (Rao and Singh 2006).
Nonetheless, there has been a sharp reduction in the rates and dispersion of trade taxes and a
shift to direct taxes driven in part by the introduction of the value added tax (VAT) in 2005.
At the time of writing, India was attempting to integrate taxes on goods and taxes on services
into a common goods and services tax (GST), which if implemented will anchor India’s fiscal
federalism in the foreseeable future.
Government expenditures, on the other hand, have had much less discipline, especially in
recent decades, and India’s persistently high fiscal deficits—reflecting innumerable micro-
economic inefficiencies—have been a major drag on the Indian economy. Predictably, these
expansionary fiscal policies have had monetary consequences, notably higher interest rates
and (to the extent that the deficits get monetized) greater inflation or an external debt prob-
lem (if financed externally). It is this interconnectedness between microeconomic inefficien-
cies and macroeconomic problems that fed the growing fiscal crisis in India by the late 1980s
and soon spilled over to the balance of payments.
Why has India fared better with its monetary and exchange rate policies than with its fiscal
policy? Explanations for India’s large fiscal deficits put the onus on the fragmentation of the
Indian polity, with weak coalition governments more susceptible to distributional conflicts
and the growing limitations in the state’s capacity to mediate and moderate the many demands
being placed on it. Even by the early eighties it was argued that India’s public economy had
“become an elaborate network of patronage and subsidies. The heterogeneous proprietary
726 devesh kapur
classes fight and bargain for their share in the spoils of the system and often strike compro-
mises in the form of ‘log-rolling’ in the usual fashion of pressure groups” (Bardhan 1986:
65–6). With no group hegemonic, as each group sought to grab more public resources, fiscal
deficits grew. However, these distributional compromises may have contributed indirectly to
the maintenance of democratic processes. The increasing political assertiveness of socially
marginalized groups who have been politically empowered—by the emergence of regional
and identity-based political parties and by greater representation in public offices at all
levels—has forced the Indian state to manage these pressures through a range of instruments
that seek to give something to each pressure group, ranging from agricultural subsidies to
efforts to extend the scope and duration of affirmative action programs.
In the mid-2000s the fiscal deficit began to decline, primarily because of an increase in tax
revenues (rather than a cut in expenditures) due to technological upgrading of the country’s
tax infrastructure. However, despite unprecedented growth India’s fiscal situation deterio-
rated again, because of the failure to deepen and broaden the tax base, massive increases in
expenditures in new social programs, and a political unwillingness to rein in subsidies. How-
ever, while the growth of subsidies has been driven by a political logic, the expansion of social
programs has been strongly influenced by small groups of activists. The net effect has been
an increase in government spending directed towards consumption rather than investment.
Paradoxically, this has led to greater de facto privatization in much-needed public infra-
structure as cash-strapped governments turned to public–private partnerships, the very
change some of this consumption spending is trying to stem.
The Paradox of Governance

In the early decades after independence, India’s ruling elite was drawn from a narrow social
group and by and large its probity was well recognized. Yet the policies it chose ensured that
India’s growth was modest, even though they did result in a gradual structural transforma-
tion of the economy. In contrast, since the late 1970s, as democracy has deepened and Indian
growth rates have more than doubled (and in per capita terms, tripled), there is widespread
acknowledgment of a sharp deterioration in probity in India’s public institutions and mani-
fest corruption at all levels of government. At the macro level, what explains the mismatch
between conventional indicators of corruption and economic growth? And at the micro
level, why has India persisted with directed poverty programs rather than supplying broad-
based public goods whose long-term benefits to the poor are widely acknowledged?
Several explanations have been advanced to address the puzzle on why India has persisted
in relying on targeted transfer programs and subsidies while severely under-provisioning
basic public services for the poor, such as education, health, water, and sanitation (Keefer and
Khemani 2004). Poor farmers might prefer targeted transfers to public services such as edu-
cation because they have high discount rates (the benefits of transfers are immediate while the
returns from education emerge over time). Alternatively, the poor might not m atter elector-
ally. However, India is rare among democracies in that the propensity to vote varies little by
income, education, or social group—the votes of the poor certainly matter electorally.
Another explanation argues that rather than electoral participation per se, it is the clien-
telist nature of that participation, which results in materialistic inducements targeted to
particular individuals and small groups of people as opposed to the provision of public goods
through institutional means. This behavior is due partly to social polarization (itself a cause
and consequence of a first-past-the-post electoral system) and lack of credibility of political
promises to provide broad public goods (as opposed to private transfers and subsidies). Elec-
toral competition therefore revolves around distributing public resources as club goods
(goods with excludability characteristics) rather than providing public goods to a broad base.
Finally, those who have the voice (the middle and upper classes) have de facto exited from
the system, preferring market solutions over poor quality and unreliable public services,
further reducing pressures to change the system.
Perhaps the biggest driver of India’s growth despite poor governance has been entrepre-
neurship. Although it has long been recognized that entrepreneurs are the central actor stok-
ing the animal spirits of capitalism, conventional neo-classical growth models have little
place for them. Behind the dynamism of the Indian economy in recent decades is the sharp
increase in the number of entrepreneurs from much wider social groups than in the past
(Damodaran 2008).
Historically, traders and merchants had a none-too-respectable status in India. In Kauti-
lya’s Arthashastra, the classic Indian treatise on governance, traders and merchants are seen as
“persons to be regulated, taxed and kept under watch for sharp practices.”9 While social strati-
fication kept out much of the lower castes, many of the educated upper castes who controlled
India’s policy-making apparatus regarded business and entrepreneurship as somewhat dubi-
ous activities. While the loss of political power by the upper castes certainly made the private
sector and entrepreneurship more attractive to them, the sheer demographic pressures rela-
tive to available employment opportunities, from agricultural labor to government jobs, have
made entrepreneurship a virtue out of necessity despite numerous infrastructural bottlenecks
and government obstacles. Writing of the United States in the nineteenth century, the Ameri-
can historian Walter McDougall referred to the country as “a nation of hustlers,” capturing the
spirit of a people relentlessly on the make—and doing whatever it takes. In many ways this is
an apt metaphor of the raw capitalism unleashed in India.
But unlike the scenario in the United States a century or so ago, the contemporary Indian
version is inextricably intertwined with a state that while weak in its implementation capac-
ity has remarkably strong rent-seeking abilities. India’s economic reforms unleashed market
forces and capitalism, but the parallel strengthening of the institutions that underpin a mar-
ket economy did not occur. The resulting crony capitalism has been especially potent in sec-
tors with high regulatory intensity, especially in natural resource-related sectors (such as
land, mining, spectrum, water, and forest resources). This has undermined both competi-
tion and the very legitimacy of capitalism, and poses the single biggest challenge to India’s
long-term growth.
Conclusion
With a sixth of the world’s population, India’s economic development has not only impor-
tant implications for its citizens, but global ramifications. While there is little doubt
regarding the substantial economic transformation after 1990, compared to most other
large developing countries India has moved more gradually on most measures of market-
based reform, be it privatization, trade, or financial sector liberalization. Nonetheless,
728 devesh kapur
during this period its growth has been nearly twice the average for developing countries
outside Asia and much better compared to its own past. Yet, while all political parties have
more or less accepted the broad thrust of the shift to a market-oriented economy (although
differing on specific priorities), even after more than two decades reform does not have an
overt political constituency.
If India continues to grow at the rate it has achieved in recent years, its global presence will
become much more significant. Indeed, it is likely to emerge as the world’s third largest econ-
omy by around 2030.10 Of course, this outcome is by no means certain: India has significant
assets but also major liabilities.
India’s recent success has in many ways created new and difficult challenges. Its creditable
performance in recent decades notwithstanding, Indian agriculture faces serious long-term
obstacles. Excessive use of water relative to supplies and distortions in the application of
chemical fertilizers have led to the gradual building up of severe environmental problems.
With yields stagnating as the after-effects of the green revolution take hold, the diversion of
scarce agricultural land for urbanization and industrialization, and India predicted to be one
of the countries most adversely affected by climate change, the pressures on Indian agricul-
ture are likely to become more severe over the next few decades and to impose major con-
straints on future development.
Rapid economic growth is also imposing severe resource constraints, be they land, energy,
or water. The allocation of these scarce resources will require a degree of fairness and trans-
parency that has been markedly absent in the non-market discretionary and opaque govern-
ment actions that have contributed to a range of growing ailments, including a Maoist
insurgency in India’s central tribal belts, unprecedented levels of corruption, and a policy
paralysis from the public backlash.
But perhaps the foremost challenge India faces is strengthening public institutions and
governance. Its democratic success and the demographic dividend mean that tens of mil-
lions of young people will be joining India’s work force with aspirations that their parents
couldn’t even dream about. Managing their expectations will be no mean task. In the two
decades after the onset of economic liberalization India added 364 million people to its
population—more than the stock at the time of independence, a stock accumulated over
many millennia. Understanding the implications of this immense demographic change
in such a short period of time and limited land mass is not easy. Managing it will be even
harder.
The challenge India faces is to create a state that enforces laws impartially, rather than
simply to create new rules at its convenience and enforce them arbitrarily. While in the fore-
seeable future the expansion and growth of India’s private sector and all-too-vibrant civil
society will certainly fill in for some of the shortcomings of the public sector, there are a wide
range of core functions, from regulation to security and from social inclusion to public goods
provision, where the State is—and will be—indispensable. The integrity and responsiveness
of the Indian state to the multiple challenges facing the country, both internal and external,
will fundamentally determine India’s future.
Table 42.1 The Indian economy, 1900–2010
1900–50 1950–60 1960–70 1970–80 1980–90 1990–99 2000–10
Growth rate (%) (annual average)
World 2.1 4.2 5.3 3.6 3.2 2.5 3.7
India 0.5–1.0 3.7 3.6 2.8 5.8 6.1 7.3
Population growth rate (%) 1.0 2.3 2.3 2.3 2.1 1.8 1.5
Population (millions) 361 439 548 683 846 1,028 1,210
Tax/GDP (%) 6.2 7.8 10.3 13.7 15.4 14.5 14.7
Gross domestic capital 8.4 14.0 15.1 19.9 26.0 24.3 35.1
formation/GDP (%)
Exports/GDP (%) 6.2 3.9 3.6 4.6 5.8 9.9 14.5
Agriculture as share of GDP (%) 65.4 49.8 43.9 38.3 33.0 25.3 16.7
Rural population (% of total) 82.7 82.0 80.0 76.7 74.3 72.2 68.9
Per capita net national product 5,708 7,121 8,091 8,594 11,535 15,172 35,993
(Rupees constant 2004–05 prices)
Total public sector 7.1 11.1 15.5 19.1 19.1 17.9
employment (millions)
Life expectancy 32.1 41.3 45.6 50.4 58.7 62.5 67.0
Literacy rate (%) 18.3 28.3 34.4 43.6 52.2 64.8 74.0
Infant mortality rate 146 129 134 104 80 68 47
(per 1,000 live births)
Sources: RBI, Handbook of Statistics on Indian Economy; Census of India; Planning Commission; Economic Survey.
730 devesh kapur
Notes
1. I am grateful to Galileu Kim for his research help in putting together this chapter.
2. For a comprehensive understanding of almost all aspects of the Indian economy, see Basu
and Maertens (2012).
3. Quoted in Pankaj Mishra, “How India Is Turning Into China,” New Republic, December
21, 2012 (<http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/magazine/111367/how-india-turning-
china>, accessed February 18, 2013).
4. Brown (2009: 314).
5. Variations in the period covered in different studies lead to differing growth rates when
comparing pre-reform and post-reform or 1980s and 1990s. The discussion in this section
draws from Kapur (2010a).
6. The following discussion draws on Joshi and Kapur (forthcoming).
7. This section draws on Kapur (2010b).
8. Poverty estimates in India are based on monthly per capita consumption expenditures
based on national household surveys, with official poverty lines defined in terms of a
threshold monthly per capita expenditure linked to minimum calorific intake. For an
excellent overview, see Deaton and Kozel (2005).
9. The Arthashastra (4th century bce) is an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic
policy, and military strategy which identifies its author by the names “Kautilya” and
“Viṣhṇugupta,” both traditionally identified with Chāṇakya (c. 350–283 bce), a teacher
and scholar.
10. This would be so at both market and purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates,
although India’s per capita income will be well below those of industrialized countries.
Currently India is the world’s fourth largest economy based on PPP exchange rates.
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ment. London and Oxford: British Academy and Clarendon Press.
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(eds.), A Handbook of Indian Politics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 443–57.
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Economic and Political Weekly, February 28: 935–43.
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chapter 43
econom ic dev el opm en t:

th e ex per ience of
su b-sa h a r a n a fr ica
olu ajakaiye and afeikhena jerome 1
Introduction
Sub-Saharan Africa’s development experience over the past six decades has been varied,
cyclical, and sporadic, and until recently it has lagged behind the rest of the world. After a
spurt of post-independence economic growth and nascent structural and social transforma-
tion, external shocks, poor policy responses, and ineffective development strategies resulted
in economic stagnation in the 1980s; the gains of the first two decades of independence were
quickly wiped out, and poverty intensified. This contrasts sharply with the rest of the devel-
oping world, where per capita income more than doubled and, in some of the most success-
ful developing countries, increased fourfold or more.
Similarly, while the successful developing countries experienced economic transforma-
tion from primary production to more diversified industrial production and subsequently
to more sophisticated service industries, with considerable progress toward becoming
knowledge economies, virtually all African countries have remained primary producers, the
only exceptions being Mauritius and South Africa. In addition, while the successful develop-
ing countries have witnessed remarkable progress in human development, especially in the
areas of health and education, virtually all African countries remain at the lower end of the
Human Development Index (HDI). Correspondingly, while successful developing countries
were able to pull the majority of their people out of poverty, most Africans continue to wal-
low in poverty.
Recent years have, however, brought some respite to alleviate this picture of gloom for
Africa. The past decade has been characterized by sustained economic growth and con-
siderable political maturity, leading to the recent euphoria on African renaissance. While
the global commodity price boom has certainly contributed to Africa’s recovery, there is
a different mindset and a new confidence in Africa’s ability to forge its development path
economic development: the experience of sub-saharan africa 733
as a result of improvement in governance. Africa’s private sector has become an increas-

ingly powerful engine for change, driving innovation and transforming outdated busi-
ness models. Foreign direct investment has also increased by a factor of six over the past
decade. It is increasingly evident that Africa is on its way to becoming a preferred invest-
ment destination, a potential pole of global growth, and a place of immense innovation
and creativity.
However, there are still some palpable challenges. Recent growth in Africa has not been
accompanied by significant structural transformation. Indeed, the economic structure of
several African countries, especially resource-rich countries, has become more concen-
trated, making them more vulnerable to external shocks. Moreover, Africa’s recent growth
has not been inclusive, as it fails to provide remunerative employment opportunities, pro-
pelled as it still is in several countries by primary resources (principally fossil fuel and min-
ing sectors), with low employment elasticity; as a result, the majority of the people are still
enmeshed in poverty and rising inequality. Achievements in the area of human development
have remained dismal, and, with the exception of Mauritius, African countries are unlikely
to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.
This chapter briefly appraises Africa’s development experience, especially since the 1960s
when several African States became independent. It reviews the development experience
and development policy practice in Africa over time, while recognizing that because of the
diversity of African countries and their experiences, interpreting Africa’s development expe-
rience is no simple endeavor.
The chapter is structured as follows: The next section sets the stage by reviewing Africa’s
economic development performance from 1960 to 2010. It is followed by an appraisal of
development policy and practice on the continent, then by some concluding remarks.
Review of Africa’s Development

Experience, 1960–20102,3
In this section, we briefly review Africa’s economic development experience since inde-
pendence in comparison with what obtained in the rest of the world, especially East Asia
and the Pacific (EAP). Using historical context and in order to presage the evolution of
development thinking (as well as development policy and practice in Africa, discussed in
the following section), the review period has been decomposed into three distinct phases,
each corresponding to a dominant development policy regime and strategy. The three
phases are: the immediate post-independence era (1960–85) characterized by state-led
development strategy marked by pervasive market failures and the imperative of meeting
the high expectations of the population in a post-colonial era; the structural adjustment
program era (1986–95) when, on account of pervasive state failures, market fundamental-
ism reigned supreme; and the neo-liberal policy era (1996–2010), which is essentially
rooted in market fundamentalism but nuanced to accommodate poverty, inequality, and
other concerns of the international community, such as good governance and climate
change.
734 olu ajakaiye and afeikhena jerome
Immediate Post-independence Era, 1960–85

On attaining political independence mostly in the 1960s, African countries adopted the
import substitution industrialization (ISI) development model, which was then the domi-
nant economic model, inspired largely by the Latin American School as the framework for
growth and development strategies. While the initial focus was on consumer goods, the
expectation was that as the industrialization process advanced, there would also be domestic
production of intermediate and capital goods needed by the domestic consumer goods
industry. It was widely assumed that domestic production of hitherto imported goods would
eventually enhance self-reliance and help prevent balance-of-payments problems.4 This
development strategy seemed to have been successful during the first fifteen years of inde-
pendence, when the GDP growth rate hovered around 4 percent on the continent and
trended well with the other developing regions. By the mid-1970s, Africa and Latin America
and the Caribbean (LAC) regions had lost momentum while the EAP region continued to
forge ahead, as shown in Figure 43.1.
With respect to structural transformation, the expectation is that as the economy grows,
contributions of various sectors to GDP should change as factors, especially labor, move
from lower productivity to higher productivity sectors (Lewis 1954; Kuznets 1955; and Chen-
ery 1986). At early stages of development, contributions of primary production (agriculture
and mining) to GDP tend to dominate. As development proceeds, the contributions of
primary production tend to decline while those of secondary activities (particularly

manufacturing) tend to rise. As the economy advances towards becoming a knowledge
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
–5.0
–10.0
–15.0
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
EAP LAC MENA SSA
figure 43.1 Annual GDP growth rates: Africa and other developing regions, 1960–85
Note: EAP = East Asia and the Pacific, LAC = Latin America and the Caribbean, MENA = Middle East and North
Africa, SSA = sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: World Bank (2011) World Development Indicators.
(a) 45 (b)
40
40 35
35
30
30
25
25
20
20
15
15
10 10
5 5
0 0
60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 19
65 966 967 968 969 970 971 972 973 974 975 976 977 978 979 980 981 982 983 984 985
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19
EAP LAC MENA SSA
figure 43.2a Contributions of agriculture to GDP: Africa and other developing regions, 1960–85
Note: EAP = East Asia and the Pacific, LAC = Latin America and the Caribbean, MENA = Middle East and North Africa, SSA = sub-Saharan Africa.
figure 43.2b Contributions of manufacturing to GDP: Africa and other developing regions, 1960–85
Note: EAP = East Asia and the Pacific, LAC = Latin America and the Caribbean, MENA = Middle East and North Africa, SSA = sub-Saharan Africa.
economy, the contributions of the modern sophisticated services sector to GDP tend to
become dominant, as is the case in many OECD countries.
Against this background, the decline in the contributions of agriculture to GDP was very
pronounced in EAP and less perceptible in other developing countries, including Africa.
Correspondingly, the increase in contributions of manufacturing to GDP was quite steep in
EAP and also imperceptible in Africa (see Figures 43.2a and b). Just like economic growth,
which lost momentum in Africa after the first fifteen years of the post-independence era, the
structural transformation that appeared to have commenced during this period also plum-
meted thereafter. As a result, the much-desired development (growth plus structural trans-
formation) did not materialize in Africa. In contrast, indications in Asia show that
development was underway by 1985.
Structural Adjustment Era (1986–95)

The Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) era in Africa commenced in the mid-1980s, when
many African countries lost the growth momentum of the first fifteen years of independence
and also experienced a severe balance of payments crisis resulting from the cumulative
effects of the first oil shock, the decline in commodity prices, and the growing import needs
of domestic industries. In order to manage the crisis, many countries sought financial assist-
ance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. African countries
that obtained the financial support of the IMF and World Bank had to adopt the SAP, which
required them to implement certain policy reforms. As a result, the mid-1980s witnessed the
formulation and implementation by most African countries of wide-ranging economic
policy reforms, including: (a) deregulation of interest rates; (b) trade liberalization; (c) pri-
vatization of state-owned enterprises; (d) withdrawal of subsidies; and (e) currency
devaluation.
A key objective of SAP was to reduce the role of the state in the development process and
give market forces a greater role in the allocation of resources. The assumption was that mar-
kets are more efficient than the state in resource allocation and that the appropriate role of
the latter should be to provide an enabling environment for the private sector to flourish.
Despite the vigorous implementation of SAP in many African countries, economic per-
formance continued to lag behind that of other developing regions. Indeed, by the beginning
of the 1990s, when the impact of SAP policies had become manifest, Africa had become the
slowest growing region in the world (see Figure 43.3). However, beginning in the mid-1990s
African countries started to experience considerable growth revival, but structural transfor-
mation remained imperceptible as the contributions of agriculture to GDP in Africa
increased slightly while the contributions of manufacturing continued to decline. The pic-
ture is quite different in EAP, where manufacturing contributions to GDP remained high
and rising, as shown in Figures 43.4a and 43.4b. Evidently, the declining contributions of
manufacturing to GDP in Africa are stark manifestations of the de-industrialization that
occurred during the SAP period in the region.
By the end of the 1990s, poverty headcount ratios in twenty of the thirty-two African
countries for which data were available exceeded 50 percent. This, along with the burgeoning
informal service sector, suggests that the growth revival of the 1990s in Africa was neither
inclusive nor pro-poor.
12.0
10.0
8.0
6.0
4.0
2.0
0.0
–2.0
–4.0
1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995
EAP LAC MENA SSA
figure 43.3 Annual GDP growth rates: Africa and other developing regions, 1986–95
New Orthodoxy Era (1996–2010)

Clearly, the SAP policies failed to deliver on development in Africa, the growth revival of the
first half of the 1990s notwithstanding. Africa suffered serious de-industrialization which
swelled the rudimentary service sector dominated by low productivity distributive trade
activities, and poverty became a serious concern in the region. By the end of the 1990s, there-
fore, the IFIs had started to reconsider their approaches and practices in the developing
countries. Eventually, a joint initiative launched by the IFIs at the end of 1999 put the fight
against poverty at the heart of growth and development policies.
Apparently, the IFIs ignored the deleterious effects of the SAPs on structural transforma-
tion in Africa. As a result, low-income countries wishing to apply for financial aid or for debt
relief under the HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) Initiative, were required to draw
up poverty reduction programs known as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). At
the same time, the United Nations system was actively engaged in setting the millennium
development goals (MDG) targets culminating in the Millennium Declaration in 2000, with
poverty reduction at its heart, while remaining silent on the issue of structural transforma-
tion. A hallmark of these initiatives is the continued reliance on market fundamentalism to
undergird development policies; state intervention remained anathema.
It turned out that the growth revival of the early 1990s could not be sustained, and by
1998 Africa was one of the slowest growing regions in the world. The sharp growth decline
experienced in EAP between 1996 and 1998 is attributable to the impact of the Asian
financial crisis, from which the region recovered quite dramatically. Africa’s recovery,
which also started in 1999, was sustained, such that by the beginning of this century and
as shown in Figure 43.5, Africa had become the second fastest growing region in the
world, next to Asia. Meanwhile, poverty is still a concern in Africa: the headcount ratio
exceeds 50 percent in twenty-two of the forty countries for which we have data, and the
(a) 30 (b) 35
25 30
25
20
20
15
15
10
10
5 5
0 0
1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995
EAP LAC MENA SSA
14.0
12.0
10.0
8.0
6.0
4.0
2.0
0.0
–2.0
–4.0
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
EAP LAC MENA SSA
figure 43.5 Annual GDP growth rates: SSA and other developing regions, 1996–2010
Gini index exceeds 40 for twenty-three of the thirty African countries, indicating consid-
erable inequality. Clearly, the growth renaissance experienced in Africa during the first
decade of this century has been neither inclusive nor equitable (Ajakaiye, Jerome, and
Chigunta 2011).
In terms of structural transformation, the contributions of agriculture to GDP have been
declining in both Africa and EAP, as shown in Figure 43.6a. However, the contributions of
manufacturing to GDP were also declining in Africa whereas they were increasing in EAP
(see Figure 43.6b). Correspondingly, the contributions of services to GDP remained high
and rising in Africa, whereas they were rising gradually in EAP, suggesting that the regions
might be witnessing gradual progress toward becoming knowledge-driven economies.
In essence, the remarkable growth performance and declining incidence of violent con-
flicts5 notwithstanding, Africa still faces a number of development challenges. Foremost,
after sixty years of post-independence efforts, economic development encompassing growth
and economic transformation is still elusive in most African countries, with Mauritius and
South Africa as notable exceptions.6 Moreover, Africa is the only region of the world that has
experienced an increase in poverty over the last three decades, in stark contrast to the dra-
matic gains in the fight against poverty that have been achieved elsewhere, particularly in
Asia. Thus, despite comprising only 10 percent of the world’s population, Africa is still home
to a disproportionate 30 percent of the world’s poor. Worse still, the number of people in
extreme poverty has doubled to some 300 million people since the mid-1980s and is expected
to reach as high as 400 million by 2015.
Most countries in the region are also grappling with the problems of climate change, high
disease burden, poor infrastructure, brain drain, violent conflicts, and lack of development
of domestic research and development as well as productive industrial capacity. Further, in
the last few years African countries have had to deal with the effects of rising food and energy
prices and the complications arising from the global financial and economic crisis, especially
(a) (b)
25 35
30
20
25
15
20
10 15
10
5
5
0 0
9 6 9 7 9 8 9 9 0 0 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10
19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20
EAP LAC MENA SSA
the financial turmoil generated by the intensification of the fiscal crisis in Europe. These
multiple crises pose threats to the recent progress made by the region in economic growth
performance, and are jeopardizing efforts by African countries to achieve the MDGs; mean-
while, the challenges of poverty, inequality, and economic transformation persist.
Development Policy and Practice

in Africa
The intellectual underpinnings of development have grown and evolved over six decades
into a daunting and formidable array of ideas, concepts, theories, empirical studies, and dis-
tinct schools of thought. Consequently, there has been a fundamental change in development
policy thinking over time. The “twists and turns” in the field, especially the role of the state in
accelerating development, have had profound implications for development policy and
practice in Africa over time.
At independence, most post-colonial African governments inherited economies charac-
terized by low levels of education, poorly developed infrastructure (designed primarily to
evacuate raw materials and minerals to the ports), few African entrepreneurs, little technical
change in agriculture, undiversified economies with small manufacturing capability, a reli-
ance on a few crops or minerals for export earnings, and state structures and policies that
were quite interventionist. African governments faced enormous pressures and challenges
after independence. The frustration and anger of local populations coalesced into independ-
ence movements, leading to a very rapid transfer of power. The same anger was rapidly
transformed into enormously high expectations and aspirations as to the potential of post-
independence governments. The rapid pace of independence, and little investment by colo-
nial states in an African civil service, created a large administrative and political vacuum that
left the state open to patron-client pressures. Poor policy choices were also due to the impact
of prevailing orthodoxy and the character of investment and aid. The structural nature of
African economies dictated the need for a gradual transformation to build institutions and
capacities, which would expand future economic options.
Post-independence Development Strategies

Immediately after independence, therefore, the development strategies adopted in Africa
were oriented toward catching up with the developed world through industrialization and
accelerating the pace of human development. These were to be achieved within long- and
medium-term development planning frameworks whose objectives were to eradicate the
“colonial structure” that had been imposed on African economies and to speed up economic
growth and structural transformation, thereby improving the living standards of the people.
The key feature of African development initiatives in the 1960s was the important role
envisaged for the state. In consonance with the prevailing development thinking of the time,
the state allocated to itself a central role in the development process—building social and
economic infrastructure and providing social services to the impoverished people of the
continent. Another feature of the development initiatives in the 1960s was, as noted elsewhere,
the import substitution industrialization (ISI) strategy, which aimed at ensuring adequate
protection of local industries and employment. This development strategy, with the central
role for the state and the protection of local industries and employment, would come to be
condemned and dismantled by the international financial institutions just a few years later.
However, as pointed out earlier, by the mid-1970s the momentum of Africa’s development
had slowed considerably. The economic slowdown of the late 1970s can be attributed to sev-
eral factors related to “over-investment” in the social sector, corruption, and the debilitating
effect of the Cold War. Although hardly acknowledged, perhaps the most important factor is
the collapse of the prices of Africa’s exports, primarily agricultural commodities and miner-
als. The developed countries’ gravitation toward knowledge economies significantly reduced
the primary commodity intensity of their production activities, and Africans had not devel-
oped local capacity for processing and adding value to these commodities to meet local
demand by other industries and domestic consumers. Loans were taken out from interna-
tional lenders by newly independent governments, many of which were dictatorships
strategically backed by the Cold War superpowers. By the late 1970s, many African states had
been seriously weakened by the spate of political instability across Africa (including seven
civil wars), as well as by the beginning of the economic decline and the marginalization
of Africa.
Initiatives by African Leaders

It is important to note that African leaders have been articulating their own ideas on how to
combat the problem of underdevelopment in the continent. Specifically, in response to the
loss of growth momentum in the late 1970s, African governments came up with their own
economic blueprint—the Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa 1980–
2000, known as the LPA—crafted by Africans working through two major institutions, the
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the Secretariat of the
Organisation of African Unity (OAU), for the Conference of Ministers of Finance and
Economic Planning; the plan was later endorsed by the Heads of State and Government
meeting in Lagos in 1980.
The LPA enunciated the goals of collective self-reliance. It sought to adopt a new, inward-
looking development strategy to replace the inherited externally oriented pattern. The Plan
emphasized, among other factors, the development of domestic markets in Africa rather
than reliance on external markets, the control of natural resources by states, the role and
importance of domestic factor inputs in development, the imperative of self-sufficiency in
food production, the development of human capital, and the provision of social infrastruc-
ture for the African people. Clearly, by concentrating on sectoral programs, the LPA, like the
preceding ISI strategy, envisaged structural transformation of African economies. In spite of
its rigor and clear vision of sustainable, equitable, and poverty-reducing growth accompa-
nied by structural transformation, the LPA achieved very little and was scarcely
implemented.
The LPA repudiates the whole logic of the neo-liberal development thinking of the time,
and hence did not elicit the necessary support from the IFIs and the international commu-
nity. Instead of supporting the LPA, within a year after its adoption by African leaders, the
World Bank released a report entitled Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An

Agenda for Action (1981), otherwise known as the Berg Report (after its principal author,
Professor Elliot Berg). The report was a scathing criticism of the LPA, eulogizing the role of
the market and external trade in economic development, with a spirited attack on the state in
Africa. Ignoring underlying structural causes of Africa’s development challenges and the
efficacy of increasing intra-African trade, the report blamed Africa’s economic weaknesses
on domestic “policy inadequacies and administrative constraints” and advocated for sub-
stantial currency devaluation and trade liberalization, along with dismantling industrial
protection measures. These recommendations formed the basis of structural adjustment
programs (SAPs)—market-oriented policy packages—that became conditional to the IMF
and World Bank loans made to African countries desperate for convertible currency needed
to service external debts. The path to economic development in Africa, the report concludes,
was for Africa to liberalize its economy, cut back on the role of the state, and privatize public
enterprises. Meanwhile, the World Bank used its financial leverage in many debt-ridden
African countries to compel them to jettison the LPA.
While the IMF was initially responsible for short-term, typically anti-inflationary macr-
oeconomic stabilization programs, and the World Bank for more medium-term market-
liberalizing structural adjustment programs (SAPs), their policies converged around what
was subsequently dubbed the “Washington Consensus.” That Consensus is generally seen as
spearheading the global trend toward greater economic liberalization since the 1980s. While
its policy priorities have changed over time (partly in response to poorer-than-expected eco-
nomic performance in implementing countries), it has remained the “conventional wisdom”
at the core of economic policy making across most of the African continent (see, for exam-
ple, Stiglitz 1998 and Stein 2008).
Throughout the adjustment years, the IFIs seized much of the policy initiative, and fore-
closed the debate by literally insisting that there was no alternative; with African scholars,
the non-governmental/civil society organizations and policy-makers largely relegated to
reactive protest against the policies “imposed” by the dollar (loan/grant)-dangling IFIs.7
With the shift in emphasis from broader development to macroeconomic stability (as rec-
ommended by numerous IMF and World Bank reports), the ministries in charge of agricul-
ture, industry, rural development, education, health and employment, and infrastructural
development were downgraded. Instead, the ministries of finance and the central banks,
which normally would be serving and supporting the real sectors of the economies (i.e.
agents of African growth and structural transformation), were dealing directly with the Bank
and the Fund, whose interest in these issues was not obvious, to say the least. In several Afri-
can countries, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning was stripped of its economic
planning functions in order to focus all its attention on short-term financial issues, mainly
inflation and exchange rate management, ignoring the implications of their policies for real
sector growth and structural transformation.
While the LPA could not be implemented, African leaders and their institutions contin-
ued to tinker with alternative development strategies separate from the neo-liberal doctrine
of SAP. Examples include the UN Programme of Action for Africa Economic Recovery and
Development, 1986–90 (UN-PAAERD); the UNECA Alternative Framework to Structural
Adjustment Programme for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP) of
1989; and the African Charter for Popular Participation and Development adopted in Aru-
sha, Tanzania in 1990. All these economic proposals for Africa’s development remained
merely statements of intent, as the dominant forces in the global economy, spearheaded by
the IFIs, were either opposed or gave cold reception to them. The tendency was for the IFIs to
deploy their political and economic leverage on African countries to sway them away from
such blueprints as they, like the LPA, challenged the orthodoxy, emphasizing the imperatives
of structural transformation and the inevitability of government intervention in pursuit of
an inclusive and equitable development agenda with the emphasis on job creation.
The fight against poverty took center stage in the preoccupations of public authorities in
Africa and the international community from the mid-1990s. Based on a 1995 World Bank
report (A Continent in Transition: Sub-Saharan Africa in the Mid-1990s), and under intense
and sustained pressure from international civil society organizations as the problems of
implementing liberal reforms contained in the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s
and early 1990s became evident, the World Bank and other international actors began to lay
out a new approach to development that placed greater emphasis on poverty reduction and
the participation of civil society organizations. Thus, poverty reduction strategies became
the framework for economic policies and development choices in most African countries.
This reorientation of economic policies was reinforced by the adoption of the HIPC initia-
tive for debt reduction, with the adoption of a poverty reduction strategy as a precondition
to accessing support. Most African countries committed to the poverty reduction path from
the mid-1990s, and a great number of them have reached the HIPC completion point that
allows them to benefit from significant external debt reduction and to increase social sector
spending in order to combat poverty and assist vulnerable populations.
Despite these initiatives, growth remained weak and fragile, and far below the levels
required to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and reduce poverty by half by 2015.
Like the underlying development thinking of the period, issues of structural transformation
and the role of the state did not receive any attention.
New Partnership for Africa’s Development

In the last decade, a renewed urge to reclaim development agenda setting in Africa by Afri-
can leaders was galvanized with the establishment in October 2001 of the New Partnership
for Africa’s Development (NEPAD 2000).8 NEPAD is the second major attempt by African
leaders, after the aborted Lagos Plan of Action, to muster a collective will to engineer eco-
nomic development in Africa. It represents a pledge by African leaders, based on a common
vision and a firm and shared conviction that they have a pressing duty to eradicate poverty
and to place their countries, both individually and collectively, on a path of sustainable
growth and development, and at the same time to prepare them to participate actively in the
world economy and global politics.
NEPAD has seven priority areas of intervention:
1. strengthening mechanisms for conflict prevention, management, and resolution;

2. promoting and protecting democracy and human rights;
3. restoring and maintaining macroeconomic stability;
4. revitalizing and extending the provision of education, technical training, and health
services, with high priority accorded to HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other communicable
diseases;
5. promoting the role of women in social and economic development;

6. building the capacity of the states in Africa; and
7. promoting the development of infrastructure, agriculture, and its diversification.
To achieve the above, NEPAD9 calls for policy reforms and increased investments in the pri-
ority areas of agriculture and food security, science and technology, environment, trade and
market access, governance, infrastructure (energy, transport, and water sanitation, and
information and communication technologies), gender, and capacity development. NEPAD,
in conjunction with the African Development Bank and the UNECA, also continues to
emphasize the participation of the private sector, civil society organizations, and the African
Diaspora in fostering development on the continent.
Unlike previous initiatives by African leaders and their institutions, NEPAD neither chal-
lenged the orthodoxy nor emphasized structural transformation and government interven-
tion. Accordingly, the developed world typified by the G8 has given tacit approval and
overwhelming support to the NEPAD initiative, apparently because it is perceived to be in
tune with the prevailing new orthodoxy in development thinking.
Developmental State and Economic Transformation

Paradoxically, the first decade of this century has also been a period of intellectual ferment
inspired by the global economic crisis of 2008–9, during which past experiences were evalu-
ated, basic assumptions and theories questioned, complexity of development processes
acknowledged, and new approaches to development thinking and practice encouraged.
The weaknesses of the Washington Consensus, which was paraded as the intellectual
showpiece of the so-called reform movement, have been widely discussed. The general
consensus is that the Washington Consensus policies have not lived up to expectation,
not only in Africa but around the world. As a package, they were neither necessary nor
sufficient for growth; and too often, even when they brought a modicum of growth, it
was not accompanied by structural transformation and hence it was not inclusive, as
the bulk of the benefits were appropriated by relatively few people, leaving the majority
in poverty.10
In recent years, following the global economic and financial crisis, there seems to have
been a convergence of ideas, at least within the African Union Commission (AUC) and
UNECA, on the imperatives of a democratic developmental state in Africa as a spur to rapid
economic development in the region. This is given impetus by two reports: the UNECA/
AUC Economic Report on Africa (ERA) 2011 on “Governing Development in Africa: Role of
the State in Economic Transformation,” and Good Growth and Governance in Africa: Rethink-
ing Development Strategies, edited by Noman et al. (2011). The two reports suggest that the
state has a crucial role to play in meeting the current and emerging development challenges
in Africa. In particular, the UNECA/AUC ERA 2011 advocates that Africa’s developmental
states should undertake three major tasks for achieving economic transformation: planning
the process, formulating appropriate policies, and implementing the plans and policies. The
report therefore recommends that the developmental state approach should be operational-
ized through disciplined planning while avoiding the pitfalls of state intervention, such as
capture, through a competent and autonomous bureaucracy responsible for planning and
implementation as well as constructing a developmentalist coalition among committed

political leadership, the bureaucracy, private sector employers and employee associations,
and civil society.
Clearly, this admonition, while in line with the emerging development thinking—espe-
cially the new structural economics articulated by Lin (2011)—may not enjoy the same tacit
approval and overwhelming support of the developed world as did the NEPAD initiative.
However, in view of the success of the emerging markets, particularly those of the EAP
region, in implementing a judicious and pragmatic combination of government interven-
tion and market mechanisms in the process of economic growth and structural transforma-
tion, and the spate of significant government interventions in the OECD countries in dealing
with the ongoing economic and financial crisis, Africa should find support for a judicious
and pragmatic combination of government intervention and market mechanisms as a
strategy for achieving the inclusive, poverty-reducing, and equitable growth and structural
transformation that has so far proved elusive.
The challenge this time, however, is that financial assistance from the traditional partners
may not be as forthcoming as before. African countries should therefore capitalize on the
opportunities and manage the risks presented by the emergence of a multi-polar world and
resource shifts toward Asia and other developing regions, as elucidated by UNECA/AUC
(2012: 77–81).
Conclusion
The upshot of the foregoing is that during the past six decades Africa has experienced spurts
of economic growth that were not accompanied by reductions in poverty and inequality.
Most of the policy initiatives, especially those inspired by the IFIs, ignored the issue of struc-
tural transformation. The indication, therefore, is that economic development characterized
by robust and sustained economic growth, poverty reduction, inequality reduction, and eco-
nomic transformation has remained elusive in Africa.
Meanwhile, development economics, which crystallized as a separate discipline in the
post-war period, embracing the instrumentality of government intervention in advancing
growth and structural transformation, evolved to become increasingly hostile to govern-
ment intervention, and over time (especially after 1980, as a result of the neo-classical counter-
revolution) jettisoned the issue of structural transformation.
Correspondingly, development policy and practice, which also initially (in the 1950s)
advocated a strong role for the state, gradually switched (particularly since 1980) to dogmatic
reliance on market mechanisms, which, in fact, became the new orthodoxy until recently
when it is increasingly being challenged. Not surprisingly, initiatives by African leaders that
were not in tune with the new orthodoxy were vigorously resisted and failed to find the sup-
port of the international community.
Meanwhile, experience shows that policy advice based on either of the two extremes—
that is, exclusive reliance on government intervention or market mechanisms—has failed to
produce development encompassing inclusive, equitable, and poverty-reducing growth and
structural transformation.
The experience of successful developing countries suggests that a developmental state

capable of maintaining a judicious, dynamic, and pragmatic combination of government
intervention and market mechanisms is a crucial recipe for success. Recent evolution in
development thinking, especially the conclusion of the Growth Commission and the new
structural economics emanating from the World Bank, is quite propitious for Africa. This is
particularly so as this is occurring at a time when many African leaders are adopting a demo-
cratic developmental state approach to development (growth plus structural transforma-
tion), as outlined above (Developmental state and economic transformation).
Underlining all this is the need for strong and visionary political leadership with the
capacity to mobilize the population around a common national vision. This must be comple-
mented with an effective institutional framework that defines and enforces the roles and
responsibilities of the three drivers of change—the state through pragmatic and dynamic
government intervention, the private sector, and civil society—for implementing the com-
mon national vision and ensuring mutual accountability among them. This also calls for an
enabling policy environment and a stable and predictable rule on the operations of all stake-
holders necessary for fostering economic development. If this perspective persists for the
next three decades, African countries may not only grow at a decent rate but also structurally
transform their economies, shifting from the current chronic dependency on agriculture
and export of commodities to a more industrialized model where manufactured exports
account for the bulk of total exports, as Malaysia did over a thirty-year period (Yusof 2011).
African leaders can also take advantage of the ongoing global financial crisis to work with
old and new economic partners and lay the foundation for a stable, prosperous continent
anchored in democracy, rule of law, and sound, people-oriented development policies. Per-
haps what is needed is a deepening of continent-wide institutions and initiatives that are
providing the continent with a vision for Africa in the twenty-first century.
Crucially, African countries can develop faster by unleashing their productive poten-
tial—by aggressively investing in infrastructure, science and technology, and human capital,
harnessing the potential of their youthful population, and promoting good governance.
With decisive leadership at home and sustained support from development partners, there is
now an opportunity to unlock that potential and set the course for a future of shared pros-
perity, more equal opportunity, and political stability.
The contemporary development history of Africa also underscores the misconceptions of
a “one size fits all” approach to economic development, which has largely failed. We should
not repeat the mistakes of the past. The appropriate mix of government intervention and
market mechanisms will depend on the initial conditions of each country and the pace of
development over time. Accordingly, careful, detailed, and contextually relevant country-
level studies should regularly underpin the articulation of policies and programs necessary
to initiate, sustain, and advance the goals of inclusive, equitable, and poverty-reducing
growth accompanied by structural transformation in Africa.
Notes
1. The authors would like to thank Francis Chigunta for his editorial assistance.
2. For the purposes of this chapter, “economic development” is defined as growth accompa-
nied by structural transformation.
3. Data underlying the analysis in this section were obtained from the World Bank’s World
Development Report 2011.
4. Although there are country-specific differences in policies adopted, the implementation
of ISI in Africa generally involved: (a) restriction of imports to intermediate inputs and
capital goods required by domestic industries; (b) extensive use of tariff and non-tariff
barriers to trade; (c) currency overvaluation to facilitate the import of goods needed by
domestic industries; (d) subsidized interest rates to make domestic investment attractive;
(e) direct government ownership or participation in industry; and (f) provision of direct
loans to firms as well as access to foreign exchange for imported inputs (Mkandawire and
Soludo 2003; UNCTAD/UNIDO 2011).
5. Africa has become more peaceful: in 2002, 55 percent of worldwide violent conflict took
place in sub-Saharan Africa, but by 2011 the share had dropped to 24 percent (Africa
Progress Panel 2012).
6. Indeed, there are indications that Mauritius and South Africa are well on the way to
becoming knowledge economies, as they are the only two African countries whose
knowledge economy index exceeded 5 as at 2009. The remaining twenty-nine African
countries covered in the 2009 report scored below 5; indeed, of the thirty-three lowest
scores, twenty-six are from African countries.
7. See Ajakaiye (2007) for a discussion of the implications of this relegation for policy imple-
mentation in Africa.
8. In all, four African leaders, namely, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Abdoulaye Wade of
Senegal, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, and Abdelaziz Bouteflicka of Algeria, were criti-
cal of the establishment of NEPAD.
9. As part of the process to integrate NEPAD into the African Union structures and proc-
esses, the 14th African Union (AU) Summit (held in 2010) decided to strengthen the
NEPAD program by transforming the secretariat into an implementation agency, the
NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency (NPCA).
10. East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) is a notable exception, apparently because it did not com-
ply with the tenets of the Washington Consensus.
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chapter 44
econom ic dev el opm en t i n

th e a r a b r egion: a ta l e
of oil a n d politic s
ahmed galal and hoda selim 1
Introduction
The experience of the Arab countries offers a rich experiment for a study of the evolution of
thinking on international development. Admittedly, the region shares many of the charac-
teristics of other parts of the developing world; hence its study can only provide supporting
evidence to what may be observed elsewhere. However, because the modern history of Arab
countries is also defined by oil and most countries in the region are ruled by non-democratic
regimes in an increasingly democratic world, its study offers a distinct opportunity to review
the literature related to the oil curse and the influence of politics on development.
We start from the observation that the Arab countries today are not considered developed
by international standards. Furthermore, they are not converging toward the standard of liv-
ing in advanced or even successful emerging countries. The main question we address in this
chapter is why.
Explanations of underdevelopment vary and have evolved over time. We do not intend
to review this vast literature here, but would like to single out three broad explanations. The
first attributes underdevelopment to the failure of governments to provide the necessary
conditions for markets to function well and the Schumpeterian creative destruction to
flourish. A recent vintage of this view is the Washington Consensus, which argues funda-
mentally that higher economic growth requires reducing market distortions, increasing
competitive pressure, getting rid of ill-designed selective interventions, and reducing state
domination of economic activities. In natural resource-rich countries, this approach would
emphasize smoothing out consumption and savings over time, safeguarding against vola-
tility and avoiding the Dutch disease.
Other explanations beyond economics have also been advanced, blaming underdevelop-
ment on culture and/or geography. According to Max Weber, development in Europe benefited
from the Protestant work ethic. By implication, other cultures, including the Islamic culture,
economic development in the arab region 751
may not be compatible with the accumulation of wealth. As for geography, Collier (2007) has
argued in the context of Africa that landlocked countries tend to be underdeveloped. Both
arguments could be interpreted to suggest that some countries are destined to remain under-
developed because it is difficult to change culture or geography within a reasonable period of
time, if ever.
Finally, the last few decades have seen the rise of institutions as a critical factor in underde-
velopment (North 1991). This argument has recently been elaborated by Acemoglu and
Robinson (2012), who demonstrate convincingly, drawing on centuries of history and a com-
pelling framework, how political (and economic) institutions influence the fortune of nations.
If political institutions are inclusive of most citizens, they tend to produce rules of the game
that foster economic growth and shared prosperity. In contrast, extractive institutions have
the opposite effects, even in the presence of temporary spurts of economic growth. Institu-
tions are path dependent, but they can change over time at what are called “critical junctures.”
In exploring the relevance of these explanations to the Arab world, we argue that eco-
nomic policies, culture, and geography cannot fully account for the region’s poor perform-
ance. Since the Second World War, most Arab countries have adopted development strategies
that mirror the evolution of development thinking. They share some cultural characteristics,
at least in terms of religion, with more successful countries such as Turkey, Malaysia, and
Indonesia; the region is centrally located geographically, and has ample access to multiple
seas and oceans. The more relevant explanation seems to be the extractive nature of their
institutions, which predate the discovery of oil. The interesting question now is whether or
not the Arab Spring will be viewed in the future as a critical juncture that put at least some
countries in the region on a positive trajectory.
The rest of the chapter covers as many as twenty-two countries.2 Notwithstanding their
common culture and geography, these countries are heterogeneous at least in terms of size
(population and income) and natural resource endowment. Because of the central role of oil
in economic development, we find it analytically useful to divide them into oil-rich and non-
oil-rich countries.3 Admittedly, countries within each group are also heterogeneous in other
ways and merit an in-depth historical analysis in their own right, but such an analysis is
beyond the scope of this chapter.
The chapter is structured as follows: We begin by placing the Arab countries on the devel-
opment ladder and assessing their track record in catching up with advanced countries. In
the following section we explore how oil-rich countries managed their resources, how oil
may have impacted their institutions, and how institutions may have shaped their utilization
of oil revenues. Next, we focus on the oil-poor Arab countries, exploring their economic
reform efforts and how these were influenced by political institutions; we then briefly discuss
the potential implications and possible trajectories of the Arab Spring. The final section
offers some concluding remarks.
The State of Development in the Arab World
In measuring development outcomes, attention was earlier given to such measures as eco-
nomic growth, GDP per capita, and to a lesser extent poverty and income distribution. In the
early 1990s, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) championed a measure
752 ahmed galal and hoda selim
of well-being that relies on human development, which is a composite index of life expect-
ancy, educational attainment, and income. More recently, increasing attention has been
given to other measures such as inequality of opportunity, environmental sustainability,
political voice, human rights, and even happiness.
Clearly not all of these concepts are easy to measure, nor are the data to measure them
readily available in the Arab countries. However, available indicators unambiguously sup-
port the assertion that Arab countries are not among the most advanced regions in the world,
nor are they likely to catch up in the near future.
Per Capita Income and Income Convergence

At a growth rate of 1.7 percent per annum, it took the region from 1973 to 2010 to double GDP
per capita. Over time, the region’s GDP per capita relative to that of the OECD declined from
15 percent in 1980 to 9 percent in 2002 (Figure 44.1). In contrast, East Asian countries, whose
GDP per capita was similar to that of the Arab countries in the mid-1970s, made substantial
progress: in 2010, average per capita income in East Asia was 18.5 percent of the OECD aver-
age, up from 15 percent in 1980. Some countries, like South Korea, did even better, reaching
58 percent of the OECD’s GDP per capita in 2010, up from 13 percent in 1960. The Arab coun-
tries also fell behind Latin America and were only ahead of sub-Saharan Africa.
Within the region, the oil-rich economies exhibit a low per capita growth/high volatility
pattern. The oil-poor Arab countries did better, averaging 2.5 percent per capita GDP growth
during the period 1961–2010, compared with only 1.4 percent during the same period for the
oil-rich economies. Volatility of economic growth (measured by the ratio of standard devia-
tion of growth over the mean) was also higher in oil-rich countries because of the adverse
effects of volatile terms of trade between 1970 and 2007, which offset the positive impact of
commodity booms (Cavalcanti, Mohaddes, and Raissi 2012).
In terms of catching up, oil-rich economies show alarming trends. In 1975, average per
capita income in the member countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—namely,
25% 5%
All regions except SSA (%)
Sub-Saharan Africa (%)
20% 4%
15% 3%
10%
2%
5%
1%
0% 0%
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02
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Arab World East Asia & Pacific (all income levels)

Latin America & Caribbean (all income levels) Sub-Saharan Africa (all income levels)
figure 44.1 Convergence of GDP per capita in developing regions relative to OECD average,
1974–2010 (constant US$2,000)
Source: Authors’ calculations based on World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI) data.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Bahrain—was almost
the same as in the OECD; in 2010 it was slightly less than one-third. Correspondingly, the
trend is more favorable for the oil-poor economies, although the average per capita income
never exceeded 12 percent of the OECD average.
Poverty and Inequality

Notwithstanding the modest per capita growth rates since 1961, poverty in the region is rela-
tively low and has in fact declined over time. Using the US$1.25 poverty line (in 2005 pur-
chasing power parity/PPP), poverty in the region is only around 4 percent, which is less than
one-fifth of the average poverty rate for developing countries and close to the figure for the
much richer Latin American region. Based on the US$2 a day higher threshold, poverty in
the Arab countries is still less than half of the average for developing countries. The rate
declined in 2008 to 2.7 percent (Abu-Ismail, Taleb, and Ramadan 2011).
Turning to inequality, Bibi and Nabli (2010) survey the literature on the Arab world and con-
clude, on the basis of average Gini coefficients, that the region is a “medium inequality” region.
Arab countries fare better than Latin America (where inequality is the highest) and sub-Saharan
Africa, but are more unequal than East Asia, South Asia, and (by far) Europe and Central Asia.
The above conclusion takes the Gini coefficients at face value. However, their accuracy has
been called into question on the grounds of limitations of coverage and the shortcomings of
the data. It is therefore important to look at other measures of inequality, such as inequality
of opportunity, for example in terms of access to education and health care. In this context,
Assaad et al. (2011) show that the Arab world faces unequal opportunities in child health
because of circumstances that lie beyond the control of families.
Human Development and Unemployment

By various measures of human development, the Arab countries fall behind advanced coun-
tries as well as developing regions except sub-Saharan Africa. As shown in Table 44.1, this
observation holds whether we consider enrollment in primary or secondary schools, life
expectancy, or infant mortality rates. Fertility rates also remain much higher than elsewhere,
averaging 3.3 births per woman.
Table 44.1 Human and social development indicators, 2009

Arab Europe and Latin Sub-Saharan
countries East Asia Central Asia America Africa
School enrollment, primary (% gross) 97.7 110.5 101.6 116.7 99.9
School enrollment, secondary (% gross) 73.6 77.8 96.6 89.6 36.0
Life expectancy at birth, total (years) 69.9 73.0 75.5 73.9 53.8
Fertility rate, total (births per woman) 3.3 1.8 1.7 2.3 5.0
Mortality rate, infant (per 1,000 live births) 37.2 18.8 11.8 18.1 76.4
Source: World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI).

Over time, human development indicators improved significantly in the region. Between
the 1960s and 1990s, access to free education and primary health care services was broad-
ened, especially in Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, and Algeria. By 2009, close to 100 percent of the
children in the region were enrolled in primary school, and secondary school enrollment
went up from 20 to 74 percent of the relevant age cohort. Life expectancy went up by some 25
years, fertility rates declined by 4 births per woman, and infant mortality rates dropped by
more than 100 per thousand live births.
Notwithstanding this progress, the increased supply of skilled labor was not put to pro-
ductive use. At the same time, unemployment persisted at around 9.3 percent and was con-
centrated among the young and educated. The gender bias is also evident, with unemployment
rates for women at about 18 percent compared to 8 percent for men. These rates are almost
double the corresponding rates in Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) and Europe.
Within the region, unemployment in the oil-rich Arab countries is low at around 4 per-
cent, with the notable exceptions of Yemen and Algeria. The GCC labor markets rely on for-
eign labor to the extent that the proportion of the domestic work force to total labor force is
invariably under one-half (Assaad and Ramadan 2008). Most employed nationals work for
the government. As for non-oil-rich economies, unemployment rates tend to be higher
(approximately 11 percent), especially in Tunisia and Jordan.
Over time, the oil boom in the 1970s led to a decline in unemployment in resource-rich
countries, which has remained low since then. In the resource-poor economies, however,
unemployment has been on the rise. In Egypt, from the 1960s to the 1990s, under the
influence of populist policies, all graduates were assured employment in government.
However, Assaad and Ramadan (2008) argue that the policy of hiring at higher than mar-
ket wages encouraged new entrants into the labor market to queue for years for a public
sector job. They further argue that the education systems were adapted to meet the strong
demand for credentials that allow entry into the public sector, to the detriment of the skills
required in a private-sector economy. This observation may also apply to other countries
in the region.
In sum, then, the state of development in the Arab world, oil-rich or not, is not satisfac-
tory. To be sure, poverty in the region is relatively low, by available evidence inequality is
moderate, and notable progress has been made in the area of human development, including
enrollment in education, life expectancy, and fertility and infant mortality rates. However,
economic per capita growth has remained modest and volatile, especially in oil-rich coun-
tries. Inequality of opportunity and possibly wealth is high and employment opportunities
are meager relative to a growing labor force. The situation is particularly acute with respect
to youth and women. So what went wrong?
Economics and Politics in Oil-rich

Arab Countries
For a group of eight Arab countries, the share of oil rents to GDP, excluding other hydrocar-
bon sectors, fluctuated around 38 percent between 1974 and 2009 (Figure 44.2). The percent-
age is much higher for Iraq (60 percent), Kuwait (48.5 percent), Saudi Arabia (44 percent),
100 10
90 8
80 6
GDP per capita growth

70 4
60 2
oil rents
50 0
40 –2
30 –4
20 –6
10 –8
0 –10
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oil rents (% of GDP) GDP per capita growth (%)
figure 44.2 Oil rent and GDP per capita in oil-rich Arab countries, 1974–2009
Source: World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI).
and Oman (42 percent). Figure 44.2 also indicates that their economic growth mirrors oil
revenues. This observation suggests that these economies are defined largely by oil booms
and busts. And given that these economies have not been successful in joining the group of
advanced countries, it is tempting to attribute their failure to an oil curse.
This interpretation contradicts the early literature, which considered natural resource
abundance a source of economic development because of its ability to generate income,
savings, and investment that would sustain future output growth and enable governments
to provide public goods (Nurkse 1953; Rostow 1960). It is consistent, however,with subse-
quent country experiences, which showed that resource abundance is associated with poor
development outcomes. This curse has been attributed to several causes, the most impor-
tant of which are: (1) the Dutch disease and low savings, (2) “political resource curse,” and
(3) “extractive institutions.” This section explores these transmission mechanisms.
The Dutch Disease, Export Diversification, and Savings

One of the potential channels of the resource curse is the Dutch disease. Corden (1984)
provides a theoretical framework in which the appreciation of the real exchange rate due
to increased resource revenues spent on non-tradable goods leads to a decline in the com-
petitiveness of the non-resource sector, or skews the composition of exports away from
manufacturing exports (Sachs and Warner 1995).
In some oil-rich Arab countries there is evidence of real exchange rate appreciation
between 1975 and 2005 (Diop, Marotta, and de Melo 2012). This misalignment has under-
mined the competitiveness of non-oil exports, especially manufacturing. According to Nabli
(2007), the exchange rate overvaluation reduced manufacturing exports by 18 percent (as a
percentage of GDP per year) between 1970 and 1999.
Compared to other regions, the Arab region’s non-oil merchandise exports relative to total
exports are much lower (Galal and Selim 2013). This suggests that countries of the region were
unable to diversify their economies, which is problematic given that oil is not a renewable
resource. This is a reminder of the fear once expressed by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who
said (in an interview with his oil minister, Sheikh Yamani), “In one generation we went from
riding camels to riding Cadillacs. The way we are wasting money, I fear the next generation
will be riding camels again.”
Turning to savings, because oil revenues are subject to depletion, rational governments
need to smooth out consumption well beyond the period of peak resource revenues and
stock precautionary savings to ensure inter-generational equity. They also need to gradually
transform their oil wealth into assets whose income stream would sustain a stable level of
government spending. This literature advises resource-dependent governments to develop
counter-cyclical fiscal policies, resisting the temptation to overspend during oil booms.
The empirical evidence shows the opposite: fiscal policy in commodity-exporting coun-
tries in general is pro-cyclical. Arab resource-rich countries are no exception (Abdih, Lopez-
Murphy, and Sahay 2010). More generally, there is some concern related to the way
governments are engaged in the depletion of natural resources and the minimal concern
they show for the environment (Galal and Selim 2013). Finally, the high volatility of oil reve-
nues was costly in terms of economic growth in oil-rich Arab countries (Cavalcanti, Mohad-
des, and Raissi 2012).
All this is to say that macroeconomic management in oil-rich Arab countries leaves much
to be desired.
The Political Resource Curse

Turning to the impact of oil on politics, modernization theory predicts that rising income is
associated with democratization. However, Ross (2001) argues that this prediction may not
hold in oil-rich countries. He identifies three mechanisms through which oil revenues ena-
ble governments to maintain their authoritarian rule. First, income from natural wealth is
said to breed a “rentier state.” Second, it enables governments to “repress” the population by
acquiring the means to do so. Finally, oil revenues are not always associated with bringing
about the cultural and social values that promote democracy and “modernization.” A fourth
mechanism, not mentioned by Ross, is that oil wealth could sustain autocratic regimes by
insulating them from the pressure from the West to democratize.
There is a large body of literature that supports the claim that oil hurts democratization
(Ross 2001), recently disputed by Haber and Menaldo (2011). Studies focusing on the Arab
region (e.g. Elbadawi and Makdisi 2011) reach a similar conclusion.
The logic behind the assertion that oil sustains authoritarianism rests on several grounds.
The first is that oil revenues breed “rentier states,” a proposition made by El Beblawi and
Luciani (1987). If governments derive large sums of money from oil, they can afford to apply
low tax rates and reduce the pressure for more accountability. The figures provided in
Table 44.2 point out that most oil-rich Arab governments derive a large fraction—in fact,
more than two-thirds—of their total revenues from oil. As a result, tax revenues as a per-
centage of total revenue are less than 6 percent in all countries except Algeria. Oil rents
thus break the link between taxation and representation.
Large oil rents also enable Arab governments to engage in patronage and appeasing of cit-
izens through public expenditure. These expenditures tend to rise sharply at times of threats
to the regime. For evidence, between 2003 and 2010, subsidies and transfers in the countries
listed in Table 44.2 range between 14 and 35 percent of total expenditures. Beyond explicit
subsidies (electricity, water, and fuel) and transfers, citizens in the GCC receive free health
care, education, and social security. Perhaps more important, the most frequently used
mechanism for patronage is the provision of well-remunerated and stable public jobs to
nationals. The average salary of Saudi civil servants is three times the average wage for Saudis
in the private sector (Hodson 2011).
When political unrest mounted in 2011, oil rents were used by the GCC governments to
calm down citizens. Kuwait and Bahrain responded by giving out cash, Bahrain and Oman
provided public-sector jobs, and Saudi Arabia and Oman raised workers’ wages and benefits.
Clearly, while these transfers increase citizens’ welfare, they are also politically motivated.
Turning to the “repression” channel, it is evident that political demonstrations are a rarity
in the Gulf countries. Is this a reflection of satisfaction or repression? Recent events in Oman
and Bahrain are instructive. Encouraged by neighboring countries’ success in toppling their
autocratic rulers, pro-democracy protests took place in these two countries in early 2011. In
response, governments resorted to the security apparatus. Moreover, Bellin (2004) adds that
these regimes often maintain strong personal linkages with the coercive apparatus by
appointing family members to key branches of the military and security forces. In Algeria,
the military is very strong, to the point that Mohammad Harbi was quoted as saying, “Every
state has an army but in Algeria the army has a state.”4
With respect to the “modernization effect,” certain occupational specializations, urbani-
zation, and better education are supposed to accompany economic development, and these
changes should produce a population better able to organize and bargain for greater political
demands (Inglehart 1997). The problem is that oil money could be used to at least slow down
these social changes. Many of these features characterize oil-rich Arab countries. Farsoun
(1988) argues that those who benefited from social changes were those related to the ruling
family. Other intellectuals were absorbed in unproductive government bureaucracies.
Finally there is the “external” factor. The abundance of oil made the region of geopolitical
strategic importance to the West, motivated as it was by self-interest. This reality made these
regimes less vulnerable to external pressure to adopt political openness (Diamond 2010).
Further, Bellin (2004) suggests that the West has supported the regimes in Saudi Arabia and
Algeria because of the belief (perhaps mistaken, as she says) that their stability would assure
a regular supply of oil and containment of an Islamist threat.
Extractive Institutions and Oil

In the above section, the argument ran from oil to democracy. However, the inverse causal-
ity—from political institutions to oil—is even more compelling. In this scenario, rulers do
not face significant restraints on their power and enjoy ample access to rents, which they use
primarily for private rather than public good. Accordingly, oil wealth is not a curse in its own
right, its management is. The political resource curse is a symptom; extractive institutions
are the primary cause.
This argument has been developed by Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). They attribute the
failure of nations to the concentration of power in the hands of a narrow elite who make the rules
in their own favor at the expense of the majority. These rules tend to create barriers to entry, pro-
vide special concessions, limit opportunities, and discourage entrepreneurship and innovation.
Table 44.2 Government revenues and expenditures in selected Arab countries,

averages 2003–10 (percentage)
Algeria Kuwait Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia UAE
(% of total revenue)
Hydrocarbon revenue 72.5 76.3 77.4 62.0 86.8 76.2
Non-hydrocarbon revenue 27.5 23.7 22.6 38.0 13.2 23.8
Tax revenue 24.2 1.7 6.9 5.4 na 2.6
(% of total expenditure)
Current expenditure 59.0 87.6 66.5 71.5 78.3 75.3
Wages and salaries 22.5 29.2 21.6 18.9 30.2 13.2
Subsidies and social benefits 26.8 35.4 9.0 13.9 4.2 16.7
Defense and security 9.5 21.4 29.5 9.8 27.3 22.5
Note: Because of the unavailability of data for some variables, data are included until 2009 only.
Source: Galal and Selim (2013).
Focusing on oil countries, Robinson, Torvik, and Verdier (2006) built a theoretical model
explaining how institutions impact the rate of extraction of oil, how oil booms impact the
extraction path, and how abundance of revenues affects the behavior of politicians. They
conclude that:
The overall impact of resource booms on the economy depends critically on institutions
since these determine the extent to which political incentives map into policy outcomes.
Countries with institutions that promote accountability and state competence will benefit
from resource booms since these institutions ameliorate the perverse political incentives
that such booms create. Countries without such institutions however may suffer from a
resource curse. (Robinson, Torvik, and Verdier 2006)
These predictions are supported by several studies, the key conclusion of which is that the oil
curse is not destiny and depends on institutions (Mehlum, Moene, and Torvik 2006). Elbad-
awi and Soto (2012) also show that resource-rich economies with a high degree of inclusive-
ness (a measure of democracy) and strong political checks and balances turn the resource
curse into a blessing.
It is of course possible that oil abundance can and does provide an opportunity to weaken
institutions and increase corruption. And indeed there is some evidence to that effect (Leite
and Weidmann 1999). However, this evidence does not negate the view that institutions are
the primary driving force of how oil impacts development. These institutions often predate
the discovery of oil, and they tend to linger on.
Currently, institutions in oil-rich Arab countries seem to carry the features of extractive
institutions described above. In 2011, out of the 115 electoral democracies in the world,
87 were considered “free,” of which none is an Arab oil-rich economy (Freedom House
2012).5 Only one country, Kuwait, is considered partly free. This pattern worsened between
2000 and 2010, especially with respect to measures of voice and accountability, political
stability, and corruption (Figure 44.3). Areas of observed improvements (government effec-
tiveness and regulatory quality) relate to private sector’s interest, not the population at large.
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figure 44.3 Governance indicators in oil-rich Arab countries, in 2000 and 2010
Note: Values vary from –2.5 (bad governance) to 2.5 (good governance).
Source: Worldwide Governance Indicators 2010, World Bank.
Historically, these institutions are not the product of oil; they predate the discovery of oil.
In tracing their roots, Atallah (2011) offers very useful insights. For Oman, Bahrain, and
Qatar, their geographic proximity to India, where Britain’s colonial interests lay in the early
twentieth century, shifted the balance of power in favor of the local rulers who were loyal to
the British in return for military and fiscal support. Enjoying external rents, the rulers could
ignore demands for political participation. In these countries, the discovery of oil (or natural
gas) merely replaced the subsidies from the British.
Countries that were geographically distant from Britain placed more emphasis on coali-
tion-building with internal players, either religious or economic groups. In Saudi Arabia,
the ruling Al Saud family built an alliance with the religious police, commonly called the
mutaween. In return for support, the ruling family gave the mutaween a platform through
which to promote their interpretation of Islam. The discovery of oil did not change this
coalition and may in fact have strengthened it.
In Kuwait, the setup was different and more conducive to political representation. Atallah
(2011) explains that in the absence of oil, the rulers depended on the merchants for revenues,
which pushed them to concede some political power in return for fiscal backing. An assem-
bly was created as early as 1938, even though it was dissolved soon afterward. The discovery
of oil provided the ruling elite with enough financial leverage to weaken the link with the
merchants. However, the strength of this class enabled them to negotiate giving up some
political rights in return for a share in the rents.
Over time, all rulers in the region gradually expanded their patronage networks to include
friends and family. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait “institutionalized family members into govern-
ment positions, partly to give them a stake in the system and partly to monitor them” (Atallah
2011). An elite of “rent-seeking pseudo-entrepreneurs” became intertwined in the state cap-
ture of resource rents (Dauderstädt and Schildberg 2006). And according to Nabli (2007),
governments in these countries failed to create a dynamic and competitive private sector;
rather, they extended favors to a privileged group, which over time has become the guardian
of the status quo.
In sum, the modest progress made by oil-rich Arab countries cannot be blamed solely on
the way the economy was managed or on the abundance of oil. Extractive institutions, which
predate the discovery of oil, seem to be the true culprits.
Economics and Politics in Oil-poor

Arab Countries
The oil-poor Arab countries share many of the characteristics of other developing countries.
Furthermore, most of them adopted the development strategies that mirrored the evolution
of development thinking. However, more than half a century later, none of these countries
was able to join the group of successful emerging countries. In the remainder of this section,
we review their reform efforts and explore the roots and nature of the political bargain the
ruling elite struck with the population.
Reform Efforts
Just like many other developing countries, oil-poor Arab countries started their attempt to
develop after independence in the post-Second World War era by employing an import sub-
stitution strategy (ISS). The state played the leading role in the development process to com-
pensate for incidents of market and coordination failures. Countries like Egypt, Tunisia,
Jordan, and Morocco pursued industrialization through large public-sector projects, protec-
tion, and central planning. They also committed themselves to a grand welfare agenda,
including land reform, free access to social services (health and education), and employment
guarantee schemes.
This strategy had strong intellectual underpinnings. Keynes gave the state a good name in
the context of dealing with the great depression in the 1930s. Well-known development
economists like Rosenstein-Rodan and Lewis provided powerful arguments for state leader-
ship of development, and pioneers of the structuralist approach (e.g. Raúl Prebisch) argued
that underdevelopment in the south was due to an exploitative relationship between the rich
countries (the center) and developing countries (the periphery).
In its early phases the import substitution policy produced positive results, particularly in
terms of economic diversification, inclusion of marginalized groups, and higher levels of
employment. However, the limitations of this development model and the drying up of
resources to finance social programs led to a shift toward market forces and private-sector
initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s. The shift in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, and
Jordan was supported by the international financial institutions (IFIs).
The “Washington Consensus” agenda was credited with bringing about macroeconomic sta-
bility, higher economic growth, and in some cases poverty reduction. However, these achieve-
ments were associated with corruption and an increased concentration of power and wealth in
a few hands, which may have contributed to the recent wave of upheavals in the region.
The Underlying Social Contract

So what went wrong? Was poor economic performance due to the wrong kind, mix, or
sequence of recommended policies? Or was it due to the adoption by the ruling elite of policies
that supported its persistence in power? We argue it is the latter, without entirely dismissing the
former view.
In attempting to understand the nature of the social contract that led the ruling elite to
behave the way it did, some analysts developed what is now called an authoritarian bargain
model (ABM) (Yousef 2004; Desai, Olofsgård, and Yousef 2009; and King 2009). In this
model, autocratic leaders provided their citizens some economic benefits (welfare and pub-
lic employment programs) in return for consent to relinquish political rights.
The ABM was defended by the leaders of nationalist movements as necessary to pursue
the larger cause of rapid industrialization, social justice, and greater equality. Anderson
(1987) argues that in reality, populist measures aimed to inhibit the development of an inde-
pendent bourgeoisie that might have threatened political stability. Along the same lines,
King (2009) argues that the undeclared aim was to build new constituencies in support of
the regime instead of the bourgeoisie that consisted of rich landowners who were seen as
the main ally of colonial powers. Thus, Arab socialism favored workers, peasants, and the
lower middle classes generally, including the administrative elite and bureaucrats in the
public sector. These preferences were often expressed explicitly in constitutions, laws, and
public policies. In return for these generous benefits, governments expected unconditional
political support from the masses. They also imposed control over organized labor and
other political and intellectual movements: in Egypt, for example, strikes were forbidden.
When necessary, the state became sharply coercive and repressive.
The ABM came under strain in the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of the decline in oil
prices (and associated remittances to oil-poor countries) and the structural reforms carried
out in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia under the umbrella of the IMF and the World
Bank. The ABM survived but not without consequences. As governments were reluctant to
curtail many of the interventionist–redistributive policies inherited from the 1960s, they
were compelled to proceed with some political liberalization. In countries like Egypt, Jor-
dan, Morocco, and to a much lesser extent Tunisia, the autocrats gave opposition political
parties more political space, expanded civil liberties, and increased the participation of civil
society (King 2009). These experiments fell short of democratization, and merely provided a
façade of multi-party politics.
Meanwhile, economic reforms, particularly privatization, generated new rents and con-
tributed to the formation of a new coalition composed of a rent-seeking bourgeoisie, instead
of the old 1960s coalition of workers, peasants, and the middle class (King 2009). This new
group contributed to the transformation of populist authoritarian regimes into elitist crony
capitalist forms of authoritarian rule.
One piece of supporting evidence for the above analysis is the set of indicators provided in
Figure 44.4, which show that all governance indicators in the oil-rich Arab countries were
negative between 2000 and 2010. Moreover, these indicators have in fact deteriorated over
time. This observation applies to voice and accountability, political stability, the rule of law,
and control of corruption. Where some improvements were made (regarding the quality of
regulation and government effectiveness), it can be argued that they were adopted because
they served the private sector, which was seen as supportive of the regime.
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an
lat
ica
of
rn
ro
ice
gu
ve
nt
lit
le
Go
Ru
Co
Re
Vo
Po
0.0
–0.2
–0.4
–0.6
–0.8
–1.0
–1.2
2000 2010
figure 44.4 Governance indicators in oil-poor Arab countries, in 2000 and 2010
Note: Values vary from –2.5 (bad governance) to 2.5 (good governance).
Source: Worldwide Governance Indicators 2010, World Bank.
The role of the West in this process was very similar to its role in the oil-rich countries.
In the 1960s, the West supported autocratic leaders in oil-poor countries to limit the influ-
ence of communism. Later, it turned a blind eye to autocratic regimes in order to maintain
regional stability, contain a perceived threat of Islamists, and protect leaders with a moderate
position in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The Roots of Institutional Imperfections

Notwithstanding major shifts in the political life of many countries in the region in the last
century or so, the roots of extractive institutions can be traced to earlier periods. During the
Ottoman occupation, some two hundred years ago, the Sultan himself was “accountable to
few and sharing power with none,” according to Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). He created
a system in occupied territories where the land was the property of the state, commerce was
under state control, and the economy was strictly regulated by monopolies. The Ottomans
resisted serious institutional reforms in their provinces as their interests were narrowly con-
fined to control and taxation. They opportunistically relied on a small group of allies, like the
Mamluks in Egypt or local governors in Syria, who had enough power and authority to col-
lect land taxes in return for a regular salary or a portion of land for their own use. In turn,
these agents allied themselves with small but loyal local networks through a combination of
“threats, patronage and largesse.” In time, both the agents and their allies accumulated sig-
nificant personal wealth and retained large parts of revenues to maintain force to deter
potential rivals (Owen 1981).
When the European colonialists replaced the Ottoman Empire, they tolerated some
political and civic representation, allowing a vibrant civil society to emerge, including polit-
ical parties, trade unions, and professional associations. However, power continued to be
concentrated in a few hands, mainly those of feudalists and emerging industrialists who
were the main allies of the colonial powers (Owen 1981; Anderson 1987; Yousef 2004). This
institutional setup, along with the rise of anti-colonial/nationalist movements, paved the way
for the 1960s populist social contract, as discussed above.
In short, then, oil-poor Arab countries did follow evolving development strategies after
independence. While some progress was made, their political (and economic) institutions
were not conducive to achieving sustainable development. The form of extractive institu-
tions changed over time, but their essence remained the same. The Arab Spring movements
appear to be a potential disruption of this trend.
The Arab Spring
If there is one thing the 2011 uprisings made clear, it is that governments in the Arab Spring
countries failed to provide a satisfactory life for the majority of their citizens. The social con-
tract, which had survived economic hardships and waves of democratization the world over,
finally broke. Surprisingly, it first broke in Tunisia and Egypt, the two countries in the region
that were hailed right before the uprisings for achieving high levels of economic growth. The
youth who took the lead in these uprisings were educated, middle class, and well versed in
social media. In both countries, they demanded freedom, dignity, and social justice—
precisely the values that previous governments had failed to achieve. Intuitively, the revolu-
tionaries came to the conclusion that it was bad politics, not bad economics, that produced
undesirable outcomes.
In attempting to explain what happened in a rational framework, Diwan (2012)
expands the ABM to include three players: the rich (the autocratic coalition who bene-
fited from the 1990s liberalization policies), the middle class, and the poor. In a game
theoretic setting, he shows that the middle class, traditionally allied with the autocrats
and supportive of the ruling regime, chose to tip their support away from the autocrats
toward democratic transition. The rationale for their behavior is that they were no longer
the main beneficiaries of the social contract. They were also facing increased repression
and abuse of human rights. At the same time, they saw that crony capitalism was flourish-
ing and driving up inequality.
Two important questions are now on the minds of many in the region: Will these revo-
lutions spread beyond the current set of countries, and will these changes constitute a step
toward building inclusive institutions in the Arab Spring countries? On contagion, it is
remarkable how fast the fire caught across countries in the region. Within a year, the revo-
lutions moved from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen, Libya, and Syria. The potential for these
uprisings to spread to oil-rich countries at a significant scale in the short run may not be
high, in part because of oil rents and in part because many of the rulers derive their legiti-
macy from religious or tribal associations. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the
kings of both Morocco and Jordan are trying to be ahead of the curve by adopting some
institutional reforms to impose more checks and balances on their relationships with their
citizens.
Will these uprisings constitute “critical junctures” toward more inclusive institutions?
This is a difficult question to answer. For a clue, Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) seem to be
advancing two preconditions: (1) the existence of a centralized state, and (2) signs that the
institutional changes are allowing political competition, participation, and restraints on
the ruling elite. Clearly it is not easy for a country like Somalia to have inclusive political
institutions under the current fragmentation of power and low order. And it is equally diffi-
cult to see how North Korea could make its institutions more inclusive in the short run, given
the tight grip of the communist party on political life. For countries in between, alternative
scenarios are possible, fully recognizing that the process is likely to be non-linear and may
take years to bear fruit.
Applying the above framework to the Arab Spring countries, Tunisia and Egypt seem to
have the potential to turn their uprisings into a move toward inclusive institutions. Both
countries have well-established centralized states with well-recognized boundaries and no
history of significant internal conflicts. In 2011–12 both countries took steps toward drafting
a modern constitution with checks and balances, and have been able to hold free parliamen-
tary and presidential elections. This is not to say that these countries will immediately be able
to create consolidated democracies. The events of 2013 reveal that transitions can be lengthy
and non-linear. Two questions remain unanswered regarding the future of Arab countries:
whether political change will lead to more inclusive economic institutions, and whether
political Islam will foster or hinder this change.
It is worth recalling that institutions both persist over time and can be path depend-
ent. Acemoglu and Robinson (2008) caution that changes in political institutions, that
alter the distribution of de jure political power, can lead to “captured democracy”
whereby the new democratic regime continues to choose economic institutions that
favor an elite. In this case, economic or policy outcomes persist despite changes in polit-
ical institutions. In both Egypt and Tunisia, the pre-revolution elites still enjoy substan-
tial influence and are likely to exercise their power to foster institutions that would
sustain their interests.
The Islamist parties rose to power due to a head start in organization and their ability to
present themselves as an alternative to the old regimes, thus rallying popular support in the
wake of the 2011 revolts. The year 2012–13 revealed some evidence of their willingness to
influence the new rules to favor their own members and political agenda, resulting in new
tensions with other groups that equally had opposed the old regimes and continued to aspire
for more inclusive political and economic opportunities.
The path forward depends on the evolution of—and interplay among—the political par-
ties in each country, both the Islamist and the secular. The agenda of various, competing
Islamist parties range from the Turkish vision of moderate principles within a secular eco
nomy, to the Saudi Arabian vision of religion guiding everyday life. Meanwhile, secular par-
ties remain fragmented, unable to present a coherent counter proposal, and frequently
upstaged by spontaneous movements and calls for street protests. Competitive politics
remains nascent, but it exists within and between both the Islamist and secular camps. In
some countries like Egypt, citizens have resorted to “crowd democracy” to influence policy-
making (Nawara 2012) until political actors learn to: present their ideas and critique those
presented by others, to exercise their responsibility as opposition parties, and to govern
through negotiation with others. What becomes of the Arab Spring will depend on whether
this slow process continues, or stumbles along the way due to economic crisis or violence.
Conclusion
This chapter reviewed the development experience of the Arab countries since the Second
World War in the context of the evolving thinking about economic development, oil abun-
dance, and the nature and history of political institutions. It has been argued that limited
development outcomes in the oil-rich countries can be traced much more directly to the
nature of politics in these countries than to mismanagement of resources or the oil curse. On
the contrary, the abundance of oil offers these countries an opportunity to make progress on
the development front that was missed because of their extractive institutions. The claim
that modernization will take hold as per capita income rises and urbanization and education
spread seems illusionary.
The paradox is that over the past few decades, oil-poor Arab countries have performed
better than oil-rich countries in terms of per capita growth rates. However, these countries
were similarly held back by their exclusive political systems and the domination of authori-
tarian regimes that worked for the benefit of the few. The recent uprisings in some of these
countries offer an opportunity to break with past regimes, but the outcome remains uncer-
tain. The positive signs of adopting and implementing new election rules, the drafting of new
constitutions with more checks and balances, and the rise to power of new political groups
promise a brighter future, even if the process is likely to be protracted and non-linear.
The broader conclusion in terms of development thought is that the experience of the
Arab countries is not dramatically different from that of other developing countries. How-
ever, this experience brings to the forefront the critical role that natural resource abundance
and politics play in economic development.
Notes
1. We thank Bruce Currie-Alder, Rohinton Medhora, and James Robinson, as well as the
participants of the Bellagio workshop in May 2012 for their constructive comments on
earlier drafts. We are also thankful for the excellent research assistance provided by
Ramage Nada.
2. The Arab region refers to members of the League of Arab States, including Algeria, Bah-
rain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania,
Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab
Emirates, and Yemen.
3. Of the 22 Arab countries, 11 account for 55 percent of global oil reserves.
4. Le Soir de Bruxelles, January 11, 2002.
5. A country is free where there is open political competition, a climate of respect for civil
liberties, significant and independent civic life, and independent media.
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DE V E L OPM E N T AC TOR S
Having explored the motivations, experiences, capabilities, successes, and failures of several
important regions and a number of critical emerging powers, both large (India, China,
Brazil) and medium-sized (Chile, South Africa—the latter a private-sector driven eco-
nomic powerhouse, active throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa), we now turn to other
key players in development. While it may be inappropriate to think of countries and regions
as “actors”—although the government of the countries included are—this term applies very
much to those whose role is explored in the ensuing chapters, be they multilateral institu-
tions, civil society organizations, or policy-driven groups which have created extensive
communities around their activities, notably development assistance.
This section returns to the distinction between state and society. Indeed, its first chapter,
an examination of the state, by Celia Lessa and Jaques Kerstenetzky (Chapter 45) address the
“developmental state . . . one that pursues well-being—not merely power—and highlights
contemporary welfare states as core actors.” Notably, the chapter examines the welfare state
as “a critical [agent] for economic transformation.” Others harbor greater reservations over
state capacities and motivations, preferring to supplement or counter what states can do with
non-governmental initiative. Kumi Naidoo and Sylvia Borren are leaders within the Green-
peace environmental movement and add the perspective of activists committed to promot-
ing development. In part written onboard the third Rainbow Warrior vessel, their chapter
(46) focuses bracingly on the role that civil society actors have played and can play in advanc-
ing shared interests, the idea of justice, and new ideas on development. Civil society provides
a check on the exercise of political and economic power, and challenges the assumed roles of
governments, corporations and individuals.
Multilateral institutions are not new. A floating system of diplomatic conferencing (the
Concert of Europe) flowed from the Congress of Vienna convened in 1815 after Napoleon’s
downfall with the aim of preventing the recurrence of continent-wide conflict. As we have
seen, notions of international arbitration and of a more structured approach to the preven-
tion of war marked the last years of the nineteenth century (through such bodies as the Inter-
Parliamentary Union and meetings such as the first Hague Peace Conference) and the first
decade of the twentieth. But it was due to the unprecedented devastation of the First World
War that the most ambitious effort up until then to order and regulate international relations
was devised through the Covenant of the League of Nations by U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson (influenced by South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts). With U.S. participation
ultimately ruled out by the U.S. Senate, the League, lumbered by a peace treaty that imposed
punitive reparations on Germany and other losers of the war, and with few autonomous
powers of its own, proved incapable of promoting and protecting peace.
experiences 769
Nevertheless, after the League’s failure and the outbreak of the Second World War, U.S.
President Roosevelt and U.K. Prime Minister Churchill were undeterred. They spent much
time during the war years improving on the League’s design by adding significant institu-
tions to promote economic stability and prosperity and by promoting a UN Security Council
with some meaningful coercive powers that the League had lacked. It is these institutions,
including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (and the still-born Inter-
national Trade Organization, for which a weaker General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
and more recently the World Trade Organization, ultimately substituted) that now form the
core of a complex, indeed bewildering network of multilateral institutions, including a range
of regional and specialized economic and humanitarian ones.
Several of these multilateral organizations are addressed here, namely the World Trade
Organization (WTO) (at the time of writing somewhat becalmed, given the paralysis of its
Doha Round of trade negotiations, but busily engaged in trade dispute resolution); the Inter-
national Monetary Fund, created to buttress a monetary system founded on the gold stand-
ard, which disappeared in 1971, but serving a variety of financially stabilizing purposes since
then; and the World Bank, globally the most influential and best funded of a range of devel-
opment financing and policy institutions, much favored by Western donors, and powered by
talented staff. Diana Tussie and Cintia Quiliconi (Chapter 48) document how preoccupa-
tions of developing countries have evolved from an early focus on differential treatment for
them under global trade rules, to a focus on policies—their own and those of the major
industrialized powers. Danny Leipziger (Chapter 49) argues that the “intellectual contribu-
tions of both [the IMF and the World Bank] were unparalleled in their early decades.” How-
ever, in the last decade and particularly since the recent global financial crisis, the Fund and
Bank have considerably declined in global significance, both as generators of ideas and as
sources of financing. Ultimately, all three institutions have struggled to refine their role and
adapt to new realities—including the migration of intellectual leadership to emerging
powers—thus perhaps leaving their future relevance in doubt.
While each of these bodies is much criticized, no convincing alternatives for their role or
activities have been advanced. Meanwhile, consultative groups of Finance Ministers and
Heads of State have sought indirectly to steer the work of multilateral bodies. The initial club
of leading industrialized countries expanded from a Group of Five, to a Group of Seven (G7)
then Eight (G8) through the 1970s–1990s, and to a Group of Twenty (G20) in the wake of the
global financial and economic crisis of 2008. Looking back, after promising beginnings,
none of these forums retained much policy traction or public credibility. Importantly, the
composition of the G20 marked the entry of a number of emerging countries (ranging from
China to Brazil) as full partners of the industrialized powers. The G20’s elevation in 2008 to
the level of leaders also produced some excitement. But early enthusiasm soon yielded to
media and public disappointment over the forum’s equivocal, often opaque, pronounce-
ments that seemed to produce very limited results in the quest to revive the world economy.
Jorge Heine and Gregory Chin (Chapter 51) remind us that much high-level diplomacy
nowadays takes place within groupings from which the industrialized countries are excluded,
such as the BRICS formation and the IBSA cohort (India, Brazil, South Africa). These various
forums neither substitute for nor claim to give direction to the more formal multilateral insti-
tutions but they can, indirectly through their positions, influence them in varying degrees.
Richard Jolly (Chapter 52) addresses the United Nations, often decried for its cumber-
some bureaucracy and variable effectiveness, in a refreshing way. He argues convincingly
770 development actors
that while the UN has not always been impressive in conducting developmental activities, it
has been intensely influential at the level of ideas, doubtless much more so than several con-
siderably better funded multilateral actors.
A drive within civil society in Western countries to assist the poor and oppressed in and
from developing countries is not new—the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries is a successful (if slow-moving) example from the past. So were the
principles and actions of Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing, and others
driven by a desire to provide humanitarian relief to (some of) those caught up in warfare and
to those, for example in India, afflicted with abject poverty. Her contemporary, Henri
Dunant, whose experience of the aftermath of the battle of Solferino inspired the creation of
the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1863, leading to the Geneva Con-
vention of 1864, lived to see his ideas translated into a large, highly organized network of
local and global institutions under the Red Cross (and also later the Red Crescent) banner
that has continued to grow in ambition, capacity, and policy effectiveness. Another form of
civil society action intended to improve the lives of those in poorer territories and regions of
the world was that of missionary movements of various Christian denominations, some with
counterproductive methods and results, but many spreading modern education to regions
whose poor had not previously been offered any.
On the other hand, as Homi Kharas (Chapter 50) points out, official development aid is
comparatively recent, initially focused on post-war reconstruction in Europe and Asia. Aid
flows have been influential at certain times and in certain places, both in terms of size and
more importantly in terms of the conditions that accompanied them. Given the severity of
the financial and economic crisis gripping the industrialized countries, it may be that official
development assistance (ODA) has reached its high water mark. The club of Western donors
that launched the aid business has now expanded to an ecosystem, with a multiplicity of
actors, agendas, and methods of operation aided by the digital revolution. Carol Adelman
and Yulya Spantchak (Chapter 47) point out that private charity (often faith-based), founda-
tions, and such financial transfers as worker remittances and foreign investment contribute
considerably more than ODA does to financial flows toward developing countries. Indeed,
they challenge ODA’s delivery model as expensive and outdated and suggest that private
entities are more likely to prove successful and efficient, thus refocusing political attention
on “results, demand-driven development, transparency, and sustainability.”
While this introduction tends to pair or group together several chapters, in fact the vari-
ous chapters of this section dialogue with each other and make clear what a rich (and con-
stantly contending) array of development actors vie with each other for space, and sometimes
dominance, in the global conversation over development aims, policies, and outcomes.
chapter 45
th e state as a
dev el opm en ta l actor :
state for ms for soci a l
tr a nsfor m ation
celia lessa kerstenetzky and
jaques kerstenetzky
Introduction
The topic of the state as a developmental actor is as vast as it is under-theorized, for a longside
the absence of a theoretical corpus, a plethora of ideas and practices reflects the fragmenta-
tion of the experience and plurality of perspectives. Benefiting from this rich ideational
reservoir, our narrative focuses on a broad notion of the developmental state as one that pur-
sues well-being—not merely power, let alone ill-being—and highlights contemporary wel-
fare states as core actors.
Thus, taking an historical perspective, we begin by noting a shift in views on state forms
from power to development and justifications of states’ progressive involvement in eco-
nomic transformation. In the following section we point out a change in perceptions on
intervention, from positive to negative, which invites a political approach of the state,
introduces democracy as a subject of attention, and qualifies the welfare state as a critical
state form for economic transformation. Following that, we pause to remark that histori-
cal processes and the variety of experiences reposition the perennial question of what
development is or should be about, so we review the Capability Approach’s objections to
development as economic transformation and the view of development as social trans-
formation, as these are consequential to (welfare) state models. In the next section, a
short presentation of the Danish socio-economic model illustrates new state ways and
strategies of capability-delivery in recent decades. We conclude with hints of what lies
ahead.
772 celia lessa kerstenetzky and jaques kerstenetzky
The Need for the State
Historical accounts of the origins of the modern state trace it back to the 1648 Westphalia
Treaty, which set a new political topography of the world as a system of nation-states: the
Treaty formally established the sovereignty of the state over its territory. Expansions on this
power–state notion later included the claim for legal limits to be imposed on the sovereign
ruler (as in Bodin and Locke), and the Enlightenment’s and French Revolution’s notion that
power entails responsibility. Thereafter, ideas spread that the business of the state goes
beyond defense and order and comprises sheltering the freedoms and well-being of the indi-
viduals in the territory, even warranting assistance and work when needed, as for example in
Article XXI of the French Declaration of Human Rights. And eighteenth-century liberal
views of a natural order, which emerged on both sides of the English Channel, represented
the legal system in its capacity of securing individual freedoms and public assistance as pil-
lars of that order.
According to historical-comparative studies, negative and positive duties of the state
invited its involvement in economic transformation, if anything, to secure revenues and
advance interests that converged with state purposes (Evans 1995; Chang 2002). Evidence of
this development can be found in the myriad mercantilist policies that were undertaken in
Europe, and the commercial and industrial policies that were amply utilized to assist nascent
industries in the British catch-up and Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century
(Chang 2002).
Hitherto mostly driven by revenues, state assistance to economic transformation found
yet a new style with the Meiji restoration (1868–1911) in Japan. In fact, forced into trade
openness and facing poor private entrepreneurship, Japan turned to industrial policies as
the centerpiece of a strategy of structural change that led the state to play many roles:
entrepreneur, financier, facilitator, coordinator, and regulator of economic activities
(Chang 2002; Wade 2003). Economic (industrial) transformation appeared to stand as
much for material prosperity as for the affirmation of national independence and self-
determination in the system of nation-states. By tracing out a path that would lead to
much success after the Second World War with the Ministry of International Trade and
Industry (MITI) experiment (Johnson 1982), Japan set an example to be followed by other
countries in the twentieth century, one which was especially appealing to countries such
as South Korea whose development initiatives were undertaken under duress, after the
ravages of war.
While being transformational, states have diverged when it comes to planning changes.
Some of them established “development plans” with explicit and coherent objectives,
strategies, and coordinating agencies, whereas others were non-planners that nonethe-
less undertook industrial, commercial, and technological policies on a pragmatic basis
(e.g. pre-Second World War England, Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries).
Among the planners, some were “holistic,” with a comprehensive plan, but lacking effec-
tive feedback (Soviet Russia and post-war Eastern European countries), and others took
more “piecemeal” approaches, making room for learning and experimentation (post-
the state as a developmental actor 773
Meiji Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and arguably most of the developed nations after the Second
World War).
Unsurprisingly, the need for a plan was felt most keenly by countries that had a long
way to catch up with the industrial leaders. But if it seems quite clear why the search for
material prosperity captured the imagination of leaders—self-financing, self-determina-
tion, and internal legitimacy being the more likely candidate-reasons—there still remains
the need to figure out, both in actual practices and more abstract theories, how and why
the state was necessary for economic transformation. Most countries turned into plan-
ners after the Second World War, and while this was for reconstruction reasons in those
directly involved in the war, it was for outright construction reasons in the limitedly
independent and newly independent nations that had escaped the war’s destruction
(Judt 2005).
It was then that the “problem of development” drew the attention of economists: the eco-
nomics of development emerged as a theoretical field in its own right soon after the war.
Prima facie, economic development means increasing the domestic output; thus, growth
models (such as Harrod–Domar or Solow), which identified capital accumulation as a
requirement for economic change, could be of use. However, these models originally
applied to the case of early industrialized countries and thus represented economic trans-
formation as a natural consequence of market allocations from given endowments. This
encouraged the emergence of additional theoretical frameworks, which envisioned a
discontinuous transition from a backward to a modern economy, to fit the case of
latecomers—the so-called structural theories of the first generation of development econo-
mists (Agarwala and Singh 1958).
In most versions, structural change, that is, industrialization, needed state intervention
to coordinate investments that due to externalities would otherwise (i.e. through sheer
market forces) not materialize. Famously, a Latin American ramification emerged in the
United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL/
ECLAC) under the lead of the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, illustrating a case of
two-way interaction between practice and theory: the CEPAL “school,” through its policy-
oriented inductive account of Latin American underdevelopment, influenced policy-
makers, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs in the region (Bielschowsky 2009) at a time when
many countries there were trying out import substitution industrialization, with varying
degrees of success.
Even as the problem of development was being detected by the theoretical radar of eco-
nomics, giving rise to analytical justifications for the economic action of the state, the need
for the state was reinforced by authoritative historical observation. Remarkably, the Russian
economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron (1962) identified, in nineteenth-century
Europe, a continuum of situations in which institutions, such as the state, were instrumental
in overcoming economic backwardness. While in Germany universal banks had performed
the role of coordinating investments, cases of extreme backwardness such as Russia and
other East European countries—where entrepreneurs, a disciplined labor force, and finance
were all lacking—required intensive and extensive state intervention. Later, his nuanced
account of state activism would, alongside structural theories, fertilize numerous late
twentieth-century historical-institutional approaches (Hirschman 1958; Herrick and Kindle-
berger 1983; Evans 1995; Chang 2002). Structural theories also echo in contemporary “new-
structural theories” (Lin 2011), which advocate state activism only as a complement to market
allocation.
In the end, except for the pure market view, the need for the state in economic transforma-
tion found justification along a variety of perspectives, and much of the theoretical thinking
resulted from the observation of the development practices more than the other way around,
though indirect ways of diffusing theories should not be underestimated, as the case of
CEPAL suggests.
But precisely what state capacities were involved? This question, though not drawing
much attention from economics, resonated in historical-institutional studies. Inattention is
rooted in public choice theory’s warning about the dangers of state capture by private maxi-
mizing agents—and that public interest is but private interest in disguise (Krueger 1990).
Others would contest the sequitur. In fact, historical-institutional studies took a subtler
approach and looked into actual state capacities and connections that were enlisted for the
big leap of industrialization and their effects. Early contributions came from studies of the
East Asian takeoff in the 1960s and 1970s (Amsden 1989; Chang 2002; Wade 2003) and origi-
nated the concept of the “developmental state” (Johnson 1982). And the Asian experiences
were rich in innovations and invited different representations. In a World Bank report (1993),
for example, the Asian Tigers exemplified the benign workings of free markets, the lesson to
be learned. But institutional studies would establish that state action was pervasive and mul-
tiform, less in ownership or control, more in enabling private capital to thrive. As it turns
out, the experiences stimulated a refined study of structure and agency aspects of the state.
Paramount among these was the presence of an autonomous, coherent, and cohesive Webe-
rian bureaucracy and state connections with civil society, especially with entrepreneurs—
“synergy” (Evans 1995).
Different roles of the autonomous but connected state were spotted in actual transforma-
tion processes: “custodian,” “demiurge,” “midwife,” and “husbandry” (Evans 1995), as the
state acted respectively as regulator, owner, birth-giver, or facilitator, with private capital.
Some of the former experiences of industrialization relied more on regulatory roles, while
later ones, such as Korea’s and Taiwan’s, resorted to birth-giving, through credit and other
facilitating interventions. Generally speaking, it is the existence of certain preconditions that
defines the appropriate role: bureaucracy and connections in combination with external cir-
cumstances, which at different junctures would indicate the dynamic sectors. In short, even
if state protagonism is retained, in keeping with the Gerschenkronian historical tradition, no
roles, sectors, or set of policies are advocated in abstraction from circumstances and actual
state capacities and connections.
However, insofar as national projects in the narratives conflated with industrialization,
state–society relations reduced to bureaucracy–private capital links, that is, “elite connec-
tions,” a move that posed new problems. For even though in some cases it was quite clear that
an autonomous and capable bureaucracy was lacking and hindered sustained growth, as in
Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s, in others, as in Korea, where an autonomous and capable
bureaucracy was in place, top-down development strategies were insulated from the influ-
ence and control of broad sections of the population (which was also the case in Brazil).
Unsurprisingly, then, the industrialization synergy ended up raising concerns and indeed
political protest contesting the legitimacy of the particular path undertaken toward capital
accumulation. The question relates to the appropriate means to define the content of the
public interest in a development context. In the next section, we explore two alternative
mindsets: public choice theory’s market view (and skepticism about political life) and poten-
tialities of democratic experiences.
Politicizing the State for Economic

Transformation
Starting in the 1980s, two circumstances contributed to discrediting the intervention of the
state for economic transformation. First and foremost, many experiences of state-led capital
accumulation, though conducive to economic growth, did not translate into sustained
growth, let alone well-being, failing on theoretical expectations and political promises of
alignment. This was particularly true of Latin American, African, and South Asian coun-
tries, which experienced non-sustained growth paths with growing inequality and/or pov-
erty and slow improvement of social indicators during the state-led import substitution
industrialization of the 1960s and 1970s (Sen 1983; Lin 2011), followed by a debt crisis later in
the 1980s. And although historical-institutional studies would at some point argue that the
failures had roots in the lack of proper state capacities and weak civil–society connections
(Evans 1995), the new mood, reverberating public choice theory’s mantra, was that the eco-
nomic intervention of the state was to blame for interfering with market forces and creating
opportunities for capture and bad political economy.
Second, stagflation and fiscal crises spread in the developed world as early as the 1970s,
and these too were largely attributed to government mismanagement. It was under this
changed ideological climate that a second generation of development economists emerged,
this time from within neoclassical economics, forcefully arguing that development should
be about reinstating market mechanisms and thus “get[ting] all policies right” (Meier 2001):
liberalization of foreign trade and investment, stabilization programs, privatization of state-
owned enterprises, and restoration of the market price system.
Among the countries that were first influenced by this strand of thought and got their
policies right—with relative success if growth rates are the focus, much less so if inequali-
ties and democracy are factored in—is Chile. Even more consequential was the redirection
of the World Bank lending policy toward structural adjustments in indebted countries,
accompanying the substitution in 1982 of economist Anne Krueger, of the second genera-
tion of development economists, for first-generation chief economist Hollis Chenery: at a
certain point indebted countries were paying back more than they were gaining from the
loans. And yet by the end of the decade, and in spite of criticism including a famous
UNICEF report of damage to the health and education of Third World children associated
with the adjustment programs (Goldman 2005), the idea of getting policies right had the
upper hand and was absorbed in the ten recommendations of the Washington Consensus
(Williamson 1990).
In time, however, persistent problems of bad economic performance—poor or no
growth, volatility, poverty, and inequality—following the adoption of the recommenda-
tions, while inflating criticism and protest, also had the effect of turning international
financial organizations’ attention to the developing countries’ institutions. New Institu-
tional Economics (Williamson 1985) had for some time been claiming that markets do not
emanate from a societal vacuum; its account of the development trajectory of industrial-
ized countries (North 1990) and the obnoxious construction of market economies out of
the ashes of East European socialist societies contributed to make clear that, for better or
worse, “institutions matter.”
Despite theoretical uncertainty as to which institutions qualify as “good” (Bardhan 2005),
institutions in developing countries, as they were seen as differing from the ones in devel-
oped countries where markets thrived, became the object of variable reform recommenda-
tions (Williamson 2004; Singh et al. 2005). Integrated into international financial institutions’
arsenal of policy reform, an enlarged list of recommendations now included liberalization of
labor markets, financial codes and standards, independent central banks, elimination
of capital controls, good corporate governance practices, and targeted social policies
(Williamson 2004; Rodrik 2006). Eventually, after a failed “decade of reform” (the 1990s), a
reassessment by the World Bank in the 2005 Development Report recognized that advice
should definitely turn away from the “one size fits all” rule, focusing less on efficiency and
more on the dynamics of growth.1
As it turns out, the “new structural” perspective of the World Bank (Lin 2011) briefly
referred to in the preceding section is an indication of the search for new orientations; a twist
of ideas from within the institutionalist field, suggesting a “contextual” alternative to “uni-
versal” institutionalism, is yet another one. While accepting that something went wrong with
state intervention in the failed development cases, the new perspective claims that countries
should be permitted to build their own institutional solutions to self-perceived development
problems, drawing on their own experiences and circumstances. It is, in one version, a mat-
ter of emphasizing “small scale,” community, or group level development projects, to the det-
riment of state-led “big development” (Pritchett, Woolcock, and Andrews 2010). In another
version, it is a matter of deepening democracies. Even though a major impact of small devel-
opment initiatives is yet to be reported, the political strand managed statistically to identify
in a large sample of cases that “participatory” democracy has fared better than alternative
regimes in promoting growth, especially “high quality growth,” that is, stable, predictable,
resistant, and more equal economic growth (Rodrik 2000). Seemingly, democratic regimes
that give voice to non-elites are more effective mechanisms than alternative arrangements
for the aggregation of preferences, pooling of knowledge, and free experimentation with
institutional solutions.
The “deepening democracies” perspective contributed an “effectiveness” argument to
rehabilitate the political dimension of the state to development thinking: it established
participatory democracy as a more appropriate framework to settle notions of public
interest and developmental priorities than both “elite connections” and “state capture.”
The analysis of the success stories of developed countries, where the alignment of capital
accumulation, sustained growth, and well-being roughly occurred, adds a “legitimacy”
argument. There, on prominent accounts, economic transformation was assisted by broad
negotiation on the distribution of its bonuses: co-evolving with democracy, a politically
negotiated welfare state helped spread well-being through income redistribution and pub-
lic goods provision while the economy was booming (Kuznets 1955). As many have noted,
in continental Europe the new state form was as much a set of social policies of risk-sharing
and servicing as an extra-parliamentary mechanism of expression of organized demands
of elites and non-elites alike evolving in tandem with the political system. The cases of
Germany, a risk-sharing welfare state pioneer, and Korea, an emerging welfare state, illus-
trate the point.
Bismarck’s Germany featured fast industrialization, urbanization, demographic
change, and increasing mass political participation. Social security was introduced as a
top-down initiative by a conservative central government aiming at social control and
taming socialist penetration. But the welfare system evolved as the resulting vector of
class negotiation and parliamentary representation, with contributory social policies
extending beyond industrial workers to other occupations, taking on new forms, and
increasing benefits, so that it was erected as part and parcel of the development process—
even as the complex political environment in Germany, and broadly in Europe, could not
at the time fully reconcile emerging capitalism with civil societies, giving rise to decades
of turmoil (Berman 2006).
Post-war Germany’s “social market” reconstruction economy, in contrast, embodied a
successful conciliation of market forces and democracy, with roots in the now longstand-
ing corporatist tradition, producing booming growth at least up to the 1980s. A high
degree of coordination between social and economic issues secured risk protection for
banks, industry, and labor, including a welfare state based on employment contributions
that guaranteed workers’ income replacement in the risky circumstances of a capitalist
market society. Under the German-style “social partnership” arrangement, unions and
employers bargained autonomously over wages and employment, with spillovers in terms
of growth, inflation, and unemployment, while unions had a voice in the management of
individual firms and in the administration of the social security system (Streeck and
Hassel 2004).
The relation between development and democracy also sheds light on the trajectories of
emerging countries, such as Korea and Brazil (Kerstenetzky 2012; Kerstenetzky 2014), that
have transitioned from authoritarian to democratic regimes. The Korean story began with
fast capital accumulation from the 1960s to the 1980s, led by a nationalist and authoritar-
ian government (Woo-Cumings 1999). Devising rapid industrial growth, the “midwife”
state nurtured industrial groups and formed a close relationship with them, where scarce
resources were channeled in exchange for a commitment to economic performance and
technology absorption (Amsden 1989). The fast economic growth that increased incomes
(also aided by previous investments in education and an early land reform) came at the
price of authoritarian government in the form of political repression, weak union activity,
and lack of social welfare. True, the military government directed public social policies at
selected segments of the population (teachers, soldiers, and civil servants), but it was up to
employers to provide mandatory welfare benefits to employees (Sook 2004), and families
(especially women within families) to take care of the inactive and unemployed (Gough
et al. 2004).
Eventually, the model of pressure-containment broke up in the 1980s. Mounting dissatis-
faction with the government brought political mobilization and democratization and
opened the path for social welfare (Sook 2004; Evans and Heller 2012), which increased espe-
cially after the Asian crisis in the late 1990s. In spite of capital accumulation and growth in
the catch-up period, it was with democracy and a new orientation toward a universal welfare
state that social protection and well-being spread even as the economy was able to keep
growing (Evans and Heller 2012).
Now, leading accounts established that if the welfare state was a critical factor in securing
well-being in the industrial era, and thus in legitimizing economic change, this remains true
of the contemporary knowledge economy. In this new setting, economic processes in combi-
nation with demographic and social changes have superimposed new social risks over the
uncertainties of life and economic cycles: precarious labor market connections, heterogene-
ous family compositions, an aging population (Esping-Andersen 1999, 2009). Heightened
levels of social risks were a likely thrust for welfare state expansion in the central economies
in the 1980s and 1990s, and for its diffusion to regions such as East Asia and Latin America in
the 2000s, where it combined with democratization (Haggard and Kaufman 2008; Castles
et al. 2010). It has also been noted that the welfare state is directly consequential for wealth
production, a critical function in the face of increasing demands and requirements of the
knowledge economy. In fact, accounts of economic development indicate more directly pro-
ductivist functions such as exchanging productivity efforts for social entitlements (Chang
and Kozul-Wright 1994; Kaspersen and Schmidt-Hansen 2006), promoting productivity
through investment in human capital (Esping-Andersen 2009), and stimulating innovation
by guaranteeing economic security and lifelong learning (Kangas and Palme 2005). These
actions, which are a hallmark of the Scandinavian social-economic model, are examined
below in a case study of Denmark, after we review an additional and fundamental perspec-
tive in the next section.
Re-conceptualizing Development
Failed and successful development experiences alike elicited a normative reflection on what
development should be about. For one, when observing what on economic grounds are gen-
erally considered successful experiences, such as the Asian Tigers’ catch-up, one might argue
that these countries could have done much better had democracy, not only elite connections,
been in place. For another, when considering cases of economic growth with poor well-being
achievements, of “unaimed opulence” (Drèze and Sen 2002), such as Brazil’s in the 1970s,
one might feel reluctant to consider them cases of “development.” Also, when assessing the
trajectories and achievements of different developed countries, one might want to make
statements regarding their relative success vis-à-vis one another, in matters beyond per cap-
ita GDP, a metric on which they tend to differ little. These include different degrees of social
inequality due in part to different welfare state configurations, in the comparison, for
instance, of Germany with Denmark, or the USA with continental European countries. Gen-
erally speaking, the normative reflection catered to an increasing dissatisfaction with the
conflation of development with capital accumulation and per capita GDP growth, and a
somewhat intuitive emphasis on “people.” The so-called Capability Approach (CA) stands
out for providing one such benchmark (Sen 1983).
The CA reclaims the original idea that development is about promoting well-being, and
formalizes this notion as expansion of the real freedoms or “capabilities” people have to lead
meaningful lives. These, it claims, are not reducible to per capita GDP growth. Real freedoms
have opportunities and agency aspects: they need social conditions that allow people to
make autonomous decisions on life plans, including taking part in collective decisions that
affect their planning, and to follow the plans. In the end, if, as suggested, development boils
down to freedom (Sen 1999), development policies should be about creating the enabling
conditions, and per capita GDP is not the only important factor.
Actually, from the CA perspective, the displacement of the real objectives of development
for something that should remain as a means to it, and sometimes a poor means at that, is
consequential. Real freedoms seem not to be purchasable and may be lacking while GDP is
growing and policies are fixated on it. The health status of a population is best served by tak-
ing care of the population’s health rather than pursuing growth policies (Sen 1989; Drèze and
Sen 2002). Freedom from hunger has more to do with the presence of entitlements—owner-
ship and exchange ones, and social and political provisions such as social protection, rights,
and democracy—than with people’s purchasing power (Sen 1983, 1999). More generally,
social protection, rights, and democracy are central to promote capabilities that are poorly
related to income, such as “health, education, social equality, self-respect or freedom from
social harassment” (Sen 1983). Hence, development seems more aptly described as social
change, where “the domination of circumstances and chance over the individuals” is replaced
by “the domination of individuals over circumstances and chance” (Marx, in Sen 1983).
A shift of attention from markets to politics then follows, as social change seems to depend
more on collective decisions than on markets (Sen 1983; Rodrik 2000). And also by recog-
nizing the multidimensionality of capability, the CA, while offering a general orientation in
lieu of a complete list and an exact metric, raises democratic choices on items and priorities
in the capability set to the highest rank.
But does GDP help?
Some studies have analyzed the relation between economic growth and well-being (Drèze
and Sen 2002) and concluded that growth without a previous level of capability promotion
(basically, health and education) seems not to be sustained or to have led to capability expan-
sion; and that policies that attempt to boost growth are unlikely to lead to sustained growth
unless capability improvements are also undertaken (Stewart, Boozer, and Ranis 2011). These
results are consistent with new growth theories inferences, which emphasize education and
research and development (R&D) investments as reproducible factors through which cur-
rent growth can be converted into future growth. Other supportive studies note that some
level of education must be attained before an economy escapes from a low level income trap,
after which economic growth will enhance capabilities (Stewart, Boozer, and Ranis 2011).
Among the measured impacts of capabilities on growth are the productivity-increasing
effects of health and education, and education and health spending on private investments.
An illustration is provided by Korea’s early investments in education (Evans and Heller 2012;
Chang and Kozul-Wright 1994), but references are also made to education investments of
other piecemeal planners, such as Germany and the Scandinavian countries (Chang 2002).
But, as a more general approach, the CA builds a framework where instrumental purposes
do not exhaust the value of education. The same goes for democracy, which is viewed as a
development objective in itself, beyond its utility for other valued purposes (e.g. high-quality
growth). That this should be so can be seen from the many aspects of real freedom whose
greatest value the CA presupposes.
When it comes to the influence of income on capabilities, the record is mixed. There is
empirical support for the notion that, for example, reductions in mortality and increases in
life expectancy have been induced by technology improvements and, indirectly, by improved
incomes (and thus by previous investments in education and health) (Stewart, Boozer, and
Ranis 2011), but the historical record also lends support to the view that capability improve-
ments are consistent with a direct, non-income-mediated approach. It has been shown that
even though interactions between both of them are strong, basic health and education
achievements are poorly related to income (Drèze and Sen 2002).
Known cases of non-growth-mediated development counted on state action. To the extent
that it helps elicit social mobilization to promote basic capabilities, state action may start a
virtuous cycle of achievements in which other freedoms are also enhanced, including the
freedom to participate in social change. This is suggested by the much-cited development
case of the densely populated (32 million people) Indian state of Kerala. In the 1950s, public
action (Drèze and Sen 2002) undertaken by state actors in conjunction with political and
social organizations launched a process of redistribution of entitlements and reallocation of
priorities that involved, in the following decades of mostly left-wing governments, land
reforms, mass literacy, and school enrollment, and generated an educated and politically
active citizenry that demanded social opportunities and empowerment. The viability of this
non-growth-mediated progress, it is claimed, has been helped by the inexpensive nature of
the labor-intensive public provision of primary education and basic health care in a low wage
economy and by complementarities between educational attainment and health status
(Drèze and Sen 2002)—but arguably also by sheer mobilization, as the cases of the mass lit-
eracy campaign of 1991 and local level participatory planning started in the 1996 demon-
strate (Isaac and Franke 2002).
Outperforming India on many social counts and displaying accomplishments com-
parable to Korea’s in life expectancy, child mortality, and literacy, Kerala achieved social
development in spite of low per capita GDP. This illustrates the strength and efficacy of
political factors—a well-functioning democracy, a committed and accountable ruling
party, and an intense political and social mobilization of non-elite organizations—in the
redirection of development priorities. In most interpretations of the Keralan experi-
ence, participation and outright empowerment of the underprivileged are considered
developmental objectives in themselves (Véron 2001; Isaac and Franke 2002; Isaac and
Heller 2003).
Now when we turn to growth-mediated cases, again, it is public provision of opportuni-
ties to capabilities, not growth per se, that is considered to make the difference. As it redis-
tributes income to fund the provision of opportunities that affect people’s well-being and
life chances, the welfare state is the state form that suits the cases. And insofar as it assists
economic progress, the welfare state also helps to increase the resources the state needs to
finance an enlarged public provision. In a democratic ambiance, with civil and political
rights in place, welfare states may deepen democracy by institutionalizing mechanisms of
negotiation, coordination, and deliberation among societal groups, as noted in the case of
Germany. Moreover, to the extent that they help minimize social imbalances, welfare states
also contribute to increasing the value of the rights for the citizens. In this regard, it has
been reported that while welfare states reduce inequalities of market income everywhere,
especially the robust European ones (OECD 2008), the universalistic North European
countries deliver the lowest level of both inequalities of post-fisc distribution of income and
of social opportunities among twenty-four European countries (Checchi, Peragine, and
Serlenga 2009).
With the help of the CA and thus under a broader light, the welfare state now appears as
a general means of delivering opportunities to multiple capabilities. In the next section,
we focus on these broad effects in the experience of Denmark, one of the most robust
social states in the contemporary era, which coexists with a burgeoning market economy.
There, capabilities translate into an extensive and generous cover of social risks and provi-
sion of social opportunities, and a highly decentralized and “participatory” kind of
democracy.
Case Study: Denmark, a Power- and

Growth-sharing Developmental State
Three features have often captured the attention of students of the Danish development
model: the high standards of guaranteed well-being and democracy; the fact that well-being
delivery is supported by very high rates of economic activity; and the fact that capability deliv-
ery and economic activity are embedded in an intimate network connecting the state and civil
society. The evidence includes high indices of satisfaction with democracy (Demokratiudval-
get 2004 in Kristensen 2011); total, female, and elderly employment (OECD 2009); social
and economic equality and low post-fisc poverty (Checchi, Peragine, and Serlenga 2009;
OECD 2009); work satisfaction; and conciliation of family life and work (European Com-
mission 2004).
The story goes back to the late nineteenth century, when official support for voluntary
associations and important institutional and policy innovation started. It was then that Dan-
ish-style social partnership emerged and became institutionalized. It involved increasingly
dense and organized interest groups and the state in a long-standing tradition of consensual
policy making (Obinger et al. 2010).2 It was also then that the roots were laid down of the
notion that economic transformation should be negotiated, including a quid pro quo
between wage restraint and social entitlements.
But political mobilization and the fifty-year-long social democratic rule in the twentieth
century up to the 1970s were also key ingredients. In fact, the mature contours of the Danish
welfare state took shape under social-democratic leadership after the Second World War:
after a short flirtation in the interwar years with German-like insurance principles, the
Danish turned to universalism, combining high levels of adequacy with a comprehensive
view of social protection (Esping-Andersen 1990; Obinger et al. 2010). Myriad universal
benefits and quality services funded by general taxation were designed to protect the whole
citizenry from life cycle, intergenerational, and economic vicissitudes.
In the “golden years” between 1945 and 1973, the welfare state was also instrumental in
achieving high levels of employment and economic activity. It was an important source of
jobs (about 30 percent of employment, most of it female) and it facilitated female economic
participation, with the introduction of universal daycare and family policies such as paid
maternity and paternity leaves and family allowances. The dual-earner family model that
was then being encouraged later proved to be a potent shield against child poverty and a
poor future, placing Denmark in a privileged position among its OECD peers. Investment in
early childhood education also turned out to be an equalizer of life chances. Finally, the crea-
tion of a public employment system, another important innovation of the period, also turned
out to be strategic in the coming decades.
When the crisis of the 1970s hit and the need for structural changes in the economy and
society became clear, the Danish, while sticking to their egalitarian and consensual style of
policy making, liberalized their economic policies and expanded and recalibrated their
social policies—much to their advantage. In fact, Denmark, even while continuously increas-
ing social spending up to more than half of the total public spending and a third of GDP in
the 2000s, greatly benefited from the knowledge economy and globalization, achieving the
highest scores in the World Economic Forum Index of Competitiveness and per capita GDP
in the 2000s (Kristensen 2011) and peak levels of labor force participation and low unem-
ployment as early as the 1990s (Kenworthy 2004).
Based on the high degree of policy autonomy of the Danish state in an era of economic
liberalization and European integration, two policy innovations seem to account for the pro-
pulsion of Denmark to the avant-garde of nations with knowledge economies and prosper-
ous societies.
The first is flexicurity: the combination of a flexible labor market and generous welfare
benefits with active labor market policies. While accommodating competitive markets’
yearning for flexibility with workers’ yearning for economic security, these policies provide
long-term training and retraining, thus adding a higher skills/better quality jobs/lifelong
learning perspective to labor flexibility.
The second is public support for private investments in innovation. It combines coordina-
tion and funding with, again, welfare state spending: universal public education, training
and retraining of the labor force, lifelong learning and cognitive-skills-generating early
childhood education, in combination with cash benefits to help ensure the continuing activ-
ity of the population. These policies positively interacted with “discretionary learning,” the
uppermost degree of worker autonomy in the workplace, which has disseminated to most
Danish jobs (Huo and Stephens 2012) and whose introduction was facilitated by the high
union density typical of the Danish welfare state (Esser and Olsen 2012). Discretionary learn-
ing, even as greatly valued in the cutting-edge Networked Innovation Systems of coopera-
tion among firms, employees, and locales (Kristensen 2011), brought a high level of job
satisfaction (European Commission 2004).
While the state has performed new roles—actually updating risk sharing and servicing
under the new circumstances—more of its inner workings have become apparent. Nordic
bureaucracies are known for their quality, but an additional feature is that they have flour-
ished within democratic traditions of negotiation and partnership with major organized
interests. In the myriad commissions and committees of consultation, legislation prepara-
tion, and policy implementation, in tandem with the political system, Danish state officials
practice their relative autonomy while “sharing the political space” (Crouch 1994 in
Kaspersen and Schmidt-Hansen 2006) with major societal actors. These, in turn, also thrive
in public deliberation on welfare, firm organization, and major social and economic issues
(Boyer 2008)—a process that while not avoiding conflicts, minimizes stalemates and the
need for top-down intervention. Lately, “power-sharing” has extended to a variety of citi-
zens’ associations and agendas and has become less centralized, strengthening the degree of
directness of the Danish democracy (Boyer 2008; Kristensen 2011). This peculiar type of
“stateness” may be one explanation for the low degree of dissatisfaction with globalization
among the Danish (Kristensen 2011), by facilitating the negotiation of social entitlements for
competitiveness, “growth sharing.” A case in point is precisely the labor market reform of
1994 that introduced flexicurity (Kaspersen and Schmidt-Hansen 2006).
It has been noted that the life-course, human-centered investment the Danish chose means
that their egalitarian orientation does not so much translate into equality here and now—as a
lot of people move from employment to unemployment and back to employment or educa-
tion or training—but also into equality of life chances and protection (Esping-Andersen
1999), especially as the Danish economy embarks on the innovative, “experimentalist” econo-
mies (Kristensen 2011), with all the change and uncertainty this entails. In the end, while the
socio-economic model seems firmly rooted in an ethos of strong mercantile activity and
mobility, it remains to be seen whether it will be able to keep resisting the increasing inequali-
ties, and their solidarity-eroding quality, which daunt knowledge economies. Up to now the
process has been mostly negotiated so that the alignment of means and ends of development,
the very soul of the Danish regime, keeps warranting a supportive political economy.
What’s Next?
As the idea of development travels over time, understandings of state action evolve, so that
development analysis cannot help continuously re-signifying past experiences as it looks
ahead to future challenges. In the face of expansive and non-convergent meanings of devel-
opment, hardly any experience appears solidly established as a standard to be followed. In
the light of new ideas, so-called developed countries may appear less so and less developed
ones may be able to teach one or two lessons. The concept of development as capability
enhancement, providing a framework for the elusive notion of well-being, tries to capture
this plasticity of meanings even as it attempts to remain faithful to the notion of the ends of
development. Among the many aspirations it seems able to accommodate is ecological sus-
tainability, as the notion of real freedom reaches beyond existing generations to future ones,
to whom there is no legitimate reason to deny the same possibilities. As a consequence, the
new concept recalls that, as a collective endeavor, development cannot dispense with demo-
cratic procedures regarding the setting of priorities, strategies, and actions. To the extent
that the category that designates this endeavor, “public interest,” still makes sense, the place
of the state is vindicated, for all the pitfalls and temptations that accompany its existence.
And insofar as widespread political participation is accredited as a superior mechanism of
decision making concerning what qualifies as the public interest, democracy attracts general
attention, being charged with protecting the state against predatory raids as well as warrant-
ing open deliberation on the content and form of the development agenda even while keep-
ing its intrinsic value.
Looking to what we already have on the shelves, the state form that in the post-war dec-
ades appears most conducive to capability delivery is the welfare state, for its ability to neu-
tralize the grip of circumstances and chance over the real freedoms of individuals, and render
economic transformation legitimate and effective as a means to social transformation. Its
emphasis on people-intensive public goods may influence production and consumption pat-
terns in an environmentally friendly direction. When coupled with democratic regimes, the
welfare state has the potential to deliver what the majority in a vast constituency expresses
should be the elements in the development set—and this includes productivist and non-
productivist experiments alike (which we might still consider a welfare state of sorts, as
redistribution, provision of public goods, and political mobilization are all there). Recipro-
cally, welfare states may help deepen democracies by raising the value of political freedoms,
through equalizing interventions, and by increasing the directness of democracies, through
mechanisms of political negotiation, deliberation, coordination, and participation. And
when this happens, as in the Danish experience, democratic welfare states display a high
degree of flexibility to deal with challenging new circumstances.
But, of course, welfare states and democracy exist under many guises and with varying
accomplishments. Hence, questions of interest include features of the socially chosen capa-
bility sets, comprising provision and distribution of their key elements, and tensions and
complementarities between, for example, political participation and representation, par-
ticipation and inequalities, market generated inequalities, and political support for
redistribution.
Also, there is the question of scale involving the successful stories of Kerala and Denmark:
are these accomplishments likely to occur in big countries, such as Nigeria or Brazil, where
concerted social action may prove more difficult to achieve? This is an empirical question
that no doubt should attract a great deal of attention. But while these cases leave open the
question of whether there is a maximum scale for successful social transformation—even
though Kerala stands as a success story of a big region within a huge country—they never-
theless show there seems to be no “minimum scale” for decentralization policies and partici-
patory democracy, two strategies that were central to the positive outcomes. This suggests
that a similar path should be followed in all cases. In any case, future development studies
might focus on forms of democracy, decentralization, and welfare state configurations.
Notes
1. This move famously marked a separation from the IMF’s universal institutions blueprint
at the time (Rodrik 2006; Singh et al. 2005).
2. To be sure, the consensual style draws on other sources besides social partnership, includ-
ing a sequence of minority governments and a tradition of decentralization.
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chapter 46
ci v il societ y
kumi naidoo and sylvia borren
Introduction
Much of the thinking and practice of international development emanates beyond states
and markets. It comes from the vibrant work of civil society and social movements strength-
ening citizen action throughout the world. It is particularly prominent in areas where par-
ticipatory democracy and citizens’ freedom of association are challenged, both highlighting
the unintended consequences of development and offering alternative perspectives on how
development may be practiced. The chapter examines definitions of civil society, how it
organizes for change, by challenging roles within society, and promoting transformative
thinking about development.
As civil society includes a range of NGOs and social movements, it does not speak with
one voice, but contains within it various ideological and power differences. History provides
examples of social change as people organized movements against perceived injustice, and
in favor of new ideas of development. The concept of “civic-driven change” counters an apo-
litical and technical understanding of development, to instead address the political barriers
that perpetuate poverty and inequality. Civil society is motivated by a pluralistic “idea of jus-
tice” which challenges the assumed roles of governments, corporations, and individuals.
These roles are undergoing new scrutiny in the face of rising demands for accountability, in
which civil society provides part of the checks and balances on political and economic
power.
Defining Civil Society
Keane (2009) notes that the term originated in Europe during the late eighteenth century,
to describe the realm of social life separate from the state. This original definition included
not only charitable groups, clubs, and voluntary association; but also market exchanges,
civil society 789
independent churches, and publishing houses. Keane further notes that the ensemble of
actors that constitute civil society tend to be self-organizing, and “permanently in tension,
both with each other and with the governmental institutions that frame, constrict and enable
their activities.” During the twentieth century, civil society came to be seen as also separate
and distinct of markets, corporations, and businesses. Thus, the World Alliance for Citizens
Participation defines civil society as “the arena, outside of the family, the state and the mar-
ket, which is created by individual and collective actions, organizations and institutions to
advance shared interests” (CIVICUS 2012: 8). Under this definition, civil society embraces
formal non-government and non-profit organizations, as well as more diffuse social move-
ments, such La Via Campesina or the Occupy Movement. Diani and Bison (2004) define
civil society as the “informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups, or asso-
ciations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity.”
The causes furthered through civil society range from those promoting sport and culture, to
those fostering an indigenous or religious identity, to those advocating for labor, youth, or
human rights.
Glasius (2010) identifies three ways of describing civil society. First, civil society can be
understood as social capital, drawing on insights from Alexis de Tocqueville and Robert
Putnam. People meet and interact, forming networks to collectively solve problems and
improve the well-being of their communities and fellow citizens. In one form or another,
civil society instigated the abolition of slavery, the promulgation of human rights and
women’s rights, and environmental victories, such as a bans on whaling and on nuclear
weapon testing. Second, civil society can be understood as public debate, drawing on insights
from Habermas (Corchia 2010). Citizens are prepared to work for causes which increase
their common good. Whether through in-person meetings, the formal media, or social
media, civil society is active in building support to improve policy and inform politics. Prob-
lems such as child labor and violence against women are put on the political and public
agenda by civil society actors. Third, civil society can be understood as counter-hegemony,
drawing on insights from Antonio Gramsci. It can work to challenge the powerful and cham-
pion the marginalized through the media and movements either for (e.g. women’s rights,
civil rights) or against (e.g. anti-apartheid, anti-poverty) particular agendas. Civil society
can prompt action by government, in its responsibility for the “rule of law,” and for-profit
sector, which transmits pressures down the chain of operations and into the daily lives of
workers and their families.
A commonly accepted aspiration of civil society is to pursue change through non-violence,
inspiring collective action to resist perceived injustice. The example of Gandhi and peace
movements was adopted within a host of human rights-, feminist-, anti-poverty, anti-nuclear
as well as environmental movements. It is also the start of spontaneous uprisings such as the
Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and accountability movements, such as the Global Call
to Action against Poverty and the Tax Justice Network.
Civil society is commonly associated with efforts to further the “common good,” yet it is
also affected by efforts toward “common evil.” Popular understanding tends to ignore the so-
called “non-civic” part of civil society, such as the mafia and drugs cartels, terrorist organiza-
tions, and racist groups. The CIVICUS definition is neutral in that it does not carry a value
judgment regarding the nature of the “shared interests” pursued. By its very nature, civil
society not only works toward the common good, but often seeks “club goods” that favor a
minority, or particular segment of society. Thus civil society, similar to governments and
790 kumi naidoo and sylvia borren
corporations, can work for the common good or evil depending on the goals and behaviors
involved. Indeed in many jurisdictions, civil society faces a growing number of rules and
regulations designed by governments to disrupt terrorist networks, control dissent, and
manage threats to state legitimacy (Sidel 2004; Monga 2009). Governments claim that they
alone can act for the common good. Controls on civil society in some countries, from Ethio-
pia to Russia, seriously reduce access to information, create obstacles to funding, and limit
the freedoms of speech and assembly. Measures intended to enhance public security can end
up permitting the state greater control over public debate and civic space. This is a particu-
larly dangerous in situations where human rights and citizen action are labeled as subversive
to political or national interests.
Some thinkers suggest that the family also forms part of civil society. This argument is
based on the connections between family and class, as well as caste in different civil society
arrangements through history and in different countries (Keane 2006). Family law, tax sys-
tems, and welfare arrangements see the family as the cornerstone of society, suggesting it is
conceptually useful to see “family” as part of civil society. Furthermore, feminist work on
violence argues that the family is an important element in understanding power and gender
relations, and the cultural practices that perpetuate inequalities (Pearce 2007). The family is
the one place where human rights legislation does not apply fully. Children do not have
direct access to legal redress unless their parents act on their behalf, which they are unlikely
to do if they are exploiting their children. A person’s sense of justice often stems from child-
hood situations which were perceived as unfair or unjust. Conversely, children who have
suffered in their families may grow up to repeat patterns of oppression, violence, discrimina-
tion, and cruelty which they learned at home. Unsurprisingly, many development interven-
tions target families, or “households.” Yet not all families are rooted in a single place, as
migration and kinship ties can create complex family networks between rural and urban
areas, and across countries.
As there are many definitions of “civil society,” there are many civil society actors—includ-
ing churches, community associations, trade unions, and NGOs—which do not offer a sin-
gle voice or position, nor always acting collectively among themselves. Instead the diverse
constituents of civil society are analogous to the variety of political parties: each embody a
different ideology, hold different values, and offer different visions. A better analogy is to
consider the diversity of actors within the for-profit sector where most companies are in
stringent competition with each other; even while business councils might further common
goals and companies may cooperate on research and development (R&D) or corporate
social responsibility (CSR). Arguably civil society is more diverse in practice than either the
political or for-profit landscape, and this diversity is a strength that contributes to critical
public debate and collective action. Civil society organizations and social movements can
and do form alliances to broker change in the policies pursued by governments and
corporations.
The problems of development can also be cultural, requiring civil society to face its own
prejudices and injustices. The slow progress made by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual
movements in the last four decades illustrates how transformation is needed within civil
society to change attitudes and norms, as well as within government to change laws and
jurisprudence. Patterns of power and privilege also affect civil society itself. National consti-
tutions and international agreements embody a commitment to human rights, including
civil society 791
those of children, women, migrants, and minorities. Yet the combined weight of poverty and
culture shape a daily reality that is far from these aspirations, one in which the majority of
women still deal with oppression and violence. It is interesting to note that interaction with
business can be positive, as the purchasing power of consumers can demand ecological and
labor justice when such considerations became part of choosing which products to buy.
In summary, civil society can be defined as the arena, outside the state and the market,
which is created by individual and collective action to advance shared interests. This defini-
tion is quite broad and is not value-driven, the concept of “shared interests” can be both for
the common good of all society or the benefit of a minority group. Civil society includes
social movements and faith-based, as well as cultural, sport, or recreational institutions, and
as wide a range of issue-based social activity as is imaginable. Civil society actors have their
own ideological and power differences, and are influenced by different historical, political,
and economic realities on the ground. It is therefore hardly surprising that civil society is in
constant internal debate and flux as different factions organize to affect local, national, and
global forces for the greater common good, or for different forms of private goals or gain.
Organizing for Change
The history of different countries and religions are full of dramatic stories of attempts by
groups of people to fight for their own freedom of culture, language, and belief, and to live
free from slavery, oppression, and abject poverty. Much of civil society has been born out of
emotion, concepts of justice, and the urgently felt need for change. Much of what is now
accepted as the responsibility of government was brought about by the initiatives of private
citizens who rallied against perceived injustice and organized with others around them “to
do something” about it, whether education, health, child-care, or other causes. Numerous
charitable initiatives originated with a humane impulse: soup kitchens were run by the wives
of the very land- or factory owners responsible for the living and working conditions of
“their subjects.” These early seeds later germinated into social security arrangements. Well-
to-do elites set up projects to look after orphans, organize food banks, and provide aid dur-
ing natural disaster. The same motivation is seen in corporate foundations today who, having
made huge profits, plough some of this wealth back into social goals of their own choosing.
From a first phase of “reacting to needs” many civil society movements and organizations
began to discover the structural patterns of power which fueled such injustice. There are his-
toric examples of social change which began as a broad fight against injustice, and ended in
long, tenacious and very precise social, legal, and sometimes physical battles. In the U.S.,
the anti-slavery movement would centuries later inspire the civil rights movement. In
South Africa, the anti-colonialist battles for national freedom were in time followed by the
heroic struggle against apartheid. Trade unions, feminist, and fair trade movements have
achieved enormous social improvements in the last six decades. The transition from dicta-
torship to democracy in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s now inspires events in the
Middle East. A partial list of contemporary causes includes human, women’s, and sexual
rights; environmental, indigenous, Dalit and youth movements; global networks such as
Avaaz; and transparency initiatives in aid spending, extractive industries, and government
information (e.g. Wikileaks). These and other efforts seek to make injustice more visible, reveal-
ing who gains and who loses in the present order of power and vested interests. As such, civil
society often serves to highlight those disadvantaged by development, people who are threat-
ened with loss of their land, rights, voice, and—all too often—their lives. Civil society thus plays
a key function within democracy, providing checks and balances on the exercise of power.
There are also patterns of power within civil society itself. Many times women activists
hear that gender justice will be dealt with after economic or ecological justice is won, instead
of seeing the intrinsic connection between these battles. Civil society is learning to manage
the gap between the global north and the global south, without the former trying to manage
the latter. Money, privilege, and power are carried by northern NGOs, which decide which
actors in the global south receive attention, political support, and financial grants. Such divi-
sions in power can split civil society and weaken its standing in, for instance, UN negotia-
tions where the for-profit sector has increasing access to the corridors of decision making.
The media also plays a role as it decides whose stories are told or ignored. For instance, there
was hardly any global media attention in October 2009 when 173 million people from all
walks of life in 130 countries joined demonstrations organized by the Stand Up and Take
Action campaign. Happily there was press coverage in developing countries, where the cam-
paign leveraged political action for improvements in child benefits, spending on health and
education, and civil society consultation in national planning.
Fowler and Biekart (2008) argue that the theories and practice of international develop-
ment tend to bring only incremental change, unable to upset the neo-liberal perspective on
development. These authors call for civic-driven change to fight “for equity of political agency
rather than equity of economic opportunity.” “Being civic” is understood as pro-social
behavior that respects differences between people and shows concern for the whole of soci-
ety. This is a value-driven definition, based on Confucian teachings, in which respect for
diversity and concern for the common good are two pre-conditions for achieving “social
order.” Such authors present a counter-dialogue that is critical of the theories and practices
of development which pursue an apolitical and technical agenda. Yet such an approach to
development invariably treats the symptoms rather than the cause, stopping short of chal-
lenging the political barriers that perpetuate poverty and inequality.
Edwards (2010) notes that, “any significant question in the development field takes us into
disputed territory that is increasingly enveloped by the fog of ideology and interest group
contestation.” This means accepting that thinking about development invariably involves the
politics of knowledge—how ideas are created, used, and disseminated. Edwards argues that
these politics determine how thinking is translated into action of various kinds and which
ideas are considered legitimate. Some NGOs and philanthropic foundations support initia-
tives that are critical of development, including the Global March against Child Labour, the
World Social Forum, CIVICUS, and various other human rights, feminist, and indigenous
initiatives. However, a scarcity of funding following the financial crisis, combined with the
political backlash against NGOs in some countries, is encouraging a simple focus on direct
poverty alleviation. Worryingly, there appears to less tolerance of, and support for, those
voices that are critical of how development is currently understood and pursued.
The insights of Amartya Sen are particularly relevant for civil society. In Identity and
Violence, Sen (2006) argues that all people have multiple identities which are more or less
relevant in different contexts,
civil society 793
Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when the manifold divisions in the world
are unified into one allegedly dominant system of classification—in terms of religion, or
community, or nation, or civilization. . . . [We are all] diversely different . . . the hope of har-
mony in the contemporary world lies to a great extent in a clearer understanding of the
pluralities of human identity, and in the appreciation that they cut across each other. (Sen
2006: xiii–xiv)
Sen’s argument is helpful for understanding diversity and overcoming divides in civil soci-
ety; here too a hierarchy of issues and identities can lead to conflict rather than cooperation.
In The Idea of Justice, Sen (2009) argues that justice is not a monolithic ideal, but a pluralistic
notion with many dimensions. For him what counts is real-life behavior, and the practical
realization of justice for all. In his view, human rights are not merely a theory or principle,
but rather the realization of rights is an empirical question. All actors, be it government,
business, or civil society, each have their own responsibility to work toward the idea of
justice.
Sen’s insights are highly relevant for civil society and citizens today, as humanity faces
a “perfect storm” of economic and ecological disaster of its own making. The growing
worldwide discontent of “the people” is visible in various social uprisings around food
prices, sexual violence, and equality. Global civil society is struggling to find a common
voice, initiating global dialogue around, and as alternatives to, UN climate negotiations
and the post-2015 development goals. There are attempts to forge broad coalitions
including trade unions and faith-based organizations working toward new and renewed
ideas of international development. But there is also doubt and disappointment. Proc-
esses at the UN, G20, and World Economic Forum seem to have little more than token,
or symbolic, interest in civic voices, human rights experience, gender realities, and youth
initiatives.
There are plenty of transformative concepts and real-life practice that offer economic,
environmental, and social alternatives for “the world we want” emanating from trade unions,
citizens, activists, philosophers, indigenous peoples, feminists, and ecologists, and many
others. There are indeed real and practical alternatives to international development as prac-
ticed in the current economic model. The biggest problem in any process of change is not the
lack of new visions or practical ways forward, but it is how to deal with the vested interests of
privilege and the simple fear of change.
History provides us with many inspirational stories of social change mostly propelled
by civil leaders motivated by a deep sense of outrage at the injustices they saw, which in
their time were considered “normal.” They organized movements against slavery, coloni-
alism, apartheid, child labor, sexual violence, and human trafficking; and they organized
for sexual- and reproductive rights, equal educational opportunities, social protection,
and labor laws. Leaders and movements need to be both inspirational and practical. Civic-
driven change is value-based in that their concept of “civic” is based on Confucian phi-
losophy. Respect for difference and concern for the whole society, instead of self, is a
prerequisite for social order. The question facing humanity today is whether it can muster
enough civic-driven change at local, national, and global level to solve the present “per-
fect storm” of multiple economic and ecological crises. Can it overcome identity or issue-
driven divides within civil society, and harness Sen’s plural, but moral and practical,
notion of justice in order to shift the powerful actors and short-term interests that block
such change?
Challenging Roles within Society
It is commonly assumed that the corporate sector can only be driven by the need to make
financial profit, regardless of the consequences to people or planet; that civil society is or
should be intrinsically “good”; and that government has the job to balance or mediate
between these different demands and interests. In this thinking, governments organize the
“rule of law” and the process of compromise, thus achieving a more or less just balance.
National constitutions usually define fundamental rights and responsibilities, based on the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international laws and conventions.
Yet the demands for accountability of corporations are often less stringent than those of most
governments and organized civil society. Sometimes the corporate sector is talked about as
though they are not (nor need to be) party to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights
or the various conventions ratified by their countries.
These assumptions are undergoing new scrutiny. The recent global economic crisis,
caused by highly irresponsible behavior on the part of certain banks and corporate lead-
ers, raised new questions about roles and responsibilities. For example, Unilever is proud
of its track record on social corporate responsibility, yet has been critiqued for its compli-
ance with labor rights in African countries. Analysing the total financial picture, share-
holders appear to gain between 5 to 10 percent in dividends per year, while production and
labor costs vary between just 1 and 3 percent of the product price. This difference begs the
question of what constitutes a fair division of profits, as well as new demands for public
scrutiny.
Recent research from the Tax Justice Network has calculated that US$21 trillion dollars
are lost annually through tax havens and tax exemptions for the most powerful corpora-
tions and individuals (Henry 2012). To cite Adam Smith (2009 [1759]), “the disposition to
admire, and almost worship, the rich and the powerful and to despise, or at least to neglect
persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of corruption of
our moral sentiments.” Build into this equation the realities of poverty, and one gains an
insight into the drivers of semi-slavery that continue to exist today: human trafficking,
enforced prostitution, and child labor. But happily, time and again, history has witnessed
the emerged civil, government, and corporate leaders who have pushed back discrimina-
tion and injustice. This kind of leadership is urgently needed to ensure a sustainable future
of life on the planet.
Demands for accountability are on the rise. While the Arab Spring is unfolding, in India
an “accountability battle” speaks to a society no longer willing to tolerate corruption or vio-
lence against women. With developed countries, civil society is suspicious of their govern-
ments’ closed-door negotiations with African countries, and agreements that are not shared
until they are already signed and sealed. Political campaigning is increasingly about person-
alities and the amount of money they can muster for their campaign. The exposure and the
debating qualities of the candidates are more important than their past or future ability to
govern. Election promises are made, but most of the population has come to accept that
these will not be kept. The result is that voters begin to disengage from the formal political
process. In the Netherlands, a number of NGOs—including Oxfam Novib, Greenpeace, and
World Life Fund—have considerably more financial supporters than all the Dutch political
civil society 795
parties combined. Yet NGOs are often challenged about their democratic base and who they
claim to represent.
The lack of accountability is worse at the global level. Diplomats and leaders attend
UN, IMF, and World Bank meetings, and G8 and G20 summits without direct account-
ability to voters regarding the positions taken. Civil society is kept at bay from such
international negotiations, resulting in little expectation of keeping to promises and
commitments made, and seriously undermining the confidence of citizens. Since the
Social Summit in 1995, a global civil network called Social Watch has prepared an annual
report tracking the progress (or lack thereof) between the UN human rights agree-
ments, conventions, development goals, and the reality on the ground. With 140 indica-
tors, it provides a measurement of basic capabilities and of the gender gap in each
country, including the progress and regression over time in realizing the promises made
to citizens.
Pressure to be accountable and coherent has been brought to bear on civil society. Within
organizations, this not only means an accounting for resources and actions, but also their
relationships with others. Do NGOs respond adequately to the aspirations of civil society
actors in the developing countries? For individual consumers, do they ensure that the prod-
ucts they buy do not involve child labor or excessive environmental costs? This is where
responsibility becomes concrete and actionable, the extent to which organizations and citi-
zens contribute to achieving Sen’s “idea of justice.”
Individuals do have multiple identities: as citizens, family members, as employees in gov-
ernment, business, or civil society. They may be activists, travellers, and religious practition-
ers. They are consumers, voters, and participants in local civic life. So coherence and
accountability can also be asked of individuals in their own behavior within their different
roles and walks of life. How is any one person affecting labor standards, the environment,
and developing countries through her or his daily behavior? The sum of small decisions mat-
ters, such as whether or not to eat meat, take public transport, purchase fair trade products,
advocate for CSR in the workplace, or cast an informed vote in elections. The concept of
“global citizenship” can manifest itself in our daily behavior. Promoting justice is not an
abstract ideal, nor can it be left only to governments, corporations, or civil society. The prin-
ciple of “do no harm” is applicable in our own daily lifestyles.
Accountability for the agreed principles of human rights involves government (local,
national, regional, global), corporations (from small businesses to multinationals), civil
society and individual citizens. In this sense, the responsibility to respect diversity and to
look out for the common good, above self-interest, can apply equally to all actors within
society. Everyone has a role in causing, or solving, the problems that face humanity and the
planet.
All members of society contribute to implementing international agreements and con-
ventions, whether they are active within government, business, or civil society. Govern-
ments, corporations, and NGOs carry a large share of this responsibility; but individuals also
need to work toward a just and sustainable future through their families, place of work, and
as consumers and voters. The responsibility of organizing for change does not only lie only
with civil society. It lies equally with governments, corporations, and individuals to work
toward Sen’s “idea of justice.” Together there is no global problem which we cannot help to
solve to create a better common future.
Transformative Thinking about

Development
The concepts of democracy and civil society are interconnected; the latter contributes to the
former to form a “system in which the exercise of power is subject to public monitoring,
compromise and agreement” (Keane 2009). Democracy is more than political parties, elec-
tions and concepts of majority rule. It requires respect and space for the rights of minorities.
It requires that people are empowered to speak, act, and control their own lives. Various
institutions—including religions, trade unions, development and women’s organizations—
face a crisis of trust as diverse groups of citizens, including young people, do not recognize
themselves in the established civil society. As new grassroots movements emerge and dis-
content spreads through social media, existing structures and organizations need to change
and transform. NGOs make diverse contributions to civil society and democracy. Mercer
(2002) argues that the role of NGOs in the politics of development is far more complex than
commonly assumed, and requires a more contextualized and less value-laden understand-
ing of these politics.
The concept of governance, instead of government, recognizes the need for an interactive
and inclusive dialogue in which multiple stakeholders negotiate a common future. Democ-
racy becomes an interactive process in which majorities and minorities with different ideol-
ogies, beliefs, and lifestyles try to find a way out of present stalemates. The environment is an
area that urgently needs broader agency and new solutions, by and for all stakeholders.
Renewable energy sources can replace fossil fuel and nuclear power, oceans and forests can
be preserved without overfishing or overexploitation. Production methods in the clothing
industry are now subject to greater scrutiny, and new standards reduce its use of toxic mate-
rials. One in seven people populating our planet today suffer from chronic hunger, mostly
women and their dependents, while a similar number suffer from obesity and related health
problems.
Development as pursued in recent decades has continued to encourage economic growth
through overconsumption and short-term financial gain that drives overexploitation of peo-
ple and the planet. New and transformational thinking and practice is urgently needed.
Edwards (2008) argues that there is a need to learn rigorously from history, to lever deeper
transformations that change society forever, including the economic system that has gener-
ated wealth. Imagine first the stimulation of local solutions within the frameworks of global
agreements. Vibrant local communities can be strengthened through finding local renewa-
ble energy solutions and green jobs, clarifying land rights for farmers and investing in sus-
tainable food production, organizing fair financing and favoring local trade over
international trade, and accounting for the full price of products including their use of fossil
fuels and environmental impact.
There are some examples of multi-stakeholder platforms that pursue new models of
development: for instance on soya or palm oil production which does not destroy forests or
local food production, or advances in agriculture and food security that empower women
farmers and their access to land (see White et al. and Swaminathan et al., this volume). New
global connections enable consumers to trace the origin and history (or chain of custody) of
civil society 797
products, including how far a product has traveled, and the ecological and labor conditions
under which it was produced. There are instances of interaction between the governments,
businesses, and indigenous communities where citizens determine their own route of devel-
opment (Lâm, this volume). Some countries have made the rights of the planet a part of their
constitutions. Others have established minimum levels of women candidates in elections or
of women directors in a start-up company before it can become publicly traded.
The challenge to be faced here is that local interactive democracy has to be stimulated,
enabling citizens to take responsibility for organizing their own future, including public
services for energy, water, social security, education, health, and local economy. There are
already examples of this working in communities around the world, including “human
rights cities” and “child-friendly villages.” Other cities foster local food production and a
concept of work that balances economic enterprise, living conditions, child care, health, and
education. Communities need the means to build their common future and to defend them-
selves against development they do not want: be it unsustainable fisheries, buying up land for
industrialized farming, or flooding the local market with cheap plastic products.
National governments support local efforts to build vital economic and ecological com-
munities. Interactive democracy occurs where multiple stakeholders are informed enough
to engage in a debate about the choices of their own future. Development can occur through
dialogue with citizens at home, and not merely as negotiations among nations at multilateral
fora, ranging from world trade to climate change. If so, then business can follow, rather than
determine, local and national governance. The greatest challenge for those wanting to organ-
ize civic-driven change, and realize Sen’s “idea of justice,” is to ask governments and corpora-
tions to broaden beyond incremental change and move into transformational practice.
The balance of power still lies with those who stand to gain from short-term economic
exploitation, including common evils such as violence and environmental exploitation. This
power imbalance is not coherent with the “idea of justice” and responsibility to respect, and
to act for, the common good above self. The idea of justice must become part of our thinking
and practice. The direction of change needed is clear: development can do much more to
benefit the common good of people and the planet. Herein lies the challenge for those trying
to achieve civic-driven change: to design local inclusive governance that creates checks and
balances, supported by national democratic process.
The urgent need to design more inclusive, democratic, and just development is an enor-
mous task for transformation. How to convince those that stand to gain by the status quo
and those who fear change? It was once difficult to convince slave-owners and apartheid-
supporters, men attached to their presumed dominance over the lives of others. In the past,
such change required the passage of generations, for a slow evolution in social norms, yet
development today does not allow for this privilege of time. Each individual faces a choice,
to engage or not, in forming a new idea of development. Ultimately, civil society is part of the
checks and balances on political and economic power.
References
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chapter 47
fou n dations a n d
pr i vate actors
carol adelman and yulya spantchak
Introduction
Traditionally, international development practitioners have placed value on government

actors on both the donor and the receiver side. Official Development Assistance (ODA) often
manifests itself in the transfer of public monies from a donor government into the hands of a
recipient government. During much of the twentieth century, official flows comprised the
majority of resource flows in international development. After the Second World War,
the Marshall Plan was composed mainly of U.S. government grants and technical assistance
to European nations. While private sector actors supplied goods, they were not the main
financial source, and the majority of the resources came from official flows.
Today, ODA flows constitute only a small fraction of the total public and private flows to
developing countries. This change in the public to private ratio is a recent one: only in the
1990s did private money, composed of philanthropy, remittances, and investment, begin to
significantly surpass ODA (Hudson Institute 2012). This paradigm shift offers a great oppor-
tunity to reinvent official aid, allowing the aid community to better focus on results, demand-
driven development, transparency, and sustainability.
During the latter part of the twentieth century, the aid community saw a rise in popularity
of public–private partnerships. Increasing participation from private actors reflects changes
not only in the traditional donor countries, but also in developing countries. Over the past
thirty years, and particularly in the last decade, developing countries have seen an increase
in open markets and open societies (Adelman and Eberstadt 2008). The rise of emerging
economies is largely a result of increased economic and democratic growth and is character-
ized by a more skilled labor force, improved life expectancy, and increased civil freedoms
and entrepreneurship. In turn, communication technologies have produced a means to
access the local talent and local organizations with which private-sector entities can partner.
Furthermore, private actors in emerging economies and developing countries are them-
selves taking on a larger role in the assistance process. With recent economic prosperity in
emerging economies, these countries are developing not only their own government aid
800 carol adelman and yulya spantchak
strategies, but also philanthropic initiatives domestically and abroad. In addition to philan-
thropy, remittances continue to rise and contribute to the disposable incomes of individuals
in developing countries. Diaspora communities as a whole have engaged in philanthropic
activities, and diaspora philanthropy has caught the attention of policy leaders in donor and
developing countries alike.
Private actors have provided new and rising cash flows domestically and across borders.
These private flows have fundamentally transformed the way foreign aid is delivered: the
private sector, with more flexibility and higher risk tolerance, is more likely to fund programs
that government aid may not.
Not only have private actors changed the architecture of aid, but new strategies are chang-
ing the way aid is being delivered. Traditional, grant-making foundations are embracing
program-related investments; corporations have gone beyond traditional corporate social
responsibility to promote a shared-value approach and corporate volunteerism; investment
funds are taking on mission-related investing; businesses are working to reach a double
bottom line; remittances are being pooled into development projects and used for securiti-
zation; and diaspora bonds are being issued to raise capital. With the large contributions
from the private sector, it is critical not only to include private actors in development strate-
gies, but to stay current on the continuing changes within the private aid delivery system
and its best practices.
This chapter will cover the value of private flows, the actors involved, future developments
in private sector involvement in foreign assistance, and the impact of private flows on the
development landscape.
Financial Flows to the Developing World
Official development assistance currently consists of government flows from twenty-three

Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members, with Korea being the newest mem-
ber. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),
total ODA flows have been steadily increasing since the 1960s. According to the OECD, in
2010 ODA was at its highest ever, exceeding $128 billion. Despite the recession, many nations
continued to increase their assistance packages.
The OECD and the international aid community set targets and encouraged donor nations
to increase their aid packages. In the 2002 Monterrey Consensus, developed countries were
urged to increase their government assistance to 0.7 percent of their gross national product
(GNP) (Clemens and Moss 2005). The call for this increase was based on the assumption that
more government funding for international development would help the world reach the
Millennium Development Goals. Thus far, only five of the twenty-three traditional DAC
donor nations have reached the 0.7 percent target; however, ODA in absolute amounts has
been increasing and has held steady at over $100 billion per year since 2005 (Hudson Institute
2012). ODA is composed of more than just cash flows. Critics of aid have noted that much of
ODA is not actual cash, but rather debt forgiveness and technical assistance (Kharas 2008). In
fact, analysis of the $107 billion of aid flows in 2005 determined that only $38 billion of that
was composed of funds for projects on the ground in developing countries (Kharas 2008).
foundations and private actors 801
While DAC donors’ goals continue in support of increasing ODA, non-DAC donors and
private sector actors have filled many of the financing gaps in foreign assistance (Desai and
Kharas 2008). Private financial flows (including philanthropy, investment, and remittances)
far exceed ODA, and now dominate the development landscape (Hudson Institute 2012). This
paradigm shift from government to private flows will become even more substantial in the
future as private flows continue to rise. Figure 47.1 shows the steady rise of private flows from
the traditional DAC donor countries over the last twenty years. As demonstrated, the private
monies took off with unprecedented momentum in 1991 and will likely continue to far out-
pace ODA, making government flows a minority shareholder in the development landscape.
Figure 47.2 shows the breakdown of the private flows into the three components: investment,
remittances, and philanthropy. Of the $575 billion in 2010 private flows, private capital invest-
ment is the largest and the most volatile. However, even if this market-dependent source is
excluded, remittances and philanthropy combined are nearly double government aid.
While remittances are not philanthropy, they are a substantial private flow with demon-
strable effects on poverty reduction. During the recession in 2008–10, remittances held at
remarkably steady levels. Moreover, on a macroeconomic scale, countries are beginning to
use remittance inflows as collateral to improve nations’ creditworthiness for access to capital
markets (Ratha 2006). Figure 47.2 shows remittance flows from donor nations to developing
countries; however, South–South remittance flows have also grown substantially in the past
decade. The World Bank reports that nearly 50 percent of all migrants from the South reside
in a nation which is also considered to be in the South (Ratha and Shaw 2007). While remit-
tances from developed to developing countries in 2010 amounted to $190 billion, total remit-
tances to developing countries are estimated at $371 billion, thus demonstrating that almost
half of remittances come from South to South migration. The cost of remittance transfers has
700
600
500
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Billions $
300
200
100
0
91
92
93
94
95
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00
01
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09
10
20
Total private flows More complete CGP total private flows

Official flows
figure 47.1 Total official and total private flows—philanthropy, remittances, investment—
from OECD donor countries to developing countries, 1991–2010
Source: Data from Center for Global Prosperity (CGP).
400
Billions $ 300
200
100
0
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Private investment flows Philanthropic flows
Official flows more complete CGP
Remittances philanthropic flows
figure 47.2 Official, private investment, philanthropic, and remittance flows from OECD
donor countries to developing countries, 1991–2010
Source: OECD, Hudson Institute’s remittance calculations from DAC donors to DAC recipients based
on data from the World Bank’s Migration and Remittances Team’s Bilateral Remittance Matrix, 2010,
Hudson Institute, 2005–12. Data from Center for Global Prosperity (CGP).
decreased substantially in the past decade, allowing for migrants to transfer money securely
regardless of their base location.
Philanthropy involves numerous actors, including foundations, private and voluntary
organizations, corporations, religious organizations, and volunteers. In traditional donor
nations and emerging economies, private relief and development assistance travel through a
variety of channels. Philanthropy data for the U.S. are more complete than for other coun-
tries. According to recent data, U.S. philanthropy going to international relief and develop-
ment causes amounted to $39 billion in 2010, outpacing U.S. ODA by nearly $10 billion. This
philanthropic value is composed of $7.6 billion from corporations, $4.6 billion from founda-
tions, $14 billion from private and voluntary organizations, $7.2 billion from religious organ-
izations, $3.7 billion in volunteer time, and $1.9 billion in private financial assistance to
students. International philanthropy from the other twenty-two DAC donor nations in 2010
is estimated at $17 billion (Hudson Institute 2012), although this amount is under-reported
because not all DAC donors adequately measure private giving. The total value of global phi-
lanthropy is even harder to estimate, as there are even fewer data on philanthropy from
emerging economies.
As research into measuring philanthropic flows improves, other donor countries’ govern-
ments may also begin to value the size and opportunities that this financial flow offers, lead-
ing to better measurement and publicity. The UK government has already appointed a
Philanthropy Ambassador in an effort to engage the philanthropic community and promote
philanthropic activities. The Japanese government, in collaboration with Osaka University,
has also begun measuring private giving.
The rise of philanthropy goes beyond the borders of traditional donor nations. Emerg-
ing market economies such as China, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa, with eco-
nomic growth and the emergence of high net-worth individuals, are also seeing a rise in
giving. In India, individual giving increased by 50 percent from 2006 to 2011, and more
high net-worth individuals are beginning to establish foundations (Sheth and Singhal
2011). Younger family members are playing an active role in the launching of these founda-
tions and in local development. Similarly, after the 2008 earthquake in China, the Chinese
upper and middle classes were encouraged to give through a remarkably well-organized
Internet and mobile campaign launched by Chinese movie star Jet Li. In Brazil, corporate
philanthropy has been on the rise for the past decade, and in 2012 Brazil’s Institute for the
Development of Social Investment formed a partnership with the Global Philanthropy
Forum to further work in increasing Brazilian philanthropy. Similar trends are seen in
Russia and South Africa.
Organized philanthropy, which in the past has been considered an American tradition, is
now rising in various forms in both developed and developing countries, and is increasingly
being channeled to international efforts. These indisputably substantial philanthropic flows
are being developed by a variety of actors. Understanding the role of private actors in relief
and development and the resources they bring to the table is valuable in order to develop
best practices in aid projects and to reassess the changing role of government assistance in
foreign financial flows.
Private Actors
Foundations
Although private aid is delivered through a number of channels, the international develop-
ment community and the public often focus specifically on the role of foundations in devel-
opment, particularly with the rising influence of certain large foundations. According to the
Foundation Center (2011), the U.S. foundation sector has grown tremendously in the past
few decades, increasing from 22,000 foundations in 1980 to 76,000 in 2008. Similar growth
has also been observed in Europe and to a lesser extent globally. Nevertheless, U.S. contribu-
tions from foundations to relief and development causes are relatively small compared to
contributions from corporations, religious organizations, and other private and voluntary
organizations. Foundations constitute only 12 percent of U.S. global philanthropy (Hudson
Institute 2012).
Traditionally, family foundations have led the way in international giving. In 1913, well
before the Marshall Plan era, the Rockefeller Foundation launched research into yellow
fever in Africa, leading to the development of critical vaccines used today. The foundation
continued to support medical research in Africa through the 1960s and 1970s (Rockefeller
Foundation 2013). Later, in the 1990s and 2000s, the Rockefeller Foundation supported
Product Development Partnerships, which were first-of-their-kind initiatives aimed at
controlling infectious diseases globally by partnering with organizations across sectors.
Since the 1990s, the public–private partnership model has been embraced by foundations,
corporations, and governments in a variety of sectors.
Foundations were pioneers in demonstrating that private actors can have a pivotal role in
development, particularly because foundations tend to be more flexible than government
agencies and able to take on greater risk in testing out new ideas. For example, Grameen
Bank, a microfinance institution started in Bangladesh, came to fruition largely as a result of
seed funding from the Ford Foundation. Similarly, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has
taken numerous initiatives in the field of vaccine research, contributing $10 billion over the
course of ten years. Both of these initiatives carried larger risk than traditional government
aid models could handle.
The dominance of Gates, as an example of the impact a single private actor can have, has
been received with both applause and criticism. More than half of foundation giving in inter-
national aid comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ($2.7 billion in 2008). While
this spending surpasses the ODA contributions of nine of the twenty-three DAC donor
countries, it is still small compared to U.S. total philanthropy of $37 billion. The Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation’s ability to create “convergence” on its priority areas is undeniable
(Tompkins-Stange 2011). Through the sheer volume of funding, the Foundation has been
able to invigorate entire areas of health research. Aside from funding initiatives, the Founda-
tion has been successful in driving policy toward its own key interest areas (Freschi and
Shaikh 2011).
Because the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a single donor with such a large contribu-
tion, critics have noted that the Foundation can easily create a monopoly through its ability to
set the agenda, particularly in global health: of the $2.7 billion that Gates spent on interna-
tional programs, 60 percent was directed at global health programs. Before this, spending on
global health was largely focused on maternal child health and primary health care. After
Gates, global health funding increased dramatically in HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and
other infectious disease-based programs. Notably, President George W. Bush’s significant
focus on these same diseases paralleled the Gates Foundation’s efforts. Some of the criticisms
of the Gates Foundation started in 2008, when the head of the World Health Organization’s
malaria program, Donald G. McNeil Jr., noted that Gates’ dominance in funding of malaria
research has led scientists to depend on the success of their peers to continue receiving fund-
ing, thus compromising the peer-review process (McNeil 2008). The Foundation has helped
revive research into malaria eradication and vaccine development. Before 2000, malaria
spending was less than $100 million annually, yet over the following eight years the Founda-
tion alone allotted over $1 billion to this cause.
In addition to their influence over agenda setting, foundations have been questioned
about the transparency of their activities. In order to qualify for tax-exempt status, founda-
tions in the U.S. are required to report overall disbursement figures to the Internal Revenue
Service. However, they are often left to their own discretion in determining the level of
reporting they want to pursue beyond the required basics. The Gates Foundation has been
criticized for its lack of reporting on its decision-making process, measuring results, and
reporting successes and failures (Freschi and Shaikh 2011). Despite the drawbacks, founda-
tions working in relief and development often have more flexibility with their spending, and
can devote large sums of money to causes over long periods of time. Foundations with sig-
nificant assets can direct larger sums of money to single initiatives and make a significant
impact in a specific area, while government aid may be distributed over a wider range of ini-
tiatives and regions. Foundations today have taken on more entrepreneurial approaches, by
applying business techniques to create long-lasting solutions.
While Bill Gates has become the face of philanthropy in the U.S., in emerging economies,
high net-worth individuals are also engaging in philanthropy. Perhaps the most famous in
Indian philanthropy is the work done by the Tata family, which established the Tata Trusts in
1919. The Tata model of philanthropy focuses on creating long-term institutions, and these
trusts have funded a number of hospitals, educational institutes in science research, and a
performing arts center. In addition to the Tata family, Azim Premji, chairman of the Indian
tech company Wipro, created his own foundation in 2001 in order to improve education.
Much of this foundation’s work in elementary school education is done in public–private
partnership with the Indian government. Like the movement in the U.S. foundation sector,
the Azim Premji Foundation has committed to measuring outcomes and remaining trans-
parent. In addition, the Shiv Nadar Foundation and the Bharti Foundation, both initiated by
high net-worth individuals, work on education issues.
Philanthropy in other emerging economies is also on the rise. According to the Founda-
tion Center (2011), foundation spending in Brazil amounts to $2 billion annually. In China,
economic growth has given a number of individuals a billionaire status. While Chinese phi-
lanthropy is highly regulated, the value of total giving has more than quadrupled since
2006, and high net-worth individuals are becoming increasingly active in philanthropy.
For example, Yu Pengnian, a real estate developer, donated $1.2 billion through his charity,
which focuses on health and education. In Russia, where philanthropy has only recently
become part of mainstream society, a similar trend is seen with high net-worth individuals
establishing foundations. The public’s growing trust in Russian charities has enabled greater
involvement by these private institutions in domestic issues such as HIV/AIDS and tuber-
culosis, orphan care, and education. This rise in local philanthropic activities demonstrates
that solutions are beginning to grow locally from both the public and private sector in
Philanthropy is beginning to bloom in Africa as well. However, much of Africa’s giving is
limited to the continent’s emerging economies, such as South Africa and Nigeria. Besides
local philanthropy, African diaspora members abroad are launching foundations to work in
their countries of origin. Mo Ibrahim, who is Sudanese-born but now resides in the UK,
launched his foundation in order to promote better governance and democracy in Africa.
The Mo Ibrahim Prize is awarded annually to African leaders who demonstrate fairness and
good leadership while in office. In addition to the prize, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation offers
educational scholarships to young Africans.
While foundations in emerging economies vary in size and activities, they do share some
similarities. For example, there is a large focus on institution building, particularly in edu-
cation and health, both areas in need of improvement in developing nations. This focus is
intuitive, and demonstrates that philanthropists abroad are in tune with the needs of the
population, especially in areas where the public sector may fall short.
Private and Voluntary Organizations

The non-profit sector in donor countries and recipient countries has increased tremen-
dously. From the late 1990s, the number of non-profits in the U.S. has grown by 60 percent in
a span of a decade. In 2004–5 the U.S. non-profit sector brought in $1.6 trillion in reve-
nue; $300 billion per year is estimated to come from private donors, the majority of them
individuals (Kapur and Whittle 2010). Individual giving to organizations comprises a large
portion of the $14 billion in private spending on international development causes. This fig-
ure excludes donations from foundations and corporations, which are attributed directly to
those sources. Members of InterAction, a coalition of U.S.-based international relief and
development non-governmental organizations (NGOs), report increasing activities with the
private sector in partnerships that exclude the government (InterAction 2011). In addition to
short-term humanitarian work, the majority of InterAction members are focusing on long-
term solutions in their programming. Furthermore, NGOs are working across sectors and are
partnering with local institutions (Kharas, Makino, and Jung 2011). Civil society is growing
internationally as well, providing opportunities for a local voice in international development
projects. During the 2008 High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (held in Accra, Ghana), 360
civil society organizations from eighty countries were recognized as independent “develop-
ment actors in their own right.” Civil society groups were also represented at the 2011 High
Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (held in Busan, South Korea). The declaration from this
meeting states that civil society is vital in implementing development policies.
The rise of numerous private actors in development and the resulting possibility of frag-
mentation have caused concern among some policy-makers. Although there are signifi-
cantly more private actors than governments, the NGO sphere, like the foundation sector, is
dominated by a few large institutions. The largest NGOs have annual budgets surpassing
$100 million, and some, like World Vision, have budgets in the billions. These organizations
have thousands of employees worldwide, a history of working with local governments, and
the capacity to perform extensive monitoring and evaluation of their projects. Furthermore,
NGOs, working through civil society networks, prefer to implement initiatives by using local
groups.
The rise of technology and other convenient methods to promote individual giving have
helped civil society continue to grow, particularly in relief and development. The 2010 Haiti
earthquake brought increasing attention to individual givers equipped with mobile technol-
ogy: it is estimated that individuals gave $43 million to Haiti relief efforts using text messag-
ing, with the majority of individuals donating for the first time (Smith 2012). However, once
they had experienced the ease of mobile giving, more than half of the donors made contribu-
tions to other disaster relief efforts post-Haiti via mobile phones. Technology and its ease
of giving have increased “impulse giving,” or making a small contribution on the spur of
the moment without doing significant research. While individual contributions are small,
the sheer number of people with a cell phone can result in contributions totaling millions of
dollars. The “Text for Haiti” campaign is an example of a fundraising strategy used by NGOs
and aimed at individual donors in response to an event. Besides specific campaigns, numer-
ous online platforms have been developed to make it easier to reach local non-profits. For
example, GlobalGiving.com vets organizations to ensure that small NGOs abroad are using
the funds appropriately. Similarly, Kiva.org works through an online platform to provide
microloans to individuals.
Improved technology has eased financial transactions, increased the speed of giving, and
improved communications, allowing non-profits to target donors on an individual level—a
vast difference from the traditional grant-seeking model in which NGOs sought out funds
from government agencies or large foundations. Platforms such as give2asia.org have begun
targeting individual and corporate philanthropy to specific geographic regions. These same
technologies that are creating new fundraising mechanisms for NGOs may also be used to
advance accountability (Kapur and Whittle 2010). While GlobalGiving.com allows an

NGO to tap into a new source of revenue, it also creates external pressure on the organiza-
tion to maintain a public track record in order to be eligible to continue raising funds
through its site.
Sharing best practices among the vast number of civil society groups needs to be encour-
aged. In addition to creating networks, NGOs have begun to share information and imple-
ment geographic information systems (GIS) technology to map their activities. During the
aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, organizations working in the area provided detailed activ-
ities of their projects and locations. This information was then fed into a publicly accessible
online Haiti Aid Map. Such information sharing not only provides a way to coordinate
efforts, but helps hold organizations accountable to their donors. The increase in private
funding to relief and development has enabled non-profit organizations working in this sec-
tor to employ innovative techniques in fundraising, reporting, and project implementation.
Corporations
While foundations and other civil society organizations are often considered the more typi-
cal non-governmental actors in relief and development, corporations have also worked in
this space for decades. This involvement has been through a variety of methods, including
direct cash contributions, in-kind donations, corporate foundations, employee volunteer-
ism, and employee matching programs. Corporate interest in international philanthropy
continues to grow. According to the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy
(CECP), as companies expand their business operations abroad, their international philan-
thropic activities also expand (CECP 2012).
The highest dollar value of corporate involvement in relief and development is given
through in-kind donations within the health sector. Such giving has a long history, especially
among U.S. pharmaceutical companies. One of the first successful public–private partner-
ships was in combating river blindness, a neglected tropical disease prevalent in some of the
poorest regions of the world. The partnership between Merck, a variety of multilateral organ-
izations including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank, and inter-
national and local communities was launched in 1987. Today, it is one of the largest medical
donation programs. The partnership has provided over 500 million treatments to individu-
als living in the most remote areas of the world. Traditional medical donation programs for
neglected tropical diseases, tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS remain popular, and over
90 percent of the $7.6 billion in U.S. corporate giving is attributed to in-kind pharmaceutical
donations of drugs for these and many other diseases. While other industries also engage in
significant philanthropy, drug donations are higher in value and easier to measure and report
than other forms of corporate contributions.
Outside of the U.S., corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained significant traction.
For example, in China, while 20 percent of philanthropic contributions come from individu-
als, the majority of the balance comes from corporations. Chinese firms engage in corporate
social responsibility both in China and abroad, particularly in Africa, where CSR initiatives
improve the public perception of Chinese firms. Indian companies are also active in CSR
and are estimated to have spent $7.5 billion dollars in initiatives in 2006. In India there is
great overlap between corporate foundations and family foundations.
Social responsibility in Brazil has also become popular over the last decade. In 2010 alone,
top Brazilian companies gave over $1 billion to causes such as education and community
development. Arguably, CSR in Brazil has outstripped traditional philanthropy, to a point
where it is now expected of companies. The majority of Brazilian grant-makers were formed
by corporations. In contrast to the U.S., corporate foundations in Brazil channel a greater por-
tion of their grants to managing programs directly, as opposed to giving grants to NGOs. In
Russia, corporate philanthropy is also relatively high and is estimated to constitute 70 percent
of the value of all charitable donations in the country. As in Brazil, companies in Russia are
open to corporate giving, with many setting up social funds for charitable purposes.
Today’s corporate involvement is moving beyond traditional philanthropy toward more
inclusive business models and a shared value approach where companies create good in a
society while building shareholder value. Through a shared value approach, businesses rede-
fine their products in order to benefit the community at large, reconsider energy and resource
use in value chain production, and contribute to developing local businesses. For example,
Nestlé, which has coffee growing production in Latin America, built up local businesses that
produce agricultural inputs such as fertilizer in the regions the company operates. Building
up local business operations has both created more jobs in the community and helped Nestlé
with its coffee growing operations. The involvement of corporations in development has
come a long way from the precedent set by Western pharmaceutical companies. Corporate
philanthropy and social responsibility have now permeated globally, and are viewed as ben-
eficial not only by the recipients of corporate initiatives but by the corporations themselves.
Religious Organizations
Globally, religious organizations have long played a dominant role in poverty relief efforts.
Measuring religious contributions can be a challenge, as in many countries religious organi-
zations, unlike foundations and non-profits, are not required to report donations or tax data
to the authorities. U.S. religious organizations are estimated to contribute nearly $8 billion
annually in cash donations and volunteer time through mission trips. In addition to cash
donations, members travel to developing countries on short-term and long-term service trips.
Since the First World War, U.S.-based faith-based organizations (FBOs), such as Catholic
Relief Services and Lutheran World Relief, have been active in community development both
domestically and abroad. Today, FBOs continue to play a large role in relief and development,
and their number has increased in the past decade, in both developed and developing coun-
tries. Some estimates show that as much as half of the education and health provision in Africa
is done by religious organizations and churches (Marlink and Teitelman 2009).
While FBOs by definition have a religious affiliation, their activities are not always geared
toward the promotion of religion. A study of FBOs that work with the UN Economic and
Social Council found that almost 50 percent of these organizations have a dominant field of
work that excludes religious promotion, such as a focus on education, health, environment,
and other services (Petersen 2010). Besides FBOs, religious giving also encompasses relief
and development activities taken on by U.S.-based churches, some of which have networks
that span countries and continents. For example, Saddleback Church has over 400,000
churches in its worldwide network. Through its members, the church has been addressing
health issues such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. While FBOs receive some government
funding, studies show that the greater portion of FBO revenue comes from individual giv-
ing. Churches, more than FBOs, rely on individual contributions. Thus, religious giving
remains a top channel for individuals, whether based in developed or developing countries,
to contribute to improving lives at home or abroad.
Volunteerism
While volunteerism is not reflected in traditional cash donations, individuals contribute sig-
nificant amounts of time to relief and development. In the U.S. this value amounts to nearly
$4 billion annually (Hudson Institute 2012). Researchers in other countries have also found
significant contributions in volunteer time from their citizens. In Japan, the annual value of
volunteer time donated to international activities is estimated to be over $2 billion. In addi-
tion to short-term volunteering activities, many NGOs and faith-based organizations rely
on skilled volunteers for long-term work. For example, Mercy Ships depends heavily on
highly skilled volunteers for many of its health care operations. Doctors Without Borders,
Engineers Without Borders, and even Clowns Without Borders all rely on volunteers who
donate their time to relief and development abroad.
With increased globalization of multinational corporations, cross-border corporate
volunteerism has also been on the rise. Companies are beginning to offer fellowship pro-
grams in which the company covers expenses and provides paid time off for the volunteering
employee. Such programs run on an ongoing basis or respond to an unexpected disaster.
IBM, through its corporate volunteerism program, has deployed volunteers during numer-
ous disasters in the past decade. Other companies, such as GE, have provided volunteers
within their sector for help in electrical maintenance and water purification activities.
Whether short-term or long-term, NGO-affiliated or corporate, volunteerism continues to
be a substantial resource to international relief and development causes.
Evolution of Private Aid Delivery
With technology and increased emphasis on social entrepreneurship, private aid delivery
methods are themselves transforming (Bishop and Green 2008). In addition to e-philanthropy,
cause-related marketing, remittances, public–private partnerships, and new financial vehicles
are blurring the lines between typical investment and traditional philanthropy. These new
means for private actor involvement include socially responsible investing (SRI), program-
related investing (PRI), mission-related investing (MRI), and social enterprises.
Socially responsible investing (SRI) is a form of investment that avoids companies that
may negatively impact the environment or society as whole. While SRIs are traditional
investments with a return, the screening component provides an incentive for companies
to incorporate social benefit into their bottom line. SRIs are not limited to developed coun-
tries: according to the Emerging Market Disclosure Project (SIF 2012), socially responsible
investing is rising in emerging markets as well, especially in Brazil and South Africa.
Program-related investments (PRIs), unlike SRIs, are closely linked to charitable activities
of an organization and are strictly defined in the U.S. by the Internal Revenue Service. These
capital investments are made by foundations to support philanthropic activities that have
the potential to return the capital within a certain timeframe. Unlike grants, PRIs have a
return on investment through repaying loans or returns on equity. The main purpose of PRIs
must be consistent with the purposes of the foundation, and the main purpose of the invest-
ment cannot be to produce a profit. Thus, many PRIs have below market returns.
Impact investing or mission-related investing (MRI) occurs when capital is invested in
projects that seek to generate societal change and financial returns with the ultimate goal of
creating a larger impact than can be achieved by philanthropy alone. Impact investing and
MRIs do not screen companies based on negative impacts; rather, they focus on finding a
positive societal benefit in addition to the profit.
Social enterprises refer to non-profit or for-profit organizations that operate using busi-
ness strategies to advance the organizations’ social goals. Unlike corporate social responsi-
bility programs, social enterprises create products that aim to directly impact disadvantaged
populations in accordance with the enterprise’s mission.
Impact of Private Actors
Private flows and the increased involvement of private actors in development have helped
rectify some of the critiques of bilateral and multilateral government aid. Private aid has
brought to light the value of creating partnerships across sectors and with local institutions,
where numerous groups have a stake in an initiative. Increasingly, private and government
aid donors and analysts are documenting the progress of private aid programs, including the
Center for Effective Philanthropy and the International Finance Corporation. The Hudson
Institute (2012) has published an annual Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances which
documents successful private aid programs and public–private partnerships.
Private aid, however, is not without its detractors. While there is reason to believe that pri-
vate aid may be more cost effective than government aid, through the use of volunteers and
lower overheads, evaluations to measure this claim are largely lacking (Desai and Kharas
2008). For example, evaluations of NGOs are often self-performed and tend to highlight the
positives, not failures. One website, <www.admittingfailure.com> shares personal accounts
of failed or problem projects. While this is not a comprehensive, systematic look at failures, it
is a step in the right direction.
Private aid has been critiqued for its lack of evaluation. Michael Edwards notes (Edwards
2011) that foundations lack transparency and are insulated from public criticism. Tending to
set and follow their own specific priorities can limit their flexibility in responding to new
problems and creative approaches. The Millennium Villages Project, a massive public–private
partnership funded by foundations, national and local governments, corporations, and part-
ner organizations, was critiqued for overstating results that could have occurred from overall
economic growth, independent of project interventions. The drop in child mortality in the
pilot villages was slightly less than the drop in the region as a whole (The Economist 2011). In
the early phases, the project was criticized for failing to include control villages for compari-
son. Thus, when positive results were proclaimed, they were attributed to the project, not con-
trolling for an overall improvement in the region.
In addition to measuring effectiveness, the multitude of players within a single partner-

ship program can create its own problems. For example, a case study of the decade-long
Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (2010) funded by a number of leading U.S.
foundations found that participants lacked clarity and understanding of overall goals of
the partnership, which very broadly aimed to improve higher education on the continent.
Furthermore, lack of coordination among a large number of participating organizations
hindered decision making and lengthened program implementation. Large partnerships
often face different standards and cultures among organizations, which can create com-
munication barriers and slow the progress of programs.
When numerous actors are engaged in private aid, they can add to an already fragmented
foreign aid system. As scholars at the Brookings Institution point out: “Multiple donors will
make requests for studies and for individual meetings with country officials; these donors
will establish separate project-management units and multiple procurement practices for
the same products; and they will be unable to coordinate to identify and propagate best prac-
tices” (Desai and Kharas 2008). Fragmentation of private aid among different groups can
also lead to volatility in the disbursements of funds to recipients, impeding long-term insti-
tutional improvements.
Both public and private actors are facing pressure to be more flexible, demand-driven, and
accountable. The role of flexibility is particularly pertinent as changing demographics and
economies mean countries are faced with new and more complex development challenges.
For example, today’s developing world is suffering not only from infectious diseases, but
from chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes, and donor organizations need to adapt to
this change. Programs that are demand driven, as opposed to only donor or government ini-
tiated, have proven to be more successful and sustainable. Private aid has shown that one way
of tapping into such demand is using improved communication technologies; local indi-
viduals and NGOs are closer to the needs of their communities. As seen with organizations
such as GlobalGiving.com and Kiva.org, individuals and NGOs that are based in-country
can now raise funds abroad via individual-to-individual channels, bypassing traditional
intermediaries in the aid architecture. Communication technology has lowered the cost of
creating feedback loops by collecting information directly from beneficiaries. Moving for-
ward, competition among non-profit organizations may increase as each tries to produce
better results in rating agency rankings, knowing that a higher ranking may encourage
donors to provide more funding.
Conclusion
The changing economic and demographic landscape of the developing world, the increase
in the skilled labor force, the emergence of new private players and approaches to deliver-
ing foreign aid, and limited evidence of official aid impact on economic growth suggest
that ODA requires a new business model to reflect a new developing world and new
expectations of aid (Adelman and Eberstadt 2008). Government aid can be leveraged
with organizations that put in their own resource contributions from private sources.
Competing organizations can be assessed by governments based on their proposed
projects’ economic and social impact, local ownership, partnership with local institu-
tions, and achievement of community self-reliance. Too often, the focus on “fixing”
official aid is dominated by discussions of the volume of resource commitments, organ-
izational structure, and the coordination of objectives and players among various
donor countries. Such thinking is conceptually trapped within a world that existed fifty
years ago, when the public sector was the leading player in financial flows to develop-
ing countries. Today among DAC members, this is no longer the case: private flows in
the form of philanthropy, remittances, and investment have made government flows a
minority shareholder.
While the resource shift does not make government aid irrelevant, it does call for a change
in the ways it is delivered. One solution may be to have governments acting more as conven-
ers of resources, where they can help leverage successful private endeavors and facilitate
introductions and regular substantive consultations among private-sector actors in global
development.
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chapter 48
th e wor ld tr a de
orga n iz ation a n d
dev el opm en t
diana tussie and cintia quiliconi
Introduction
The development literature has placed a strong focus on the role of the trade policy
regime in growth, and more broadly on the link between liberalization and growth.
Country performance in relation to these issues has been the subject of controversy for
well over a century. The debate on whether trade was a handmaiden or an engine of
growth was an analytical one before it became increasingly fact-based from the late 1960s
onwards, when developing countries were first subjected to intensive scrutiny in the heat
of the center–periphery debates. This chapter will not touch on the debate but review
the road taken in a stylized fashion. The aim here is not to elaborate on any of these
vast and complex topics, but rather to show interconnectedness as well as the most sig-
nificant ways in which the trade regime has acted and reacted to the evolution of ideas on
development.
Global trade was worth almost US$15 trillion in 2011. This figure represented almost a
third of global production, a comparison that is meant to show the relevance of trade for
development. Thus, traditionally, developing countries have sought differential and more
favorable treatment in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organiza-
tion (GATT/WTO) with a view to increasing the development relevance of the trading sys-
tem (Hudec 1987; Finger 1991). But the multilateral trade regime did not incorporate
development concerns until the Doha Development round, which paradoxically has, since
its launch in 2001, contained the seed of its own failure, given the focus on development it
was supposed to embrace.
A country’s trade chances depend on a mix of conditions and circumstances based on
endowments, internal structures, and the world market context. Policies and internal dynam-
ics matter but they are formulated and implemented within the context of a facilitating or
816 diana tussie and cintia quiliconi
inhibiting global regime. This context was first marked by the GATT and then by its succes-
sor, the WTO, which sets limits and crystallizes trends. As such, what is possible for national
policy is set by the trade regime, itself continuously redefined by the negotiating process and
the right to litigate. The rules established by the WTO and its predecessor, the GATT, have
contributed to the global trade system through the provision of a regulatory framework
within which member countries conduct trade and other commercial relations among
themselves. This has contributed to a measure of stability and predictability as contrasted to
an alternative scenario in which arrangements are dominated by unilateral policies and
bilateral arrangements.
If global collective action is to be acceptable, it must result from a bargaining process based
on the full and equal participation of parties. However, power differentials result in rules that
sanction an unequal distribution of benefits and conflicting interests. For that reason the
trade regime retains heavy overtones of a North–South struggle.
Based on liberal economic theories that assert a connection between open trade and
growth, the regime has sought to promote the liberalization of trade, enforced a set of rules
and regulations, and served as a forum to settle disputes. The system was originally con-
ceived at the end of the Second World War. Its first expression was the GATT, adopted in
1947 by twenty-three founding members. Between 1947 and 1994, the GATT held a total of
eight rounds of tariff reductions, leading to the substantial liberalization of trade in the man-
ufactures of developed countries. The premises underlying import-substitution policies
were so widely accepted in the post-war period that they were incorporated into the charter
of the GATT. Article XVIII explicitly excluded developing countries from the “full obliga-
tions” of industrialized countries and permitted them to adopt tariff and quantitative restric-
tions. Although the GATT covered a wide array of trade issues, it omitted some crucial trade
areas for development, such as commodities.
For most developing economies, the GATT was a “rich men’s club” where they did not
belong. Round after round of negotiations delivered meager benefits for developing coun-
tries. Liberalization remained largely restricted to the large scale operations of industrial
countries (Tussie 1988). In 1955 the trade in manufactured products among developed
countries had accounted for a third of world trade; by the end of the 1960s this had risen to
nearly half. No efforts were made to tackle the issues of trade in primary products. The
panoply of tariffs and nontariff barriers on primary products posed severe obstacles for
other countries to develop downstream processing. Subsidies ballooned after the Common
Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Economic Community (EEC) came into being
in the 1960s.1 As subsidies grew unabated, prices were pushed downwards and the devel-
oped countries were able to surpass the developing countries in the value of primary prod-
uct exports. By 1969, developed countries’ share of world trade had reached over
80 percent.
This chapter looks at the major aspects of the trading system and its relations to develop-
ment. The first section addresses how the GATT evolved in its treatment of developing coun-
tries. The second section analyzes how the use of special and differential treatment (S&D)
has changed over the years. The third section addresses how the imbalance in rule-making
became evident with the results of the Uruguay Round agreements and its implementation
costs. The fourth section addresses how the debate has moved from the concept of S&D to
the discussion of policy space. Finally, we conclude with some reflections about the current
governance challenges the WTO faces today.
the world trade organization and development 817
The Early Years
From the day the GATT was established, developing countries emphasized the uniqueness
of their development problems and challenges and their need to be treated differently. How-
ever, the system did not take into account their development needs except for granting them
a list of exceptions that was systematized under the S&D treatment until the late 1970s.
The GATT revision of 1954–5 marked the first time provisions were adopted to address the
needs of developing countries as a group. Three main provisions were adopted, two of them
related to Article XVIII reflecting the argument that developing countries would be more
prone to face balance of payment instability over an extended period of time; Article XVIII B
was revised to include a specific provision to allow countries at “an early stage of their devel-
opment” to adopt quantitative restrictions on imports whenever monetary reserves were
deemed to be inadequate in terms of the country’s long-term development strategy. At the
same time, Article XVIII C was revised to allow impositions of trade restrictions (tariffs and
quantitative restrictions) to support infant industries. In 1961, the GATT adopted the Decla-
ration on the Promotion of Trade of Less Developed Countries, which called for preferences in
market access for developing countries not covered by preferential tariff systems such as
Commonwealth.
In 1964, Part IV of the GATT—entitled “Trade and Development” was adopted—providing
a specific legal framework for developing countries. This Part IV includes three new articles.
Article XXXVI established that parties should provide “in the largest possible measure more
favorable and acceptable market access conditions for products of export interest to devel-
oping countries” (particularly primary products and processed goods), while stipulating at
the same time that developing countries should not be expected to make contributions
inconsistent with their level of development. In addition, Articles XXXVII and XXXVIII
called for improved market access for products of export interest to developing countries.
In sum, a pattern evolved in these early years in which on the one hand the GATT accom-
modated developing countries’ desires not to liberalize their import regimes based on infant
industry grounds and balance of payments reasons, but on the other hand failed to take
action on questions of market access to developed countries as well as commodity price sta-
bilization. The GATT Committee on Trade and Development was a forum to discuss devel-
oping country issues but not to negotiate legal commitments in their favor, as many
developing countries were not part of the GATT or participated only minimally in its delib-
erations. Developing countries did not see the GATT as a primary forum to debate their
trade concerns; during those years they lobbied instead at the United Nations Conference
for Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
With UNCTAD’s support, developing countries succeeded in establishing the General-
ized System of Preferences (GSP), which essentially provides an exemption from the most
favored nation principle (MFN), with the purpose of lowering tariffs for developing coun-
tries on a basis of voluntary preferences granted by developed countries. Among other con-
cerns, developing countries claimed that MFN was creating a disincentive for richer
countries to reduce and eliminate tariffs and other trade restrictions that could benefit devel-
oping countries. In 1971, the GATT issued an official waiver that permitted developed coun-
tries to grant tariff preferences to developing countries for an initial ten-year period, and
another waiver allowing developing countries to grant preferences among themselves. The
main argument for this system was that reductions in industrial tariffs in previous rounds of
negotiations were not particularly beneficial for developing countries, as most of the prod-
ucts of export interest to them were not covered by the negotiations. This exemption later
evolved into the concept of special and differential treatment (S&D) analyzed in the
following section.
Rise and Fall of Special and

Differential Treatment
By the late 1970s, import substitution provided declining returns in terms of growth and
many of its premises came under siege in development circles. The marginalization of devel-
oping countries from international trade had concurrently given rise to an active campaign
to reform the structure of the international trading system under the leadership of Raúl
Prebisch (Dosman 2008). From the UNCTAD which he created, he had advocated the
principle of S&D for developing countries.
The first steps towards S&D—that is, asymmetrical treatment or non-reciprocity in
international trading rules when they involved transactions between developed and devel-
oping countries—were gradually inscribed toward the end of the 1960s to underscore the
trade–development link. It allowed positive discrimination for developing countries. S&D
had first led to the drafting of Part IV of the GATT on trade and development, and subse-
quently to the more comprehensive “Enabling Clause” approved in 1979 during the Tokyo
Round (Tussie 1988).
The understanding of the meaning of S&D was clarified and written into the fifth provi-
sion of the Enabling Clause: “Developed contracting parties shall therefore not seek, neither
shall less-developed contracting parties be required to make, concessions that are inconsist-
ent with the latter’s development, financial and trade needs.”2 The main development of this
principle was the creation in 1968 of the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) and its
implementation in the early 1970s by major industrial countries, based on the waiver to the
MFN principle for the GSP approved in 1971. However, the GSP did not turn out as planned:
a generalized (as its name indicates) system of preferences subject to multilateral supervi-
sion. As far as market access was concerned, studies soon indicated that its effects were rather
frustrating. Thus, for example, Karsenty and Laird (1987) showed that in 1983 the GSP had
increased developing country exports by only 2 percent, with half of those benefits going to
the Asian Tigers and Brazil (Whalley 1990).
As for what leeway was allowed to protect their own markets, S&D manifested as benign
neglect in terms of ensuring that developing countries’ domestic policies conformed to tight
regulations. Until the Uruguay Round (1986–94), developing countries were able to keep
most of the tariffs unbound at high levels, to use quantitative import restrictions and other
mechanisms of trade intervention. Developing countries were also left out of the loop of the
codes of conduct on export subsidies, import licenses, and other issues. Drache correctly
concludes that asymmetry in the acceptance of rules paradoxically became the institutions’
default option (Drache 2011). In practice, the “development dimensions” of the global
trading system continued to be a bone of contention.
A key factor in the global environment all through the 1980s was, of course, the change of
perception in the development debates about the virtues of import substitution versus
export-led growth. In the orthodox interpretation that gradually gained ground, protection
was increasingly viewed not only as leading to inefficient allocation of resources but also as a
source of the “anti-export biases” that blocked growth. The interpretation of trade as adjust-
ment to market forces turned the tables from a development approach to trade policy to one
in which trade liberalization became the path to development. It was most compellingly
articulated by Anne Krueger (1974), and when she became Chief Economist at the World
Bank it became the official World Bank doctrine in the 1980s. This implied a view of protec-
tion and export promotion as stark alternatives rather than complementary strategies, and
was based on a particular interpretation of East Asian success with export-led growth, which
emphasized “neutral incentives” rather than state intervention, in sharp contrast to the inter-
pretations by Amsden (2001), Chang (2003), and Wade (2003), among others.
Mexico’s accession to the GATT in 1986 was the turning point. The country agreed to bind
all of its tariff schedule and sign four of the six codes of conduct of the Tokyo Round, a sig-
nificant departure from the typical pattern in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when countries
that joined the GATT were only required to bind a next to negligible proportion of their tar-
iff schedule and did not have to abide by any of the codes. As the tide turned, a host of coun-
tries, particularly in Latin America, turned to outward oriented growth in an effort to
emulate the success of Southeast Asia. By the time the Uruguay Round of the GATT closed
in 1994, countries were snatching the multilateral agenda as a means to lock in freshly
acquired taste in trade policies or as an element to throw into their “package of concessions”
as a lever they could use to prise open closed markets. With this new thrust came an accept-
ance both of rules and of tariff reductions for the first time. Certainly, in previous rounds,
countries that had already joined the GATT had either stood on the sidelines or had pressed
to be released from rules. But when the Uruguay Round closed in 1994, all countries extended
their “bindings” to almost all tariff items. The Uruguay Round also gave birth to the succes-
sor of the GATT, the World Trade Organization (WTO), which was established through the
Marrakesh Agreement in April 1994. It incorporated the GATT’s principles and added a
strong enforcement mechanism through its dispute settlement system.
The preamble to the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement establishing the WTO states that “trade
and economic endeavor should be conducted with a view to raising standards of living,
ensuring full employment and a large and steadily growing volume of real income and
effective demand . . . in accordance with the objective of sustainable development.” It further
recognizes the need to “ensure that developing countries, and especially the least developed
among them, secure a share in the growth of international trade commensurate with the
needs of their economic development.”
In any case, and leaving aside the conceptual debate on development policies, it was
increasingly clear that those developing countries that relied on export-led growth now
had a growing interest in a better multilateral trading order per se. It also meant that indus-
trial countries increasingly saw them as competitors, and were thus reluctant to grant
them S&D. Turning the tables, developed countries now called for a “level playing field”
(Bhagwati 1995).
New Rules, Novel Concerns,

Fresh Approaches
Imbalanced Rules
Despite the cumulative efforts countries made to play by the rules and accept blanket obliga-
tions, they came out sorely disappointed. Countries soon learned that acceptance of the rules
of the game (including their own liberalization) did not translate automatically into lever-
age, as they found it difficult to decisively influence the process of agenda setting and to shape
the final outcome of negotiations. Over the first decade and a half of the WTO, while the call
for a level playing field gained ground, developing countries made efforts to put forward
technically substantive negotiating positions, no longer accepting the WTO principles, rules,
and processes uncritically.
First, they showed how the rules and outcomes of negotiations were imbalanced against
their interests. The expansion of the agenda under the Uruguay Round, through the intro-
duction of the then new issues, made the system even more imbalanced, as well as constrain-
ing of the domestic policy space as the system moved from its traditional concern with trade
barriers at the border to issues involving domestic economic and development strategies and
policies. Many developing countries have complained that the benefits they anticipated have
not materialized, particularly in the area of agriculture. While developing countries reduced
tariffs, increased bindings, and agreed to tighten rules on intellectual property and get rid of
export subsidies, they did not gain much in terms of improved market access.
In agriculture, even after a reduction by 36 percent, which was the set obligation, in order
to retain room to maneuver, many products ended up with higher levels of protection than
applied prior to the Uruguay Round. For example, the following ad valorem tariffs were iden-
tified by the European Union (EU) as base rates: rice 361 percent, wheat 156 percent, sugar
297 percent, meat 125 percent, and dairy products 288 percent (Hathaway and Ingco 1995).
Subsidies on agricultural products were “bound,” that is, could not be increased beyond the
specified level, but binding levels were strikingly generous in the amount of water included
over and above the leeway to change from restricted to unrestricted categories (the notori-
ous “blue box”)3 and other such loopholes. The following are estimated figures of public sup-
port to farmers: in Japan, US$23,000 per farmer; in the EU, US$20,000 per farmer; and in
the USA, US$16,000 per farmer.
Before the commodity bonanza that started in 2003, in Japan agricultural subsidies repre-
sented 58 percent of the total value of production, and in the European Union and the United
States 35 percent and 21 percent respectively. In short, there was meager agricultural liberali-
zation and in many cases there was room for retrogression (Meller 2003). Japan, Iceland,
Norway, the Republic of Korea, and Switzerland are among the countries with the highest
level of subsidies, and the EU also exceeds the average of the OECD. In some cases, as subsi-
dies shifted from one crop to another the redistribution has actually broken the rules. Thus,
in a dispute settlement case involving cotton, the U.S. was found to have wrongly shielded
some trade-distorting subsidies within the category of non-trade-distorting,4 hence permit-
ting subsidies (the so-called Green Box); it was asked to change its policies accordingly.
The developing countries had expected to benefit significantly from the Uruguay Round
through increased access to the markets of developed countries for products. This was espe-
cially true in agriculture and textiles, sectors in which developing countries have a compara-
tive advantage. These two sectors remained those subject to the highest levels of protection
in industrial countries. Tariff peaks continued to be an embedded feature of the system, par-
ticularly in these two sectors, and continued to affect in particular developing country
exports. About three-fifths of total imports into industrial economies of tariffs that exceed 15
percent (which represent slightly less than 8 percent of these countries’ tariff schedules) came
from developing countries (Hoekman, Ng, and Olarreaga 2002).
Developed countries’ subsidies are partly redundant from the point of view of their
domestic markets, to the extent that tariff and nontariff protection make domestic consum-
ers pay higher prices. This is why the computable general equilibrium simulations men-
tioned above indicate that the relevant issue from the point of view of liberalizing agriculture
is actually market access, particularly tariff rates applied beyond the minimum quota of
market access. However, developing countries are affected by subsidies in two ways. First,
they have to compete with subsidized agricultural goods in their own markets. In this regard,
even the full elimination of export subsidies, as proposed during the Doha Round of negoti-
ations, may hardly solve the problem, so long as production subsidies equally allow produc-
ers to sell below production costs. Second, developing countries lose export opportunities in
third markets. This is particularly true of cotton, where world market distortions are essen-
tially generated by production subsidies in the U.S. (Khor and Ocampo 2011).
Tariff escalation by industrial countries retained substantial loading against imports from
developing countries. Much more important for development strategy were the provisions
on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPs). All members had to recog-
nize minimum rights for owners of intellectual property, and to establish national enforce-
ment mechanisms. Under these provisions the pharmaceutical industry was able to hold
back on making valuable drugs available to developing countries. In the case of Argentina it
has been estimated that rents of $425 million per year may have been transferred from
domestic to international pharmaceutical industries (Nogués 2005). The right to other pol-
icy instruments was also narrowed down and challenged in WTO committees and the dis-
pute settlement mechanism: price bands5 and simplified drawback schemes (in Chile), price
reference system for imports (in Uruguay), export credits (in Brazil), and regional subsidies
for tobacco and port development (in Argentina), among others. An underlying reason for
the imbalanced outcome was that negotiations were not used to open foreign markets, but as
a means of locking in reforms. In this context of enfeebled bargaining power, the world of
ever growing continuous negotiations strengthened essential asymmetries, subjecting devel-
oping countries to disciplines from which they had previously been exempt. Negotiations
often turned out to be opportunities for a combination of structural adjustment packages
along a comparative advantage pattern.
Implementation Costs
The implementation problems were the second thrust of the link between trade and devel-
opment. When the costs of new obligations hit the raw nerve of policy, developing countries
identified the multiple problems they faced when implementing their own obligations.
In the run-up to the Seattle Ministerial Conference at the end of 1999, developing countries
spoke up at the WTO and tabled papers on the implementation problems, and a group of
them prepared a list of implementation issues that they wanted resolved.
This list was included in the draft Ministerial Declaration prepared by the Chair of the
General Council. With the failure of the Seattle Ministerial Conference in 1999, nothing was
agreed. The developing countries then actively pursued the issue in the process of preparing
for the next Ministerial Conference in Doha in 2001: a draft decision on implementation-
related issues was prepared, and a compilation of over a hundred outstanding implementa-
tion issues and proposals for their consideration was issued.6
After the Seattle fiasco, the developing countries made the negotiations on resolving
implementation issues their top priority. They asked for priority solutions to these con-
cerns, and wanted to defer proposals of the developed countries for introducing yet more
new areas (the Singapore issues) into the WTO mandate. However, the developed countries
made it clear they were not interested in discussing the implementation issues, which to
them were the result of previous negotiations (the Uruguay Round) whose outcome had
already been agreed on. They wanted to push ahead instead with injecting new issues into
the WTO.
In the aftermath of 9/11, when the Doha Ministerial Conference was convened, the devel-
oping countries held a strong bargaining position and so succeeded in placing implementa-
tion-related concerns in four areas of the Ministerial Declaration that launched the Doha
Work Programme: First, a separate Doha Ministerial decision on implementation-related
issues and concerns was adopted,7 which addressed several of the problems faced by mem-
bers. However, the more important and difficult issues remained unresolved, and although
this document is supposed to contain decisions to resolve problems, in fact many of them
merely refer the particular matter to some WTO body or other for further discussion.
Second, a full section of the Doha Declaration (Paragraph 12) dealt with implementation
issues. It mentioned that negotiations on outstanding implementation issues should be part
of the Work Program. The outstanding implementation issues and their negotiations are part
of the single undertaking, which means that an outcome on these issues is to be an integral
part of the whole set of agreements on the various issues of the Doha Work Program. There
was also a deadline set for reporting back on the progress of the implementation negotia-
tions by the end of 2002. The position of Paragraph 12 (as the first item of the work program)
and the early deadline (before the conclusion of the negotiations on other issues such as agri-
culture or the Singapore issues) showed that there was an intention to give priority treatment
to the implementation issues in the Doha Work Program.
Despite the prominence given to implementation at Doha, however, those issues were
subsequently pushed out of sight. As awareness on implementation costs grew, countries
resisted all proposals from developed countries to negotiate the introduction of still newer
agreements or rules in the WTO, first on labor standards and second on the “Singapore
issues.” The latter is a set of issues (investment, competition policy, transparency in govern-
ment procurement, and trade facilitation) that the developed countries introduced at the
WTO’s first ministerial meeting held in Singapore in 1996. If accepted as the subject of new
rules, these issues would have greatly expanded the mandate of the WTO. Since 1996, these
issues have bounced back and forth in the WTO’s negotiating process.
The stalemate between the two camps reached a record high at the Ministerial Conference
in Cancun in October 2003. The meeting collapsed, and the list of proposals compiled and
submitted by developing countries also went down the drain. The trade and development
issues then took a new turn in terms of substance and process, as we shall now review.
Space for Development Policy
Of equal or greater relevance to implementation are the constraints imposed on their policy
space to implement development-oriented measures such as promotion of local industries
or adoption of new technologies. The changeover from the GATT to the WTO substantially
altered the range of available development policies (DiCaprio and Gallagher 2006). In
addition to imposing disciplines on a wider range of activities, the WTO was also better
equipped than the GATT to enforce compliance given the change in the Dispute Settlement
agreement.
The agreement on subsidies allowed developed countries a free hand with their own sub-
sidies (e.g. for research and development, regional development, and environmental protec-
tion) but outlawed subsidies normally used by developing countries (for export
diversification). In turn, the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs)
prohibits developing countries from making use of local-content policy (which developing
countries had used to increase the use of local materials and improve linkages to the local
economy) and some aspects of foreign exchange balancing (export targets aimed at correct-
ing balance-of-payments problems). This prevents developing countries from taking policy
measures that promote domestic industrial development, and that had previously been used
by the present industrial countries and several developing countries.
The Agreement on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for the first time set minimal stand-
ards for the whole range of intellectual property. Developing countries, which previously
had enjoyed the ability to set their own IPR policies, are now constrained by having to adhere
to IPR standards that are not only high but also sanction monopoly rights to firms in devel-
oped countries. Prior to the WTO agreement, several developing countries had exempted
pharmaceutical drugs and food from patentability, and had an active policy of promoting
generic medicines. However, this policy of exemption can no longer be maintained, as the
agreement prohibits exemptions on the basis of sectors. The agreement has therefore
increased the costs for local firms in developing countries to access technology. Further-
more, in contrast to the strict protection of the rights of the innovator, there is no compara-
ble protection of the rights of countries over their natural resources, nor of the rights of
traditional communities over their ancestral knowledge. In this sense, there is an incentive
for “biopiracy” (Khor and Ocampo 2011) or the misappropriation of biological resources
and traditional knowledge over the use of natural resources that mainly originate from
The services agreement has also increased pressure to open up service sectors—such as
finance, utilities, business services, and telecommunications—to foreign participation, which
could put local service providers at a disadvantage. In the traditional area of goods, several
developing countries have also faced problems from rapid tariff decreases, sometimes as the
result of national decisions to bring tariffs below WTO bound levels, commitments made
in free trade agreements with industrial countries, and, in many low-income counties,
c onditions placed on financial support from international financial institutions. In the indus-
trial sector, many African and Latin American countries have suffered “de-industrialization.”
Similarly, as pointed out, in agriculture, liberalization has reduced the capacity of developing
countries to compete against subsidized goods from industrial countries.
The results of the Uruguay Round are a fundamental paradigm shift in terms of the con-
ception of development at the WTO. Since then the basic objective of trade disciplines
became to oblige all WTO members to abide by the same rules. As Abugattas and Paus
(2008) state, this meant a paradigm shift from a development-oriented S&D to an adjustment-
oriented and vanishing S&D. Under the WTO, S&D was limited basically to longer transition
periods and the provision of technical assistance in order to allow developing countries to
implement those multilateral commitments. It is widely acknowledged that those multilat-
eral commitments limited space for industrial policies through the agreements on subsidies
and countervailing measures, the agreement on agriculture, TRIMs, TRIPs, and the General
Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) (see, for example, World Bank 1993; Gallagher
2005). However, they also agree that certain policy space is still available for active public
development policies.
As S&D was seen to be a losing battle while at the same time a new balance of global eco-
nomic power began to emerge, the focus of the debate shifted to policy space for develop-
ment policies. Some economists, including Rodrik and Stiglitz, have proposed a much more
proactive role for economic policies. This may be interpreted as suggesting that developing
countries could increase their current policy space only by opting out of at least some of
their international commitments. Moreover, Rodrik (2007) argues that developing coun-
tries should embrace an alternative view of the world trade system in which the centrality of
trade has to be questioned, particularly because a development-friendly international trade
regime cannot exclusively focus on improving poor countries’ access to developed coun-
tries’ markets. Instead, the focus should be on experimenting with institutional arrange-
ments and leaving room for them to devise their own solutions to the problems or poverty
traps they face.
While a reclaiming of policy space gained ground in the WTO after the Doha Round,
North–South economic integration agreements resulted in further constraints on policy
space. The web of bilateral asymmetric trade agreements between developed and developing
countries reproduce the patterns that have characterized developing countries when they
focus their expectations and complaints on asymmetries in market access (Quiliconi and
Wise 2009).
Governance
Finally, although WTO governance brought improvements in relation to the GATT, its deci-
sion-making process also came under fire for not allowing meaningful participation of
developing countries. This was especially so in the earlier years of the WTO, during which
the major developed countries were able to leave out the developing countries that com-
plained about the decision-making process, especially during Ministerial Conferences
where the most important resolutions are adopted.
After the 1999 Ministerial Conference (the so-called “Battle of Seattle”), asymmetries in
the WTO became a matter of concern for business and civil society alike. A new awareness
and the power of numbers (i.e. the jump in WTO membership) gradually gave way to a
new negotiating dynamic based on the formation of multiple negotiating coalitions. Pent-up
dissatisfaction reemerged at the subsequent Ministerial Conference in Cancun in 2003. This
time governments prepared beforehand, showing their ability to act in pursuit of collective
interests and in favor of leveling the playing field. Brazil, the third largest exporter of food-
stuffs, took the lead and joined forces with other emerging powers—China, India, and South
Africa—as well as with leading agricultural exporters in Latin America.
Particularly remarkable was the rise within the WTO of a “G20 developing countries”
centered on Brazil and India.8 Following in the footsteps of the Cairns Group, the G20 was
set up just before the Cancun Ministerial Conference in order to coordinate pressure on the
EU and the U.S. to reduce their import tariffs, export subsidies, and domestic support in
agriculture. By then China was “dictating global prices for nearly everything from copper to
microchips,” since its share of world trade had jumped from 1 percent to more than 6 percent
in the last twenty years (Blázquez-Lidoy, Rodríguez, and Santiso 2006: 32). Leaning on com-
modity power as the new engine of growth, countries flexed their muscles against the histor-
ical rigidities in the trade regime, and especially against the subsidies of developed countries
which, if not brought under control, could now win the race for access to the prized Chinese
markets. After Cancun, Brazil in conjunction with India began to play an innovative role,
showing a greater interest and capacity to coordinate and lead positions.9
Learning from the experience of the G20, tropical exporters in the Andean and Central
American countries have followed suit and come together as the G11, upholding the liberali-
zation of tropical products. Interestingly, this coalition so far comprises solely Latin Ameri-
can members of the Andean Community and the Central American Common Market
(Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Peru,
Nicaragua, and Venezuela). The G33 is another bargaining coalition of developing countries
that emerged, this one aiming to restrict access to domestic agricultural markets in net food-
importing countries concerned about the prospects of premature liberalization at home.10
These new coalitions have a proactive agenda characterized by technically substantive
proposals at each stage of the negotiations, and which is increasingly covering issues other
than agriculture, particularly the so-called non-agricultural market access chapters. Each
one relies on considerable research to support its agenda and looks for windows of opportu-
nity to move. This strategy is in sharp contrast to the ideological battles that countries had
waged in their call for the new international economic order of the 1970s.
Even more interesting is the permanent interaction between the coalitions. Because of the
differing priorities (and sometimes directly conflicting interests) of some of these coalitions,
rifts are bound to appear from time to time. “Alliances of Sympathy” between coalitions build
bridges and demonstrate efforts to coordinate positions and share information with other
developing countries, and at the very least minimize overt contradictions when fuller coor-
dination is not possible. Facilitated by overlapping membership, the bridges between the
G20 and the G33—the first representing aggressive agricultural interests and the latter argu-
ing for the respect of food security—serve as a case in point.
Coalitions frequently come to operate across issues, and are bound by a collective idea
that the developing world shares several problems and needs to address them collectively.
But unlike the confrontation of the 1960s–70s for a new international economic order, the
challenge mounted by these coalitions has not been accompanied by a call to replace the
WTO with an alternative organization. Their mission is to inject momentum when it is lack-
ing and to advance proposals for negotiations (in contradistinction to the attempt in the
1960s to establish the UNCTAD as a counter-alternative to the GATT). They have not fully
advanced a vision of development alternative to the neo-liberal one, and the change that they
have demanded is change within the WTO regime rather than radical restructuring. Mem-
bers emphasize the importance of interests and the production of knowledge to press for
these (Tussie 2009). Nonetheless, their tactics still show a strong policy commitment to dis-
tilling the issues of development and economic justice along North–South lines. There is
actually no strong reason to dismiss these softer forms of associations as fickle because they
allow members freedom of action and multiple allegiances from the onset.
To press the point just a bit further, in the world of negotiations coalitions continue their
tasks. But coalitions are not a matter of principle: they are formed for specific contextual rea-
sons, in this case the need to open up and to an extent democratize the WTO decision-mak-
ing process. In such settings, coalitions play a major regulating role as much through
movement as through existence. But framing and defining problems, questions, and issues
does not translate neatly into a full development strategy. Such issue-specific trade alliances
are restricted to the liberalization of certain products or, alternatively, to the concern not to
give away policy space in exchange for market access, a necessary but insufficient condition
for development, as witnessed by the 2001 Doha Declaration on Public Health. In view of the
massive transfer of rents from developing countries to multinational drug companies, aware-
ness that patent protection may now be too strong has increased. At the same time as coun-
tries accept intrusive disciplines over an ever-widening range of development policy areas by
virtue of the North–South free trade agreements, they use the WTO to resist the continuous
un-leveling of the playing field, and are bent on obtaining a more balanced treatment of
domestic needs. And it is here that much of the remaining value of the WTO may remain,
regardless of the outcome of negotiations.
This proactive posture has been present in a number of areas. Paraguay and Bolivia have
been active in raising the special needs of landlocked countries. Chile, Colombia, Mexico,
Argentina, and Brazil form part of the group to promote tighter practices on the use of anti-
dumping, either of a free trade or defensive variety. Whatever the eventual outcomes of the
Doha Round, coalitions have introduced a semblance of limited pluralism in the WTO and
have led to the limbo in which the Round now exists.
Certainly, the entry of China into the WTO has shaken policies as well as beliefs. While
China’s low labor costs and strong competitiveness pose risks to manufactured exports,
China’s appetite for raw materials and foodstuffs has favored commodity producers. China is
the major exporter of textiles and now concentrates almost 40 percent of world trade in
clothing. At the same time, by 2003 China had become the world’s largest importer of cotton,
copper, and soybeans, and the fourth largest importer of oil. China has become the fastest-
growing export market for a number of countries across the globe. Trade with China is, how-
ever, concentrated on a very small basket of commodities: copper, oil, iron ore, soybeans,
and wood. The new engine of growth may deepen the historical trade specialization toward
commodities—goods usually characterized by strong price volatility. Unless an effort to
deepen specializations is mustered, and over-reliance on a single engine of growth is tem-
pered, dependence on a few commodities will intensify; countries will remain overexposed
to trade shocks, and the inequality-generating forces of international asymmetries will
hardly be tamed. This scenario poses even more questions on the current stalemate than the
Doha development round currently faces, and tears apart old North–South dichotomies,
opening a space for a wider debate about what role development should play in the multilat-
eral sphere.
Conclusion
All told, the important point in the new scenario is that for the most part it has been the tech-
nical specialists who have held center stage, either hired experts and consultants or profes-
sional policy-makers working for national governments. By definition, these specialists
work within the established political parameters of an era. They strive for a compromise
between the concerns of policy space and the technical power of institutionalized ideas;
without the aspiration of delivering a new paradigm, they are smart, alert, and industrious.
In the real world of negotiations this was a door that needed opening; it was not a leap across
boundaries to a new development paradigm, but it has made inroads into the processes of
global governance.
If we are to take up the development approach to trade we need to look at the complexities
of international economic institutions and the negotiations that ensue from them. At the
core of these negotiations lies the question of whether the current trade regime enables
developing countries to design policies that promote development. This is not an easy sub-
ject. Many studies have shown that appropriately designed trade reforms have the potential
to make a significant contribution to development, and, with appropriate parallel measures,
to do so in a socially sensitive or sustainable manner. It has, however, proved extremely diffi-
cult to achieve these goals through the existing trade negotiating process.
For one, the Doha agenda did not change the multilateral process, only its stated goals.
Multilateral trade negotiations are not designed to deliver development. Their purpose has
always been to maximize gains, and through a process of give and take, to move toward freer
trade. To give real life to the development component, it may be necessary to reform the
foundations of the negotiating process itself and to accept that “one size fits all” recipes have
not produced a positive outcome in all developing countries. Most trade agreements have
adopted development as a goal, but the bodies that negotiate them are not responsible for
development, do not have the competence to define what sustainable development means,
and are not subject to the requirements of any other authority except as provided through
international law and other mechanisms of regional and global governance.
Moreover, while most of the literature addresses the correct sequence of policies and the
timing for liberalizing trade, it does not address local conditions in depth. Negotiations are
not paced or shaped in such a way as to allow timing and sequencing, nor do they take
account of the concentration of economic power within countries. As well, academic knowl-
edge is systematically disregarded by the realpolitik of world trade negotiations. Trade policy
choices are path-dependent, and that is why a long-term and tailor-made approach to devel-
opment that allows policy experimentation is so important. The implications for domestic
bureaucracies are paramount, since development should be an integral long-term part of all
phases of the decision-making process, not an isolated goal stuck into an agreement. There is
a disconnection between those in government who deal with the adjustment process and
those in charge of the trade decision-making process. Attention needs to be paid to the
decision-making process itself in order to better address the most significant regional and
global issues that have been identified within trade and development linkages.
Notes

1. The CAP was established by the 1957 Treaty of Rome. At the time, the EEC was a net
importer of foodstuffs, so the first impact of the CAP’s high support prices for domestic
farmers was exclusion of imports. The CAP was so effective, however, that the EEC
rapidly became a net food exporter, with major repercussions in the markets of many
commodities of relevance to developing countries, particularly sugar.

2. Paragraph 5 of GATT Document L/4903 (November 28, 1979).

3. The “blue box” refers to government support payments that limit production by impos-
ing production quotas or requiring farmers to set aside part of their land. Blue box meas-
ures were excepted from the general rule that all subsidies linked to production must be
reduced or kept within defined minimal (de minimis) levels.

4. The debate since has indicated that the division between trade-distorting and non-trade-
distorting subsidies is artificial.

5. The use of price bands provides a buffer that prevents world prices from falling below
domestic prices. It consists of setting a band of upper and lower prices for imports so as
to trigger the application of an offsetting tariff when the international price of a product
falls below the lower band level.

6. Document JOB (01)/152/Rev.1, available online at (<http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/
trips_e/ta_docs_e/2_job01152rev1_e.pdf>, accessed February 26, 2013).

7. Document WT/MIN (01)/17. See WTO (2009).

8. Not to be confused with the G20 Leader summits or meetings of Finance Ministers, this
“Group of 20” within the WTO subsequently expanded to twenty-three members,
including: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala,
India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, South Africa,
Tanzania, Thailan, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.

9. The newfound commodity power was also a factor that enabled countries to hedge their bets
and decide whether or not to plunge into the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

10. The G33 comprises the following countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize,
Benin, Bolivia, Botswana, China, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican
Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia,
Jamaica, Kenya, Korea, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua,
Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint
Vincent and Grenadines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Surinam, Suriname, Tanzania, Trinidad and
Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
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chapter 49
th e rol e a n d i n flu ence

of i n ter nationa l
fi na nci a l i nstit u tions
danny leipziger
Introduction
International financial institutions (IFIs) have strongly influenced development

thinking and practice in recent decades. IFIs have exerted direct influence thorough the
volume of their financial transfers, and indirectly, for example, through their impact on
the resource transfers of others, including donors and the private sector. Even more
important, IFI analysis and ideas have dominated aspects of development strategy and
ideology. This chapter discusses the Bretton Woods institutions—the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Arguably, no development debate can take
place without talk of the Washington Consensus and IMF conditionality, without refer-
ence to the number of people living below the poverty line according to World Bank data,
or, more recently, without discussion of how IFI leaders are selected. The intellectual
contributions of both major Bretton Woods institutions have declined in recent years,
but for many decades, it has been difficult to separate national development plans from
the views, funds, and influence of the IFIs.
This chapter explores how the IMF and World Bank have influenced thinking on global
development by governments, donors, and the international community. The first section
focuses on the period 1970–2000, when IFI resource transfers were large, and these institu-
tions had a major influence on paradigm shifts in development thinking. When govern-
ments were debating economic strategies, when aid programs were being designed or trade
agreements were being negotiated, or when central bank agreements were being signed, the
positions of the Bretton Woods institutions were seriously considered. The intellectual con-
tributions of both institutions were unparalleled in their early decades; they included the
Fleming–Mundell model (Boughton 2003) that underpinned international macroeconomic
thinking, and the Chenery and Syrquin (1975) evidence that growth and distribution need
not be at odds in development.
832 danny leipziger
Next, we examine how the IMF and World Bank have fared in the past decade, and espe-
cially since the recent global financial crisis. We focus in particular on how global develop-
ments have affected IMF and Bank influence on thinking and practice, which we will argue
has materially declined. We conclude with a few thoughts on whether the declining influ-
ence of the IMF and World Bank may be reversed.
The Role of the IMF
Developing economies (DEs) have had unequal relations with the IMF. Unlike developed
countries in crisis, DEs have been short of foreign exchange, exposed to commodity price
fluctuations, and prone to balance-of-payments crises—and thus have been compelled to
take advice without argument. The core IMF admonition has always been to keep the bal-
ance of payments (BOP) in line, inflation low, and fiscal accounts balanced—in order
words, to pursue prudent macroeconomic policies. Although the tone of this advice was
never pleasant (until very recently), it was not inherently harmful to development objec-
tives. Indeed macroeconomic stability has long been identified as a necessary but not suf-
ficient condition for economic progress. For example, the Spence Commission’s Growth
Report identifies strong macroeconomic management as one of the five essential ingredi-
ents to high and sustained growth rates (Commission on Growth and Development
2008).
Much has been written about the role of the IMF during economic crises (Zagha and Nan-
kani 2005; Woods 2008). But Fund influence has been stronger in non-crisis times, as the
voice of both macroeconomic prudence and economic conservatism (Bretton Woods Com-
mittee 2009). As the voice of prudence, often articulated through “Article IV” consultations
with governments, the IMF frequently had allies in central banks or ministries of finance.
They were happy to let the Fund take responsibility for fiscal and monetary rigidity that was
deemed necessary but difficult to enact, given a recalcitrant government or hostile domestic
political environment. Hence, even proud and talented bureaucracies (as in India) valued
harsh IMF prescriptions that helped contain spending pressures. Even nonmembers have
benefited from Fund advice. For example, the anti-inflationary program of the Government
of Vietnam in 1989–90 was designed with Fund advice but not a single penny of IMF or Bank
resources, since Vietnam was blocked from Bretton Woods membership until 1993. The
admonition to follow prudent macroeconomic policies has been largely accepted in most
developing and emerging-market economies, and the positive role of the Fund in this trend
is hard to ignore.
Certainly, the IMF’s advice has not always been right, and nor has it always found the opti-
mal balance between macroeconomic stability and economic development. IMF remedies
may have slowed development in some countries, especially those too small or strategically
unimportant to have representation at the IMF Board of Governors or the help of the U.S.
Treasury. Sometimes the counterbalancing argument for development objectives came from
“the other side of 19th Street,” namely, the World Bank. The IMF’s mis-steps in the name of
macroeconomic stability were driven by poor management during crises and by ideology
during non-crisis times.
the role and influence of international financial institutions 833
Beginning with crisis management, the IMF’s uniform model of adjustment—often

backed by much-need financing—has in retrospect drawn criticism from many, including
the IMF’s own Independent Evaluation Office. Management of the banking crisis in Indone-
sia and the subsequent measures imposed has sidelined the Fund from any meaningful role
in East Asia since the financial crisis of 1997 (Sussangkarn 2010). The “IMF approach” to
liquidity crises, applied in the Republic of Korea in late 1997, was correctly disparaged by
Stiglitz (2002). In retrospect, the Fund clearly was thinking only of currency flows and not
considering structural parameters, such as the high leverage of Korean firms (Stiglitz 2002).
During the crisis, interest rates were raised to levels that bankrupted many Korean conglom-
erates (chaebols), while not halting capital flight; this was a colossal blunder by the IMF.
Luckily, Korea recovered quickly and exhibited strong macro fundamentals throughout,
including a fiscal surplus entering the crisis. But other countries facing BOP problems not of
their own making did not fare so well.
The casualty of harshly administered austerity programs was always economic growth,
often set back for many years, usually led by precipitous cuts in infrastructure spending. As
shown by Calderon and Serven (2004), Latin America’s growth rates suffered particularly
due to fiscal contractions that hit infrastructure hardest. Economic growth rates were invari-
ably taken as exogenous variables when their endogeneity was obvious; the reason was that
although Fund programs are of short duration, their impact can be long lasting. Similarly, in
today’s crisis in Greece, an economy with neither monetary nor exchange rate levers, the
fiscal contraction being advocated is incompatible with the resurgence of growth necessary
to halt the decline.
Past IMF financial models were impervious to growth concerns, and often to social issues
as well. This led many DEs to follow rigid and slow growth paths. Others ignored the Fund
and followed heterodox, rebellious paths that often led to worse economic outcomes,
including high inflation, inflated currencies, and poor economic management; examples
include periods of hyperinflation in Latin America and poor adjustment policies in the
Philippines and elsewhere. Other programs failed because IMF adjustment financing lasted
two to three years, whereas structural adjustments often took at least twice as long. The
Fund’s one-size-fits-all approach of the 1970s and 1980s has been roundly criticized, because
it led in many cases to a low-level equilibrium associated with low growth and economic
underperformance.
The Fund’s interventions did lead to some favorable economic outcomes. In crisis
management, for example, the Uruguay bailout of 1995 pooled enough resources to effec-
tively cover a broad definition of M1, which saved the banks. (Ironically, the banks were
hit again when the convertibility plan collapsed in Argentina six years later.) In 1994,
effective credit lines helped Brazil avoid serious damage after the “Tequila Crisis,” and
bailouts of serious banking failures in Thailand were also well managed. Of course, strong
fundamentals lessened the pain of IMF interventions: large countries with sound under-
lying institutions and strong international political backing got more generously con-
structed bailout programs and better trade-offs between short-term adjustment and
long-term development.
Banking crises are among the most damaging to economic growth and development pros-
pects (Caprio and Klingebiel 1996; Perry and Leipziger 1999). One way that IFIs have helped
countries avoid banking crises is through the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP),
which is jointly managed by the IMF and the World Bank. Started after the 1999 economic
834 danny leipziger
crises in East Asia and the Russian Federation, the FSAP is a diagnostic exercise which looks
at vulnerabilities and financial sector impediments to growth. Over 1999–2009, more than
140 FSAPs were completed. Most were done confidentially for governments, usually at the
behest of central banks or ministries of finance (IMF 2012). Long before the current crisis
raised concerns about the quality of banking supervision, FSAPs were helping countries to
identify and deal with banking problems. Large economies like Brazil, Mexico, and Indone-
sia requested FSAPs in the early 2000s, and central bankers privately praised the exercise
and stressed its importance.
Clearly, the IMF role in development has been complicated. It has usefully enforced
better macroeconomic management and destructively perpetrated flawed or draconian
adjustment policies. But hanging over the IMF’s operations for several decades has been a
cloud of ideology. In the 1980s, one department of the Fund boasted that its leadership
included the “high priest” of the Fund known for his monetary orthodoxy, while more
generally implementation of the so-called Washington Consensus fell to the Fund. Nobel
laureate Robert Lucas’s admonition to “stabilize, liberalize, and privatize” had many adher-
ents at the Fund. This ideology, similar to trickle-down economics, preaches that eco-
nomic probity and market-based solutions will generate their own rewards. Few economies
can afford to invest in this mantra, and even those with impeccable macroeconomic disci-
pline have pursued additional nonmarket policies for growth (Amsden 1989; Kim and
Leipziger 1993; Leipziger and Petri 1993). The Washington Consensus may have partly
originated in the U.S. Treasury, which at the time advocated against state involvement in
the economy and which took advantage of crises to promote neo-liberal reforms via Fund
programs. Some countries were forced to choose between the policies advocated by the
Fund and those promoted by development banks, like the World Bank. More fortunate
countries played off one IFI against the other; the less fortunate were fed strong doses of
draconian adjustment.
IFIs have always been governed and influenced by developed nations, and this has been
somewhat controversial in terms of policy. As a developed nation, France was able to press
the argument that the CFA zone (an exchange-rate regime tied to French franc) enhanced
development in Francophone Africa; the U.S. government intervened with impunity on
behalf of political friends. “Realpolitik” has interfered with policy decisions, and arguably
still does, despite reforms. Recent developed-nation bias may be discerned in the bailouts of
Greece and the Eurozone (Münchau 2012).
Nevertheless, in difficult times, the Fund has had the credibility and the clout to make
workouts happen and to stop the hemorrhaging of reserves by instituting adjustment pro-
grams. Among successful interventions were programs in Thailand and Korea in the early
1980s, Uruguay in the mid 1990s, many of them in conjunction with World Bank SALs
(World Bank 2001). Moreover, the Fund has helped build central banking institutions. With
the World Bank, it has managed the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability
(PEFA) program since 2001 to help improve fiscal accountability. Every dollar that PEFA
saves is a dollar spent on development, and we know that many dollars go missing in national
treasuries (Lewis 2006). The IMF, along with the OECD Tax Center, has also been a leader in
reform of tax enforcement and collection. Improved tax revenues supply domestic resources
for development that far exceed donor assistance.
The IMF and the World Bank:

Cooperation across 19th Street
When founded, the Bretton Woods institutions had distinct mandates. The IMF was to man-
age international financial matters, and the World Bank was to handle reconstruction lead-
ing for renewed growth and development. However, as the Bank began to focus more on
development than reconstruction, responsibilities began to overlap with the IMF operations.
After all, issues in the development sphere, like export promotion, are affected by issues in
the financial sphere, like exchange rates. Similarly, poverty is affected by inflation and invest-
ment by the cost of capital. Macroeconomic conditions matter greatly for the achievement of
development goals.
Nevertheless, the Fund avoided consideration of poverty and social outcomes. It
preferred to mandate austerity to restore fiscal balances, and asked the Bank to advise
on spending cuts. This division of labor was awkward for the IFIs and DEs alike.
Governments had to host “missions” from both institutions. Often these missions were
poorly integrated, both logistically and analytically, and not conducive to economic
development.
This contrived dichotomy ended after the oil shocks of the 1970s, when it became clear
that significant adjustments were needed to reflect quadrupling oil prices. Oil shocks affected
short-term BOP problems and also longer-term development concerns. Moreover, the Bank
became a major instrument in the triangulation process whereby surpluses from OPEC were
in effect intermediated through private capital markets for on-lending to oil-importing
countries. To make it more likely that oil-importing DEs could manage and repay debt, and
to facilitate necessary structural changes in the economy, the World Bank began as of 1980 to
provide Structural Adjustment Loans (SALs). SALs were cheaper, long-term transfers to
facilitate macroeconomic adjustment—and as such encroached on IMF turf. At first limited
to 25 percent of Bank lending, but at times climbing to a third, these large, recycled flows put
the Bank in the macroeconomic game. Many DEs benefited from SALs and used them to
deal with structural impediments to growth and development, including trade liberalization
and industrial restructuring (World Bank 1999).
World Bank SALs had better terms than capital markets or IMF lending. Moreover, lend-
ing arrangements took note of distributional and social impacts. Trade-offs between
expenditure cuts and growth objectives were discussed with a sympathetic institution.
Among other aspects, SALs had a new emphasis on energy efficiency, and DEs, new to the
issue, received advice and additional lending for energy conservation and alternative
energy development. SALs also had many Fund-like conditions, such as cutting unneces-
sary expenditures, redeploying subsidies, and selling unneeded state assets to pay for oil
imports. The SAL process tended to involve all stakeholders: aid recipients got coherent
advice; the Bank received the Fund’s “imprimatur” that its structural programs made finan-
cial sense; and the Fund’s short-term BOP management was linked to medium-term adjust-
ment. Nevertheless, DEs began to sense that the Bretton Woods institutions were “ganging
up” on aid recipients.
836 danny leipziger
World Bank–IMF cooperation also showed signs of stress. Efforts to align programs
included Policy Framework Papers, which aimed to create inter-temporal coherence among
BOP management (including cutting trade deficits and fiscal spending), long-term adjust-
ments (such as the need to maintain imports for growth), and spending for priority social
purposes. Executive Board members, led by the U.S. government and other OECD chairs,
insisted that the IMF certify the macroeconomic soundness of Bank SALs. The Board also
strongly advocated that the Bank should conduct Public Expenditure Reviews to prioritize
cuts for restoring fiscal balances. DEs, needing the support of both institutions, often a nec-
essary condition for capital market access, were forced to outsource many economic deci-
sions. The term “cross-conditionality” gained prominence as issues of coherence and overlap
became prevalent and charges of ideological bullying were voiced (Oxfam 2006).
More difficulties arose in 1989 when the Bank proceeded with a SAL for Argentina with-
out the blessing of the Fund. The resulting brouhaha led to a formal understanding between
the World Bank and the IMF, the so-called Concordat, which lasted for almost twenty years.
The Concordat indicated that the Fund had primacy on matters of macroeconomics and that
the Bank had responsibility for development. These matters were discussed by the respective
Boards, but borrowing countries lacked the power to have their voices effectively heard.
Eventually the Concordat was reviewed by a joint Committee led by Pedro Malan, former
Minister of Finance of Brazil. The Committee advised that Bank–IMF cooperation should
be more fluid and organic than prescribed in the Concordat (Malan et al. 2007). A major
change was that three of the six members of the Committee represented DEs (Brazil, Indo-
nesia, and Nigeria). Governance was beginning to change.1
The World Bank and its Influence
From 1970 to 2000, the World Bank was the global institution most influential in setting the
development agenda through its lending, its co-financing, and its analytic work. During this
period, Bank lending came to account for a large part of concessional financing available to
DEs. Lending by multilateral development banks has rarely been the primary investment
driver for developing countries. However, MDBs have had a major influence on develop-
ment priorities for national governments and other donors, as well as providing cover for the
lending of the private sector. The type and role of financing has varied: the poorest countries
were eligible for International Development Association (IDA) credits, which are highly
concessional, grant-like funding (Leipziger 1983); wealthier countries qualified for the World
Bank’s longer-term, subsidized loans.2 Prior to the advent of adjustment lending (that is, pro-
grammatic lending), lending was for projects, often large or strategically important infra-
structure works that laid the basis for economic growth and development.
Major dams, roads, energy projects, and irrigation systems requiring both financing and
technical expertise were usually Bank financed. Often, having a Bank project enabled coun-
tries to seek funding from other sources, such as the U.S. Agency for International Develop-
ment (USAID), other bilateral donors, or the private sector. Projects so financed required
international competitive bidding, which ensured greater transparency and laid the basis for
national procurement regulations, project analysis, and domestic institutions that liaised
with the multilateral project teams. These institutions later became the core of national plan-
ning and implementation functions in DEs. If one asks the Korean bureaucracy what they
valued most from the World Bank, the answer is usually the training of a cadre of experts, the
creation of administrative apparatus for development, or the formation of a regulatory
agency or local development bank. Funds were important, but institution-building efforts
left a longer legacy.
Having a partner in development is important. Planning ministries worked intensively
with the MDBs in setting priorities and the latter provided a sounding board or validation.
Korea’s Economic Planning Board, Thailand’s National Economic and Social Development
Board, and Malaysia’s Economic Planning Unit all benefited from interaction with MDBs.
This included Bank economic advisory work (so-called Economic and Sector Work), which
provided early support when DE staffing was thin and access to best practice was limited.
These services were particularly valuable for fast-growing economies (as in East Asia) where
structural transformation was extremely rapid, transition economies (as in Eastern Europe,
China, or Vietnam) where paradigm shifts were undertaken, and very poor countries where
expertise was especially scarce.
The role of coordinating flows via consultative groups, formal or informal, was valuable
and well recognized in Indonesia, for example. Exposure to practical policy experience was
also highly valued, and so Vietnamese policy-makers meeting with counterparts from Korea,
Indonesia, and Malaysia under Bank auspices in the early 1980s helped shape policy toward
Russian debt, toward five-year economic development plans, and toward FDI. The Bank also
played a coordinating role for many poorer DEs in need of foreign capital. For example, in the
Lao Peoples Democratic Republic, the Nam Thun II Hydro-electric Project used the World
Bank as late at 2002 to vouch for environment, social, and expenditure management to private
sector financiers (World Bank 2009). In these cases, the Bank and other MDBs crowded in
private investment flows and integrated sound development objectives for the inflows.
Developing countries, large and small, have also benefited from the embedded advice and
know-how in World Bank lending. This is true even when the resource transfers themselves
were small, and in some cases, beside the point. Bank designed projects can be replicated,
and ultimately Bank efforts redirected into fee-for-service contracts and reimbursable tech-
nical assistance programs. Examples where external advice and experience helped even
Middle Income Countries are many, particularly in the areas of environmental management,
private provision of infrastructure services, building of sophisticated transport systems and
inter-modal connectivity, or the design of social assistance programs, to note a few (World
Bank 2003, 2010, 2013; Brushett 2000).
It would be wrong to suggest that hardware, expertise, or institutions were more impor-
tant to development thinking and strategy than intellectual contributions to the development
debate. There were efforts by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and others in the
1990s to disparage the Bank for its alleged ideological bias (Danaher 1994), but no other
entity in the 1970s and 1980s wielded as much intellectual clout. Beginning with the presi-
dency of Robert McNamara, the Bank’s pronouncements, whether on agricultural produc-
tivity, family planning, or income distribution, fashioned the development debate. Influential
academics also played a large role, but putting theories to the test required laboratories and
financing, which the MDBs could provide.
The Bank also began to collect systematic data to track progress and to bolster its argu-
ments. Calculation of poverty numbers began in earnest in 1990 and to this day, the Bank is
838 danny leipziger
seen as the most legitimate source of many development statistics.3 Governments have used
poverty and income distribution data originating from the Bank to bolster applications for
assistance, to help shape domestic policies, and to frame the dialogue around strategy. Data
collection begun under multilateral programs made possible the “Progresa” conditional
cash transfer program in Mexico, the similar “Bolsa Familiar” program in Brazil, and other
social assistance policies. Governments would not complain to the World Bank about its
reported income distribution statistics if they did not have domestic and international
significance.
No development strategy during this period could avoid the intellectual work of Syrquin
and Chenery (1989) on growth with distribution. No economic planning model could be
designed without looking at the work of Dervis, de Melo, and Robinson (1982). No project
would be assessed without the benefit of Price Gittinger’s Guide to Project Analysis ( Gittinger
1972). Major intellectual contributions abounded in the analysis of returns to education,
optimal subsidy pricing, and the elements of cost–benefit analysis. These analytical tools had
in common the measurement of who benefited from expenditures and how pricing could
effectively be used to improve development outcomes. Practical manuals and models on
road maintenance, electricity grid management, traffic safety, and many other infrastructure
aspects were imported by DEs as best practices. Many governments sent officials to be
trained or to be seconded to the World Bank. Many Bank officials returned to their home
countries in high-level posts with experience drawn from actual country cases.
Critics complained that IFIs had an ideological bias that favored market solutions over
government intervention, but this is not supported by the facts in many instances. Cross
subsidies favoring the poor were a basic tool of analysis. Expenditure incidence analysis was
commonplace to target service delivery. There were ideologies that favored getting the pub-
lic sector out of non-essential economic arenas. But even in some critical areas such as the
provision of credit, fashions change in IFIs and in governments. National development
banks are one such example. Most successful DEs have used national development banks to
promote small and medium-sized enterprises, agricultural development, or national cham-
pions. Efforts by IFIs to privatize national development have failed to alter the prominence
of Banco de la Nacion in Argentina, BNDES in Brazil, or a host of similar institutions in East
and South Asia. Governments usually reject advice that they abhor.
Major new strands of development thinking, such as the importance of institutions as
explicated by North (1991), were used by IFIs to promote practical development activity.
Outside ideas also found acceptance at the Bank, and were supported by a vibrant research
department. Major publications such as the annual World Development Report carried tre-
mendous import, particularly in the first ten to fifteen years of its publication (Yusuf and
Deaton 2009). The World Development Report embraced ideas about key constraints to
development (whether in infrastructure or the social sectors) and at times took on contro-
versial topics (such as successful versus failed interventionist government policies). It dis-
tilled development knowledge and provided policy-makers with guidance on what was
known and what tended to work in practice (World Bank 1991). The Bank’s special reports
had similar importance. They included the East Asia Miracle (World Bank 1995b), which
was ahead of its time in assessing the role of industrial policies in promoting development
in East Asia (see also Leipziger and Thomas 1993). Another important branch of Bank
research in the 1990s was on privatization, led by the Bureaucrats in Business publication
(World Bank 1995a).4
Under the presidency of James Wolfensohn, a number of important bridges were crossed
that had strong impacts on development thinking and practice, none more important that
his decision to acknowledge the corrosiveness, wastefulness, and immorality of corruption
(Wolfensohn 1996; Wolfensohn and Kircher 2005). Examples of the new focus in practice
included work by Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi (2007) to systematically construct meas-
ures of corruption; the willingness of donors to include corruption measures in making
assistance decisions; and new programs such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initia-
tive (EITI), the 2006 Stolen Asset Recovery initiative (StAR), and Bank-wide anti-corruption
programs.
Similar to the work on income distribution and poverty in the 1970s and 1980s, the period
from 1995 onward has been marked by the Bank’s leadership in the area of governance. This
leadership is evident in countries where anti-corruption surveys were conducted, public
service scorecards were kept, and anti-corruption commissions or teams were formed. Suc-
cess has been limited, but the global acceptance of transparency and anti-corruption efforts
(aided also by the Anti-Bribery Convention of the OECD in the mid-1990s) as an element of
development programs is now unquestioned.
Many ideas that lead development efforts originated with the International Finance
Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector arm that has successfully mobilized and
leveraged funds for private enterprise investment. The IFC has succeeded by providing dem-
onstration effects, including catastrophe bonds, local bond market development, and ven-
ture capital funds. Even more important has been the Bank/IFC product Doing Business,
which ranks countries by ease of conducting business. Along with the Global Forum’s World
Competitiveness Survey, it is a standard reference, and governments are keen to show
improvement in their rankings (Schwab 2012).
IFI leadership in other areas continues, but its prominence in development has been sur-
passed by the emergence of stronger think tanks in DEs, broader efforts by NGOs, and a
myriad of global initiatives. Notable contributions to the development debate, where IFI
leadership has perhaps helped to mobilize greater support, include the Bank’s Gender Action
Plan (2005–10), the work of the Commission on Growth and Development (2005–9) (Com-
mission on Growth and Development 2008), and the Sustainable Development Network.
But the rise of Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, and China (the BRICs) has led to greater
diversity of ideas on the right mix of market- and state-friendly policies. With the large
resource-transfer role of China, development thinking and practice is no longer the hegem-
ony of Washington DC or even of the MDBs. Their voice has diminished as the voices of the
G20 (and within it the G5) have begun to grow. The prominent question now is where do
DEs look for their role models?
The Current State of Development

Thinking and Practice
Since the onset of the financial and then global economic crisis in 2008, IFIs have strug-
gled to stay relevant. Global economic trends in the twenty-first century do not favor
MDBs. The continued rise of China is foremost among these trends. The country’s
840 danny leipziger
astounding growth rate is driven by a favorable wage-productivity calculus, ambitious

government-led export policies, prodigious savings, and the sheer size of the economy.
This eastward shift has meant that South–South trade has become less a catchphrase and
much more a market reality. At the same time, flush liquidity in global financial markets in
the early 2000s made access to capital easier than ever for DEs. Even previously capital-
starved regions like Africa began to attract foreign investment, and it looked like IFIs were
losing their clients.5,6 Massive precautionary lending in 2009–10 reversed this course tem-
porarily, but the trend remains.
The IMF’s situation worsened after its failed management of the East Asia crises. Those
countries and others with access to external capital began accumulating reserves in rainy
day funds and the IMF lost much of its business. Countries began to feel that they no
longer needed Fund advice or insurance. Prudent macroeconomics was a well-accepted
principle; however, more heterodox policies also began to emerge. They appeared not only
in anti-capitalist governments in Venezuela and Bolivia, but also in the state policies of
Brazil, India, and others seeking to follow the high-growth path of China and finding
much to emulate in the Asian model (Mahbubani 2008). The more stolid position of the
World Bank and its preoccupations with social policies and anti-corruption efforts at the
expense of growth made it less relevant to many DEs.7 Bank and IMF policies, which hadn’t
changed much in the past decade, seemed more concerned with social policies and anti-
corruption efforts than growth. The World Bank’s business model seemed to be about
maximizing the transfer of IDA resources to the poorest countries, lending to middle-
income countries in carefully circumscribed conditions and sectors, and decentralizing in
an ambitious attempt to get closer to the client.8 The fact that James Wolfensohn was
followed by a two-year president (Paul Wolfowitz) and a one-term president (Robert
Zoellick) didn’t help the Bank maintain its strategic edge or develop a strong global vision
that would appeal to its clients.
At the global level, economic discourse had moved to the environment, risk management
strategies, and activist industrial policies, and much of the thinking behind these notions did
not emanate from IFIs. An exception was the voice of Justin Lin, the World Bank’s first
Chinese Chief Economist, who advocated strongly for activist government policies in China
(Lin 2012). There were international commissions on African Infrastructure (Commission
for Africa 2005); global actions such as the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (IMF 2005),
which the G8 produced and the Bank and Fund were told to implement; and the Stern Report
on Climate Change (Stern 2007). Neither the Fund nor the Bank was leading this new global
dialogue on development. Indeed, following a downsizing and internal reexamination, the
Fund languished until the 2008–10 crisis gave it renewed relevance, an influx of resources,
and a voice in the newly reinvigorated G20.9
Emerging-market economies were no longer waiting for new ideas to emerge from the
IFIs, but rather they were doing their own homework and designing home-grown devel-
opment interventions.10 The African Development Bank (AfDB) had gained in expertise
and was now a larger player on the continent, and the Inter-American Development Bank
(IADB) had similarly gained stature to be a more credible partner in Latin America. The
Asian Development Bank (ADB) gained resources and influence, especially in infrastruc-
ture, that the World Bank had begun to neglect in the late 1990s and never regained.
Indeed, DEs had become less interested in multilateral financing. Some had experienced
the Bank’s occasionally strident ideology concerning privatization; often, governments
pushed back when privatizations failed or were rejected by the citizenry, largely because of
poor regulatory frameworks or poor Bank advice or poor media campaigns or all of the
above (Foster and Leipziger 2002; Guasch 2004; Di Tella, Galiani, and Schardgrodsky
2011). At other times, stakeholders in DEs were of the view that IFI boards had become
advocates for welfare programs and mistrusting of investments leading to growth. Gov-
ernments were now in a position to self-finance more and to attract foreign funding with-
out the IFI umbrella. And inside the halls of the G20, the new global forum of consequence,
the World Bank was not seen as the main advocate for development, since there were
numerous emerging-market economies inside the G20 itself.11
What happened to the Bank and Fund to make them suddenly so inconsequential for
development efforts? DEs now possessed the skills necessary to both design and implement
development policies and a much stronger ability to learn from one another as well as from
the OECD. Thus, the IFIs needed to lift their game, but in many respects they did the oppo-
site (Strauss-Kahn 2010; Leipziger et al. 2012). The skills available at the IMF no longer out-
class those available in the private sector or in central banks and universities. As the
supervisory and regulatory challenges of vastly integrated financial markets have grown, the
IMF’s basic advisory services are no longer leading edge for many clients. And the World
Bank, in its fervor to be close to the client by decentralizing to the maximum, lost the com-
petitive edge that its highly technical staff once provided. It is now a minor leaguer in a major
league game.
Furthermore, the development paradigm offered by both IFIs has lost its glamour. The
Fund has not been able to show that it could design adjustment programs that were pro-
growth. Indeed, even its commitment to precautionary lending services has gone largely
unused because countries fear the stigma of a “Fund program” of any kind. Indeed, in the
2008–10 crisis, it was the Bank that provided “precautionary” lending to its preferred clients
like Mexico, India, Brazil, and Indonesia in the form of quick loans for budget support
(World Bank 2008).12 The advent of more statist policies by many BRICs, and the success of
some of these policies, has also left DEs with the sense that they have learned all they can
from IFIs. Yet, there are major challenges in health care financing, environmental manage-
ment, urbanization, and risk mitigation. However, unlike in past decades, the IFIs no longer
seem to hold the answers, either intellectually or financially. The development agenda seems
to have passed them by.
Who is Leading in Development Thinking?
A seismic shift has occurred. The IMF has struggled for relevance and has changed its
advisory tune to accommodate capital controls (such as Brazilian capital import taxes).
The Fund has also acquiesced to join flawed adjustment programs within the Eurozone
membership. It has been lax on banking supervision issues, weak on imbalances, and
inconsistent on exchange rate management. Despite its precautionary lending windows,
the Fund has not helped countries deal with global uncertainty or capital flows. Therefore,
it may well be true that a developing country finance minister can learn very little from the
IMF these days.
842 danny leipziger
The World Bank, a previous leader in many areas of development strategy, has been turned
into a bystander in middle-income countries, a cheerleader in emerging economies, and
reluctant crisis manager in post-conflict countries. Countries are more on their own than
ever. This is in part because of paradigm shifts (see, for example, the notion of a new normal
as espoused by El-Erian 2008) and activist state policies (as espoused by Rodrik 2011 and
Aghion 2012). Countries are also taking new development paths because of new players
(including flows from BRICs) as well as OECD’s preoccupation with its homegrown prob-
lems. Many new development approaches, such as the randomized trial approaches of the
MIT Poverty Lab or the Multidimensional Measures of Poverty, have been developed in
academia and have gained considerable traction. Globally, the UN inspired Millennium
Development Goals (MDG), a concretization of the basic human needs approach of the
1980s, is still a rallying cry for sustained social efforts. Clearly, intellectual leadership has
migrated away from the IFIs.
The fact that the leadership of both institutions has remained unchanged—a European
heading the Fund and an American heading the Bank—also has not improved the image of
the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs). IMF members have witnessed its powerlessness to
force China and the United States to deal with their imbalances; they have seen financing
without a growth strategy for Greece; and they have seen the unmet gaps in international
banking supervision. Bank borrowers sense the lack of vision at the helm of the institution
and see the pursuit of bilateral development fetishes funded by trust funds. Moreover, DEs
are searching for the right forum to discuss crucial issues, since the G8 has lost its power and
the G20 some of its luster, the UN has limited implementation capacity, and the MDBs seem
pre-occupied with internal reforms. This is the unfortunate state of affairs at a time of global
stress.
Note that neither BWI has been persuasive in providing advice on job creation or contain-
ment of health care costs. Neither institution has been quick to redesign new financial instru-
ments to reduce risk. While both are still sources data and projections, neither is any longer a
major voice in the world of policy. And the fact that jobless growth and worsening distribu-
tion coexist with supposed recoveries, the fact that regulation on the advanced economies
could be so poor, and the fact that many now advocate a more activist role for government in
promoting growth has also taught DEs that some major paradigms may have flaws. If so,
which other prescriptions might be faulty?
This cynicism about prevailing paradigms can lead to worse outcomes. Faced with diffi-
cult challenges, countries may decide to experiment with policies that are unlikely to yield
better outcomes, and many mistakes can be made (Commission on Growth and Develop-
ment 2008: 68–9 on Bad Ideas). Moreover, issues of jobless growth and distribution are cre-
ating discontent with globalization in rich countries. More active roles for the state are being
contemplated, but are state institutions up to these new challenges?
The next decade may well be one dominated by risk management, new roles for the state,
and greater expectations that distributional equity be addressed. How to square these con-
cerns with market efficiency, proper regulation, and global economic management is where
development thinking is headed today. Except for the very poorest countries, the challenges
facing the developed and developing worlds are more similar than ever before. This is partly
due to convergence, partly to mismanagement in the rich countries, and partly to greater
agreement on many aspects of development thinking. IFIs played a major role in the evolu-
tion of development thinking, but what role remains for them is now an open question.
Notes

1. Committee Members included: Pedro Malan, Michael Callaghan, Caio Koch-Weser,
William McDonough, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

2. The subsidy element arises from the lower borrowing costs of the World Bank. With the
backing of its shareholders, the Bank can issue debt at rates roughly comparable to those
of the U.S. Treasury, and then pass on these low costs (with a small markup for adminis-
trative fees) to its borrowers.

3. See <http://data.worldbank.org/topic/poverty>.

4. The World Bank’s report on Korea (World Bank 1987) can be seen as an early example of
a contrarian ideology later developed in the East Asian Miracle (World Bank 1995a) and
resurrected in the Growth Report of 2008 (Commission on Growth and Development
2008) that looks more favorably on the role of the state in leading an active development
strategy. This more balanced view of the state was opposed by some governments. For
example, the U.S. Treasury opposed some aspects of the East Asia Miracle report on
ideological grounds. This pitted the U.S. government against Japan inside the Executive
Board of the World Bank, but also influenced the policy advice provided to DEs.

5. This trend reinforces the view that attempts to make Bank lending more programmatic,
more country driven, less cumbersome, and quicker have been insufficient.

6. MDBs have always had their critics. See, for example, Mikesell (2001).

7. The Growth Commission, while useful in attempting to reset priorities, may have
appeared too late on the scene. Moreover, the Growth Report (Commission on Growth
and Development 2008) was released just as the crisis hit the global economy.

8. Aggressive decentralization may have put World Bank staff closer to the client; however,
the strategy proved costly, both in terms of budgets and in terms of maintaining core
expertise at headquarters. Some have argued that this led to a decline in expertise that
damaged the ability of the Bank to help its middle-income clients, who valued technical
advice over either resource flows or implementation help (see Leipziger et al. 2012).

9. This reform was led by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director during this period,
who also positioned the Fund to be the primary source of global economic
information.
10. Brazil executed Luz na Campo and Bolsa Familiar, China the Three Gorges Project,
and India started ambitious infrastructure investment programs, all without major
assistance.
11. The Bank’s claim to be the voice of the poorer and unrepresented countries seemed
unheeded. Indeed, the G5 countries began talking about creating their own BRICS devel-
opment bank.
12. Ironically, because the Bank’s president declined to seek a major capital increase, this
lending burst has left the institution vulnerable to a low level, steady-state of future lend-
ing in a world of bigger flows and larger demand for capital.
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chapter 50
dev el opm en t assista nce

homi kharas 1
Introduction
The concept of charitable assistance is as old as human civilization but has traditionally been
undertaken by individuals giving to the less fortunate. By contrast, the concept of official
development assistance (ODA) is almost entirely a creation of the modern era. Nations have
always engaged in economic transfer for trade, military, and political purposes, but ODA,
formally defined as flows of official concessional financing with the aim of promoting the
economic development and welfare of poor countries, is a more recent phenomenon. Even
the terminology was only introduced and used for the first time in 1969, although in reality
ODA had already been flowing for some years. Historically, official development assistance
has addressed a broad range of purposes, including providing humanitarian aid, promoting
basic needs, fostering economic growth, and supporting the provision of effective, demo-
cratic institutions. ODA thus represents something new from the post-Second World War
period, a type of international solidarity unique in human history.
Systematized ODA traces its beginnings to the Bretton Woods institutions (BWI),
created in 1944 as the world began to envision its recovery from the devastation of the
Second World War. While these organizations had antecedents in the Red Cross (1863) and
the government-funded Committee for Relief in Belgium (1917) (Reinisch 2008), the BWI
represented something different. Instead of simply treating wounded soldiers and feeding
refugees, the BWI had ambitious and long-term goals: rebuild a war-torn continent,
restore its former prosperity, and promote international economic cooperation. The Inter-
national Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the first of the organizations
today collectively known as the World Bank Group, set out its purposes as: (1) facilitate the
investment of capital for productive purposes; (2) promote private foreign investment;
(3) promote the long-range balanced growth of international trade; (4) focus on the “more
useful and urgent” projects; and (5) assist in a transition from a wartime to a peacetime
economy.2 Thus, the origins of ODA were firmly rooted in the notion that international
cooperation was required to create the conditions for all countries to prosper and trade in
a peaceful fashion.
848 homi kharas
This chapter explores the changes in the nature and organization of development assist-
ance since the Second World War. It first describes the context of development in the “Third
World,” where the geopolitics of post-colonialism, globalization, and the role of the state
have been playing out for seventy years. It then examines the organization of international
development cooperation as it adapts from a loose grouping of rich countries to an interna-
tional consensus rooted in the processes of the United Nations and the Millennium Devel-
opment Goals. In parallel, ODA has evolved from donor dominance and its corresponding
aid dependency to mutual accountability and, most recently, to a new Global Partnership for
Effective Development Cooperation. Along with these institutional shifts, the strategic
priorities in aid management have evolved: where assistance should be allocated across
countries to ensure the best value-for-money in terms of poverty reduction; how assistance
should be provided; and what areas should be prioritized. The paper concludes with some
observations about the future of a new aid ecosystem, with multiple actors and interlocking
partnerships creating an open-source development model.
The “Third World” and its Challenges
Initially, the division of the globe into the “First, Second, and Third World” arose as a Cold
War convention to describe the demarcation of capitalist, communist, and non-aligned
camps. However, as the Third World was mostly composed of poor nations, it quickly became
synonymous with economic underdevelopment. Throughout the Cold War, ODA from the
West was colored by efforts to ensure that Third World countries did not align themselves
with communism, but instead embraced the concepts of private capital, investment, and
free trade as the foundation for development. Given this context, it is not surprising that
ODA has always been intertwined with politics, a feature that continues to play out in the
UN (where developing countries have organized themselves into a monolithic G-77 bloc), in
governance of international development institutions, and in negotiations over aid
conditionality.
The politics of development assistance to the Third World are deeply rooted in the history
of colonialism. Almost every country in the Third World, with a few exceptions like Thai-
land, was at one point a colony of a Western nation. Colonial institutions in the form of legal
codes, education systems, civil services, and language have persisted into the present day, as
has the debate into colonialism’s complex legacies (Easterly 2012). For good or ill, and most
probably some of both, colonial ties are one of the strongest determinants of ODA flows,
with a number of Western European nations giving a majority of their aid to former colonies
(Alesina and Dollar 2000).
Many Third World countries achieved their independence through nationalist move-
ments that viewed colonial rule with suspicion. As colonies, developing countries had
seen their share of global output collapse, most famously in India, where share of global
output fell from 24 percent around 1700 to 4.2 percent just after independence in 1950
(Maddison 2010). Similar figures of relative decline were recorded all across the Third World
and spawned a branch of development thinking that linked relative decline to “unequal
exchange” (Emmanuel 1972), a structural reliance on raw materials (Prebisch 1950), and
development assistance 849
other “dependency” theories (Singer 1950; Cardoso 1969). This perspective led some leaders
to question the value of receiving ODA, especially when aid was tied or conditional on policy
change. For instance, in the 1970s Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley campaigned on
an anti-IMF platform, saying “we are not for sale” (Black 2001). Accordingly, there has been
a persistent tension between the post-colonial desire for independence and sovereignty
versus rich countries’ desire to bring developing countries into a neo-liberal world order
based on private capital and market forces. That tension is now subsiding as the benefits
from a g lobalized, market-oriented system have become recognized in most countries, and
the alternative model of Soviet-style planning has been largely discredited.
The first flows of aid were premised on theories exemplified by the Harrod–Domar model,
in which economic growth is driven by the level of capital investment. In this set-up, devel-
oping countries were considered to be poor and slow-growing because they could not obtain
sufficient capital. The role of assistance from rich countries, then, was to correct this defi-
ciency. As capital was unlikely to come in large enough quantities from the private sector, the
public sector was required to step in.
The idea that economic growth was the key to alleviating poverty stood in contrast to
the communist focus on equality and redistribution to increase welfare. With the passage
of time, however, Western views on the primacy of growth became more nuanced. The
watershed event in this transformation was World Bank President Robert McNamara’s
1973 Nairobi speech, in which he included numerous statistics starkly depicting the reality
of poverty and called for a “reorientation of development strategy” (McNamara 1973).
Measuring development by GNP growth, he said, ignored the fact that GNP calculations
weight individuals by their economic worth; the poor thus barely factor into the number. If
growth was not delivering poverty reduction, it could not achieve its objective of promot-
ing a peaceful, stable, global economy. In this, McNamara implicitly recalled President
Truman’s Point Four Program statement: “Communist propaganda holds that the free
nations are incapable of providing a decent standard of living for the millions of people in
under-developed areas of the earth. The Point Four program will be one of our principal
ways of demonstrating the complete falsity of that charge” (Truman 1949). If ODA did not
touch the lives of the poor, it would not be effective in achieving its political objectives.
Since then, despite the disappearance of the communist threat, the concept of basic welfare
as the ultimate end of development has endured as a lasting legacy of the McNamara Bank
(see Figure 50.1).
The political negotiations at Bretton Woods proved enduring, establishing the basic con-
tours of multilateral development assistance for decades to come. Motivated by the sover-
eign defaults of the 1930s, the economic consequences of the Versailles peace agreement, and
the crippled state of European infrastructure, the delegates established the groundwork for
the World Bank.
The IBRD gave its first loans to reconstructing France and other European countries, but
re-oriented its focus toward economic development due to the sheer size of the newly
enacted Marshall Plan. President Truman had approved a program of $17 billion (or about
$160 billion in 2008 dollars) over three to four years, an annual expenditure of almost 2 per-
cent of the U.S. GDP ($245 billion in 1947). Given the injunction in its articles of agreement
to pursue “the more useful and urgent” projects, the IBRD started to shift toward richer
developing countries, such as Chile, when the most obvious large reconstruction projects in
Europe came to an end or were financed through the Marshall Plan.
Structural Governance &
Infrastructure and Capital Basic Needs Environment Partnerships
Adjustment Results
UN Dev.
Decade
[1960s]
Debt Crisis MDGs

IDA
[1982– [2000–
[1960]
1989] 2015]
Cancer of
4 Point
DAG/C Brady Plan Corruption
Plan
[1960] [1989] Speech
[1950]
[2005]
BWI & Paris

USAID SAPs Brundtland
IBRD Declaration
[1961] [s. 1980s] Report [1987]
[1944] [2005]
Dept. McNamara Sustainable

Washington Rio Jubilee Busan
Marshall Plan Colombo Technical Nairobi Development
Consensus Agreements Campaign Partnership
[1947–1951] Plan [1950] Cooperation Speech Goals
[1989] [1992] [2000] [2011]
[1961] [1973] [2015]
1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s >2015
figure 50.1 The evolution of development assistance: key events

The IBRD was not designed to provide humanitarian assistance. Its lending model
reflected a view that countries’ capital requirements would evolve in a linear manner
with their incomes. The poorest countries would need grants and concessional loans, but
the richer ones could expand infrastructure and other public investments through non-
concessional capital, first from the public sector with relatively long-term maturities, and
then from the private sector in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI), bank loans, and
ultimately bonds. Other forms of assistance were left to individual rich country governments
and philanthropic organizations like the Red Cross and various religious groups. In the
United States, President Truman attempted to expand and systemize American development
assistance through his Point Four Program. In his inaugural address, Truman championed
the notion that the scientific knowledge of advanced nations, if properly shared, could elimi-
nate poverty: “More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching
misery. . . . For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to
relieve the suffering of these people” (Truman 1949). However, empathy was not the only
motive at play. As Truman later remarked, the hungry are apt to “turn to false doctrines,”
namely that of communism. Despite its intention to address such towering concerns, the
Point Four Program was modestly funded, with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1950 allocating
$35 million ($340 million in 2008 dollars) for technical assistance (Paterson 1992), a small
fraction of the amount devoted to the Marshall Plan. Nonetheless, Truman’s Program
marked an important change in U.S. foreign assistance, ultimately setting the stage for its
modern form in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Decolonization, poverty, and the fall of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in China similarly
combined to motivate the creation of the Colombo Plan. Australia, through the prominent
urging of its Minister for External Affairs, Percy Spender, began to realize the need for an
outward-looking foreign policy. It organized a meeting among Commonwealth countries in
Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1950 to outline an aid and technical assistance program for
South Asia, agreeing both on communism’s threat to the region and the global benefits of
Asian growth. Although the program was no Asian Marshall Plan (or “Spender Plan”), its
legacy has proved to be an enduring anchor of Western nations in South Asia to the present
day (see Oakman 2010), with many highly placed individuals in member developing coun-
tries benefiting from scholarships and other training programs.
By 1960, donor aid flows had become large and broad enough to warrant professionali-
zation and multilateralization. In the United Kingdom, a 1960 White Paper identified eco-
nomic development as the best way of lifting poor nations out of poverty, and a Department
of Technical Cooperation was created in 1961. In the same year, the United States Congress
passed the Foreign Assistance Act, creating USAID. The World Bank’s International
Development Association (IDA) was formed in 1960 to provide concessional credits to
poor countries that were deemed not creditworthy for IBRD loans. In 1960, rich countries
also established a committee called the Development Assistance Group (later renamed the
Development Assistance Committee, or DAC) to “consult on the methods for making
national resources available for assisting countries and areas in the process of economic
development.”
The 1960s also marked the beginning of the first “UN Development Decade,” launched by
the General Assembly in December 1961. The concept was for a “growth plus change” agenda,
to be implemented through a process that laid out specific goals for each country. Some of
these goals, like a 5 percent minimum national income growth rate, were not generally
852 homi kharas
achieved. Others, like smallpox eradication, succeeded beyond expectation. From this
beginning, the UN has over time set out around fifty quantified, time-bound economic and
social goals, culminating most recently in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
most of which have been largely achieved (Jolly et al. 2005). A few, however, including the
famous pledge of advanced countries to provide 0.7 percent of GNP in the form of aid to
developing countries, have been largely ignored.
The 0.7 percent aid target has had a mixed record. It was never accepted by the United
States, but has provided a convenient rallying point for European and other aid donors. Its
problems partly stem from the weak analytical underpinnings and justification for the figure.
There is a suggestion that the starting point was the 1958 call by the World Council of Churches
for countries to contribute 1 percent of their national income to support development. That
figure dovetailed with academic calculations of the money needed to fill the savings and
investment gap for developing countries to raise their growth rate to meet the UN targets. In
1968, UNCTAD noted that public flows represented two-thirds to three-fourths of total flows
to developing countries; as such, they computed that official aid flow should be 0.75 percent of
GNP. The more modest figure of 0.7 percent was a political compromise recommended by the
Pearson Commission in 1969 but has no formal standing (see Clemens and Moss 2005).
The institutionalization of the aid architecture during the 1960s and 1970s revealed seri-
ous cleavages in the development agenda, with the UN and other multilateral agencies strug-
gling for leadership. Developing countries had a greater voice in UN discussions, where the
focus was kept on aid, basic needs, and human development. The UN agenda reflected a
“rights-based,” individual-centered approach to economic development, as laid out in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the General Assembly in 1948), coupled
with a focus on post-independence state-building. Advanced countries, on the other hand,
dominated the agenda of the World Bank and the DAC and maintained a focus on economic
growth, debt, free trade, and private investment. The gap between these two agendas would
grow so large that in 1977 the Brandt Commission on international development issues was
formed to chart a new path forward.
For a brief period, there was a convergence of views between developing and rich coun-
tries. Robert McNamara was appointed President of the World Bank in 1968 and brought
with him a bold vision. He set out to double the Bank’s overall lending volume in five years,
with a focus on reducing absolute poverty, shifting resources toward Africa, and strengthen-
ing assistance for education, agriculture, and population growth. In 1974 his Chief Econo-
mist, Hollis Chenery, published an authoritative volume, Redistribution with Growth, to
balance the macroeconomic and poverty-reduction issues. But this rapprochement was
short-lived. The food and energy price hikes of the early 1970s caused serious macroeco-
nomic disruptions in developing countries, with bouts of high inflation and excessive defi-
cits, funded temporarily through borrowing from commercial banks. That borrowing
became unaffordable when the United States ratcheted up interest rates in a determined
effort to bring down the double-digit inflation rates created by supply shocks and accommo-
dative monetary policy.
In August 1982, Mexico became the first of many countries to announce that it could not
repay its loans (FDIC 1997), ushering in a “lost decade” for development and forcing a pro-
longed period of fiscal austerity upon many countries. The Baker Plan bought some time for
countries to avoid default by encouraging a rescheduling of bank debts, but it was not until
the Brady Plan of 1989 that a long-term solution to the debt crisis was found.
The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) introduced in the 1980s by the IMF and the
World Bank widened the gap between those arguing for higher public investments in human
capital and poverty reduction and those focused on macroeconomic and fiscal rectitude. To
the former camp, it seemed unfair that servicing the debt should come at the expense of cut-
ting services designed to help the poor, when the benefits of borrowing were often captured
by elites in developing countries. There was clear evidence to show that corruption and capi-
tal flight were important drivers of debt difficulties, but these had deep institutional causes
and could not be easily remedied. Hence the options were cast in terms of stark choices:
default or cut spending. Default, by and large, was considered unacceptable as it could
undermine the basic objective of bringing countries into the global economy. When Brazil
announced a moratorium on its debt payments in early 1987, the response from banks was
chilling: they froze trade credit lines and other working capital, imposing huge costs on the
Brazilian economy. Official organizations that could have provided Brazil with much-needed
liquidity declined to do so.
Support for the Brady Plan, with its perceived tilt towards commercial banks over poor
people, fueled criticism of the IMF and World Bank as neocolonialist institutions with inad-
equate concern for poverty reduction, a perception both tried hard to counter. Formulating
a new approach based on “country ownership,” the two moved away from the staff-prepared
Policy Framework Papers and encouraged countries to produce Poverty Reduction Strategy
Papers (PRSPs, see IMF 2012), designed to foster local participation and to define more
explicit partnership agreements. Similarly, the DAC formally endorsed country ownership
as one of five core principles of the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. Although it
has taken time for some countries to build up their capacity to produce and implement
such strategies, there is now broad consensus that the leadership and responsibility for this
process rests with developing countries themselves. Handily, developing countries them-
selves recognized the costs of macroeconomic profligacy and have become more financially
prudent.
Throughout this period, we have seen that development practitioners’ focus has swung
back and forth between macroeconomic considerations, such as capital and infrastructure,
and individualistic ones like basic needs and poverty. In some sense, the MDGs, with their
focus on subjects such as child health and hunger, marked another shift in the latter direc-
tion. However, the new emphasis on country-ownership has generated pushback toward
growth. Both Ghana and Vietnam added “growth” to “poverty reduction” in the titles of their
national development strategies. Indeed, growth is perhaps the only way to ensure inde-
pendence from donors and the strictures of aid conditionality.
The country-ownership focus requires a new architecture of development cooperation
that has yet to be fully put in place. The prevailing architecture was organized around donor
meetings, whether in Paris, at the DAC, or Washington, at the World Bank. Developing
countries had muted voices at these gatherings, despite some efforts to increase their partici-
pation. However, it has not been easy to replace these with country-based meetings. In some
cases, developing countries do not have the capacity to host effective meetings (nor the
willingness to disagree publicly with key donors). In other cases, donors have not delegated
sufficient authority to their in-country representatives to permit them to make decisions on
new partnerships.
Part of the difficulty with any form of meeting as the centerpiece of the development archi-
tecture is the sheer number of stakeholders—a problem that has become known as donor
854 homi kharas
proliferation. In 1960, there were on average only two donors active in each developing
country. By 2006, that number had grown to more than twenty-eight (Frot and Santiso
2009). Simultaneously, a growing number of international and local civil society organiza-
tions have become prominent donors, with some international non-governmental organiza-
tions (INGOs) now larger than many official aid agencies. Collectively, private philanthropy
accounts for $50 to $75 billion in grants each year, and these organizations have a large
on-the-ground staff presence and accumulated experience (Kharas, Makino, and Jung 2011).
While most INGO programs involve a large number of small programs, the private business
sector, and some foundations, are attempting to develop scalable development solutions
through new business models aimed at the “base of the pyramid” and institutional invest-
ments, like agricultural research. In each case, such efforts usually involve some form of
public–private partnerships.
An additional complication has been the intersection of the development and environ-
mental agendas. The artificial separation between these was recognized as early as the
Brundtland Report of 1987, which introduced a “sustainable development framework.” Real
change started in 1992, at the Rio de Janeiro summit, out of which came the goals of promot-
ing conservation, growth, and equality. Twenty years later, the Rio + 20 conference again
proposed a formal linkage between environment and economic and social development,
paralleling UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s calls for a set of “Sustainable Development
Goals” (SDGs) to replace the MDGs after 2015. The bold ambition of the SDGs has been
made possible by the perceived success their predecessors. Agreed to in 2000 as part of the
Millennium Declaration, the MDGs have framed the global debate on development for over
a decade. Although some of the goals will not be met in the aggregate, and many more will
not be met at the level of individual countries, the MDGs have firmly established the value of
goal setting at the international level.
Thanks to the MDGs aligning the priorities of many development actors, the notion of an
ecosystem rather than an architecture governing development cooperation relationships is
taking hold. In an ecosystem, there are complex interactions among stakeholders. Unlike an
architecture, where there are strict relations between the components (and an acknowledged
architect that designs the structure), an ecosystem may have no formal rules, but rather
evolves in a way that serves the purposes of each actor. Although the actions of each actor have
an impact on others, there is no need for formal rules to ensure compliance; self-interest
does the job.
The tension between the architecture and the ecosystem is most strongly observed in the
activities of advanced country donors and some emerging economies, particularly China.
The advanced countries are eager for China to play by the same set of rules that they have
established for themselves, including adoption of international social and environmental
standards and promotion of good governance. The Chinese are reluctant to be bound by
rules that they did not develop and that they feel have not resulted in effective project imple-
mentation. Developing countries prefer to use competition between Chinese and other
donors to spur better performance from each, rather than organizing cooperation and
harmonization. Similar issues apply to NGOs, many of which prefer to work outside of
government systems and not involve themselves in formal coordination efforts.
The latest attempt to shape development cooperation is through the Global Partnership
for Effective Development Cooperation, an outcome of the Busan Forum. It formalizes the
acknowledgment that a variety of stakeholders should be integrated into development
iscussions. Its steering committee, which will effectively set its agenda, has three co-chairs,
d
one each from advanced countries, emerging economies, and poor countries. The remaining
membership of the steering committee includes non-state actors from business, civil society,
and Parliamentarians. In opting for a governing structure that better reflects today’s major
players, the Global Partnership thus provides a new model for modern international devel-
opment. But as many of its members cannot make commitments on behalf of their full con-
stituency, the steering committee is likely to be more effective in framing soft norms and a
new narrative for the development ecosystem than in constructing a new architecture for
true development cooperation.
Three Strategic Questions
The fundamental problems for development cooperation are the modalities of assistance. In
particular: Who should get assistance? How should assistance be provided? In what areas
should assistance be given? Many different approaches have been tried over the years. Aid
has been targeted at countries with strong democracies, those with strong economic poli-
cies, or sometimes simply those that donors hope to court politically. It has been provided
through a mixture of money, technical assistance, and knowledge sharing. It has focused on
agriculture, heavy industry, infrastructure, human capital, women’s empowerment, and the
removal of trade barriers. Such divergent strategies highlight the extent to which develop-
ment policy is still very much a work in progress.
Targeting Aid: Who Should Get Assistance?

Who should be targeted by development assistance so as to achieve the greatest impact?
This seemingly simple question has understandably generated extensive debate. In the
mathematical models of economic growth that informed the earliest efforts, solutions lay in
the functional form assumptions of the relationship between output and capital. In the
Cobb–Douglas formulation of the Solow growth model, for instance, capital exhibits
diminishing returns, so capital-poor countries can obtain a higher output benefit from aid.
These models suggest targeting the poorest countries, much as the IDA attempted to do at
its inception.
Poverty targeting continues to be a major practice among development agencies. Gross
national income per capita remains a strong predictor of aid (Alesina and Dollar 2000) and
the concept is enshrined in much of the rhetoric used by aid agencies to justify their mission.
The World Bank, for example, has coined the motto “Our dream is a world free of poverty”
and includes per capita income as an explicit criterion in its aid allocation formula. Particu-
larly for organizations in the public eye, poverty targeting has also come to mean targeting
poor people rather than poor countries. British Prime Minister David Cameron, in defend-
ing Britain’s aid budget, implored Britons to consider the “millions of children around the
world who are thinking: ‘Am I going to get the next meal?’ ” (Mulholland and Wintour 2012)
Many NGOs advertise with a similar focus, asking donors to “sponsor a child” rather than to
support the organization as a whole.
856 homi kharas
The focus on individualized cases of poverty has become so intense that it has drawn com-
plaints for misdirecting the debate, skewing the focus, for example, disproportionately
toward food issues (see, for example, Collier 2007; Banerjee and Duflo 2011). More generally,
aid is wasted, or at best a minor palliative, when it is recipient country policies that form the
primary barriers to development. Aid critics in this camp argue that poverty is the result of
government mismanagement rather than a lack of resources, and hence support for mis-
managed countries only prolongs the pain of underdevelopment. Indeed, aid is often kept
flowing despite anecdotes of waste and flagrant theft by developing-country politicians.
Corruption was a taboo subject among development practitioners, acknowledged but not
discussed in public, until World Bank President James Wolfensohn’s 1996 speech in which he
stressed the “need to deal with the cancer of corruption” (Wolfensohn 1996).
These critiques point to the fundamental problem of “aid fungibility.” Aid to poor coun-
tries does not necessarily go to poor people—it can be diverted to rich people in poor
countries. Even directly providing resources for educating poor children does not mean
more resources for education; politicians may feel a lesser need to allocate domestic resources
when donors fund education. In fact, most studies suggest that aid is highly fungible and so
cannot be effectively targeted (Devarajan and Swaroop 2000).
One way of addressing these pitfalls is by aligning the vision and goals of the aid recipient
and the donor. When that occurs, there is little incentive for countries to shift their own
resources to another area when a donor steps in. Partly for that reason, the targeting focus
has shifted toward rewarding countries with good governance and good policy environ-
ments. Academic studies (most notably Burnside and Dollar 2000) found that aid was only
effective in countries with “good policy.” Although their empirical results have not been
found to be robust (Easterly 2003), the intuitive appeal and implicit acceptance of the
Burnside–Dollar results remains high among aid agency officials.
From a practical point of view, the “good policy” concept can only be operationalized if
there is agreement on what constitutes good development policy. The economist John
Williamson unwittingly provided this missing piece by outlining a set of propositions on
which there appeared to be a consensus within the development community. The Washington
Consensus (Williamson 1990) argued for fiscal discipline, pro-poor public spending, trade
and foreign investment liberalization, deregulation, and other market-friendly measures.
While it quickly became contentious (no mention of institutions or rule of law) and some-
times abused (removal of capital controls is often erroneously cited as one of Williamson’s
recommendations), the Washington Consensus provided the basis for aid agencies to
develop performance-based allocation systems—essentially targeting models. The most
explicit of these was the foundation (by President George W. Bush) of a new style of aid
agency, the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), that competitively assigns
grants to developing countries meeting good governance and policy criteria.
The biggest problem for targeting has been the micro–macro paradox articulated by Paul
Mosley (1987): that aid might be effective at the project level but not at the macroeconomic
level. This proposition implies that country-based targeting of aid to achieve better aggregate
developmental impact is futile, and that aid should instead be provided wherever projects
can be successfully implemented. Several empirical studies of aid effectiveness supported
this conclusion by failing to find a systematic relationship between aid and growth (Easterly
2003; Rajan and Subramanian 2008). Others went further and argued that aid was often
harmful (Moyo 2009). But more recently, a detailed review of the evidence by Arndt, Jones,
and Tarp (2009) concluded that there does exist significant evidence for a positive associa-
tion between aid and growth, reviving the case for targeting.
Despite the intense discussion of aid’s efficacy, the targeting of development assistance is
often shaped by politics rather than impact. During the Cold War, this motivation was explic-
itly acknowledged. Truman and Spencer’s efforts at international engagement were spurred
by a fear of “the communist threat.” Today, the rhetoric is more high-minded, but the desire
to win friends remains the same. During her trip to Africa in August, 2012, U.S. Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton promoted “a model of sustainable partnership that adds value, rather
than extracts it” and made clear her strong support for democracy and human rights on the
continent. Her comments, however, were also intended as a salvo in a new U.S. “aid war” with
China, implicitly linking the latter’s aid with a self-interested natural resource extraction
unconcerned with human rights. More explicit discussions of the political benefits of foreign
aid have also noted the links with the “war on terror” (see, for instance, Patrick 2006).
A number of academic studies also point to the political nature of foreign assistance.
Alesina and Dollar (2000), for instance, find stronger correlations between aid and “politi-
cal-strategic” variables than between aid and indicators measuring poverty or policy; for
instance, years as a colony and UN votes have more explanatory power than income or
democracy. Kuziemko and Werker (2006) also document that U.S. aid to developing coun-
tries on the UN Security Council spikes during those countries’ two-year term, strongly
suggesting that the U.S. responds to their voting power in global forums rather than solely to
their developmental needs.
The newest focus of a combined political-economic approach to targeting is on “fragile
states,” nations whose governments fail to provide basic services to poor people because they
are unwilling or unable to do so. A classic example of a fragile state would be Somalia, but
there are many others; approximately 1.5 billion people live in fragile states today. Such coun-
tries have been targeted because poverty reduction there has been minimal over the last
twenty years (Kharas and Rogerson 2012) and because fragile states have become a potential
breeding ground for terrorists. The recent efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq provide telling
examples: these two countries alone accounted for one-eighth of global net aid disburse-
ments between 2004 and 2008. The impact, however, has been disappointing. After billions
of dollars spent, violence and graft have stalled even the most necessary of projects (Rosen-
berg 2012). The classic “need versus impact” trade-off that has long governed aid allocation
discussions is perhaps most extreme in fragile state situations.
Busan has provided political support for a “New Deal” framework for improving develop-
ment assistance to fragile states. Building on a dialogue among these countries, the “New
Deal” sets out five goals for development cooperation to support: legitimate politics, secu-
rity, justice, economic foundations, and revenues and services for the poor. What is note-
worthy is the balance between narrowly economic and broader socio-political goals
establishing the fundamental workings of a state. If these objectives are to be achieved, many
donors will have to alter the way aid is targeted and disbursed. Success is far from guaran-
teed, necessitating a greater risk tolerance and long-term commitment. It remains to be seen
whether development cooperation in these countries can avoid the destructive volatility that
has characterized many aid programs (Kharas 2008). Fragile states are sure to be subject to
cycles of advancement and mistakes. But that short-term volatility should not be amplified
by volatility in development cooperation driven by targeting formulas focused on annual
performance metrics.
858 homi kharas
Money, Institutions, and Knowledge: How Should Aid

be Delivered?
Aid is often thought of primarily in terms of the delivery of money and commodities, but
technical assistance, capacity building, debt relief, and other instruments have also been
used over the years. Financial transfers were the main tools of the Marshall Plan and the
World Bank credits and loans, and have been the principal focus of advocacy efforts to raise
development cooperation. Although institutions and knowledge sharing are becoming more
prevalent in growth theory (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Romer n.d.), net financial trans-
fers still form the core of aid and thus prompt the most contentious discussions. For example,
at Busan, developing countries argued forcefully to increase the share of aid provided as
budget support, and have repeatedly criticized technical assistance as inadequately tailored
to their own problems.
Analytical support for increasing financial transfers has come most prominently from
Jeffrey Sachs’s reincarnation of the “Big Push” theory. Sachs describes poor countries as stuck
in a “poverty trap,” returns to investment in any one area lowered by the absence of invest-
ment in another. As an example, building a school in a rural area may not achieve the desired
increase in enrollment if roads to the school are not also built. In this view, poverty begets
poverty. To be effective, then, development assistance needs to be given in large amounts to
“push” communities out of the poverty equilibrium. In keeping with this theory, Sachs has
piloted large investments in the Millennium Development Villages project to demonstrate
the need for simultaneous, complementary investments. Early evaluations of the Millen-
nium Villages have been controversial, with Sachs’ evidence of their impact hotly disputed
by other academics.
After the 1980s debt crisis, the focus swung to supporting policy and institutional reform,
exemplified by the World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs. Some critics felt
these programs went too far and questioned the connection between the reform programs
and the loan’s objectives. For example, the IMF’s programs in East Asia to alleviate the
regional banking and currency crises in 1997 and 1998 included many issues seemingly unre-
lated to the restoration of macroeconomic balance that is the IMF’s remit (Feldstein 1998).
But despite such criticisms, most developing countries have successfully adopted structural
reforms, either with international support or unilaterally, and have improved their macr-
oeconomic stability, reduced debt levels, and brought down inflation (with notable excep-
tions like pre-dollarization Zimbabwe). Many of these reforms are credited with helping
developing countries avoid the worst effects of the Great Recession.
Development through institutional change is the core argument of Acemoglu and Robin-
son’s Why Nations Fail (2012). They argue that nations that develop “inclusive” institutions
have much greater potential for growth compared to nations in which local elites support
exploitative or “extractive” institutions that transfer rather than create wealth. Acemoglu and
Robinson do not propose specific mechanisms for encouraging better institutions, but o thers
do. Paul Romer (n.d.) has advanced the idea of “charter cities” in developing countries that
would adopt institutional structures from an advanced country in special reform zones. The
idea is that the success of these zones would then spread throughout the economy. Romer’s
view that institutional change can be addressed by building and then expanding “islands of
excellence” has been forcefully challenged by others, but it remains implicit in many devel-
opment activities. While cities may be a big reach, it is practically a requirement for any
major development project today to account for how it will improve local institutions, or at
least circumvent their shortcomings.
Increasingly, developing countries are interested in questions of how to implement policy,
rather than which policies to implement. There is a growing sense that the business maxim
that success depends 20 percent on strategy and 80 percent on implementation holds for
development as well; many countries feel their greatest need is for advice on implementa-
tion, particularly in weak institutional contexts. This form of knowledge transfer has increas-
ingly been provided by South–South cooperation, developing countries transferring their
practical know-how based on their own experiences. It is far harder for advanced countries,
or even multilateral institutions, to transfer this kind of knowledge.
A different knowledge trend in development assistance has been to identify better micro-
economic interventions, such as optimal pricing for mosquito nets or policies to prevent
absenteeism among government workers. The movement has been galvanized by the use of
Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) that offer statistical reliability in the interpretation of
causality. Heavily promoted by groups such as the MIT-headquartered Jameel Poverty
Action Lab (J-PAL), RCTs have proliferated. However, they are not a panacea; an RCT can
show whether a particular project worked in a particular context, but any extrapolation to
projects in different contexts (external validity) is necessarily tenuous. In some sectors,
meta-studies of RCTs and other evaluations find that results are not robust (Glewwe et al.
2011), reducing faith that these studies radically expand knowledge of effective development
interventions.
The Search for the “Silver Bullet:” In What Areas Should

Aid be Given?
Early aid interventions through the 1960s saw a heavy emphasis on funding for infrastruc-
ture. These projects left a long-standing legacy; for example, the Tarbela Dam in Pakistan
was started in 1968 and still today provides around 20 percent of Pakistan’s electricity.3 The
basic thesis was that infrastructure was not only a key missing factor in development, but
also a key area of comparative advantage for advanced countries, as it required a mix of
finance and advanced engineering knowledge for design and implementation.
But infrastructure projects brought with them a range of social and environmental prob-
lems (in particular with regard to resettlement), while their benefits were widely dispersed
and often oriented toward the rich and middle classes who could afford the services. After
the success of the Green Revolution, such considerations prompted the McNamara World
Bank to reorient its focus toward the basic needs of the poor: agriculture, health, and educa-
tion became the new focus areas for development. Partly as a result, the 1970s saw developing
countries sharply expanding their borrowing to finance physical and human capital accu-
mulation, ultimately leading to the 1980s debt crisis. While structural adjustment was effec-
tive in restoring macroeconomic balances, in many places it was also seen as responsible for
austerity programs that slashed investments in development. One particular concern was
that developing countries began to over-exploit their natural resources. By the early 1990s,
an influential environmental movement was calling for the integration of environment and
development, resulting in the Rio agreements, including the Agenda 21, Forest Principles,
the Biodiversity Convention, and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (including
860 homi kharas
the Kyoto Protocol). These and other practices would collectively be termed “sustainable
development.” The major development agencies enhanced their environmental activities,
but not sufficiently to address the large and complex issues raised in Rio.
The year 2000 saw the Jubilee campaign—a massive coalition of youth groups, celebrities,
churches and other civil society organizations—successfully pressure rich countries to
absolve the debts of poor countries. While conditions were attached to these debt cancella-
tions, restoring some of the attention on structural adjustment, the campaign’s visibility and
the enormous sums of money involved made this issue the centerpiece of development
debates for several years. In theory, the money saved from debt relief was supposed to be
redirected toward poverty reduction programs. In practice, many of the savings were artifi-
cial. Countries simply did not have the money to service their debts, and the debt relief
simply recognized this reality. Ex post assessments have not found that debt relief materially
and significantly had impacted development (Dömeland and Kharas 2009).
The large writeoffs associated with debt relief reopened questions of what had become of
all the aid money. One obvious answer was that much of it had been stolen or wasted. The
anti-corruption agenda begun by Wolfensohn was pursued even more vigorously by his
successors, culminating in 2006 with a hotly debated report on strengthening World Bank
Group engagement with governance and anti-corruption. The most contentious issue was
the extent to which the World Bank should enter into the domestic political affairs of its
borrowing country clients. The governance agenda also reversed the trend toward country
ownership of development interventions, proposing that the World Bank should take up
governance issues even when uninvited by the concerned country.
The changing fashions of development assistance suggest some hard truths. Development
requires making progress on a range of complex, intertwined issues. Yet these cannot be
tackled simultaneously, necessitating a difficult allocation of scarce resources among worthy
goals. As yet, the “silver bullet” that identifies a primary missing ingredient to catalyze devel-
opment remains elusive. No single idea among these successive priorities has been able to
turn a struggling economy into a prosperous one. Indeed, after over a half-century of effort,
there are discomfortingly few solid conclusions about how to achieve development. The
consensus of today is that each country must chart its own way forward. The ingredients of
success may be common, but the recipes—the implementation, sequencing, and phasing of
the needed investments, institutions, and incentive frameworks—differ from country to
country (Commission on Growth and Development 2008).
Conclusion
A major paradox of the twenty-first century is that, despite the failure to formulate a grand
theory of development, we nonetheless live in a Golden Age of growth. The past decade has
seen the fastest increases of per capita income and the most rapid reduction of poverty in
history. As more development success stories arise outside of Asia, these trends appear to be
truly global. While credit for this performance cannot be attributed directly to development
assistance, there is a growing body of evidence that such assistance has been valuable. Cer-
tainly development assistance continues to enjoy enormous popular support in rich coun-
tries, and it has engaged the energies of millions of professionals in official aid agencies, civil
society organizations, academics and, increasingly, businesses. Nobel laureate Robert Lucas’
comment that “once one starts to think about [development issues], it is hard to think about
anything else” (Lucas 1988) seems to apply far beyond the narrow world of academic
economists.
Development assistance has a checkered history of constant adaptation. Caught at the
intersection of politics, security, and economics, it has had to manage the tensions associated
with post-colonial relationships, the Cold War, globalization, sovereignty, and human rights.
Coordinating development assistance was once a simple matter of a few, mostly like-minded,
countries sitting around a table to talk strategy and goals. It has morphed into an enormous
undertaking involving all member states of the United Nations, hundreds of international
agencies, thousands of international NGOs, and hundreds of thousands of community
development organizations.
Development assistance is being transformed at a remarkable pace. A landscape once
dominated by official aid agencies and government-to-government bilateral relationships is
now being altered by important NGOs and hybrid “impact investment” private-sector com-
panies. Technology is opening up new avenues for development cooperation among indi-
viduals. For example, the micro-credit site <Kiva.org> intermediates about $3 million a
week, an amount approximately the same as USAID. Technology is also transforming the
transparency of aid, and increasingly of budgets, helping to shift accountability to citizens
and Parliamentarians in developing countries themselves.
There is no single aid architecture (or architect) that can fashion rules governing the myr-
iad activities undertaken in the name of development assistance. The system has become too
complex. But that need not be a disadvantage if there is agreement on an overarching set of
principles and a focused set of broadly shared goals. These principles ensure that even if
development assistance is not a cooperative endeavor, it should at least be coordinated
(Woods 2011). The distinction here is important. Few expect that China and the U.S. will
cooperate extensively in their development assistance; in fact, many aid recipients hope they
will compete with each other. But rather than poaching the best civil servants to work on
one’s own projects or undermining country systems of accountability, the two can use formal
agreements or implicit norms to coordinate and avoid waste and duplication. Examples of
such behavior are increasingly common: the Istanbul principles of civil society, the Equator
principles governing private business, and certification standards for sustainable produc-
tion in specific sectors are all part of the growing web of norms that can lead to better
coordination.
Perhaps the most important thread in this narrative will be the formulation of a set of sus-
tainable development goals (SDGs), now being pursued by the United Nations. These goals
will try to identify a few priorities for global action, while leaving flexibility for countries to
pursue their own development paths. They will try to fuse the social, economic, and environ-
mental aspects of development. If successful, the SDGs can mobilize resources and innovative
ideas from millions of people and organizations, helping to align efforts of a large number of
actors without having to agree on formal partnerships. But the complexity of the politics and
the interconnectedness of these issues mean that success is by no means guaranteed. Failure to
generate broad consensus on the goals could thrust development assistance into a chaotic
state of competing interests and priorities. That would be particularly unfortunate for the
world’s poor, who will increasingly be living in fragile states where domestic governments are
unable to coordinate development assistance.
862 homi kharas
The rapid changes occurring in the world of development assistance have led to some calls
for “the end of ODA.” Indeed, the proliferation of non-DAC donors and new modalities of
assistance are rendering the old model of financial support for economically viable projects
obsolete (Severino and Ray 2009). Thankfully, the innovations of the Digital Revolution
offer an alternative to the increasingly fragmented system of today in the form of a new
model for “open source development.” The transaction costs of transferring resources, expe-
riences, and knowledge are falling dramatically. Over two billion poor people today have no
access to financial services. Thanks to the spread of cell phones and the development of
mobile money, that figure is set to halve over the next decade, opening up opportunities for a
range of new development services and approaches. Base-of-the-pyramid business models
are viewing millions of poor people as customers or suppliers. In short, development assist-
ance is rapidly becoming decentralized and competitive. To be sure, such a decentralized
system will require new levels of information and transparency but it offers the promise of a
fundamental break from the current modus operandi. Successful development assistance in
the future will be characterized by partnerships that catalyze change and transform markets
and institutions, creating the space for additional innovations and products aimed at improving
the welfare of the poor.
Notes
1. I am indebted to Cory Smith for his excellent research assistance on this chapter.
2. IBRD (1989) Articles of Agreement (<http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTABOUTUS/
Resources/ibrd-articlesofagreement.pdf>).
3. Calculations from World Bank (n.d.) and Pakistan (n.d.) data.
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chapter 51
consu ltati v e forums:

state pow er a n d
m u ltil ater a l
i nstit u tions
gregory chin and jorge heine
Introduction
The global aid architecture is undergoing significant changes. Broader shifts in the world
economy are giving rise to contestation over ideas, norms, rules, best practices, and lessons
learned about development cooperation between the traditional donors and the BRICS ris-
ing states, as well as changes in the institutional structures of the aid system. To date, there is
still no consensus on the extent to which the traditional donors are actually declining, or
whether their relative economic decline and the simultaneous ascent of the rising states sig-
nifies either a fundamental change in the norms and goals of international development or a
fundamental evolution in international relations.
Nonetheless, it is tenable to suggest that other states have started to look beyond the tradi-
tional Northern industrialized countries to a group of mid-level countries (South Korea,
Turkey, Malaysia, Mexico, Indonesia, and Chile) for models of development, and are turning
increasingly to the so-called “emerging economies” of Brazil, China, India, and South Africa
for lessons learned and policy experiences. The influence of these rising economies is rooted
in their demonstration effect, as well as the impact of the financial crisis on Anglo-American
economies and the ensuing global economic downturn, which have catalyzed rethinking
about preferred models.
The exact lessons to be drawn from the phenomenon of the rising states remain contro-
versial, and the scholarly debate is still in the formative stage (for examples of recently pub-
lished studies, see Chaturvedi, Fues, and Sidiropolous 2012; Chin and Quadir 2012).
Representatives of the (re)emerging aid senders suggest that their national experiences offer
alternatives to the predominant models offered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
consultative forums: state power and multilateral institutions 867
and the World Bank, that is, the so-called “Washington Consensus” or “neo-liberal” models.
The skeptics argue instead that the origins of the dynamism of the emerging economies
include heavy doses of economic liberalization and integration into the world economy, and
that the models offered by the rising donors are actually a story of convergence with the
dominant models. Whereas the proponents of emerging economies as alternatives see the
end of universal models, that is, the end of a “one size fits all” approach, the skeptics empha-
size the limits of and constraints on utilizing the rising states as models.
This chapter does not focus on the internal dynamics of the individual BRICS countries
(for such analysis, see the chapters on Brazil, China, South Africa, and India in this volume).
Rather, we explain how the rise of the BRICS countries as aid givers and their contestation
with traditional donors is generating realignments in the structure of inter-state relations,
the multilateral arrangements of the global aid system, and the main consultative forums for
development cooperation.
Scholars of international organization have long explained that the multilateral order can-
not hold when the arrangement of power and influence in international institutions is sig-
nificantly misaligned with the real distribution of world power (Cox 1992; Newman, Thakur,
and Thirman 1996). We analyze how shifts in the balance of world economic power have
resulted in misalignments in representational arrangements inside the established multilat-
eral consultative forums for development cooperation. Our main argument is that the repre-
sentational misalignments and the tension between the BRICS rising states and the
traditional donors have resulted in three differing institutional outcomes: first, the modifica-
tion of existing informal platforms at the apex of the existing system of global governance to
try to incorporate the concerns and experiences of the rising states, as seen in the modifica-
tion of “Gs” leaders’ summits from the old club of the Group of 7/8 to a Group of 20 Leaders
process; second, the creation of new consultative forums, especially the BRICS leaders’ sum-
mitry and the IBSA Dialogue Forum (India, Brazil, South Africa); and third, the paralysis
and decay of the established multilateral consultative forum for international coordination
on development cooperation, the OECD-DAC regime (Organisation for Economic Co-
operation and Development–Development Assistance Committee).
Rising States, Rising Donors
The world economy is in transition. The shift is reflected in the rise of new centers of growth,
production, consumption, trade, and finance—and thus new centers of global influence as
well. The emerging economies are realigning the world economy by the force of their eco-
nomic weight, both as individual countries and through their collective structural impact.
The five BRICS countries together account for nearly 30 percent of the world’s land area,
42 percent of the global population, about 18 percent of the world gross domestic product
(GDP), and 15 percent of world trade. In purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, the GDP of
the BRICS countries increased from 16 percent in 2000 to nearly 25 percent in 2010, and is
projected to reach 47 percent in 2050. Trade between these five countries experienced rapid
growth of about 28 percent per annum from 2001–10, and is projected to reach $500 billion
in 2015. BRICS representatives suggest that they have a lot in common: sharing a similar
868 gregory chin and jorge heine
stage of development, facing a similar historical task of developing their economies, improv-
ing the well-being of their people, and restructuring their economies to adjust to changes in
the world economy.
Within this structural realignment, we see the rise of large “emerging economies” as aid
providers. The dramatic rise of China as a creditor and net donor, as well as Brazil and South
Africa, and potentially India, underpins the new influence in global development (Manning
2006).
During his eight years in office, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and senior
Brazilian officials intervened directly to convert Brazil’s growing economic weight into dip-
lomatic influence. Lula da Silva made 12 visits to Africa (21 countries); foreign minister Celso
Amorim made 67 such visits to 34 countries. More than half of the embassies that Brazil
opened in these years were in Africa, for a total of 37—more than traditional donor countries
such as the UK (for these figures, and part of the argument below, see World Bank 2012).
During Lula’s visits to Africa, Brazil dispensed large amounts of technical assistance, and
focused on enhancing capacity in areas such as agriculture, health, and education. For 2011,
Brazil’s total aid contributions were estimated at just under $1 billion. Chinese leaders
matched the Brazilian enthusiasm for official state visits to Africa, and added massive infra-
structure investment in road and rail construction, energy projects, public buildings,
schools, and hospitals.
Brazil, China, and India have insisted that they do not impose the sort of conditionality
favored by Western donors and often resented by African governments. Brazil, China, India,
and South Africa all claim to build on “commonalities” they share with African countries,
ranging from soil type to technology to public health needs. By training African workers and
technicians and drawing on their own public policy experience, these nations position them-
selves not as the “traditional powers” trying to extract wealth from the Continent, but as
Southern development “partners.”
One estimate (Kharas 2010) puts the aid of the “non-DAC donors” around $17 billion for
2009, while another recent survey (Walz and Ramachandran 2011) estimates the aid of the
BRICS at about 10 percent of total global aid flows. Both are likely underestimations, given
that China alone arguably provided approximately $20 billion in aid that year, if we use a
broader definition of development finance that includes “economic cooperation”-related
concessional loans from its two state policy banks, China Eximbank and China Develop-
ment Bank. At the same time, we also see the emergence of a “next tier” of mid-level states as
aid providers: South Korea, Turkey, and Mexico. The overall outcome is a more complex and
negotiated order for international development cooperation.
The growing influence of the BRICS countries as donors should not only be measured
with quantitative indicators. As Richard Manning has shown, analyses based on changes in
aid contributions do not allow us to see shifts in amorphous qualities of international influ-
ence (Manning 2006). This is not to downplay the quantitative indicators, especially given
that the external capital contributions of the rising states have increased dramatically of late,
but rather to suggest that it is useful to map the more amorphous trends of intra- and inter-
institutional contestation in order to grasp the evolving structure of power and hierarchy in
multilateral consultative forums.
The representatives of the BRICS states suggest that their cooperation is different from
many other international and regional mechanisms, such as the G8. It is neither another new
grouping of big powers nor a political alliance; rather, it focuses mainly on economic,
nancial, and development issues. The Chinese Ambassador to India has stated to the Indian
fi
press that “in a sense, BRICS countries act as advocates and practitioners in forging a global
partnership for development” (Zhang 2011). The key word is “partnership.” They approach
the international consultative forums as self-identifying members of “the South” and draw
conscious distinctions between the traditional donors and their own approaches to
development.
The rising states have taken it upon themselves to question the legitimacy of the estab-
lished consultative forums for global policy dialogue and the dominance of the traditional
powers in decision making for global development, and have pushed for reforms in some of
the existing global consultative mechanisms for global development. On the other hand,
they have also dedicated official energy and resources to creating alternative consultative
forums for policy dialogue on global development and new development assistance arrange-
ments. Whereas one academic observer has likened the scenario to a “silent revolution” in
global development (Woods 2008), other scholars have highlighted that the BRICS coun-
tries often play the “developing country card” when it suits them (e.g. at the World Trade
Organization) while actually demanding a greater voice in other forums, which if achieved
would move them into Great Power status.1
Institutional Patterns
In the sections below, we detail the three main institutional effects or patterns of multilateral
change that we see in the consultative forums for development cooperation, resulting from
the rise of the BRICS countries and their collective engagement and institutional contesta-
tion with the traditional donors: institutional modification, the creation of alternative con-
sultation mechanisms, and institutional paralysis in the traditional donor regime.
Institutional Modification: the G20 Development Agenda

In the multilateral consultative mechanisms for development cooperation, one institutional
response to the growing contestation between the BRICS countries and the traditional
donors has been the creation of the Development Agenda of the G20 Leaders process. The
initiation of the G20 leaders’ summitry process is one example of how the existing global
architecture has been modified to try to accommodate the rise of the emerging economies
(see Heine 2010). We are referring to the modification of “Gs” leaders’ summitry, the realign-
ment of the informal consultative platform at the apex of the global economic governance
system that was created by elevating the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors
meetings to the Leaders level, and the G20 replacing the G7/8 as the key forum for managing
the world economy, including providing guidance to the formal global multilateral institu-
tions. In theory, one of the aims behind the shift away from the G7/8 and toward the G20
Leaders process was to give greater voice and representation to major emerging and devel-
oping countries within global economic governance.
Whereas the BRICS countries have actually experienced significant reluctance from the
traditional powers to share power, the G20 Leaders process has given rise to a Working
Group on Development where one can see the influence of the BRICS countries in promot-
ing a paradigm shift in global development. In the consultations around G20 agenda-setting,
the representatives of the BRICS have been frustrated by the Working Group on Develop-
ment (G20 WGD) discussion’s being treated separately from the core agenda on “strong, sus-
tainable and balanced growth,” and sidelined in terms of priority for the G20 leaders’
summits, and in the preparatory meetings of G20 finance ministers and central bank officials
that pave the way for the gathering of Leaders. The practice of stove-piping the various Work-
ing Group discussions as distinct items on the agenda for the “Gs” leaders’ summit was rein-
forced as a control device for the Toronto G20 Summit. For the G20 process, it has been hard
to recover from the segmenting of what in reality are interconnected policy challenges to
manage the world economy and promote global development.
However, within the G20 WGD, it has been difficult to ignore the concerns and priorities
of the BRICS and the other emerging economies, given that the BRICS countries went into
the 2007–9 global financial crisis in stronger shape than the advanced economies—the tra-
ditional powers—and emerged from the crisis earlier and stronger; while the crisis has also
shaken belief in the preferred models of the developed economies (Chin 2011; Chin and
Thakur 2010; BRICS 2012a: 79–102). Within the consultative processes of the G20 WGD, the
BRICS countries and the mid-level emerging economies placed a premium on securing
growth combined with an emphasis on “sustainability” and equity.
In the consultations for the G20 WGD that were organized by the South Koreans as G20
hosts in November 2010, the major and mid-level emerging economies championed a
“return to basics,” where the emphasis would be shifted back to promoting economic growth
and ensuring national manufacturing capacity, employment creation, and infrastructure
investment. Such a return to industrial developmental basics was seen as necessary for pro-
viding the bases for sustained national development over time. At the same time, the emerg-
ing economies also emphasized addressing the distributional question of “who gets what,
and under what conditions” as needed to secure poverty reduction. In the consultations
around the G20 WGD, the differences in the approach of the Asian and BRICS countries to
the “pro-poor growth” strategies promoted by the OECD-DAC regime and the World Bank
since the late 1990s became readily apparent.
The Korean and U.S.-based proponents who saw the G20 Leaders process as offering a
venue to promote a paradigm shift in global development policy attempted to initiate the
shift via the “Seoul consensus on development” issued at the close of the Seoul G20 Summit
in November 2010. The “Seoul Consensus” consists of eight pillars: infrastructure, private
investment and job creation, human resources development, trade, financial services, G20
platform for knowledge sharing, resilience and food security, and governance. The South
Korean hosts of the Seoul G20 dedicated significant effort to shaping the global development
agenda for the summit, especially the break from a “one size fits all” model, and to reestablish
the principle that different models and experiences of development should be considered. To
broker what many saw as a new ideational and normative consensus on global development,
South Korean development strategists and diplomats conducted extensive year-long negoti-
ations with leading countries in the G20, the IMF, and the World Bank on the major agenda
items for the WGD. They also expanded the consultation process at the regional level, by car-
rying out discussions not only with regional development banks but with other major
regional institutions, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Afri-
can Union, Mercosur, and Caricom.
The most telling indication of the influence of the BRICS and Asian countries in the G20
WGD was the listing of infrastructure development as the first pillar in the proposed work
plan for the G20 WGD for the Seoul Summit. In the final communiqué of the Seoul Summit,
the details were laid out for the “Seoul Consensus” on development, which gave priority to
infrastructure, private investment and job creation, and financial services—including a role
for state development banks. In the follow-up to the decision of the G20 Leaders in Seoul in
November 2010, and in preparation for the Cannes G20 Summit (November 2011), the
French hosts announced in February 2011 that a “High Level Panel for Infrastructure Invest-
ment” had been created to “mobilize support for scaling up infrastructure financing.”
Although the French G20 presidency gave strong rhetorical support to the development
concerns of the major emerging economies within the G20 WGD, in the end the results of
the Cannes Summit were quite disappointing for the BRICS and the other developing coun-
try members of the G20. The rhetoric of the French G20 Summit in Cannes, under president
Nicolas Sarkozy strongly emphasized the significance of the BRICS and developing coun-
tries within the G20 process. For example, the background document to the G20 Finance
Ministers and Central Bank Governors’ meeting argued:
Although global poverty levels have fallen considerably over the past two decades, developing
countries still have enormous needs that are not being met. . . . Emerging countries have
become key players in global economic governance and development. It is up to the G20 to
improve global economic governance and help those institutions in charge of it to evolve.
Thus, China, the world’s second largest economy, is set to become the World Bank’s third-
largest shareholder and one of the major multilateral donors for development. More gener-
ally, greater South–South cooperation means that development assistance is no longer the
exclusive domain of advanced countries. (Lagarde and Noyer 2011: 35)
The French G20 presidency went beyond the preferences of many G20 members and
expanded the development agenda for the Cannes Summit to the following four priorities:
(1) strengthen infrastructures in developing countries; (2) ensure food security in the most
vulnerable countries; (3) extend social protection; and (4) mobilize innovative sources of
development financing. During the preparatory meetings of the WGD at Cannes, a number
of BRICS and other developing country members of the G20 noted that they believed that
the French presidency was going too far in expanding the development agenda, and that it
would only dilute the commitments from the Summit, thus negating any real chance to
deliver on the commitments.
The lack of consensus from the G20 summit process on measures to ensure food security
for the developing world and the limited follow through on the commitments made by G20
Leaders on financing for infrastructure investment were disappointing for the emerging
economies. But in the end the Panel identified only a modest list of concrete regional initia-
tives that the multilateral development banks (MDBs) were willing to support—and that the
G20 Leaders were willing to endorse. Progress has stalled on scaling-up of financing for
infrastructure development for developing countries—a duty that was ultimately delegated
by the G20 Leaders to the MDBs. This outcome has been due either to reluctance on the part
of the World Bank to undertake the assignment, or its inability so far to deliver on such a
policy breakthrough, as requested by G20 Leaders. Chinese officials have noted that the
World Bank has not gone beyond instructing African countries, for example, to rely heavily
on global capital markets for infrastructure financing, or demanding that they make major
institutional liberalization reforms as a precondition for the country to receive a loan from
the Bank to finance infrastructure investment.2
The G20 Development agenda has also seen limited progress in securing policy break-
throughs on food security (Clapp 2012), on extending social protection, and on innovative
financing of development, despite the efforts at the Cannes G20 to include input from the
Gates Foundation on the role of private-sector involvement in global development. It is
reported that the Gates Report was dismissed by powerful BRICS countries, which are not as
supportive of relying more heavily on private sources of development financing. Officials in
Beijing caution that the move toward privatization of development assistance could be the
first step on a steady slope where G7 donors try to shed their (public-sector) responsibilities
for meeting their international commitments on development assistance.3
Creating Alternatives: BRICS Summitry

The contestation between the rising states and the traditional donors over development
cooperation has also played out institutionally in a second outcome: the BRICS states, as a
group of nations that have chosen to go “outside” the existing aid architecture to create their
own multilateral consultative platform for dialogue, consensus building, and decision mak-
ing on development cooperation.
The BRICS countries, as a cooperative grouping, are beginning to receive more scholarly
attention, although skepticism continues to be the conventional wisdom. Even though the
academic world has been slower to adapt, the BRICS have caught the attention of the global
media (Heine 2012). The BRICS have evolved into a multi-level cooperative framework, with
a leaders’ summit as its highest form, and supplemented by meetings of senior security rep-
resentatives, foreign ministers, finance ministers, governors of central banks, and members
of think tanks, business circles, and financial institutions. The accession of South Africa to
the grouping in April 2011 and its participation at the Leaders’ Meeting in Sanya (China) sig-
nified an important development for the grouping, expanding the reach of the BRICS mech-
anism to cover the areas of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and thus broadening its
purported representativeness, not to mention its influence (Kornegay 2011).
The BRICS governments suggest that their cooperation provides a “valuable platform for
the five countries to share development experiences and work together on development
problems . . . to promote common development based on equality and mutual benefit”
(Kornegay 2011). BRICS officials also suggest that their countries also share similar concerns
and views regarding the reform and improvement of global economic governance and rele-
vant institutions. They claim that their intention is to make “joint efforts in meeting the glo-
bal challenges” and “together to serve the common interest of their own as well as the
international community at large.” They make explicit mention of “working closely” within
the respective consultative forums in the global development system, namely the “United
Nations and G20,” and note that their primary development concerns are issues such as
“food and energy security, the Doha Round of trade talks, climate change, Millennium
Development Goals and the reform of international financial institutions.” They also state
that they are “striving to increase the voice and representation of emerging economies and
developing countries” within the global consultation mechanisms. We will return to the
BRICS later in this chapter.
An important antecedent of sorts to BRICS is, however, the IBSA Dialogue Forum—the
India–Brazil–South Africa consultative initiative which in many ways is turning out to be a
“trial run” for BRICS. Through the IBSA process, Brazil and India have learned what they
can (and cannot) accomplish with South Africa through diplomatically leveraging their soft
power status as liberal democracies. At the same time, each of the three has also gained a
clearer sense of the limits of their trilateral partnership, minus the structural heft of China
and Russia—especially if the ambition of the grouping is to exert influence in great power
politics, or even more modestly, to influence the global development agenda.
IBSA, with Brazil as the main initiator, held its first meeting in Brasilia in June 2003. IBSA
thus started at about the same time as the Russia–China–India trilateral foreign ministers’
dialogue, the precursor to the first BRIC summit, when Brazil joined the pan-Asian group-
ing at its summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia in June 2009. The IBSA nations had to overcome
considerable bureaucratic and political obstacles in order for the forum to be officially
launched. It was reported that the Indian bureaucracy was wary of entering into a grouping
with countries it considered smaller and less significant than “Mother India.” The approach
of close and formalized economic cooperation among countries in the South through the
creation of a customs union or common market, although initially considered by the IBSA
members, proved to be a non-starter. The grouping initially experienced difficulties in find-
ing “program material,” agenda items for the scheduled meetings, and projects to sustain the
grouping’s momentum. These challenges were overcome through diplomatic negotiation,
and a regularized calendar of annual summit meetings was established.
IBSA has since formed sixteen Working Groups, one of which is on “social development,”
and the group has signed more than a dozen sector-based Memoranda of Understanding.
The IBSA countries also created an IBSA Trust Fund in 2004, which became operational in
2006, where each country agreed to contribute US$1 million per year so that the IBSA group-
ing can provide project-level development assistance grants to countries of the South (IBSA
Trust Fund 2010). The Fund has dispensed aid for small-scale projects to various countries
of the South, including Haiti, Guinea-Bissau, Cambodia, Brunei, Burundi, and Cape Verde.
Though IBSA is a newly created dialogue platform, the IBSA Trust Fund is embedded in
UN structures. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Special Unit for
South–South Cooperation acts as the fund manager for the IBSA Fund; ambassadors, per-
manent representatives, and deputy permanent representatives of India, Brazil, and South
Africa to the United Nations comprise the Board of Directors for the fund; and IBSA projects
are executed through partnerships with UNDP, national institutions, or local governments
(IBSA Trust Fund 2012). The IBSA Fund received the UN South–South Partnership Award
in 2006.
IBSA has gained significance as a diplomatic reference group for its member countries,
and has served as a useful consultative platform for forging some initial common ground on
global public policy issues. At the IBSA summit hosted by South Africa in Pretoria in O ctober
2011, the three nations issued a 100-plus paragraph statement (the “Tshwane Declaration”) to
pledge their common position on a range of key issues on the international agenda, includ-
ing support for the following that relate to global development: the G20 development agenda,
the MDGs development remaining central to the Doha Round, sustainable development,
and global food security. Eleven of the sixty points in the Tshwane Declaration directly con-
cern development (IBSA-Trilateral.org 2011).
Along with Brazil’s role in creating the G20 Trade for the Doha Round of global trade
negotiations, IBSA is another example of the coalition building capacity of Brazilian diplo-
macy and its ability to harness the interests, resources, and support of others toward its own
national objectives. In theory, IBSA could provide a platform for Brazil, India, and South
Africa where they can deploy development assistance on the institutional bases of their dem-
ocratic credentials while not being overshadowed by the enormity of Chinese resources (as
could happen under the BRICS framework). As Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
has said, the “IBSA framework is unique because the interaction under IBSA transcends the
realm of government-to-government activity to encompass dialogue among civil society
and people-to-people exchanges” (Times of India 2011).
The strategic question for the respective IBSA governments is whether, under some varia-
ble geometry formula, there is utility for the BRICS and IBSA to co-exist as consultative
forums. Some influential officials in the leading IBSA countries have begun to question the
relevancy of this grouping after South Africa joined the BRIC(S) in 2010, at the BRICS Sum-
mit in Sanya (Hainan Island), China—particularly as the BRICS grouping has proven to be
an effective platform for encouraging a “comfortable but meaningful degree” of international
coordination between the rising states and for gaining leverage vis-à-vis the traditional
powers.
Returning to the BRICS, the rising states have used their own summitry as a consultative
forum for development cooperation on two fronts: first, reinforcing their shared global pub-
lic policy messaging within the structures of the G20 process and within the existing global
institutions; and second, and perhaps most important, the BRICS countries are using their
own forum to work on shared development policy interventions, as well as to create alterna-
tive institutional arrangements of their own making (such as intra-BRICS trade financing
and currency agreements) and pursuing the idea of a BRICS Development Bank.
On the first dimension, the BRICS countries are using their own summit to register coor-
dinated messaging on the content and structure of global development. A review of the
points of agreement in the Fourth BRICS Summit Delhi Declaration (March 29, 2012) that
relate to global development shows the nascent collective voice of the BRICS. Whereas highly
coordinated collective action on a wide-ranging and diverse development agenda would be a
tall order for the BRICS countries, the fact that they have outlined these items as shared
intentions is indication of a significant amount of intra-BRICS diplomatic consultation, and
most important, a certain degree of collective political will that is shared between the BRICS
countries. Moreover, the fact that the individual BRICS countries have already dedicated
resources to host major international summits to back diplomatic commitments, and have
committed to do more, adds further institutional reinforcement to the rhetoric of joint
declarations.
However, in addition to working to champion their various BRICS causes within the exist-
ing consultative forums for global development, the contestation between the BRICS and
the traditional donors, and the limited progress which has actually been achieved through
the G20 process, has also led the BRICS to seek to create alternative institutional options that
reside outside of the main existing global multilateral consultation mechanisms. The most
significant case is the current effort of the BRICS countries to form a BRICS Development
Bank. The most high-profile agenda item on the BRICS Summit in Delhi in March 2012 was
the intra-BRICS consultations focused on turning this idea into an institutional reality. In
the joint declaration from the BRICS Summit in Delhi, the Leaders pledged to “consider the
possibility of setting up a new Development Bank for mobilizing resources for infrastructure
and sustainable development projects in BRICS and in other emerging economies and devel-
oping countries, to supplement the existing efforts of multilateral and regional financial
institutions for global growth and development” (BRICS 2012b).
In April 2012, the month following the Delhi BRICS Summit, the South African minister
of international relations and cooperation, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, offered a more
affirmative statement, saying that the BRICS countries’ proposed development bank would
be officially launched in South Africa in early 2013 (Roelf 2012). African National Congress
(ANC) treasurer general Mathews Phosa stated that the joint bank is an important initiative
given that the group of emerging countries are expected to play a significant role as growth
drivers in the global economy (Odendaal 2012). In July 2012, Phosa said that in addition to
funding development and infrastructure as an alternative to the World Bank, the BRICS
development bank could also act as a platform to improve trade opportunities between the
member countries.
While financial industry analysts note that the idea of a BRICS development bank is long
overdue, they warn that the bank still has a long way to go. They highlight differing state
interests, and the need for some of the BRICS countries to avoid the domination of the bank
by one member. Alexandra Arkhangelskaya, head of the Center of Information and Interna-
tional Relations at the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
believes the bank would be good as a framework for multilateral cooperation between the
BRICS nations, but warns of the marginalization of other members by China in particular
(Klomegah 2012). In addition to bank governance issues, other unresolved issues include the
capital structure of the bank, including the relative size of the contributions of each BRICS
country in terms of the budget for the bank, as well as measures for ensuring that the multi-
lateral bank is given the independence in project financing decisions, or at least the neces-
sary room to operate effectively.
However, others—such as Alexander Appokin, a senior fellow at the Moscow-based
Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Forecasting—point out that the bank does not need
a lot of start-up capital (Klomegah 2012). The main ingredients are shared political will and a
sufficient degree of collective action to enact the action plan that will be presented by BRICS
finance ministers at the next Summit. More clarity on the establishment of the BRICS bank is
expected to emerge from recent expert discussions in South Africa. The South African
ambassador to BRICS, Anil Sooklal, has commented that experts from the five countries
were expected to meet in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to outline the requirements of a bank and
develop a possible roadmap to its establishment (Odendaal 2012). Again, we see Brazilian
diplomatic leadership as a bridge builder and initiator between the BRICS.
Fortunately for the BRICS nations, the effort to create a joint BRICS bank builds on the
momentum and synergies of other economic cooperation agreements that the BRICS coun-
tries have already established and agreed to work on together in order to intensify trade and
investment flows among their economies, advance their respective industrial development,
and reach employment objectives. In this regard, in Delhi, the BRICS concluded their “Mas-
ter Agreement on Extending Credit Facility in Local Currency under the BRICS Interbank
Cooperation Mechanism” and the “Multilateral Letter of Credit Confirmation Facility
Agreement between our Exim/Development Banks.”
The cooperation of the national development banks and export–import banks of the
BRICS countries builds on the pledge for their national development banks to meet to
iscuss cooperation at the second BRICS Summit in Brasilia, at the behest of Brazilian
d
president Lula da Silva. At the Summit, the Brazilian president, together with Russian presi-
dent Dmitry Medvedev, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, and Chinese president
Hu Jintao, witnessed the signing of a pact to facilitate cooperation between the national
development banks of their four countries. Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES)
president Luciano Coutinho signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MOC) with his three
counterparts from Russia, India, and China. In the MOC, the four development banks com-
mitted to seek together to establish mechanisms to enhance trade and economic relations
between BRIC countries, and included the possibility of co-financing projects of common
interest in areas such as infrastructure, energy, industry, high technology, and exports. In the
joint communiqué from the Brasilia Summit, the leaders also pledged to look into regional
monetary arrangements, monetary cooperation, and local currency trade settlement
arrangements (BRIC 2010).
Although to financial industry strategists the BRICS’ alternative institutional arrange-
ments may appear long overdue, the reality is that it takes significant political will, diplo-
matic effort, and resource commitments to create new institutions such as a BRICS
Development Bank, and that this has not been a step that has been taken lightly by the BRICS
states. In many respects, what the preceding discussion and the following analysis suggest is
that the BRICS might never have advanced to an institution-building agenda if it were not
for the obstinate response of the traditional powers and the traditional donors, and their fail-
ure to evolve toward the necessary degree of power-sharing in the key institutions of global
economic governance and global development.
Institutional Paralysis
In the traditional scenario, the OECD-DAC membership ruled. The regime of the traditional
powers and the established donors has exerted strong influence over the entire global aid
architecture. As the foundational scholarship on international organizations (of the late
1960s) would predict, changes in such patterns of behavior have not come easily or swiftly.
It has often been the case that international organizations, created under a specific set of his-
torical circumstances, have continued to reinforce the structures of international power that
were present at the time of their genesis; and that an international organization will often
continue to try to perpetuate the original power arrangements even after the balance of
power in the broader global environment has evolved significantly. These institutional ten-
dencies account for organizational decay in the context of shifts in the world order.
Since the early 1990s, G7 governments and Northern donors had grown accustomed to
setting the global development agenda. Together with the World Bank and the IMF, and as
part of the DAC, G7 foreign aid agencies emphasized that developing countries should
undertake economic liberalization reforms; this was also followed by promotion of a “pro-
poor” model of development. The rising donors have instead emphasized that the focus
should be on state-guided economic growth, industrial modernization, and infrastructure
investment as necessary conditions for sustained national development, with a secondary
focus on the redistribution of wealth.
In the past decade, the OECD has tracked the rise of the emerging economies, and the
DAC has kept watch on the rise of the BRICS as donors since the mid-2000s. Based on
their desire to remain the key grouping for the world’s main donors—to define and
monitor g lobal standards in the main areas of development, and for forging international
development commitments—the DAC initiated an engagement process with the rising
aid-providers. However, the DAC took a geo-strategically flawed approach to engaging the
BRICS as aid providers.
The DAC has essentially looked to contain the rising influence of the BRICS as aid provid-
ers. The main source of this flawed approach resides in the anxiety of OECD-DAC’s member
states, especially the Nordic countries and the small European member states. These states
are concerned about their waning international influence,4 given the rise of China and India
as global powers; and their response within the DAC has been to cling to the status quo and
to try to emphasize their soft power norms. This strategy fundamentally underestimates the
relative decline in the actual weight, power, and influence of the OECD members. Mindful
of this waning influence but aware of the limits imposed on them by the member states, DAC
officials have tried to move their membership to engage the rising states, despite the hesi-
tancy of the Northern European members. From 2005 to 2007, and with the backing of the
OECD Secretary General, DAC officials initiated outreach to the BRICS. They focused ini-
tially on trying to establish what could be termed a “structured dialogue” with the BRICS,
with the DAC in the lead of the process. When this outreach failed to materialize because of
lack of receptivity on the part of the BRICS states, DAC officials settled on trying to incorpo-
rate the BRICS into the DAC’s existing structured dialogue process with non-DAC donors.
Since 2008, Brazil, China, and South Africa have sent representatives to attend the DAC’s
“dialogue with non-DAC donors;” however, they did not send senior government representa-
tives. Each year the Chinese have sent a desk officer rather than an official with policy influ-
ence. In brief, OECD-DAC member states, and DAC officials, have willfully ignored the shifts
in the balance of geopolitical power that have taken place over the past decade. They have tried
to sidestep the reality that the BRICS rising powers see little if any benefit in associating more
closely with the traditional Northern donors, and in fact see significant negative implications
in terms of reputational costs. Research supported by IDRC (2008) on the B(R)ICS countries
as aid providers found that the governments of these rising states do not support joining the
OECD-DAC; instead, they give their rhetorical support to the UN system, as well as human
resource and material contributions. The research further indicated that the rising states
wanted to bear witness to and were actively working toward a reordering of the global aid sys-
tem, particularly moving beyond G7- or OECD-DAC-centered development cooperation.
The research further showed that there was variation between the BRICS countries in the
degree of support for engaging the DAC. Brazil and South Africa appear somewhat more
receptive to exploring opportunities for cooperation with the traditional Northern donors,
but mainly at the bilateral level through triangular cooperation anchored in the UN rather
than through the DAC. The Chinese government is in the middle range of “politeness” in
responding to the DAC’s outreach, and India appears least receptive to engaging the DAC.
The BRICS see little benefit in signing up for the OECD’s membership obligations—they do
not see the need for the OECD’s stamp of approval to attract foreign direct investment. The
BRICS want to avoid being entangled by the DAC’s donor norms and the donor coordina-
tion rules among the DAC members. The BRICS, as rising donors (Russia being the excep-
tion), prefer to self-identify with the South, and depict their assistance as distinct from that
of the traditional Northern donors. Unlike Mexico or South Korea, the BRICS rising states
do not harbor a desire to join either the OECD or the DAC.
Conclusion
The above analysis highlights three main points. First, that shifts in the balance of world eco-
nomic power, involving the rise of the BRICS countries as aid givers and their contestation
with the traditional donors, have not only generated inter-state tension but have had impor-
tant implications for multilateral consultative forums. In particular, there have been mis-
alignments in representational arrangements: under-representation of the rising states and
over-representation of the traditional donors in the processes of agenda-setting and decision
making on development cooperation.
Second, these representational misalignments, and the ongoing contestation between the
BRICS rising states and the traditional donors, have resulted in three differing institutional
outcomes: first, the modification of existing informal platforms at the apex of the existing
system of global governance, as seen in the shift to a G20 leaders’ process and the outgrowth
of a G20 Development Agenda with its own Working Group on Development; second, the
creation of new alternative consultative forums, especially the BRICS leaders’ summitry, as
well as the IBSA Dialogue Forum; and third, the paralysis of the OECD-DAC regime, the
established multilateral consultative forum for international coordination on development
cooperation.
Third, no single multilateral consultative forum has yet emerged where the global com-
munity can effectively and efficiently make collective decisions on global development coop-
eration and where the delivery of those global public goods can be seen through to fruition.
The differences between the multilateral forums in which the influence of the traditional
donors continues to prevail, such the OECD-DAC, and the newly emerging consultative
forums, such as the BRICS leaders’ process, are more than simply about who controls the
development agenda. These differences reflect deeper-seated divergences about the specifics
of how to foster national development. Spurred by their own accelerated growth and having
withstood the 2007–9 Anglo-American financial crisis better than many expected, the rising
states see a larger role for the state and the public sector, prefer a less intrusive approach to
policy influence (than the “conditionality” of the traditional donors), and place emphasis on
sharing public policy experiences between the countries of the South (rather than the “one
size fits all” approach preferred by the international financial institutions (IFIs) and
the DAC).
It remains to be seen whether the current efforts to bridge these differences via the G20, as
a consultative platform, will bring the results desired by its proponents. What can be said for
now is that the debate between those favoring the various consultative forums for develop-
ment cooperation—old, new, or modified—remains vigorous. The international community
is facing a scenario of “messy multilateralism” and a “negotiated order,” where respective
consultative forums, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, will continue to contend
for influence, and where mission creep, overlapping mandates, and systemic gaps will remain
as lingering problems in the system. At the same time, we believe that the continuing though
gradual rise of the BRICS, as a cooperative grouping, is a driver of systemic change. The ascent
of the BRICS will continue to be a “game changer” in development cooperation for the fore-
seeable future, and a catalyst for change in the international hierarchy of the multilateral
consultative forums for development cooperation.
Notes
1. This observation was highlighted by one participant at the Ottawa workshop: IDRC,
October 16–18, 2011.
2. Notes from Gregory Chin’s discussion with officials of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
Beijing, October 2011.
3. Notes from Gregory Chin’s discussion with officials of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
Beijing, October 2011.
4. Notes from Gregory Chin’s interviews of former and then current DAC officials: Beijing,
October 2006; Paris, March 2007.
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chapter 52
u n der e sti m ated

i n flu ence:
u n con tr ibu tions to
dev el opm en t ide as,
l e a dership, i n flu ence ,
a n d i m pact
richard jolly
Introduction
To many people, the UN is little more than a talk shop, a building of scurrying diplomats and
overpaid functionaries, who after endless and tortuous politicized debates produce a few
tiny mice in the form of banal resolutions and turgid prose. If and when the UN is faced with
real problems of conflict, emergency, and human suffering, its actions seem almost always to
be delayed, inadequate, or blocked by a veto.
Needless to say, this is a considerable oversimplification. In terms of staffing and budgets,
the whole of the UN employs about the same numbers as the fire and police forces of New
York City. And opinion surveys in the United States, one of the most skeptical of all countries
toward the UN, consistently show that the majority of Americans hold a more favorable view
of the UN than they do of the U.S. government and rate the UN’s effectiveness significantly
higher than that of Congress.
But probably the biggest public misunderstanding of the UN is the belief that most of its
work is political, highly controversial, and focused on international disputes. In fact, four-
fifths of the UN’s work relates to development and international support in such vital areas as
health, agriculture, employment, population, and statistics. Coordination of international
systems for reporting on weather, air traffic control, patents, disease, and crop production—
an ever more important part of a globalized world—are under the UN but hardly ever result
in public disputes. Promotion of human rights often hits the headlines but less noticed are the
882 richard jolly
vast numbers of country-by-country human development activities in support of children,

women, victims of HIV/AIDS, and marginalized peoples and groups, such as those with
disabilities. At this level, the UN is only one actor among many—but because of its legiti-
macy, role and global outreach, the UN has often been a pioneer and leading influence on
thinking and ideas about economic and social development.
The UN’s Founding Principles
It was initially envisaged that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank
would be an integral part of the UN system. But they began operations in Washington with
little more than nominal relationships to the rest of the UN—and working independently
of the UN Secretary General and the main UN structures. Much of the early work of the
Bretton Woods Institutions focused on reconstruction in post-war Europe. In contrast,
economists at the UN mostly worked on problems and policies in developing countries. To
date, nine economists who have worked in or closely with the UN have received Nobel
prizes for economics, a record far in advance of the Bretton Woods Institutions.
UN Pioneering Leadership
in Development
In its early years, the UN secretariat was “a hothouse for ideas” (Emmerij, Jolly, and Weiss
2001: 26–42) and early development thinking, well ahead of most other groups including
universities. Some of the brightest economic lights of the day were brought into the UN
(Toye and Toye 2004: 54), including: Michel Kalecki, Nicholas Kaldor, Sidney Dell, Arthur
Lewis, Hans Singer, Gunnar Myrdal, and Raùl Prebisch. The UN during 1949–51 issued three
major and pioneering reports: National and International Measures for Full Employment
(1949), Measures for International Economic Stability (1951), and Measures for the Economic
Development of Under-developed countries (1951). The first two reports were important for
international economic policy but the latter was the most directly related to development in
its current sense.
The latter report focused on economic development, covering a wide field of issues: meas-
ures to raise agricultural and industrial production, the need for balanced rural and urban
development, mass education, and the need for support from taxation. The report boldly
elaborated national and international recommendations for accelerating development in
developing countries, emphasizing the critical need for increases in investment beyond what
could be raised from domestic savings. A large inflow of capital into the under-developed
countries would therefore be required—and the report recommended that the World Bank
should set itself the objective of lending $1 billion each year, to be reached within five years.
Even more boldly for the time, the report recommended that “some mechanism be created
for transferring from the developed to the underdeveloped countries by way of grants-in-aid
development ideas, leadership, influence, and impact 883
a sum of money increasing rapidly, reaching eventually a level of $3 billion a year” (UN
2004a: 61, 84).
The recommendation for providing development assistance on concessional terms
became a major and controversial issue which was debated within the UN over almost the
whole of the 1950s. The very idea of concessional loans was strongly opposed by most devel-
oped countries—and by Eugene Black, President of the World Bank, who argued that the
provision of resources at below market rates would lead to a misallocation of resources.
On the other side, the need for substantial flows of concessional finance had the backing of
several UN reports as well as by many developing countries (Bhouraskar 2007). In 1957 a
compromise proposal was agreed. This was for a very much smaller fund with purposes lim-
ited to providing resources for intensive surveys of resources, establishing training institutes
in public administration, statistics, and technology; and establishing agricultural and indus-
trial and productivity centers.
Ironically—and barely two years later—the U.S. proposed the creation of IDA, the Inter-
national Development Association, within the World Bank Group. This would provide—
and has now provided for more than fifty years—concessional loans to developing countries
of exactly the sort proposed within the UN and so strongly opposed by the President of the
World Bank. But this time the IDA would be administered by the Bank and the main donors
would fund it. This became the first of many occasions when the Bretton Woods Institutions
took over ideas from the UN which initially they had strongly opposed.
The Prebisch–Singer Thesis
The UN, from its first decade, has emphasized problems arising from the unequal economic
relationships between poorer and richer countries and called for global and national action
to offset the imbalances and inequalities which these create. Ideologically and theoretically
taking account of this asymmetry has marked an almost continuous difference underlying
the economic work and policies proposed by the UN and by the Bretton Woods Institutions.
The Prebisch–Singer thesis—that the terms of trade between primary products and man-
ufactures have been subject to a long-term downward trend—was one of the first theoreti-
cal arguments to explain these asymmetries. Hans W. Singer, one of the early economists of
the UN and Raùl Prebisch, a senior and well-established Argentinean economist, working
independently, formulated the thesis almost simultaneously, both drawing on empirical
material. Singer in New York had been studying the long-term terms of trade between pri-
mary products and manufactures, presenting his results in an internal UN document,
together with a submission to the American Economic Review entitled “The Distribution of
Gains between Investing and Borrowing Countries,” published in 1950. Prebisch, employed
as a consultant to the UN Commission of Latin America—before becoming Executive
Director—in 1950 published The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal
Problems (Toye and Toye 2004).
The Prebisch–Singer thesis has been controversial from the beginning. Initially, the thesis
tended to be rejected, especially because primary product prices rose sharply shortly after
publication as a result of the 1950–3 Korean War. These reversals in the long-run trend cast
884 richard jolly
doubt upon whether there was any trend at all. But by the end of the twentieth century, after
fifty years of ever more sophisticated research, the professional consensus was to confirm the
thesis (Sapsford and Chen 1998).
Unequal relations between richer and poorer countries—and between stronger and
weaker countries—have retained a strong influence over thinking in the UN since 1945.
Such asymmetries are found not only in trade, but in flows of capital, investment, tech-
nology, information, aid relationships, and in the operations of transnational corpora-
tions. The asymmetries are especially emphasized by poorer countries—just as they are
still often dismissed or under-emphasized by richer countries. The differences in view
have influenced the ideologies and professional work of the UN and the Bretton Woods
Institutions, especially because of the clear differences in representation and voting
arrangements between them. Moreover, because of the broader mandates and non-
economic concerns of many UN institutions, extending far beyond the economic focus of
the Bretton Woods institutions, the UN has always been more open to multi-disciplinary
analyses of development issues, setting itself apart from neo-liberal economic analyses
which have dominated the International Financial Institutions. This is an important part
of the explanation as to why the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions have often dif-
fered on the key elements of development and the priorities and strategies to which they
frequently lead.
The 1960s and the Development Decade
In 1961, President Kennedy proposed in the UN General Assembly (GA) that the 1960s
become a Development Decade. The GA soon passed a resolution calling for action to lessen
the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries, to speed up the process of mod-
ernization, and to release the majority of mankind from poverty.
The resolution called for a wide range of development actions: industrialization; agricul-
tural development; the elimination of illiteracy, hunger, and disease; the promotion of educa-
tion and national planning to bring all of this together. Internationally, there would need to be
an increase in the flow of public and private capital to developing countries as well as of their
exports. Interestingly, the resolution also added that resources released from disarmament
should be used for the purpose of economic and social development.
The GA targeted GNP growth at a rate of 5 percent per annum, an estimate emerging from
the UN secretariat. There was caution, however. Fearing that this rate was too ambitious, the
resolution simply called for a rate of 5 percent to be attained by 1970, the last year of the devel-
opment decade. Contrary to expectations, however, this UN goal was considerably exceeded.
Developing countries achieved an average of 5.5 percent growth over the decade from 1961–70
and fifty individual countries, accounting for about half the population of developing coun-
tries at the time, reached or exceeded the 5 percent target.
The Development Decade served as a coordinating mechanism within the UN, at least to
some extent. Each of the UN specialized agencies and funds contributed their own plans and
programs toward the decade which were brought together in what became known as the
blue book, The Development Decade: Proposals for Action (UN 1962).
Excluding the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals), some fifty quantitative develop-
ment goals with time-bound targets have been adopted by the UN since the 1960s. The goals
have covered rates of economic growth, changes in the structure of developing country
economies, amounts of development aid, and in the 1970s a goal for financial transfers
from developed to developing countries. A number of basic human goals have also been
adopted—from the expansion of primary, secondary, and tertiary level education (which
were the first UN goals adopted in 1960 at three regional conferences organized by
UNESCO), to a range of other key goals for the reduction of infant and child mortality
and under-nutrition of children, the expansion of primary health care, access to safe drink-
ing water and sanitation, and the elimination or reduction of key diseases (Jolly et al. 2004:
259–67). The most dramatic of all the goals was the one set in 1966 for the eradication of
smallpox. Its achievement eleven years later has saved millions of lives and billions of dollars,
which would otherwise have had to be spent each year on control and treatment. None of the
other goals have been fully achieved—though impressive achievements have been recorded
in the 99 percent reduction of polio cases, the 74 percent reduction of deaths from measles,
and the substantial falls in mortality and morbidity from other communicable diseases. Only
with a few goals has performance fallen consistently and a long way behind the targets: accel-
erated reduction of literacy, the reduction of maternal mortality, and the 0.7 percent goal for
the transfer of developed country GNP as aid to developing countries (which has only been
met by five developed countries).
This assessment is not to suggest that there has always been a close and direct link between
the UN goals and country performance. Many factors have been at work and usually the influ-
ence of the goals set by the UN was only one. Nonetheless, this UN record deserves underlin-
ing, all the more so when set alongside two related considerations. First, the achievement of
UN goals is arguably much better than the record of achievement of the almost 500 structural
adjustment programs formulated by the Bretton Woods institutions over the 1980s and 1990s
(Vreeland 2007: 73–111). Although structural adjustment was politically and economically
more challenging to governments than pursuit of the UN goals, adjustment policies received
many more billions of dollars of direct support from the IMF and the World Bank than was
even given in support to the UN goals. Second, until the MDGs, the Bretton Woods institu-
tions never formally accepted any of the UN goals. International support for the MDGs today
is all the more impressive for this reason.
The 1970s and After
Over much of the 1970s, there was some important refocusing of international development
priorities. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) mounted a highly influential set
of in-depth country employment missions assessing the situation in specific countries—
Colombia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, and others. The Kenya report proved to be the
most influential, recognizing for the first time in an international document the positive
role of the informal sector. The report also proposed “Redistribution from Growth” as a
strategy which over time could accelerate poverty reduction by channeling increments from
growth into additional investments for the poorest in the form of education, health, and
886 richard jolly
roductivity-raising investments for the rural and peri-urban populations (ILO 1972). These
p
ideas began to permeate the UN system, focused in 1976 in the ILO’s strategy of Basic Needs
(ILO 1976). Basic Needs also received support from most of the donors and was formally
endorsed by DAC, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD.
Meanwhile, the World Bank in 1968 had appointed a new President, Robert McNamara,
the former US Secretary of Defense, and was developing a new dynamism. McNamara soon
became a powerful advocate for poverty reduction within the Bank and this lasted until 1981,
when his term came to an end. In spite of McNamara’s early reputation for being the paragon
of modern management, the Bank’s poverty focus died almost as soon as McNamara left.
According to the World Bank’s own history, many Bank staff members referred to poverty
reduction as the “favorite toy” of McNamara and Mahbub ul Haq, his close advisor. Even
Hollis Chenery, the World Bank’s distinguished Chief economist, initially resisted “the swing
toward poverty lending seeing the notion of target groups as ‘a boy scouts approach.’ ” Ernie
Stern, the main power behind the throne of the Bank from the 1960s to 1990s, is quoted in
his farewell speech as saying that he never really believed in poverty reduction as a goal. His
view, he said was “that growth is the only solution to the reduction of poverty and inequali-
ties” (Kapur, Lewis, and Webb 1997: 240, 372).
Over the 1970s, the UN made two major contributions to enlarging the world’s develop-
ment agenda. The first was through a series of high-level global conferences which the UN
organized: in 1972 on the environment in Stockholm; in 1974 on world food problems in
Rome and on population in Bucharest; in 1975 on women in Mexico City; in 1976 on urban
problems and human settlements at the Habitat conference in Vancouver, and on employ-
ment in Geneva; and in 1979 on science and technology in Vienna (Emmerij, Jolly, and Weiss
2001: 82–7). Each of these conferences added ideas, analyses, and a plethora of policy recom-
mendations for both national and international action. The impact of such conferences is
always difficult to assess—but there is little doubt that most of them expanded horizons and
led to substantive changes of policy and actions over the long term.
The second initiative to expand the development agenda was without doubt less success-
ful. Over the 1970s, the world economic situation experienced major disruptions. In 1971, the
US abandoned the Bretton Woods agreement, suspending the fixed rate exchange of the dol-
lar for gold. Two years later, oil prices soared—by three and a half times over 1973/4—in part,
but only in part, the result of oil producing countries forming OPEC, the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries. Soaring oil prices transferred a bonanza of oil revenues to
OPEC countries—some 2 percent of world GNP, three-quarters of which came from devel-
oped countries, and a quarter from developing countries without oil. For a short while, many
developing countries and their supporters thought this might open the way to a New Inter-
national Economic Order (NIEO). A Special Session of the General Assembly was held on
this theme in the UN in New York in 1974, followed by at least a year of negotiations on the
establishment of NIEO and a Programme of Action for the Reform of International Eco-
nomic Relations. Initially there were hopes of movement and concessions—especially
because the economies of developed countries had been thrown on the back foot by the size
and impact of the oil price increases (GNP of the developed countries fell in 1974, after almost
three decades of steady increases). But gradually it became clear that the OPEC countries
were being persuaded to invest their bounty in developed country banks, in a process known
as recycling the petro-dollars. The developed countries then indicated that there was little
point in continuing even to talk and negotiations collapsed.
The long-run consequences for developing countries were serious—and perhaps also for
developed countries. The vision of moving some way toward new measures of global eco-
nomic management was lost—and with it went opportunities for ensuring global stability,
steadier economic growth, more support for poorer developing countries, and moves toward
environmental protection. Instead, the OPEC countries became locked into financial and
economic relationships with the industrial countries, which has limited their subsequent
development, increased global inequalities and added to militarization in the Middle East.
Many of the largest OPEC economies are little richer if at all compared to what they were
some 30 years ago, while their human development indices also collectively lag the most
behind per capita incomes. And developed countries, faced in the twenty-first century with
the need to adjust and rebalance their economies in relation to the growing strength of
China, India, Brazil, and other emerging economies, are having to rely upon global institu-
tions which are still weak in the context of the new challenges of globalization. Global prob-
lems require global solutions1—yet the chance of reform to strengthen global institutions
and make them up to this task was missed in the 1970s, and several times since.
The 1980s and 1990s
The next two decades marked the apogee of neo-liberalism inaugurated by the election of
Ronald Reagan as President of the United States and Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister
of the UK. The U.S. and the UK led the way with national policies which inevitably were less
pure than their ideologies proclaimed. But internationally there was a distinct sharpening in
the application of neo-liberal ideology in the operations of the World Bank and the IMF. This
spread to most countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, usu-
ally as part of conditions for obtaining structural adjustment loans from these institutions.
The loans were needed to help pay interest on the high debts which had accumulated by the
early 1980s. The loans had been built up in large part as a consequence of the soaring oil
prices of 1973/4 and further increases in 1979 which had caused “the NOPECs”—the devel-
oping countries without oil—to pay much higher prices for their oil imports.
Combined with other factors, structural adjustment policies led to the 1980s becoming a
lost decade for development in much of Latin America and most of sub-Saharan Africa—
and in many countries this continued into the 1990s. Per capita income in Latin America,
which had grown from 1960 to 1980 by 80 percent, then grew by only a miserable 9 percent
over the twenty years to 2000. In sub-Saharan Africa, the results were even worse: over 1960–
1980, per capita income increased by 36 percent; from 1980 to 2000, per capita income actu-
ally fell by 15 percent (Weisbrot, Naiman, and Kim 2001). The result was that by 1996, no less
than fifty-seven developing countries in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa had lower
per capita incomes than they had had two or three decades earlier (UNDP 1996: 3).
This was not the case for most of Asia, which was developing in dramatic contrast. In 1978,
Deng Xiao Peng introduced reforms into China, which step-by-step launched this vast country
on an accelerated route of economic growth. China’s per-capita income more than doubled
over the 1980s—doubled again by 2000 and yet again by 2011. Less spectacularly and beginning
a decade later (in 1991), India adopted reforms which also increased substantially its economic
888 richard jolly
growth rates—not quite to the same high rate as China but to rates significantly faster than
India had achieved since independence. Smaller Asian countries also did well. Korea and
Taiwan had already pioneered a fast growth development strategy in the 1950s and 1960s which
continued. Gradually in the late 1980s and 1990s, many other countries of Asia followed suit,
combining strong government economic leadership with selective market reforms.
In the UN, international debate over structural adjustment began in the early years of the
decade—with the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), UNICEF, and the ILO being
increasingly outspoken. However, the ILO was soon threatened by U.S. and other developed
country opposition, which muted its more public opposition. But the ECA and UNICEF con-
tinued, criticizing the narrowness of adjustment policies, the negative impact on growth and
the growing evidence of the human costs of cuts and setbacks. Both organizations p resented
alternatives. ECA put forward AAF-SAP, the African Alternative Framework to Structural
Adjustment Programmes for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation, endorsed by Afri-
can Ministers of Planning and Finance (Adedeji 2004: 233–306). UNICEF in 1985 presented
Adjustment with a Human Face, first as a lecture to the Society for International Development
(SID) and later in a well-documented study (Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart 1987), arguing strongly
for incorporating support for the essential needs of children and other vulnerable groups in
the making of adjustment policies. UNICEF presented the case based on human need but it
also argued that if the purpose of adjustment was to rebuild an economy, it was illogical to cut
back on health, education, nutrition, and the other needs of children which were among the
most important forms of human investment required for sustained development.
In the 1990s, more general changes began which broadened and altered the development
agenda, often again with the UN in the lead. First, were a series of summits, a revisiting of the
themes of the high level global meetings of the 1970s, but this time raising the ante by holding
the event at head of state level. The first of these was the World Summit for Children. Perhaps
surprisingly, this was not a UN meeting as such, though held in the General Assembly and in
the ECOSOC chamber in New York. At the time, UN Protocol had ruled that UN meetings
had to be open to representatives at whatever level the government chose to send, and thus
could not be specified as a Summit meeting. However, once seventy-one heads of state had
attended the World Summit for Children, the protocol was revised and the gates of UN com-
petition were opened. Thus 108 heads of state came to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, 117 for
the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1994. By the time of the Millen-
nium Summit in New York in 2000, 147 heads of state attended.
Second, the development agenda achieved more worldwide public attention. Summit
attendance by heads of state guaranteed high profile notice in the media. Equally important,
the summits and global conferences of the 1990s attracted participation from a growing
number of non-government groups which further increased international awareness and
influence. By 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio 2,400 representatives of NGOs took part,
along with 17,000 others who joined in special activities organized by the NGOs. By the
Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, there were 5,100 representatives of 2,100
NGOs and 30,000 other individuals. Such large-scale participation of NGOs ensured fol-
low-up, both by the direct involvement of so many individuals and by creating lobby groups
and alliances for maintaining pressure on governments to implement the agreements to
which they had signed.
Third, these summits and global conferences broadened the development agenda,
updating the objectives and enlarging and deepening the issues formulated in the global
conferences of the 1970s. There was usually also some sharpening of the commitments and
goals agreed. These commitments covered the needs of children (New York, 1990), the
environment—climate change, biodiversity, desertification and deforestation (Rio, 1992),
population and development (Cairo, 1994), social development (Copenhagen, 1994),
women and gender (Beijing, 1995), human settlements (Istanbul, 1996), and food security
(Rome, 1996).
Fourth, OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, became
seriously engaged. Initially encouraged by Japan, OECD pressed for the formulation of goals
for the twenty-first century. This led to the preparation and then the adoption of a key docu-
ment: Shaping the 21st Century: the Contribution of Development Cooperation (OECD 1996).
This document assessed progress in a number of key areas over the 1980s and 1990s, as well
as improving the contribution and focus of development assistance. The document then
specified key goals to be achieved by 2015—in reducing poverty and making progress in pri-
mary education, gender equality, basic health care and family planning, and in empowering
women. Their significance is not that they were a forerunner of the MDGs—which in many
cases had grown out of earlier UN conferences—but that by being put forward by OECD
they were then taken seriously by the World Bank and the IMF and most donors. Indeed, the
OECD document led to a new level of specific collaboration between the World Bank and
the UN in the pursuit of goals, an unprecedented step which had eluded efforts of UN–
Bretton Woods collaboration for more than four decades.
Fifth, and perhaps most important of all, the World Conference on Human Rights in
Vienna in 1993 opened the way for incorporating human rights into development. The
Vienna Conference agreed long-awaited institutional changes for UN leadership and fol-
low-up in support of the UN’s many declarations and conventions of human rights. The post
of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was agreed and an office established—some
forty-seven years after the need for such a position had been identified by Rene Cassin, a
French intellectual with long experience within the League of Nations (Jolly, Emmerij, and
Weiss 2009: 53). Partly because of this but also because women and gender, children, and
other rights issues had become a growing focus for mobilization and action over the previ-
ous two decades, human rights entered the development agenda clearly and strongly over
the 1990s. A “rights based approach to development” was adopted by many UN agencies and
by a number of governments.
Human Development
Outside the conferences, the 1990s became a creative period for various parts of the UN. The
UNDP launched the Human Development Report which put forth an alternative paradigm
on the development agenda. Human Development was the joint creation of a distinguished
economist, Mahbub ul Haq, and a Nobel Prize winning economist-philosopher, Amartya
Sen. The human development paradigm put people as the central focus of development, sup-
porting this approach with a robust methodology and a sophisticated underlying philoso-
phy. Human development was defined as an enlargement of human choices and a
strengthening of human capabilities. This definition built on the basic needs approach of the
890 richard jolly
1970s but was less directive in defining the specifics of capabilities which needed to be
strengthened and even less directive in defining human choices which should be broad-
ened. These advantages stimulated human development as a field for active engagement and
research. Some 750 National Human Development Reports have been produced in states,
countries, or regions, often focusing on particular themes such as rural development,
women, democracy, or human security.
Equally important, the Human Development Report (HDR) has continued as an annual
publication with worldwide outreach, and with roughly a hundred thousand copies pub-
lished each year in several languages. The second decade of the HDR produced what has
been called the second generation of human development thinking, focused on the new
technologies, deepening democracy, cultural liberty (Fukuda Parr 2008: 223–54).
The paradigm of human development has been of fundamental significance for the UN
itself, though its potential has yet to be fully realized. Human development represents a com-
prehensive, philosophically robust paradigm for development, a positive alternative to the
neo-liberal paradigm which has ruled over the mainstream for most of the post-war world,
with increasing dominance since the 1980s. Although the UN has provided fairly continuous
criticism of neo-liberal policies in action, and often some critique of the neo-liberal para-
digm itself, it was only with human development that the UN has been able to offer a serious,
positive, comprehensive, and credible alternative.
Second, the human development alternative is multi-disciplinary, thus matching the pro-
fessional multi-disciplinarity of the UN itself. Unlike the Bretton Woods Institutions, the
UN engages with many dimensions of development through the diversity of institutions—
its specialized agencies like WHO, FAO, UNESCO, and ILO as well as its funds like UNDP,
UNICED, UNFPA, WFP, IFAD, and most recently UN Women. Most of these bodies employ
a few economists but many more professionals from other disciplines such as public
health and epidemiology, agriculture, sociology, and anthropology. Simply to list this range
of professionals indicates why so many of the UN agencies have often found the neo-liberal
policies and orthodox economic development approaches of the World Bank and the IMF
narrow and misguided. Yet until the Human Development Report, there was no paradigm
with sufficient generality and flexibility to provide an all-embracing frame within which
these other professions and UN agencies could find a place.
Third, the human development paradigm embraces all the core values of the UN itself:
human rights, gender equality, and non-discrimination in all areas, sustainability and equity
between generations, multi-cultural sensitivity, and human security. Although each of these
was recognized in the first few years and has been the topic of more detailed analysis in sub-
sequent Human Development Reports, the full use of the paradigm in policy making has
been overwhelmingly the exception rather than the rule.
Women and the Girl Child
Human Development of course, links closely with advances for women, gender equality, and
the efforts to end gender discrimination. Following the First World Conference on Women
in 1975 and the adoption a year later of the Convention for the Elimination of all forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), women mobilized worldwide for their rights.
The Conference itself had greatly stimulated this process when participants from many
countries realized they were not alone but part of a global movement with friends and
colleagues, activists and allies around the world. The later UN World Conferences in
Copenhagen, Nairobi, and Beijing increased the momentum, as did the national, regional,
and international focus on CEDAW. Notwithstanding opposition, open and behind the
scenes, remarkable progress has been made.
Within the UN, however, progress toward gender equality was mixed and slow. UNIFEM
supported activities and programs at country level—and organized support for activist
groups often when others were reluctant. UNDP’s HDR focused its 1995 report on women
and gender, with the slogan that “unless development was engendered it was endangered”
(UNDP 1995). In a heroically brave calculation, a figure was put together for the dollar value
of all women’s work, inside and outside the formal labor force, probably the first time such a
guesstimate was ever made at global level. The report calculated that if all contributions from
labor in the world were included, from work outside the labor force as well as within, unre-
munerated and remunerated, from women and from men, the total would be approximately
70 percent higher than existing estimates of global economic output. The estimate was inevi-
tably something of a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate although with some empirical input
from time-use studies in fourteen industrial, nine developing, and eight countries of the
Commonwealth of Independent States. These studies showed that women worked longer
hours in total than men—and carried 53 percent of the total burden of work in developing
countries and 51 percent in developed countries.
An earlier conceptual advance was the focus on “the girl child” by UNICEF. This concept
had first been developed by asking what should be the proper role of UNICEF, a child focused
agency, in working for gender equality. The answer was to focus on the “girl child” and the
ending of discrimination against children and women over the whole of the life cycle (Black
1996: 183–214). This approach recognized that ending the results of discrimination could
only be achieved over several generations, by gradually eliminating discrimination at every
stage of a female life. A non-discriminatory approach would need to be maintained through
childhood and education, puberty and adolescence through to young womanhood, choos-
ing a partner, marriage, having children, and pregnancy and giving birth. In virtually every
country at present, girls and women are set back by various forms of discrimination at one or
other of these stages of life. Because the results of this became embedded in women physi-
cally, psychologically, and socially, it may take up to three generations before the results of
discrimination are fully “washed out.” Only then can a society look forward to all girls hav-
ing equal opportunities to grow up and be nurtured without systemic discrimination. The
development and application of this concept was a major step forward intellectually and
operationally in constructing a non-discriminatory agenda for development.
The 2000s
The Millennium Summit, like the entry into the millennium itself, was a brief moment of
hope and expectation. More than 150 heads of state or government assembled at the UN in
New York, the largest number ever assembled in one place before. In total, 189 countries par-
ticipated, every UN member state. They endorsed the Secretary-General’s bold and broad
892 richard jolly
ranging document, which began with echoes of the Charter—“We the Peoples …”—and
proceeded to set out the challenges likely to face the United Nations in the twenty-first
century (Annan 2000). The Summit ended by endorsing the Millennium Declaration
(United Nations 2000), with eight chapters of commitments to future UN action: Values
and principles; Peace, security, and disarmament; Development and poverty eradication;
Protecting our common environment; Human Rights, Democracy, and Good Govern-
ment; Protecting the vulnerable; Meeting the special needs of Africa; and Strengthening
the UN.
In each of these areas, various initiatives were subsequently taken, usually with more
promise than fulfillment, though not without some impact. In relation to development,
the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), have been the most visible, kept on the
global agenda by aid donors and other governments, backed up by sustained pressure
from many international NGOs. Often less visible in the media, the UN remains at or
near the center in the other areas of follow up, especially with respect to international
negotiation, agenda setting, monitoring, and periodic reporting. The typical and too fre-
quent weaknesses in this process are usually the result of governments clinging to
national sovereignty as the over-ride to their commitments to stronger global govern-
ance (Weiss 2009).
Human Security
In terms of new thinking for development, human security has been an area of important
advance, after the Millennium Declaration. Much of this grew out of the paradigm for human
development. It was the 1994 HDR which first set out the concept of human security as
follows:
For too long, the concept of security has been shaped by the potential for conflict between
states. For too long, security has equated with threats to a country’s borders. For too long,
nations have sought arms to protect their security. . . . For most people today, a feeling of
insecurity rises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic
world event. Job security, income security, health security, environmental security, security
from crime—these are the emerging concerns of human security all over the world. (UNDP
1994: 22)
The 1999 Human Development Report on Globalization added financial security and food
security. It argued that stronger regional and global governance is needed, if the insecurities
in any of these areas are not to spread and multiply from country to country. Diseases do not
need passports to travel—as seen with HIV/AIDS and with Avian bird flu—as well as with
financial panics, financial instabilities, and flows of money at the touch of a computer button
or with rumors of a downgrade in a country’s rating.
Once the concept of human security was launched in 1994, the idea proved powerful,
encouraged perhaps by the initial euphoria of the post-Cold War era. In 2003, a Commission
was created headed by Amartya Sen and Sadako Ogata, the former head of the UNHCR.
Their report, Human Security Now (UN 2003), elaborated the concept and analyzed how it
could be applied, nationally and internationally.
In 2004, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, established a high level panel on Threats,
Challenges and Change (UN 2004b). The panel identified clusters of major threats: economic
and social threats, including poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation;
inter-state conflict; internal conflict, including civil war and genocide; weapons of mass
destruction; terrorism; and finally transnational organized crime. The panel made three
important points about confronting these threats: prevention is always better and cheaper
than cure, all the threats need collective not unilateral action, and the United Nations has
a key role in supporting all of these actions but to do so effectively the UN also needs
strengthening.
A year later, Kofi Annan himself issued his own proposals for taking these ideas forward.
He called his document, In Larger Freedom—towards development, security and human rights
for all. This provided important guidelines for action (Annan 2005). Following these interna-
tional initiatives were a number of country level actions. Almost twenty National Human
Security Reports have been prepared, investigating what a human security approach might
involve in such diverse situations as Kenya and Mozambique, East Timor and the Solomon
Islands, Palestine and the Arab Region, Thailand, and Afghanistan. Of these, the most inno-
vative was the report on Latvia, which showed how human security could be made opera-
tional at country level. It did this by mounting a sample survey of how individuals experienced
a diversity of some thirty types of insecurities in their lives and how they ranked them in
terms of seriousness. The second step was to explore the actions required to diminish these
insecurities, both the objective risks and the influences on subjective feelings of risk. Together
these identified actions for government, communities and non-government groups.
A related but separate development within the UN was the formulation of the doctrine of
R2P—the Responsibility to Protect and the Right to Intervene. Albeit with intense contro-
versy along the way, the General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 which marked a
major step forward in defining state obligations and, when these fail, recognizing the need
for international action. This doctrine, for the first time in the UN, sets limits on national
sovereignty. These limits are defined by obligations of the state and its rulers to protect the
peoples over which they rule. In the case of egregious failures of these obligations—for
instance, genocide or inadequate reactions to the consequences of natural disasters affecting
the mass of the population—the international community has a recognized right to inter-
vene with Security Council approval.
UN Ideas that Changed the

World—an Overview
The above account highlights how the UN has been a pioneer in the area of economic and
social development over the years since its founding. Much of UN’s leadership has been in
the creation, promotion and application of ideas. Indeed, the UN Intellectual History Project
(UNIHP), a recently completed ten-year venture, concluded that ideas were among the UN’s
most important contributions.
The summary volume of the UNIHP identified nine UN ideas whose impact had “changed
the world.” None of the ideas was an abstract conception, let alone a static notion. Each idea
894 richard jolly
related to action and evolved over time, being elaborated and applied in different ways and in
different contexts and, in the process, usually gained focus in relation to implementation.
The nine ideas are as follows (Jolly, Emmerij, and Weiss 2009):
Human Rights and Norms

1. Human Rights for All
2. Gender Equality
Economic and Social Strategies and Approaches

3. Development Goals
4. Fairer International Economic Relations
5. Development Strategies
6. Social Development
Integrated and Sustainable Perspectives

7. Environmental Sustainability
8. Peace and Human Security
9. Human Development
It was not suggested that the UN had originated all or any of these ideas. Indeed, few big
ideas of economic and social consequence arise as some independently-inspired, “light-bulb
moment” and the same has been true of the UN’s major contributions. Ideas such as human
rights, preventive diplomacy, or environmental sustainability have multiple sources of crea-
tion and inspiration stretching back years or centuries. This long process of adaptation and
change is helped on—and sometimes obstructed—by social forces, groups and occasionally
by individuals.
The UNIHP identified four main ways in which UN ideas had gained traction and impact
(Jolly, Emmerij, and Weiss 2009: 41–7):
• by changing the ways issues were perceived and the language used to describe them;
• by framing agendas for action;
• by changing the ways that key groups perceived their interests, thus altering the bal-
ance of forces pressing for support and adoption of an idea (or resisting it);
• by becoming embedded in an institution or institutions which were then given respon-
sibility for carrying the idea forward and becoming a focus for monitoring and
accountability.
The UNIHP argued that explaining the process of developing, promoting, or applying UN
ideas in economic and social development involved recognition that there were three UNs
at work rather than one. The first is the formal UN of government representatives; the sec-
ond is the UN of staff members, often in positions of leadership and initiative, more than
often the case of civil servants in national governments; and there is a third UN of experts,
advisers, commission members, and NGOs, not formally part of the organization but in fact
closely involved and influential. In the creation and promotion of ideas, the UNIHP argued
that usually the second and third played the crucial role.
Although the UN system has played a particular and unique role for each of the ideas,
there have been common elements—giving them focus and legitimacy, showing their rele-
vance to the contemporary world, shaping their international dimensions, promoting them
widely, and often applying them in the UN’s own programs. In fulfilling these unique and
diverse roles, the UN’s support for these ideas has “changed the world,” as the UN Intellectual
History argued.
This claim can be illustrated clearly in relation to the first of the ideas—Human Rights, a
norm and vision with a long history. Yet in its Charter and by the Universal Declaration of
1948, the United Nations established the bold notion that human rights were universal and
applied to everyone in the contemporary world, thereby bringing a new and, for the time,
extraordinary and immediate global legitimacy to these long-standing values. To fully appre-
ciate this, one must recall the timing: the Charter and the Universal Declaration were each
produced when imperial rule was still widespread, many countries were still colonies far
from independence, and even in the United States many blacks did not have the vote. The
contrast between these realities and the universality of the Declaration show how far ahead
of the curve of history was the UN at the time (Normand and Zaidi 2008). And in the years
following, UN pioneering in the area of human rights was reinforced by literally hundreds of
more specific human rights treaties, creating a universal human rights legal system which
embraces every child, woman, or man in the world.2 These rights have gained more opera-
tional influence and traction over the years, perhaps especially since the creation in 1993 of
the post and office of the UN High Commissioner.
The UN’s activities and international leadership relating to women, gender, and CEDAW
have been different—but equally far reaching, notwithstanding the mixed record of per-
formance within the UN itself. As elaborated earlier in this chapter, the World Conferences
on Women served as catalysts for worldwide mobilization of women and others around
the newly agreed agendas. None of these would have achieved the same impact without the
legitimacy and capacity of the UN to organize on a global scale.
The next four ideas relate more directly to what is generally considered to be part of “the
development agenda” goals: fairer economic relations, development strategy, and social priori-
ties. Here, the UN’s contribution has been both as an international pioneer of thinking or prac-
tice and as a critic of mainstream development thinking, especially Bretton Woods and
donor-driven orthodoxy. UN development ideas have often been at variance with and opposed
by neo-liberal, free-trade, or free-market economists, and by the World Bank and IMF. The
UN’s fifty goals for development, for example, were often criticized for being top-down and
dirigiste, for displacing market forces or for being little more than blue sky dreams. Similarly,
the UN’s analysis of unequal trade and other international economic relationships as set out in
numerous reports of ECLAC, ECA, and UNCTAD have frequently been criticized by academic
economists, donors, and by the Bretton Woods Institutions. And if not criticized, they were—
and often still are—dismissed as “predictable in their conclusions” or simply ignored.
896 richard jolly
This is not the place for a detailed weighing of the various merits of these many arguments,
which reflect economic and political ideology as well as the differences in the underlying
voting structure and government influences between the UN and the Bretton Woods Insti-
tutions. Here we make only one point—which is that over the years both sets of institutions
have moved somewhat closer together, though more often with the World Bank (and to a
lesser extent the IMF) moving more toward the UN on economic matters than vice versa.
For instance, the UN took the lead in criticizing the narrow orthodoxy of adjustment poli-
cies in the 1980s. Later and gradually the Bretton Woods Institutions often moved to accept
the criticisms and adapt to the UN’s views, just as it had the proposals for concessional loans
in the 1950s and did in the 1990s in accepting what broadly became the MDGs. Nonetheless,
fairer trade and unequal economic relations (as opposed to free trade and free markets)
remain a defining point of difference between the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions.
The final three ideas all show the UN’s role and leadership in broadening development
perspectives: environment and sustainability; peace, conflict prevention, and preventive
diplomacy; and on an integrated view of human development. In all these areas, the develop-
ment agenda has been enormously broadened. In the case of environment and sustainability,
the UN’s first initiatives were in the 1970s—organizing with strong Swedish support the
Stockholm conference. This launched a series of international activities and initiatives, cre-
ating the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), setting up the Brundtland
Commission in the 1980s, holding the Earth Summit in the 1992—and supporting all
these with more detailed activities like creating the International Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). Peace, Preventive Diplomacy, and Human Security illustrate how increasingly these
issues have entered the development agenda, with the UN elaborating ideas and mecha-
nisms. The importance of the Human Development paradigm as an integrating framework
for the whole of development has already been dealt with earlier in the chapter.
Conclusions
Over its life, the UN has made many contributions to ideas and thinking about development.
Indeed, ideas may have been the most important contribution of the UN to development.
In pioneering and promoting new ideas in development, the UN has often been ahead
of the curve and ahead of the Bretton Woods institutions, even though the latter have
received most financial support and attention from donor governments. The historical
record shows that the UN has frequently led the way in formulating ideas and approaches
for development which later—and often much later—the Bretton Woods institutions have
adopted.
Since the 1990s, there have been some actions to close the gaps between the UN and the
Bretton Woods institutions, much relating to shared efforts in pursuit of the MDGs. None-
theless, the relationships between these institutions, originally envisaged to be unified parts
of international economic management, remains too far apart for efficiency and effective-
ness. Stronger relationships should recognize the past contributions from both sides, but in
particular recognizing the many ways the UN has contributed positively to development
understanding and expertise.
The increasing economic power and political importance of China, India, and other fast
growing, emerging countries present new opportunities as well as new challenges for
improving global economic governance. The UN’s ideas on development, its record in elabo-
rating these ideas with legitimacy and support underlines the need for ensuring that the UN
has a stronger and more integral part in global governance for the future.
Notes
1. From the Stiglitz Commission, set up by the President of the General Assembly and which
issued in 2009 its Report of the Commission of Experts of the President of the UN General
Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System. This is only the
latest of numerous reports from outside the UN and within which have set forth proposals
for more effective management of the world economic system. Two of the most notewor-
thy in the years following the collapse of the NIEO negotiations include: North–South: a
Programme of Survival, the report of the Brandt Commission in 1980 and Our Global
Neighbourhood, the Report of the Commission on Global Governance in 1995, both of
which set out recommendations for strengthening global economic management.
2. For an overview, see <www.bayefsky.com>, The United Nations Human Rights Treaties.
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Polity Press.
epil ogu e
bruce currie-alder, ravi kanbur, david
m. malone, and rohinton medhora
Where We Are
The chapters in this volume have addressed the evolution of development thought and its
interactions with development practice over the past seven decades since the Second World
War. Will the trends identified in the volume endure? How will development thought and
practice evolve over the next fifty to seventy years? We speculate on the answers to these
questions in these brief concluding lines to the volume. In doing so we draw on the chapters
in the volume but also on the proceedings of a very special meeting of development thinkers
and practitioners held outside New York City in September 2012. The two days of discussions
compared development thought today to fifty years ago, how development thought and
practice have influenced each other, how economics has interacted with the broader social
sciences in the development discourse, and what influence the natural sciences have had for
their part. Most importantly, however, the group looked to the future to identify key features
of the development terrain that are already visible as we look ahead, and features and contin-
gencies we are very likely to encounter in the next half century.
The background to the forward-looking exercise is the charting of where we are today,
particularly in comparison to fifty years ago. This backdrop can be summarized in terms of
five propositions:
• There has been tremendous progress on virtually all dimensions of well-being among
nations that were regarded as “developing” fifty years ago. On average, incomes have
risen, poverty has fallen, health and education have improved for men and women,
and democracy has spread.
• However, this progress has been uneven over time, across nations and within nations.
Economic growth has started and then faltered. In Africa, only the last ten years have
brought a period of sustained economic growth. Latin America, Africa, and Eastern
Europe all had their “lost decades.” East and Southeast Asia, and after them China and
then India, have seen spectacular advances. But even in India and China regional
inequalities have grown, gender inequalities persist notably in sex-selective abortion,
and (in the case of India especially) malnutrition is higher than would be expected
given income growth.
• In development thinking, the objectives of development have broadened, from a nar-
row focus on per capita income growth to its distribution, to education and health, to
political empowerment, to capabilities in the broadest sense, and now perhaps even to
include “happiness.” However all-encompassing or seemingly infinite, ideology and
the nexus of interests and ideas are critical for understanding development policy
making. The opportunities for any nation are constrained not only by the availability
of resources and access to international finance, trade, and technology, but by estab-
lished interests at home, including the desires and patience of citizens.
• The actors in the development discourse have changed, too. There has been a broaden-
ing from the initial focus on individuals toward groups as the distinctive role of women
as economic actors in development has been addressed, and as ethnic and other
group-based identities have been recognized as important. Further, civil society has
been inserted into conventional debates on the balance between the roles of market
and state in development strategy.
• Political economy frameworks for analyzing development have become more promi-
nent as discussion of the role of groups has become important, and as the gap between
technocratic proposals for development intervention and their actual implementation
has come into focus. As part of this movement, economics, though still dominant in
the development discourse, has increasingly been challenged, complemented, and
supplemented by other disciplines such as sociology, political science, philosophy,
history, and the natural sciences.
The Next Fifty Years
The changes identified in the lines above are big changes. How will they play out? What will
the development terrain, in thought and practice, look like fifty years from now? Some
thoughts in the form of interconnected propositions for debate and discussion:
• In some dimensions, the development agenda will become hugely diversified. Manag-
ing middle class vulnerability in Brazil and managing conflict in Burundi cannot eas-
ily be brought into the same framework. But on other dimensions, the development
agenda will become more unified, as the globalized integration of production and
finance can be expected to continue, unless this is disrupted by catastrophic events or
untoward political developments. The middle classes of all countries will face similar
pressures. How the interests and actions of the middle class conflict—or cooperate—
with those of the disadvantaged and the elites in each country will play a critical role
in shaping domestic politics and opportunities for development.
• Ongoing trends in international migration, financial flows, and climate change will
ensure that cross-border, regional, and global spillovers and interactions will come to
be as important in the development discourse as national development policy.
epilogue 901
• Within countries, the policy importance of addressing inequality will increase even as
average incomes grow and human development indicators improve overall. And hori-
zontal inequality across socio-politically salient groupings, including by gender, eth-
nicity, religion, and region, will be central, not least to political stability and national
cohesion.
• The appropriate balance between state and market will still be a central focus of devel-
opment debates. However, the nature of the state itself will come under pressure in the
next fifty years, first from global forces requiring the pooling of sovereignty, and sec-
ond from demands for the democratic devolution of power. As incomes grow, and
even if they do not, demand for participation in decision making in general, and in
development policy making in particular, will grow. Social technology will aid this
process, including new forms of communication, which enable people with shared
interests to connect, organize, and form new collective identities and generate action.
Autocratic approaches will not be the wave of the future, and purely technocratic
approaches will invariably fail to satisfy the aspirations of all citizens.
• Global issues and national development will jointly frame the global compact, which
will not be limited just to development discussions. The current international archi-
tecture of cooperation will undergo change in a number of fundamental ways. Aid
from rich countries will not play as salient a role as it has done over the last fifty years.
Hitherto developing countries will have more voice in organizations dominated by
currently industrialized countries. Some institutions created to address immediate
post-war problems will become increasingly irrelevant while new ones emerge to deal
with problems like climate change. Development organizations per se will give way to
other mechanisms to address poverty and inequality, not just in poor countries—
indeed, these issues may be mediated in a decentralized manner through social tech-
nology, without the need for a formal official organization at the center.
• Development thinking as we have known it for the past five decades, as a North–South
or poor country–rich country dialogue, will give way to a more porous ecology.
Insights on development come from a wide array of actors, across the natural and
social sciences, and not just those self-identified with the narrow disciplines of inter-
national relations, development studies, or development economics. More impor-
tantly, development thinking will come from developing countries themselves, and
ideas and approaches will be seen to have relevance to poverty and distribution chal-
lenges in both richer and poorer countries in an interconnected world.
What Role for Thinkers?
Fifty years ago much thinking about development was “overarching” in nature. The Big Push,
Marxian interpretations, Dependencia theory, Basic Needs, the Washington Consensus,
these labels provide a signpost to the evolution of development thinking. Will development
thinking be similarly “overarching” in the coming fifty years? Certainly the issues are no less
important—climate change, ethnic conflict, rising inequality, global financial coordination,
etc. And yet it seems to us that the future of the development discourse will have to address a
diverse reality (Brazil versus Burundi) and multiple objectives of development (per capita
income, sustainability, human development, empowerment, happiness), with the result that
no single discipline and certainly not economics will be able to span the discourse by itself.
There will continue to be a debate between “big ideas” in development versus develop-
ment seen as “one experiment at a time.” But the greater diversity of country and region spe-
cific development circumstances does seem to suggest that the era of overarching frameworks
or nostrums is over, because the development discourse itself has become wide and ambi-
tious, with multiple locations.
This does not of course mean the end of development thought. It will be needed for careful
and rigorous building of arguments and analysis of evidence along the many dimensions
and the many locations of development. And it will increasingly come from developing
countries themselves. While inter-linkages between different aspects of development will
still need to be explored, grand overarching theses that encompass the whole of the develop-
ment paradigm are unlikely to thrive, and development thinkers of tomorrow will need a
new humility when faced with the growing complexity of the development terrain.
This does not make development thought and practice any less exciting than the last fifty
years. Just different. And perhaps more so.
Index
Abramovitz, M. 61 conflict 348–50

Academic Revolution 583 corruption 244
accountability 198, 262 dictatorships 71
corporations 794 higher education 589
global level 795 industrial policy 554, 557–8
of individuals 795 integration 329–35
industrial policy 561 New Partnership for Africa’s Development
political 407 (NEPAD) 249
to communities 157 philanthropy 805
water 458 structural adjustment programs
Accra Agenda for Action 154 (SAPs) 558–9
accrual accounting 262 trade with China 648
Acemoglu, D. 45, 71, 184, 236, 751, 757, 762, universities 583
764, 858 urban centres 471
adaptation: see also sub-Saharan Africa
and development 500–1 Africa Rising 633
fair 507 African Development Bank (AfDB) 648, 840
and governance 497–8, 504–5 African Economic Community (AEC) 332
and institutions 502–4 African Infrastructure Commission 840
local 501 African Union (AU) 335, 870
need of 501–2 Commission 745
in practice 499–501 Convention on Preventing and Combating
thinking on 496–9 Corruption 249
to climate change 495–508 agency 231–2, 416–19
adaptive capacity 498 Agenda 21, 859
adaptive management 497 Aghion, P. 61
Adebajo, A. 9, 258 agrarian movements 485–6
Adedeji, A. 9, 319, 329–35 agrarian reform 480–1
Adelman, C. 11, 110, 770 Agrawal, A. 499
Adeoti, A. I. 578 AgResults 608
Adeoti, J. O. 578 agri business 222
Adger, N. 498, 500 agriculture 42, 432–45
affirmative action programs 178, 179–82 Africa 734–6, 738, 739, 740
Afghanistan 70, 354, 365, 534, 857 aid for 859
Africa 775 cash crops 117, 120
Abuja Declaration 520 China 654
Berg Report 93 and economic growth 435
Charter for Popular Participation 334, 743 environmental and equity
climate adaptation 503, 504 considerations 437, 456, 502
colonial legacy 74 evolution of 436–9
904 index
agriculture (cont.) colonial interests 759, 762–3

and food security 434–6 Dutch disease 755
India 717, 718 export diversification 755–6
localized experiments 439 extractive institutions 757–60
market-driven 438 governance indicators 761–2
private incentives 439 human development indices 753–4
private sector 445 import substitution strategy 760
productivity 468 income 752–3
research 436–7, 439 Islamist parties 764
subsidies 820–1, 823, 824 oil and politics 756–7
see also irrigation oil rents 754–5
agrifood systems 467, 469–70 oil-poor countries 760–3
Ahluwalia, M. S. 89 oil-rich countries 745–60
aid see financial flows; international aid; Ottoman occupation 762
Official Development Assistance overview 750–65
Ajakaiye, O. 10, 632, 748 poverty and inequality 753
Akamatsu, K. 278 privatization 761
Akerlof, G. A. 286 savings 756
Akram-Lodhi, A. H. 491 state role 760
Al-Tunisi, K. A.-D. 15 unemployment 754
Alaskan Permanent Fund (APF) 107 see also Organization of Petroleum
Alesina, A. 110, 857 Countries (OPEC)
Algeria 354–5, 754, 757 Arab Spring 53, 246, 355, 412, 763–4, 789, 791,
Aliber, R. 305 794
Alkire, S. 143 Árbenz, J. 482
Allen, R. C. 55, 61 Arezki, R. 56
Allende, S. 482, 671, 685, 688 Argentina 419, 826, 836
Alma Ata Declaration on Primary Health Banco de la Nacion 838
Care 516, 518 military 421, 671
Almond, G. 26 and regional integration 237, 323
Altson, P. 235 terrorism 417, 425
Aman, K. 520 Aristotle 169, 345
Ambedkar, B. R 715 Arkhangelskaya, A. 875
Ames, M. 621 Arndt, C. 856
Amin, S. 328 Arndt, H. W. 15
Amorin, C. 682 Arocena, R. 10, 549
Amsden, A. H. 44, 60, 303, 562, 819 Arrow, K. 61
Andean Community 825 Arthur, P. 424
Anderson, L. 761 Asante, S. K. B. 334
Angell, N. 381 Asia 471, 635–49
Angola 244, 352, 357, 396, 400–3, 405–6 currency devaluations 638
Annan, K. 91, 239 demography 645–6
anthropology 29–30 environmental sustainability 643
Appadurai, A. 417 growth: domestic demand-led 640;
Appokin, A. 875 export-led 640
Apter, D. 26, 346 inequalities 643–4, 646–7
Arab region 634, 765 internal and intra-Asian demand 643
authoritarian bargain model investment 646
761–2, 763 middle classes 643
index 905
migration 645–6 Baer, W. 668

new markets 647–8 Bahl, R. 272
protest movements 645 Bahrain 753, 757, 759
regionalism and openness 648–9 Baker, R. W. 242
social cohesion 647 Balassa, B. A. 287
values and culture 640 Balkans 357
wages 647 Ban Ki-Moon 854
see also East Asia Bandura, R. 137
Asia-Middle East Dialogue (AMED) 648 Bangalore Principles 248
Asian Development Bank (ADB) 643, 644, Bangladesh 121, 200, 453, 486, 804
646, 840 Grameen 70
Asian development model 636 growth 637, 639
Asian financial crisis 632, 635, 636, 639, 737 banking crises 833–4
Asian model 640, 642 Banting, F. 599
Assad, R. 754 Baran, P. 37
Association of Southeast Asian Nations Barbone, L. 272
(ASEAN) 637, 641–2, 648, 870 Bardham, P. 235
Agreement on Transboundary Haze Bardhan, P. 15, 180
Pollution 644 Barrett, C. B. 435, 468
ASEAN-China Free Trade Area Barrientos, A. 8, 170
(ACFTA) 641 Barrig, M. 117
ASEAN-China Investment Fund Barro, R. J. 61
(ACIF) 646 Basel Committee on Banking
Economic Community (AEC) 642 Supervision 302
exports 639 Basinga, P. 609
Infrastructure Fund (AIF) 646 Baskaran, A. 576
Isis 118 Bates, R. H. 37, 44, 71, 349
Macroeconomic Research Office Baumol, W. J. 55, 313
(AMRO) 641 Bebbington, A. 431
Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity Beckford, G. L. 491
(MPAC) 646 Bedi, A. S. 702
Plan of Action on Energy Cooperation Bedjaoui, M. 235
(APAEC) 642 Beijing Consensus 633
Association for Women’s Rights in Beland, D. 13
Development / Association for Women Bellin, E. 757
in Development (AWID) 121 Benin 507
Atallah, S. 759 Bentham, J. 398
Athukorala, L. S. 272 Berdal, M. 9, 351, 352, 408
Atkinson, A. B. 107, 142, 145 Berdegué, J. A. 10, 431, 475
Aung San Suu Kyi 645 Berg, E. 110, 743
Australia 222, 456, 607 Bernard, A. 59, 62
authoritarian bargain model (ABM) 761–2, 763 Berners-Lee, T. 623
authoritarianism 44, 381, 419 Berry, A. 9, 170, 578
autochthony 350–1 Best, C. 599
autonomy 228 Bhagwati, J. 302
Auty, R. M. 396 Bhall, E. 70
Aylwin, P. 692 Bharti Foundation 805
Ayoob, M. 348 Bhatt, E. 120
Azim Premji Foundation 805 Bhushan, A. 273
906 index
Bhutan 454 growth 668, 672

Bibi, S. 753 and industrial policy 556, 557
Biekart, K. 792 industrialization 670–1, 674
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 522, 602, inequalities 677
604, 606, 608, 804 inflation 673, 674–6, 677
Binswanger, H. 483 Institute for the Development of Social
Biodiversity Convention 859 Investment 803
Bird, R. M. 9, 258, 272 LAN house 620–1
Bison, I. 789 land reform 484, 486
Bjornskov, C. 110 Mega Não 622
Black, R. 883 military 671–2
Bloch, I. 381 modernization 669–70
Boadway, R. 273 Movement of Landless Rural Workers
Bodley, J. H. 235 (MST) 485
Boggs, S. T. 235 music 681
Bohle, H. G. 506 net donor 868
Bolivia 202, 233, 826, 840 new currency 675
Bonaparte, Napoleon 3 overview 667–82
Boo, K. 46 Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) 676
Booth, C. 82 Partido Social Democrático (PSD) 669,
Borras Jr., S. M. 431 671, 672
Borren, S. 11, 768 Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB) 669,
Boserup, E. 117, 118 671
Bosnia 369 poverty reduction 679
Bosnia-Herzegovina 419, 421 public debt 675
Bosworth, B. 61 public funds 680
Botha, G. 702 RedeSist 576
Botswana 396 and regional integration 327, 329
Bougny, H. 68 represented at DAC 877
Boulding, E. 119 social classes 680–1
Bouteflicka, A. 748 social policies 672, 678–9
Boutros-Ghali, B. 365 stability 679, 680
Boyce, J. K. 372, 375 state role 774, 777
Brandeis, L. 398 sustainable development 681
Brautigam, D. 271 União Democrática Nacional (UDN) 669,
Brazil 162, 385, 466, 599, 805, 833, 834, 840, 887 670, 672
Beneficio de Prestação Continuada and US 669–70, 674
194 wages 670
Bolsa Escola/Familia 189, 193 water resources 452, 454, 458
Bolsa Família 194, 195, 196, 198 and WTO 819, 825, 826
Brasília 671 see also BRICS
Brazil Without Misery 577 Brazilian Miracle 671
Central Bank 677–8, 679 Brazilian National Development Bank
corporate social responsibility (CSR) 808 (BNDES) 669, 838, 876
culture and education 681 Brett, E. 36, 45, 94
democracy 874 Bretton Woods Conference 22, 38
financial institutions 677–8 Bretton Woods institutions see International
Fiscal Responsibility Legislation 678 Monetary Fund (IMF); World Bank
index 907
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and capabilities:

South Africa) 697, 703, 705, 769, basic 99–100
866–78 definition 135–6
as aid givers 867–79 Denmark 781
Development Bank 874–5, 876 and functionings 84–5
in G20 869–72 and income 779–80
growth 867–9 for innovation 567, 569, 571–4, 577–8
size of 867–9 and public provision 780
summitry 872–6, 878 technological 571
and UN 877 Capability Approach (CA) 778–80
broadband infrastructure 617 Capability Poverty Measure (CPM) 136
Bronfenbrenner, M. 77–8 capacities 416
Brook, D. 10, 549 absorptive 587–8
Brundtland Commission 429 political system 26
Brundtland Report 854 state 774
Bruno, M. 291 capacity-building 576
Brysk, A. 236 scientific 602
Bénabou, R. 110 at universities 590, 595
bureaucracy 205, 774, 782 capital 54–5
Burma 346 human 58–9
Burnside, C. 61, 856 investment 57–8
Busan 857, 858 role of 39
Busan Forum 854, 857, 858 social 416–19, 420–2, 789
Busan Partnership for Effective Development capitalism:
Cooperation 154 and bureaucracy 205
Bush, G. W. 804 crony 639, 640, 727
businesses: liberal 45
corruption 249 state-guided 51
start-ups 317 and technical change 571
see also corporations varieties of 208–9, 212
Buvinic, M. 118 carbon sequestration 502
Buviníc, M. 181, 182, 185 carbon trading 502
Buzan, B. 348 Carden, F. 590
Byres, T. 482 Cardoso, F. H. 41, 47, 633, 669, 675–8, 680, 695
Caricom 870
Caine, S. 67, 70 Caring Economy Campaign 122
Calderon, C. 833 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Calhoun, C. 170 Global Trends 354
Cambodia 245, 352, 369, 375, 400, 405 Carson, R. 429
Cameron, D. 95, 855 Carter, M. R. 435
Campbell Collaboration 160 Casanegra de Jantscher, M. 272
Canada 454, 521 Cassin, R. 889
Grand Challenge 604 Cassiolato, J. E. 10, 549
health inequity 522 Castells, M. 615, 691
International Development Research Cater, C. 9, 171
Centre 616 Catholic Relief Services 808
see also International Development causal inference techniques 160
Research Centre Cederman, L.-E. 353
908 index
Center for Effective Philanthropy 810 China 6, 11, 12, 68, 162, 307, 467, 521, 599,
Center for Global Development 158 632–3, 717, 825, 854
Center for International Development and agriculture 440, 441–2, 654
Conflict Management 354 carbon emissions 644
Central American Common Market 825 civil society and social media 663
Chānakya 730 Coastal Open Cities 655, 664
Chad 354 collectivization 482
Chakravaty, S. R. 142, 143 corporate philanthropy 807
Chambers, R. 46, 155, 466 Cultural Revolution 652, 664
Chang, G. 637 decentralization and opening up 654–5, 661
Chang, H.-J. 297, 562, 624 DiBao 189
Chang, J.-J. 819 economic reforms 653–7, 662–3
charter cities 858–9 entry into WTO 655, 656, 660, 826
Chen, L. 10 environment 657, 663
Chenery, H. 24, 89, 278, 280, 291, 297, 775, exchange rate 74
831, 838, 852, 886 Eximbank 868
Cheriff, R. 56 expectations of 663
Chernin, A. 185 exports 719
Chiang Kai-shek 851 fiscal contracting system 654
Chiang Mai Initiative 641 foreign direct investment 655
Chiapas 486 four cardinal principles 659
Chile 7, 327, 396, 414, 425, 633, 775, 826 Foxconn Dilemma 647
Chile Solidario 194, 195, 200 governance 657–62
Commission on Torture 692 government reform 659–60, 662
dictatorship 685–6, 691–2 growth 55, 58, 59–60, 174, 179, 637, 639, 653,
education 687 656, 839–40, 887–8
free trade agreements 687 higher education 586
growth 686, 690 household farming 438
health 684, 687, 693; AUGE 687, 693 household responsibility system 442
import substitution 684 hunger 433
inequalities 685–6 inequality 106
intellectuals 686 Labor Contract Law 657
longer-perspective 687–90 land reform 480, 481
Mesa de Diálogo 692 living standards 653–4
military officials 421 local government 656, 657, 662
National Commission for Truth and maintaining stability 658–9
Reconciliation 692 market institutions 655–6
order versus freedom 692–3 Marriage Act 117
political system 683, 685, 688–9, 689, middle classes 664
690 nation-state challenged 76–7
poverty 685–6, 690, 691, 692–3 natural resources 329, 402, 407–8
salmon industry 557 a net donor 868
social justice 691–2 overview 651–64
social policy 684, 687 philanthropy 803, 805
transportation 687 policy making 109, 660–1
urbanization 684 privatization 653
wages 687 property rights 655
Chin, G. 12, 769 protest movements 645
index 909
relationship with US 648 civil society 11, 69–70, 170, 224, 770, 806
represented at DAC 877 Clark, B. 587
Scientific Development Perspective 659, class see social class
664 Clean Development Mechanism 499
sex discrimination 514 Cleghorn, F. 10, 431
social policy 657, 661 clientism 241
Socialist Market Economy 659, 664 climate adaptation 495–508
Special Economic Zones 655, 660, 664 climate change 10, 222, 444, 495
State-owned Assets Supervision and mitigation 501–2
Administration Commission and pandemics 541
(SASAC) 656 and social transformation 508
state-owned enterprises (SOEs) 654–5, 656 Stern report 840
structural change 653 sub-Saharan Africa 739
succession 659 see also pollution
tax reform 655–6 Clinton, B. 676
The Great Leap Forward 442, 652, 658, 664 Clinton, H. R. 535, 857
Tiananmen Square 660 Clowns Without Borders 809
township and village enterprises Cohen, R. 610
(TVEs) 468, 654–5, 656 Cold War 3, 22, 37, 40, 51, 336, 347, 382, 414,
trade with Africa 648 481–2, 671, 685, 716, 742
under central planning 651–2 collective action 249–50
universities 583 collectivization 482
water 452, 454, 457, 458–9 Collier, P. 236, 245, 352, 387, 396, 400
see also BRICS Collins, C. 425
China Development Bank 646, 868 Collins, S. M. 61
China model 661–4 Collor de Mello, F. A. 633, 667, 669, 674–5, 681
China-ASEAN Investment Cooperation Fund Colombia 327, 352, 388, 437, 484, 625, 826, 885
(CAF) 646 Comin, D. A. 55
Choi, H.-J. 142 Committee Encouraging Corporate
Christaller, W. 470 Philanthropy (CECP) 807
Christiaensen, L. J. M. 471 Committee for Relief in Belgium 847
Churchill, W. 769 Common Market of Eastern and Southern
Ciccone, A. 314 Africa (COMESA) 331, 335, 703
Cicero 169 Common Monetary Area (CMA) 703
Cimoli, M. 551–2, 562 Commonwealth, Colombo Plan 851
citizenship 231–2 comparative advantage 288–9, 290, 304
civic society: competition 183, 555
actors 790 imperfect 287
challenging society roles 794–5 competitiveness 602
controls on 790 Comprehensive Africa Agriculture
definitions 788–91 Development Program (CAADP) 439
and democracy 796–7 Condorcet 82
on human rights 790 conflict 9, 103
organizing for change 791–3 coping mechanisms 373
overview 788–97 and development 387–9
power and privilege 790, 792 ethnic 175
civic-driven change 792 greed or grievances 352–3
CIVICUS 789, 792 integrated approach 384–7
910 index
conflict (cont.) counter-hegemony 789
intrastate 383; political economy of Coutinho, L. 876
345–57, 346–7 Cox, R. H. 13, 81
and natural resources 352–3, 354 Crafts, N. 61
prevention 353–4 Cramer, C. 371
spillovers 354 credit:
sub-Saharan Africa 739, 748 market imperfections 316
trap 371 private 304
see also post-conflict; violence; war crime:
Congo 453 costs of 389
Consultative Group on International decreasing 381
Agricultural Research (CGIAR) 154, 437, and development 387–9
439, 603 integrated approach 384–7
context 6, 8, 15, 32 transnational 383, 385–6
contract enforcement 207 Cuba 480, 671
Cooper, R. N. 280 CUDOS 596
Cornia, G. A. 106 culture 231, 750, 751
corporate social responsibility (CSR) 807–8 Cummins, M. 106
corporations: Curzon Price, V. 551
accountability 794 cybersecurity 623, 625
shared value approach 808 Cysne, R. P. 671
see also businesses Côte d’Ivoire 68, 351, 353, 385, 400, 401, 406
corruption 9, 171, 181–2, 239–52, 552, 839, 856
administrative 241 Daar, A. 603
by businesses 249 Daes, E.-I. 226
definitions 240–1 Dahlby, B. 272
and development 243–7, 244–5 Dani, A. N. 179
and economic growth 242–3, 726–7 Darwin, C. 496
grand 241 Das-Gupta, A. 9, 258, 272
impact of 242–3; on women 244–5 Datt, G. 110
India 722, 726–7 Davidson, B. 74
and inequality 243 Davies, J. C. 347, 353
and infrastructure 247 Davis, K. 8, 171
and justice system 245–6 de Blij, H. 475
legal 241 de Greiff, P. 9, 424
and local authorities 251 de Haan, A. 179
and natural resources 397 de Matos, M. 549
police 245 de Melo, J. 838
political 241 De Meza, D. 315
private sector 251 De Neve, J.-E. 185
public sector 240, 251 De Paula, A. 315
and social injustice 239, 240 De Schutter, O. 489
sub-Saharan Africa 742 de Soto, A. 363, 366, 367, 368, 371
and taxation 272 de Soto, H. 207, 483
and transparency 405–6 Deane, P. 46
Costa Rica 121, 247, 327 Deaton, A. 146, 159, 523
Cotula, L. 488 debt:
Council of Europe, Convention on Brady Plan 852–3
Cybercrimes 623 burden 331, 333
index 911
crisis 775 new models of 796–7

finance 266–7 next 50 years 900–1
reduction 744 partnerships 868–9
relief 267, 334, 860 securitization of 389–90
Decancq, K. 141 and social protection 191
decolonization 3, 23 study of 21–32
Deininger, K. 483 theories 35–47; failure 285–6
del Castillo, G. 363, 366, 367, 368, 371 thinkers’ role 901–2
deliberative processes 496, 506–7 thought 13–14, 17, 19; early 66–7; evolution
Dell, S. 882 of 2, 3–7; origins of 22–3
demand management 59–60 see also human development; sustainable
democracy 776–7, 778, 784 development
captured 764 development evaluation 8, 151–64
and civic society 796–7 affirmative action programs 180
elective 758 complexity concepts in 161–2
local interactive 797 country-led 162
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 351, ex ante 152–3
383, 401, 404, 407, 471 external 153
democratization 198, 332, 356, 756–7 participatory approaches 155–7
demography 12, 512, 645–6 rapid rural appraisal 154–6
Deng Xiaoping 652, 658–60, 664, 887 realist 160–1
Denmark 778 social assistance 197–8
bureaucracy 782 strengths-based 156–7
capabilities 781 types listed 163
case study 781–3 utilization-focused 155
discretionary learning 782 development programs:
education 781 effectiveness 157–60
employment 781 related investing (PRI) 809–10
flexicurity 782 Dewey, J. 496
liberalization 782 Di Maio, M. 549
power-sharing 782 Diamond, J. 272
Denton, F. 10, 431 diamonds 352, 396, 401, 407
dependency theory 37, 41 Dianai, M. 789
deregulation 285 Diaz-Alejandro, C. F. 305
Dervis, K. 838 Dietz, T. 497
Desai, S. 180 digital divide 615
Devarajan, S. Y. 8, 19, 60, 72 Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT
development: Force) 615
and adaptation 500–1 dirigism 43
current position 899–900 Disarmament, Demobilization and
definitions 11, 13, 22, 380, 684 Reintegration/Security Sector Reform
disruptive 568 (DDR/SSR) 366, 367
as freedom 209 discrimination 175
goals 894 diseases 530–44
indices of 19 conditions for eradication 531–2
measurement of 133 exceptionalizing 538–40
multidimensional concept 312, 315–16, global burden 520
686 and health systems 540
multidisciplinary 28–30, 884 malaria 518, 520–1, 530, 543
912 index
diseases (cont.) Economic Community of West African States

measles 885 (ECOWAS) 330, 335, 355
poliomyelitis 531, 534–5 economic convergence 290
new pathogens 521, 523 economic cycles:
non-communicable (NCDs) 521, 541 boom-bust 300, 305–6
outbreak 521 medium-term 306
SARS 521, 541 and terms of trade 325
smallpox 531, 532–4, 885 economic growth 796
targeting 530–2, 532–8 acceleration 52
see also health; HIV/AIDS and agricultural growth 435
Diwan, I. 763 Chile 686, 690
Djeflat, A. 576 and corruption 242–3, 726–7
Doctors Without Borders 809 demand pull 54, 56–7
Dollar, D. 72, 856, 857 and democratization 356
Doner, R. 47 endogenous 56, 547
Dosi, G. 551–2, 562 and governance 243
Dosman, E. 329 government role 676
Doucouliagos, H. 60 greening of 53
Downing, T. 506 ideology 52–4
Drache, D. 818 India 716–20
dracunculiasis 531 and industrialization 51–4
Duloy, J. H. 89 and inequality 174, 176, 849
Dunant, H. 770 and innovation 567
Durlauf, S. 55, 61 and natural resources 453
Dutt, A. K. 291 and presidential personalities 668
Dutt, R. C. 37 pro-poor 84, 134, 173, 870
dynamic stochastic general equilibrium and social protection 192
(DSGE) 56 South Africa 698
supply push 54–6
East African Community (EAC) 703 theory 50–62
East Asia 19, 632 UN target 884
financial crisis 68, 840 value questioned 183–4
government intervention 638–40 and well-being 174, 179, 779, 781
industrial policy 554, 557–8 economic models:
see also Asia dual economy 280, 314
East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) 733, 734, 736, formal models 280–1
739, 746, 748 growth theory 25, 39–40; endogenous
East Asian model 638 58–9
East Asian Tigers 11, 25, 42, 52, 56–7, 68, 299, see also New Institutional Economics (NIE)
555–6, 636, 639, 774, 819 economic power, balance of 867
East Timor 486 economic rents 552
Easterin, R. A. 176, 177 elites 71, 349
Easterly, W. R. 60, 184, 811 from resources 266, 756–7
Eastern Europe 6 Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) 615
ecology 435 economic structure 178, 291, 297
economic asymmetries 884 economic transformation 773
Economic Community of Central African economics 178, 256–8
States (ECCAS) 331, 335 of agglomeration 287
index 913
development 35, 773 El Salvador 245, 327, 366, 369, 385, 388, 414, 482
domination 28–30, 31 Elbadawi, I. 758
evolutionary 589 Elbers, C. 469
of ideas 287 electricity 454–5, 642
of information 286–7 electronic commerce 615, 623
limitation of 6 Elias, N. 381
neoclassical 24–5, 52, 66, 258, 280, 280–3, Ellman, A. 154–5
281, 282, 286, 289–90, 324–6, 365, 472, Emergency Post Conflict Assistance
483, 577, 588, 775 (EPCA) 367, 370
New Institutional Economics (NIE) 206–8, emerging economies 866–7, 868, 876–7,
775–6 887
New Structural Economics (NSE) 288–9 emigration see migration
normative and positive 256 emissions 498, 499–500
orthodoxy 282–3 Emmerji, L. 221
public choice theory 774, 775 employment 66, 107, 174, 670, 760
value judgments in 257 Africa 733, 742, 743
welfare 286–7 China 109, 653, 654
economy: Denmark 781, 783
centre-periphery model 325–6 distribution 53, 208
formal and informal sectors 370 and entrepreneurship 314, 315, 317, 318
New International Economic Order full 109
(NIEO) 223, 300, 301, 886 India 73, 717, 719, 721, 727
private sector 9; corruption 251; and migration for 645
public sector 560 productive 72
Ecuador 196, 327, 469 programs 188–95, 602, 692, 699, 700–2,
education 193 707, 709, 721, 760, 870, 882, 885
aid for 859 public sector 180, 754, 757, 781
Brazil 681 quality of 72, 172, 179, 182, 647
Chile 687 rural 434, 434–6, 440, 442, 445, 464,
Denmark 781 485, 654
gender balance 586–7 South Africa 699, 700–2, 704, 709, 710
higher 586–7, 589 women’s 120, 121, 126, 143, 587, 781
importance of 555–6 see also self-employment;
India 71, 180–1, 805 underemployment; unemployment
and inequality 106, 107, 178 energy:
Korea 779 and climate change 502
life-long 592 efficiency 835
see also learning; universities global demand for 454
Edwards, M. 792, 810 renewable 502
efficiency 286–7 and water 454–5
and equality 102 see also electricity; oil
market 319 Engels, F. 37
social 182–3 Engineers Without Borders 809
static and dynamic 302 Engle, K. 236
Egypt 355, 422, 754, 760–1, 763 Englebert, P. 349
Eicher, C. K. 435 entrepreneurs 257
Eisenhower, D. 670 female 318
El Beblawi, H. 756 quality of 319
914 index
entrepreneurship 257, 258, 311–20, 727 exchange rates:

behavioural definitions 312 competitive 284
externalities from 315 policies 303, 306–7
as human functioning 315 exclusion 194
impact of 317–18, 319 from social assistance programs 195
a key growth driver 257, 311–20, 727 psychological 174
occupational choice 313 expectations 346–7, 417
as a resource 313 exports:
a social phenomenon 313 manufactures 297
and structural transformation 312, 314–15 opportunities 298–9
synthesis definition 313 promotion 554
environment 9–10, 124, 657, 663, 796, 854 see also trade
environmental impact statement (EIS) 230 externalities:
Environmental Performance Index (EPI) 137 between countries 74, 75
environmental programs 859 informational 552
environmental sustainability 894, 896 positive 552
Epstein, G. 308 Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
equality: (EITI) 250, 390, 402, 405, 406
and efficiency 102
ethnic 179 Fabricant, N. 236
gender 211 Fabricius, C. 497
of opportunities 102–3 Factor Analysis 140
of respect 101 Failed States Index 384
versus economic growth 849 Faisal, King 756
Equatorial Guinea 244 faith-based organizations (FBOs) 793, 808–9
equity: Faletto, E. 41, 695
in post-conflict situations 371 Faletto, O. 47
and taxation 263 families 790
Escobar, A. 46, 235 Farming Systems Research (FSR) 466
Ethiopia 453, 469, 480 Farsoun, S. 757
agriculture 442–4 Faulkner, D. 698, 699
Comprehensive Integrated Package Felton, A. 110, 177
Projects 443 Ferguson, A. 170
employment 885 Ferguson, R. B. 235
Productive Safety Net Program 189, 193, Ferraz, J. 10, 549
194, 195, 200 Fidler, D. 526
ethnic communities 420 Filippini, L. 425
ethnic division 185, 207–8 financial crises 6, 305, 306, 739, 741
ethnic strife 224–5, 350 Asian 632, 635, 636, 639, 737
Etzkowitz, H. 585 global 301, 302, 307, 632, 635, 636, 640, 745,
Eurodollar market 300 870
European Development Fund 252 financial flows:
European Economic Community (EEC) 327 corporations 807–8
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 816, 828 foundations 803–7
European Union (EU) 251, 419, 648, 676 individual contributions 806–7
agriculture 820 overview 799–812
Eurozone 640, 643, 834 private 799, 799–800, 801, 803–9
Evans, T. 10, 431 voluntary organization 805–6
index 915
see also international aid; Official liberalizing 284

Development Assistance South Africa 702
financial sector: sub-Saharan Africa 733
global 297, 300 subcontracting 301
and industrial policy 554–5 forest fires 644
liberation 304–7 Forest Principles 859
and trade 258, 295–307 Forum for East Asia-Latin America
Financial Stability Board 302 Cooperation (FEALAC) 647–8
Finland 59 Foster, J. E. 85, 140, 142, 143
fiscal commons 269 Fosu, A. K. 110
fiscal decentralization 267–8, 271 Foundation Center 803, 805
fiscal discipline 262, 271, 284 foundations:
fiscal federalism 267–8 financial flows 803–7
fiscal policy 51 transparency 804
Fischer, S. 811 Fowler, A. 792
Fiszbein, A. 202 Framework Convention on Climate
Fitoussi, J.-P. 146, 236 Change 859
FitzGerald, V. 369, 387 France 175, 452, 455
Fjeldstad, O.-H. 271 CFA zone 834
Fleming, A. 599, 831 indigence 82
flying geese 299 philosphes 3
Flôres, R. G. 10, 632 Revolution 772
Foege, B. 511 Franco, Itamar A. C. 669, 675
Foege, W. H. 532 Frank, A. G. 41, 328
Folke, C. 497 Frantz, E. 355
food: Fraser, D. 8, 19
absorption 434 free, prior, and informed consent
access to 434 (FPIC) 229–30, 231–2, 234
availability 434 free trade agreements (FTAs)
modern retail 469–70 301–2
prices 433, 445 Freeman, C. 567, 568, 569–71
sovereignty 491 Friedan, B. 118
value chains 438 Friedman, M. 78, 683, 685
see also nutrition Fukuyama, F. 46, 68
food security 432–45 functionings 315, 320
and agricultural development 434–6 Fund for Peace Failed States Index 349
BRICS support for 871, 872 Furtado, C. 566, 571, 673
chronic and transitory 433
definition 433–4 G8 521, 615, 745, 795, 842
demand factors 435 G20 6, 302, 489, 608, 793, 795, 842
evolution of 433–4 Development Agenda 869–72, 878
Foong Khong, Y. 236 Working Group on Development
Ford Foundation 437, 804 (WGD) 869–71, 878
foreign aid see international aid; Official Gaddafi, M. 355
Development Assistance Galal, A. 10, 634
foreign direct investment (FDI) 297 Galanter, M. 206, 211
China 655 Galbraith, J. K. 185
India 720 Galenson, W. 109, 184
916 index
game theory 291 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor

Gandhi 95, 789 (GEM) 315, 317
Gates, B. 618 Global Environmental Facility 500, 501
gender: Global Fund 536, 537, 539
equality 211, 894 Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and
girl children 890–1 Malaria (GFATM) 521, 523, 525, 602
socially constructed 122–3 Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) 144
see also women Global March against Child Labour 792
Gender Action 124–5 Global Partnership for Effective Development
Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) 136, Cooperation 854–5
143–4 Global Peace Index 384
Gender Equality Index (GEI) 144 Global Philanthropy Forum 803
Gender Inequality Index (GII) 121, 137, 144 Global Witness 401, 402, 404
Gender-Related Development Index GlobalGiving.com 806, 807
(GDI) 136, 143–4 globalization 7, 52, 75, 351
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade an important concept 93
(GATT) 298, 300, 327, 674, 815 second 295, 301–7
established 817–18 and taxation 108, 269–70, 271
governance 824 Gläser, J. 548
Uruguay Round 817, 819, 820–1, 824 Glouberman, S. 161
General Agreement on Trade in Services Goh Chok Tong 647
(GATS) 824 Golding, P. 86
Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) 817 Goode, R. 272
Geneva Convention 770 Gordhan, P. 710, 711
Geneva Declaration 384 Goulart, J. 671
geography 498, 750, 751 governance 239–40, 248, 839, 856
German Development Institute (DIE) 349, 389 and adaptation 495, 497–8, 504–5
Germany 773, 777, 779 concept of 796
industrial policy 553, 555 of cyberspace 615, 623
inequalities 778 definition 505
University of Berlin 583 and economic growth 243
Gerschenkron, A. 23, 37, 39, 44, 296, 773 experimentalism 215–16
Ghai, D. 221 good 24–5
Ghana 67–8, 72, 853 India 726–7
Ghodsee, K. 117 indicators 761–2
Gibson, B. 280 water 451
Giddens, A. 86 World Bank focus 860
Gill, G. 185 world trade 824–7
Gittinger, P. 838 Governed Market theory 638–40
Gleditsch, K. S. 353 government:
global administrative law (GAL) 214, 217 failures 9, 282–5, 290
Global Alliance for Chronic Disease 604 growth of 304
Global Alliance for NCD research 521 and innovation 567, 571
Global Alliance on Vaccines and legitimacy 53–4
Immunization (GAVI) 520, 523, 525, 609 local 273
Global Call to Action against Poverty 789 role of 31, 676
Global Compact 250 see also nation-state; state
Global Consultation on Safe Water and government revenue:
Sanitation 449 instruments 268–9
index 917
non-tax 265–6 happiness 9, 170, 315

for social assistance 199–200 and inclusion 177–8
structures 271 and income level 174, 176–7
see also taxation and inequality 102, 177
Gowon, Y. 330 life cycle 185
Grabel, I. 308 see also wellbeing
Graham, C. 110, 177 Harbi, M. 757
Grameen Bank 120, 121, 804 Hariss, J. 8
Gramsci, A. 789 Harris, N. 42
Grand Challenges 603–5 Harrison, A. 563
core principles 604 Harriss, J. 19, 82, 94
global health 603, 604 Harrod-Domar model 25, 39, 54, 849
governance model 605 Hart, H. L. A. 217
partnerships 605 Hart, K. 42
Grand Free Trade Area (FTA) 703 Hasseldine, J. 272
Greece 834, 842 Hausmann, R. 287, 288, 315
Green Climate Fund 500 Hawai’i 235
green revolution 42, 432, 437–9, 465, 468, Hawken, P. 235
482, 717, 728, 859 Hayami, Y. 465
greenhouse gases 463 Hayek, F. 37, 38
Greenpeace 768, 794 Hayner, P. 424
Greer, J. 85 Hazare, A. 622
Griffin, K. 480, 484 Hazell, P. B. R. 468, 475
Grilli, E. R. 298 health 9–10, 106, 180, 193, 209–10, 438–9,
Grosfeld, I. 110 511–26
Grossman, G. M. 303 aid for 859
growth see economic growth capital 516
Growth Commission 69 as a consumable 415–16
Growth Diagnostics approach 287–8 corporate philanthropy 807
Guatemala 245, 327, 369, 385, 388, 414, 486 definitions 518
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 752, 754, determinants 415
757 epidemiologic transition 512
Gunatilaka, R. 110, 177 financing 524–5
Gupta, A. 231, 236 functionings 514–15
Gurr, T. R. 347, 353, 355, 356 global funding 804
Gurría, A. 273 governance mechanisms 525–6
Gustafson, B. 236 index of service coverage 524
Göransson, B. 549 inequality 512, 514, 515, 522
injury transition 512
Haber, S. 756 international 518–19
Habermas, J. 789 as investment 520
Haggblade, S. 468, 475 local and global 517
Haiti 806 mothers and children 520, 522–4, 523
Hall, G. 182 pandemics 521, 523, 541
Hall, P. A. 208 performance 513–14
Hall, R. 431 research partnerships 519–21
Hallegatte, S. 61 as a right 516
Hamilton, A. 328 risks to 415
Hanushek, E. A. 58 security 522–3
918 index
health (cont.) human rights 101, 894, 895

and structural adjustment programs 519 civic society 790
systems 523, 540 and ICT 622–4
targeted programmes 542 movement 209–10
transitions 511–14 violations: and agency 416–19; and human
tropical 517–18 capacities 416; and social capital 416–19
see also disease; HIV/AIDS unredressed 413
health services, country ownership of 543–4 Human Rights Council:
Heeks, R. 616, 617, 626 Expert Mechanism on the Rights of
Heine, J. 12, 769 Indigenous Peoples 226
Hellmann, J. 246 Truth, Justice, Reparations, and Guarantees
Helpman, E. 303 of Non-Recurrence 414
Henderson, D. 533 Human Rights Watch 401
Herbst, J. 349 Human Suffering Index (HSI) 135
Herrera, A. O. 571 Humboldt, W. von 583
Hess, G. 388 Hume, D. 3
Hewitt, J. J. 355, 356 hunger 432–3
Hicks, N. 140, 146 Huntington, S. P. 28, 240, 346, 356, 363, 414, 424
Hidalgo, C. A. 288 hydraulic fracturing 455
High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness 806 hydroelectricity 454
Hills, J. 184 hygienic practices 531
Hirschman, A. O. 23, 24, 37, 281, 296
HIV/AIDS 525 Iacovone, L. 62
an exceptional disease 538–40 IBM 809
funding 530, 539, 540 Ibrahim, M. 805
research partnerships 520–1 Ibrahim Index of African Governance 137,
targeted 535–8, 543 140
Hobijn, B. 55 IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) 769,
Hoeffler, A. 352 873–4, 878
Holling, C. S. 496–7 Iceland 820
Holmgren, T. 72 Ickowitz, A. 480, 484
Honduras 194, 327, 486 import substitution 554, 684, 816, 818, 819
Hong Kong 42, 243, 521, 558, 636, 638, 641 industrialization (ISI) 40, 326, 716, 734,
Horrell, S. 318 742, 775
Household Income and Expenditure Surveys strategy (ISS), Arab region 760
(HIES) 85 import tariffs 260
housing 121 incentives 302, 303, 560–1
Howitt, P. 61 inclusion 173, 180–2, 544–5
Hu Jintao 657, 659, 664 and economic structure 178
Hu Yaobang 659 and happiness 177–8
Huang Yasheng 655 policies for 175, 178–9
Hull, C. 22 psychological 174
Hulme, D. 7, 18 inclusion/exclusion literature 174–5
human development indices 752, 753–4 income:
HDI 85, 93, 135–7, 140, 252; Inequality and capabilities 779–80
Adjusted 137, 142 distribution 106, 178, 208
Human Development Report (HDR) 121, 135 and happiness 176–7
Human Poverty Index (HPI) 136 maximum 107
index 919
relative 176 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural

rising 257 Employment Guarantee Act 440
rural household 467 migration 720
transfers 193 nation-building 715
Index of Economic Freedom 137 National Congress 3
Index of Global Philanthropy and National Employment Guarantee
Remittances 810 Scheme 193
Index of Social Progress (ISP) 135 National Food Security Bill 441
India 11, 68, 329, 402, 466, 825, 840, 868, 887 National Rural Employment Guarantee
accountability battle 794 Scheme 189, 194, 721
agriculture 717, 718, 728 natural resource imports 407–8, 452
aid from UK 94 open economy 719
balance of payments 717–18 Operation Flood 438
capital goods 716 overview 714–28
capital inflows 720 philanthropy 803
carbon emissions 644 police reform 215–16
central bank (RBI) 724–5 population 12, 728
Citizen Report Cards 70, 157 poverty 72–3, 720–4
Community Development Program 721 Public Distribution System 721
corruption 722, 726–7 reliance on foreign aid 716
crony capitalism 727 remittances 720
democracy 874 rent creation 71
deregulation 61 Sardar Sarovar 210
economic indicators 729 Second Five Year Plan 40
education 180–1, 723 Self-employed Women’s Association
elite capture 180 (SEWA) 70
entrepreneurship 727 sex discrimination 514
Evergreen Revolution 441 structural change 716–20
exchange rate policies 718, 725 Tata Trusts 805
exports 719 Technology Missions 440
fiscal policy 725–6 trade agreements 720
Ganga Action Plan (GAP) 457 under colonialism 37, 714–16, 848
gender and class 724 undernutrition 439, 440–1
governance 726–7 water 454, 458, 728
Green Revolution 437 Women Farmers’ Entitlements Bill
growth 174, 453, 633, 637, 639, 716–20 441
health 535, 723 Women Power Connect 126
industrial policy 554, 555, 556, 557 see also BRICS
inequalities 722, 724 indicators:
IT sector 719 Basic Needs Approach 134–5
Jan Lokpal bill 622 composite 133–45
Kerala model 722, 780 design issues 138–45
land 121, 722–3 dimension selection 139–41
life expectancy 716 gender 143–5
literacy rate 716 normalization procedures 141, 142
macro paradox 724–6 notation 138–9
Maharashtra Employment Guarantee portfolio 134, 142
Scheme 181 stock or flow 140–1
920 index
indicators (cont.) see also manufacturing

trade-offs 141, 145 inequality 8, 345, 778
weights 141, 142 Arab region 753
indigenous peoples 221–35 Brazil 677
described 222 cause of poverty 94–5
emerging voice 8, 223–6 Chile 685–6, 691, 694–5
geographical distribution 222 and corruption 243
normativity 231 definitions 99–100
traditional knowledge and cultural desirability of 100–3
expressions 230 and economic growth 174, 176
individualistic analysis 86 gender 18
Indonesia 357, 638, 639 global health 512, 514, 515
banking crisis 833, 834, 837 and happiness 177
growth 637 health 522
land policies 486 horizontal 18, 99, 100, 103–8, 223, 353–4, 372
protest movements 645 increasing 106
industrial policy 10, 303, 316–17, 550–63 India 722, 724
accountability 561 and innovation 577
country variations 557–8 measures of 103–5
definition 550, 551–2 overview 98–110
in developing countries 553–6 policies 107–9
effectiveness 556–7 and poverty 18, 53
evaluation 561 South Africa 699
and financial sector 554–5 sub-Saharan Africa 733
historical perspective 553–9 time dimension 100
horizontal and matrix-based trap 473
approaches 58 and trust 417
incentives 560–1 vertical 18, 99, 103–4, 107–8, 224
information 560–1 information:
picking winners 552 absorptive capacities 587–8
political economy of 562 economics of 286–7
a process 561–2 externalities 552
state 316–17 and freedom of expression 625, 627
targeted 554–5 freedom of 625, 627
transparency 561 industrial policy 560–1
industrialization 24, 39, 201, 303, 644 law 250
agricultural-led 443 Information and Communication
Brazil 670–1, 674 Technologies for Development
consensus 296–8 (ICT4D) 614–27
and growth 51–4 access to content 624–5
policy 568 arguments for 619
see also import substitution and civic life 622
industrialization (ISI) criticised 618–19
industrialized countries: history of 615–18
F5 to G20 769 impact assessment 617–18, 626–7
see also G8; G20 infrastructure and governance 627
industry: policy making 627
capital-intensive 281 privacy 625, 627
state-led 67 and rights and freedom 622–4
index 921
see also internet diversity 45

information and communications informal 503–4
technologies (ICTs) 55, 571, 599, 623, interdependencies 208–9
624, 627 legal 205
infrastructure: micro analysis 45–6
BRICS support for 871 multilateral 768
broadband 617 nature of 497
and corruption 247 and oil 757–60
electricity 642 oversight 250
official development assistance (ODA) 859 paralysis 876–7
scientific 602 role of 24, 56, 569, 571
Inglehart, R. F. 177 social protection as 190
innovation 540–9, 599–612 structure 280
Advanced Market Commitments trust in 570
(AMCs) 608–9 integrated rural development (IRD) 466
context specific 569, 574, 575–6, 577 integrity 250–1
for development 600–3 intellectual property 230–1
and economic growth 567 intellectual property rights (TRIPs) 623, 624,
evolutionary 548 627, 821, 824
Grand Challenge approach 603–5 Inter-American Convention Against
grants 600, 605–6 Corruption 249
grassroots 574 Inter-American Development Bank
ideas and infrastructure 600, 603, 611 (IADB) 840
impact-first investment funds 606–7 InterAction 806
integrated 611–12 interest rates 283, 284
pay-for-performance 609 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
policies 555 (IPCC) 499, 506
private finance 600 international aid 78
prizes 607–8 criticized 810–11
product development partnerships 606 donors’ need for evaluation 152–3
products and outcomes 600, 603, 611 effects of 51
social impact bonds 610–11 fungibility 856
a social process 578 for health 543
and universities 588 for knowledge and learning 590
innovation systems 10, 59, 566–78, 602 for social assistance 199–200
definition 568 transparency 252
and development 570–1, 574–5 see also financial flows; Official
evolving concept 567–70 Development Assistance (ODA)
local 576 International Aid Transparency Initiative 252
macroeconomic conditions 569 International Assessment of Agricultural
narrow and broad 568–9 Science and Technology for Development
Innovations for Poverty Action 158 (IAASTD) 485
institutional adaptability theories 214–15 International Bank for Reconstruction and
institutions 61 Development (IBRD) 4, 403, 847, 849,
and adaptation 502–4 851
capacity 503 International Classification of Diseases
change 208, 858 (ICD) 514
critical junctures 751, 764 International Committee of the Red Cross
definition 503 (ICRC) 770
922 index
International Conference on Freshwater neo-liberalism 43, 887

449, 450 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers
International Conference on Water and (PRSPs) 853
Environment 449 Public Expenditure and Financial
International Council of Scientific Accountability (PEFA) program 834
Unions 499 role 832–4
International Covenant on Civil and Political Washington Consensus 372, 399, 639,
Rights 625 743, 834
International Criminal Court (ICC) 414 see also structural adjustment programs
International Development Association (SAPs)
(IDA) 403, 883 International Program for Development
International Development Research Centre Evaluation Training 154
(IDRC) 123, 601 International Telecommunications Union
International Drinking Water Supply and (ITU) 616, 623
Sanitation Decade 449 International Trade Organization (ITO) 298
International Finance Corporation International Women’s Tribune Center 118
(IFC) 403, 810, 839 International Women’s Year (IWY) 118
international financial institutions (IFIs) internet 599, 626, 627
11–12, 94, 124–5, 349–50 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
in post-conflict situations 371–2 and Numbers (ICANN) 623
role and influence 831–43 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 623
see also International Monetary Fund; investment 799, 801
World Bank coordination failure 552
International Initiative for Impact Evaluation foreign 770
(3IE) 158 intra-Asia 646
International Labour Organization (ILO) 89, mission-related (MRI) 809–10
120, 188, 190, 201, 885 return on (ROI) 152
indigenous peoples 225–7 see also foreign direct investment
self-employment 317 Iran 4, 283
threatened by U.S. 888 Iraq 365, 386, 400, 406, 754, 857
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 6, 234, Irish Potato Famine 436
242, 262, 283, 327, 331, 370, 397, 717, 725, irrigation 456, 502, 717
761, 870, 889, 831 see also agriculture; water
accountability 405, 795
austerity programs 833 Jackson, R. H. 348, 356
banking crises 833–4 Jacobs, J. 470
and Brazil 670 Jacoby, C. 481
cooperation with World Bank 834, 835–6 Jacoby, E. 481
creation of 769, 882 Jahoda, M. 184
crisis management 833 Jain, D. 119
Emergency Post Conflict Assistance Jamaica 385, 388
(EPCA) 367–8 Japan 637, 638, 717, 889
Financial Sector Assessment Program agriculture 820
(FSAP) 833–4 health 512
Guide on Resource Revenue industrial policy 553, 555
Transparency 403 innovation 57
losing influence 840–1 land 480, 482
need for reform 640 Meiji restoration 772
index 923
Ministry of International Trade and Keane, J. 788–9

Industry (MITI) 42, 772 Keen, D. 352, 370, 396
post war 4 Kelley, A. C. 146
volunteerism 809 Kenney, J. F. 884
water 452 Kenny, C. 46, 61
and the World Bank 303 Kenya 354, 385, 387, 501
Japan Asia Investment Company 646 employment 885
Javorcik, B. 62 Meteorological Agency 504
Jeffrey, C. 180 Stop Stock project 157
Jenks, S. 180 Ushahihi 622
Jerome, A. 10, 632 Kenyatta, J. 88
Jet Li 803 Kerstenetzky, C. 11
Jiang Zemin 660, 664 Kerstenetzky, J. 11, 768
Jinnah, M. A. 88 Key, C. 329
Jogarajan, S. 272 Keynes, J. M. 38, 43, 56, 67, 279, 298, 324, 381,
Johnson, A. 61 760
Johnson, C. 42 Keynesian economics 23, 25, 51, 282, 286, 305
Johnson, S. 45 Khadiagala, G. 9, 335
Johnston, B. F. 42, 465 Khamfula, Y. 701
Jolly, R. 11, 95, 221, 235, 769 Khan, A. R. 480, 484
Jomo, K. S. 308 Khanna, P. 637
Jones, S. 15, 856 Kharas, H. 12, 770
Jordan 355, 754, 760–1, 763 Kiiski, S. 106
Jorgenson, D. W. 61, 62 Kimberley Process 390, 401, 405, 407
Juarez, B. 15 Kindleberger, C. P. 300, 305
judicial reform 248 King, S. 761
justice: Kingsbury, B. 217
and corruption 245–6 Kirzner, I. M. 312
distributional and procedural 498 Kiva.org 806, 807, 861
field 412 Klasen, S. 141, 144, 146
idea of 788, 795, 797 Klingebiel, S. 390
international and national processes 414 Klugman, J. 142
a pluralistic notion 793 Knight, J. B. 110, 177
transitional 9, 412–31 knowledge 505, 573–4
capitalization 583
Kaldor, M. 351 contextual 19
Kaldor, N. 261, 882 cooperation 859
Kalecki, M. 279, 882 country specific 31
Kalwij, A. 110 for development 591
Kamehamaha III 235 general versus specific 23–6
Kanbur, R. 8, 15, 19, 28, 60, 68, 312, 475 politics of 792
Kant, E. 101 privatization 583
Kant, I. 398 productive 583
Kapur, D. 10, 632, 730 public good 547
Karl, T. L. 396 role of 55, 56
Karsenty, G. 818 traditional 504
Kaufmann, D. 241, 246, 839 knowledge economy 778
Kautilya 15, 727, 730 Koch, R. 515
924 index
Kohli, A. 44 ownership 722–3

Kondratiev, N. 568 registration 484
Korea 774, 777, 833, 870, 888 rights, evolutionary theory of 483
agriculture 820 secure tenure 490
aid provider 868 sovereignty 490–1
Economic Planning Board 837 land policy:
education 779 gender issues 486–7
post war 4 generational policy 487–8
see also South Korea land reform 10, 40, 107, 479–91
Kosovo 369 and agrarian reform 480–1
Koubi, V. 356 definition 480–1
Kourtellos, A. 55 dropped from agenda 482–3
Kraay, A. 839 during the Cold War 481–2
Krause, K. 9 market-assisted (MLAR) 483, 486
Kreuger, A. O. 563 market-based (MBLR) 483
Krishnan, P. 318 redistributive 480, 484, 485, 490–1
Kritz, N. 414–15, 425 Landesa Center for Women’s Land Rights
Krueger, A. O. 302, 775, 819 121
Krugman, P. R. 280, 291, 292, 304, 470, lands, territories, and resources (LTR) 288–9
686, 811 Langer, A. 353
Kubitschek de Oliveira, J. 668, 670–1, Lanjouw, P. 469
673–4, 680 Lao Peoples Democratic Republic 837
Kuhn, T. 77 Lapeyre, F. 221
Kulkarni, V. 180 Larson, D. A. 140
Kurtz, C. F. 161 Lastres, H. 549
Kuwait 753, 754, 757, 758, 759 Latham, M. 51
Kuziemko, I. 857 Latin America 11, 22, 40, 212, 471, 647, 833
Kuznets, S. 105–6, 278, 281 boom-bust cycle 300
Kuznets curve 105–6 the building of 342–9
Kyoto Protocol 499 debt crisis 301
ethnic strife 224–5
La Via Campesina 485, 486, 789 FDI 297
Labelle, H. 9, 171 growth 52
labor: indigenous peoples 222
affirmative action 181–2 industrial policy 554, 555–6, 557, 558
international division of 296–300, innovation 577
599–600 lost decade 887
see also employment poverty measurement 135
Lagos, R. 15, 690, 691, 692, 693 social assistance 196, 198, 200–1
Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) 333, 334 state intervention 296
Laird, S. 818 universities 583
laissez faire 70, 71 and the Washington Consensus 68,
Lal, D. 24, 35, 43–4 558–9, 775
Lall, S. 297 women 182
Lan, X. 632 Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) 734
land: Latin American Common Market 327
administration 483 Latin American Institute for Economic and
control of 121 Social Planning (ILPES) 327
grabs 488–9, 490 Latinobarómetro 185
index 925
law: List, F. 23, 37, 47, 328, 570

civil 212 literacy 885
common 212 Little, I. M. D. 152
concept of 205 livelihood strategies 499
and development 204–16 loans, concessional 882–3
domestic 213 Locke, J. 170
international 210–11, 213, 214 Lodin, S.-O. 273
public and private 212 Loewald, C. 698, 699
rule of 204, 207, 210, 422–3 logframe 153–4
Le Billon, P. R. 352, 397 logging 223
League of Nations 66, 768–9, 889 Lâm, M. C. 8, 171, 235, 236
learning 571 Lopez, R. A. 62
interactive 569 Lopez-Acevedo, G. 319
local 575–6 Lopez-Calva, L. F. 142, 143
North/South divide 591 Lorenzoni, I. 498, 500
traditional 574 Lucas, R. 589, 834, 861
see also education Luciani, G. 756
Leff, N. H. 311 Lugo, M. A. 141
legal norms 211–12 Lula da Silva, L. I. 633, 667, 669, 676–7,
Legal Origins theory 212 678–9, 680, 868, 876
legal reform 204, 206 Lundvall, B.-Å. 59, 568, 570
legal systems 8 Lutheran World Relief 808
definition 205 Lutz, H. 424
Lehman Brothers 306 Lösch, A. 470
Leibenstein, H. 109, 184
Leipziger, D. 11, 769 MacFarlane, N. 236
Lemos, R. 10, 549 McGillivray, M. 140, 146
Lesotho 703 MacGinty, R. 373
Lessa, C. 768 McGranahan, D. V. 135
Levine, M. 185 Machiavelli 169
Levine, R. 531 McLure, C. E. 273
Levy, S. 185 MacMaster, C. 549
Lewis, W. A. 3, 24, 37, 39, 66–7, 70, 71, 291, Macmillan, H. 43
297, 314, 435, 760, 882 McNamara, R. 27, 67, 89, 362, 363, 837, 849,
Leys, C. 39 852, 886
Li, H. 110 McNeil Jr, D. G. 804
Li Keqiang 659 Maddison, A. 307
liberal capitalism 45 Mahbubani, K. 637
liberal institutional pluralism 94 Maio, M. D. 10
liberalism: Mair, L. 118–19
economic 38, 39, 44, 92, 94 Malan, P. S. 682, 836
embedded 38, 381 malaria 518, 520–1, 530, 543
see also neo-liberalism Malathus, T. 436
liberalization 201, 371, 776, 782, 816 Malawi 247, 504
Liberia 357, 385, 400, 406 Malaysia 396, 402, 454, 638, 639
Libya 356, 763 Economic Planning Unit 837
life expectancy 512–13 protest movements 645
Lin, J. Y. 9, 31, 258, 304, 562, 746 Mali 354, 355
Lipton, M. 15, 95, 465, 479, 482 Malone, D. M. 408
926 index
Malthus, T. R. 584 Mexico 245, 306, 327, 455, 671, 834
Manahlanobis plan 40 accession to GATT 819
Manley, M. 849 agricultural research 436–7
Manning, R. 868 aid provider 868
manufactures 883 Bolsa Familiar 838
exports 295, 297 corruption 245
low-skilled 298, 300 debt default 852
trade 816 Oportunidades 189, 193, 194, 195, 197
manufacturing 303, 552, 553, 554 Progresa 194, 195, 196, 197, 202
sub-Saharan Africa 735–6, 738, 740 rural economy 467, 472
see also industry social networks 625
Mao Zedong 52, 658–9 women 182
Mar del Plata Water Conference 449 Michelacci, C. 314
Marginal Cost of Funds (MCF) 262 micro-macro paradox 856
market: Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
domination 234 459
efficiency 319 Middleton, S. 86
failure 9, 75, 279, 316–17, 552 migration 468–9, 522
and state 19 Asia 645–6
versus state 8, 65–78 remittances 720
Marshall, A. 66, 277, 287, 470, 584 temporary 175
Marshall Plan 3–4 Milhaupt, C. J. 214
Martin, B. R. 59 military:
Martin, P. L. 236 government 671–2
Martínez Cobo, J. R. M. 225, 236 international action 365
Marx, K. 22, 37, 279, 567–8 spending 381
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 616 Mill, J. S. 3
Poverty Action Lab 158, 842 Millennium Project’s State of the Future
Mastruzzi, M. 839 Index (SOFI) 354
Matsuyama, K. 314 Millennium Villages Project 810
Mauritania 354, 355 mining 222
Mauritius 739 Minsky, H. P. 305
Mauss, M. 184 Mirrlees, J. A. 152
Mayer-Rieckh, A. 424 Mitchie, B. 47
Mazza, J. 181, 182, 185 Mkandawire, T. 350
Mbeki, T. 748 Mo Ibrahim Prize 805
Márquez, G. 178 mobile telephones 616–17, 621
means testing 192 modernization 88, 278
measles 885 Brazil 669–70
Mebratie, A. D. 702 criticized 41–2
medication 531 and market failure 279–80
Medvedev, D. 876 theory 26–7, 40, 589
Meier, G. M. 46 Modrego, F. 475
Meirelles, H. 678–9 Mohanty, C. T. 122
Mellor, J. W. 42, 435, 465 Molière 277
Menaldo, V. 756 Molla, A. 617
Menkhaus, K. 371 Monga, C. 9, 258
Mercosur 870 Mongolia 639
Mercy Ships 809 Montalva, F. 688
index 927
Monterrey Consensus 800 nationalization 107, 282

Montreal Protocol 429 natural resources 246, 266, 304
Moody-Stuart, G. 241 and conflict 352–3, 354
Mookherjee, D. 180 consumption 453
Moore, M. 271 and corruption 397
Morales, E. 232 and economic growth 453
Morocco 420, 421, 422, 501, 760–1, 763 global demand 452
Morris, M. D. 110, 135 management 503, 505
Moser, C. 123 rents 397
Mosley, P. 856 see also oil; resources; water
most favored nation principle (MFN) Naudé, W. 9
817, 818 Naughton, B. 655
Motsamai, D. 9 Ncube, M. 10, 632
Mozambique 357, 369 needs, basic 27
Mubarak, H. 355 Negroponte, N. 621
Muchie, M. 576, 578 Nehru, J. 36, 46, 88
Mugabe, R. 123 Nelson, R. R. 279, 314, 587
Mulgan, G. 689 neoliberalism 42–4, 84, 89, 224, 566–7, 602,
Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 85, 639–40, 691, 699, 701, 704, 887
137, 842 see also liberalism
Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative 840 nepotism 241
multilateral development banks Nestlé 808
(MDBs) 836–7, 871 Netherlands 794–5
multilateral organizations 866–79 Neto, A. F. 678
multinational companies 249 networks 425
Mundell, R. A. 831 global 179
Murphy, K. M. 314 social 175
Muten, L. 273 spoiler 421
Myanmar 645 Neumayer, E. 388
Myrdal, G. 67, 256, 291, 570–1, 578, 882 New Institutional Economics (NIE)
Müller, S. 585, 586, 587 206–8, 775–6
New International Economic Order
Nabli, M. 753, 755, 759 (NIEO) 223, 300, 301, 886
Naidoo, C. 768 New Structural Economics (NSE) 288–9
Naidoo, K. 11 Newman, E. 351
Namibia 247, 703 Nicaragua 327
Naoroji, D. 15, 37 Niger 354, 355
Napoleon 768 Nigeria 354, 437, 453, 534
nation-state 66 corruption 245, 247
global and local 73–4 regional integration 323, 330
see also government; state Nightingale, F. 770
National Adaptation Program of Action Nkoana-Mashabane, M. 875
(NAPA) 500 Nkrumah, K. 67–8, 88
National Broadband Plans 619 non-farm sector 467–8
National Human Development Reports non-governmental organizations
890 (NGOs) 225, 458, 806, 837
National Human Security Reports 893 accountability 795
national identity 27 Conference on the Indigenous Peoples of
nationalism 12 the Americas 225
928 index
non-governmental organizations oil:

(NGOs) (cont.) exporters 330
criticized 810–11 prices 43, 71, 835, 886–7
networks 807 and water 455
in the politics of development 796 Okinawa Charter on Global Information
see also civic society Society 615
non-legal norms 211–12 oligopolies 281
Noorbakhsh, F. 140, 146 Oliver-Smith, A. 235
NOPECs 887 Olson, M. 346
North, D. 45, 206, 214, 838 Oman 753, 755, 757, 759
North Korea 480, 764 One Laptop per Child (OLPC) 621
North Vietnam 480 Oomman, N. 10, 431
Norway 233, 820 open access regimes 214–15
Nozick, R. 101 Open Society Foundation 616
Nuremberg trials 414, 421 Open Society Institute (OSI) 399, 402
Nurske, R. 37, 39, 291 open source development 862
Nussbaum, M. C. 315, 416 order versus freedom 692–3
nutrition 438–9 Organisation of African Unity (OAU)
security 444 331, 742
transition 512 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
see also food Development (OECD) 85, 269, 389, 752,
Nye, J. 240 781, 800, 842
Nyerere, J. 88, 95 aid donors 93
Convention on Combating Bribery of
OAU 742 Foreign Public Officials in International
Obasanjo, A. 748 Business 249
O’Brien, K. L. 347, 498, 500 Development Assistance Committee
Ocampo, J. A. 9, 258 (DAC) 91, 153, 800, 802, 851, 853, 876–7,
Occupy Movement 789 878
official development assistance (ODA) 770, Expert Group on Science, Technology and
799, 800, 802 Competitiveness 569
coordination 861 growth 752
country ownership 853 Guidelines for Multinational
critics of 856 Enterprises 399
donor proliferation 853–4 investment in research 540, 548
financial transfers 858 Multilateral Convention on Tax
and good policies 856 Information Exchange 249
for infrastructure 859 Shaping the 21st Century 889
need for new business model 811–12 Tax Center 834
New Deal framework 857 water resources 452
overview 847–62 Organization of American States (OAS)
performance-based allocation 856 233, 325
and politics 848–9, 857 Organization for European Economic
targeted 855–7 Cooperation (OEEC) 4
transformation of 861 Organization of Petroleum Countries
see also financial flows; international aid (OPEC) 43, 93, 282–3, 835, 886–7
Ogata, S. 892 Orrone, E. 10
Ogbu, O. 562 Ortiz, I. 106
index 929
Ostrom, E. 484, 497 Perón, J. D. 673, 682

Ottone, E. 632 petrodollars 282–3
Oxfam GB 124 philanthropy 11, 799–800, 801, 802–3
Oxfam Novib 794 Philippines 437, 482, 485, 486, 645
Phosa, M. 875
Pack, H. 314, 551 Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) 135
Pahl-Wostl, C. 497, 505 Pigou, A. C. 101, 102
Paine, T. 82, 170 Pinochet, A. 347, 683, 688
Pakistan 70, 453, 534 Pinto, A. 686
Palma, G. 41 Pistor, K. 214
Pan American Health Organization Planning-Programming-Budgeting System
(PAHO) 533, 534 (PBS) 153
Panama Canal 682 Platform of Action 122, 125
pandemics 521, 523, 541 Platteau, J.-P. 483
Pandya-Lorch, R. 430 point-of-time surveys 184
Panizza, U. 110 Polanyi, K. 37, 38–9, 234, 236, 547
Papanek, H. 118 policy:
paradox of plenty 396 coordination 561
Paraguay 327, 826 failures 281
Parente, S. L. 55 making 108–9, 660–1
Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness 154, 164 and politics 70–3
Participatory Action Research 507 poliomyelitis 531, 534–5
Partnership for Higher Education in political accountability 407
Africa 811 political campaigning 794
partnerships 228, 777 political economy 29, 207
Pasteur, L. 515 of intrastate conflicts 346–7
patronage 241 of policy making 108–9
peace: political power, through quotas 125–6
liberal 372 political stability, post-war 369
political economy of 370–1 political system, trust in 246–7
self-sustaining 365 politics 14, 28–9
Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger of knowledge 792
354 and official development assistance
peacebuilding 9, 362–76, 373–4 (ODA) 848–9
coordination 367–8 and policy 70–3
and development 374–6 pollution 457–8, 657, 663
flexibility 367–8 Asia 644
illiberal 374 cost distribution 498, 499–500
post-conflict 363, 364, 366 non-point 457–8
Pearson, L. 42 see also climate change
Pell, J. P. 164 Popper, K. 399
Pengnian, Y. 805 population:
Peretto, P. F. 314 aging 53
Perez, C. 571 explosion 518
Perotti, R. 110 global 453
Perrin, N. 154, 499 increase in 53
Perry, R. J. 235 marginalized 171
Peru 207, 422 population studies 118
930 index
positivism 430 Principal Components Analysis 140

post-conflict: principle of rectification 101
amnesties 414 Pritchett, L. 45, 693
fiscal consolidation 371 private finance initiatives (PFI) 272–3
political stability 369 privatization 285, 371, 653
transitional justice 424 product cycle literature 299
poverty 7 Product Development Partnerships 803
absolute and relative 85 product space method 288
acute 146 profits, fair division of 794
Arab region 753 property rights 207, 269, 285, 484, 655
childhood 87 Prosterman, R. 482
Chile 685–6, 690, 691, 692–3 Public Affairs Centre 70
concepts 84–7 public expenditure 108, 284
and ethnicity 185 public finance 258, 259–73
and expectations 417 path dependence, context-specific 259
feminization of 121 principles and institutions 261–2
geography of 76, 92–4 see also public sector
global 82; conferences 90–1 public goods 11, 74, 74–6
history of thought 88–92 public procurement 242
and inequality 18, 53 public sector 46, 327, 397, 444, 657
integrated programs 194 Arab region 754, 757, 760
line 85 Brazil 675, 680
low income trap 76 corruption 240, 243, 250
measurement: global 93; objective and downsizing 519, 589
subjective 86 and growth 58, 567
multidimensional 194, 195 India 718, 728
positioning 82–4 and innovation 601, 606, 607
reduction: and economic growth 134; jobs in 181, 754, 757
strategies for 94, 192, 679, 720–4, 886 see also public finance
relative deprivation 347, 353 public services 245
South Africa 699, 706, 710 public-private partnerships 587, 799
and structural transformation 435 Publish What You Pay (PWYP) 390, 402
sub-national pockets of 76–7 Putnam, R. 789
sub-Saharan Africa 733, 736, 737, 739, 744 Pye, L. 23, 26, 346
symptom or cause 81–95
targeting 855–6 Qatar 753, 759
trap 473 Quadros, J. da S. 668, 671
power sharing 354, 354–6 Quan, J. 488
Prado, M. 8, 171 Quiliconi, C. 11, 769
Prasad, E. S. 305
Prebisch, R. 9, 24, 37, 40, 41, 223, 258, 291, Rada, C. 314
299, 300, 319, 324–9, 570, 578, 684, 773, Ram, R. 135, 136
882, 883–4 Ramadan, M. 754
Prebisch-Singer hypothesis 298 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) 19,
preference formation 184 158–9, 215–16, 859
Premji, A. 805 Rangel, I. 682
Prescott, E. C. 55 rapid rural appraisal 154–6
press 792 Rapley, J. 15
index 931
Ravallion, M. 82, 85, 110, 141, 142, 143 results-based management (RBM) 154
Rawls, J. 101, 498 Revenue Watch Institute (RWI) 402, 404
Ray, I. 235 Rhoades, G. 547
Reagan, R. 686, 695, 887 Ricardo, D. 66, 279
Reardon, T. 468, 475 Riles, A. 15
Red Cross 847 Rip, A. 548
redistribution 107–8, 178 risk 61, 191, 201, 312–13, 778
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Rist, G. 15
Forest Degradation (REDD) 502 river basin management 451
Regime of Integration Industries 326 Robbins, L. 102
Regional Comprehensive Economic Robeyns, I. 139
Partnership (RCEP) 641 Robinson, J. 45, 71, 184, 236, 751, 757, 758, 762,
regional development bank 326 764, 838, 858
Regional Economic Communities Rockefeller Foundation 436–7, 517, 803
(RECs) 335 Rodney, W. 47
regional integration 9, 258, 326–8, 330–1, 703 Rodriguez, F. 142, 302
registration 192 Rodríguez-Piñero, L. 235
regulation 204–16, 316 Rodrik, D. 6, 31, 74–5, 110, 287, 302, 304, 315,
regulatory capture 247 552, 562, 705, 711, 824
regulatory reforms 52 Roett, R. 668
Reiger, C. 424 Rogers, P. 8, 19
Reinert, E. S. 570, 577 Rogoff, K. 61, 305
Reinert, S. 577 Roman Catholic Church 146
Reinhart, C. 61, 300, 305 Romer, P. M. 55, 61, 287, 589, 858
religious divide 77 Roodman, D. 60
religious organizations 793, 808–9 Roosevelt, F. D. 38, 428–9, 769
religious wars 350 Rosada, T. 431
remittances 645, 720, 770, 799–800, 801–2 Rosberg, C. 348
Reno, W. 396 Rose, G. 515
reparations 414, 415, 421, 422 Rose-Ackerman, S. 241, 250
Republic of Korea 458 Rosenberg, N. 587
research and development (R&D) 779, 790 Rosenstein-Rodan, P. 23, 37, 67, 281, 291, 296,
agricultural 436–7, 439, 717 760
entrepreneurial role in 314, 315, 317 Rosenthal, G. 329
funding for 547–8 Ross, J. 291
and productivity 57, 60 Ross, M. L. 352, 756
subsidized 599 Rostow, W. 40
see also innovation; science; universities Rotary International 520
resilience 496–7, 505 Rotberg, R. I. 349
resources: Rousseau, J.-J. 98, 101, 184, 398
common pool 484 Rowntree, S. 82, 85
curse 246, 396–8 Ruggie, J. 38
distribution 505 rule of law 204, 207, 210
endowments 207 rural:
entrepreneurship as 313 definition 464, 466
rents 266 development 42, 89; definition 464;
and war 406 uneven 472–4
see also natural resources; oil; water instability index 482
932 index
rural (cont.) security 362, 892–3, 894, 896

non-farm sector 435 the concept 380, 383
regions: endogenous change 473; cybersecurity 623, 625
stagnant 468–9 internet filtering and surveillance 626
transformation 463–74; definition 464, post-colonial 382–4
465; drivers of 467–72 security sector reform (SSR) 390
Russia 89, 402, 452, 481 seignorage 265
corporate social responsibility Seko, M. S. 347
(CSR) 808 self-determination 227–8, 231–2, 233
philanthropy 803, 805 Self-Employed Women’s Association
see also BRICS; Soviet Union (SEWA) 120
Rustow, D. 27 self-employment 313, 316–18, 721
Ruttan, V. W. 465 self-reliance 322, 331, 334, 336
Rwanda 121, 351, 375–6, 383, 414, 466, 609 self-sufficiency 324
self-sustainment 332
S&T Policy Instruments Project 571 Seligman, E. 3
Sabel, C. 215 Selim, H. 10, 634
Sach, J. 858 Sen, A. 15, 36, 61, 84–5, 99, 118, 135, 139, 146,
Sachs, J. 304 209, 236, 315, 416, 433, 474, 498, 514, 622,
Saddam, H. 400 684, 695, 792–3, 795, 797, 889, 892
Saddleback Church 808 Sen, A. K.
Saggi, K. 551 Senik, C. 110
Samman, E. 8, 18, 84 Seoul Consensus 870–1
Samuelson, P. 54 Serra, A. 570
Sandmo, A. 2 Serven, L. 833
Santos, G. 8, 17, 19 Seth, S. 140, 144, 146
Santos, M. E. 8, 17, 19 Shah, A. 236, 273
Sarkozy, N. 871 Shane, S. A. 313
Sarney, J. de R. F. de A. C. 672–3, 675 Shimeles, A. 632
Sartorius, K. 702 Shiv Nadar Foundation 805
Saudi Arabia 402, 646, 753, 754, 757, 759 Shleifer, A. 314
Saving Lives at Birth program 605, 606 shocks, external 71–2
Sawangfa, O. 177 Shorrocks, A. F. 110
Schady, N. 202 Sierra Leone 414
Scheinkman, J. A. 315 conflict 352, 357
Schiavo-Campo, S. 272 health 512
Schmidt, R. 273 natural resources 396, 400–1, 405
schooling 196, 244 Singapore 42, 243, 272, 329, 460, 558
Schultz, T. W. 47, 435, 465 Asian model 636, 638, 639, 645
Schumpeter, J. A. 312, 567–8, 570, 589 growth 637
science 428–9 United Overseas Bank 646
capacity building 602 Singer, H. W. 37, 40, 291, 325, 570–1, 578, 882,
for development 600–3 883–4
investment 444 Singer, P. 549
policy 569 Singh, M. 874, 876
see also research and development Sirimaneetham, V. 62
Scott, J. 235 Skidmore, T. E. 671
sea-level rise 222 skill formation 555–6
index 933
Slater, D. 47 policy approach 8–9, 191–2

Slaughter, S. 547 program approach 189
Slemrod, J. 272 scope of 191–3
Slottje, D. J. 143, 146 social transformation 508
slums 471 Social Watch 795
Small Area Estimates methodology 475 socially responsible investing (SRI) 809
small and medium enterprises (SMEs) 313 Society for International Development
smallholders 445 (SID) 888
Smart, M. 273 sociology 29
Smith, A. 3, 15, 21, 22, 37, 170, 277, 280, 311, Solow, R. M. 25, 277, 289, 589, 601, 667
398, 567, 584, 794 Solow growth model 855
Smith, G. C. 164 Soludo, C. C. 562
Smith, S. 380 Somalia 371, 386, 764
Smuts, J. 768 Sooklal, A. 875
Snow, D. M. 351 Soros, G. 399
Snowden, D. J. 161 Soskice, D. W. 208
Soares de Oliveira, R. 374 Soto, R. 758
Sobhan, R. 95, 482 South Africa 455, 739
social assistance 188, 190 Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative
conditions attached to 195–7 for South Africa (ASGI-SA) 705, 707,
finance for 199–200 709, 710
impact evaluation 197–8 African National Congress (ANC) 697,
information systems 198–9 700, 701, 702, 707, 875
program types 193–4 anti-apartheid movement 791
scale and scope 191–5 apartheid era 699
time windows 197 Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) 697,
social capital 789 699, 701–3, 704
and civic trust 420–1 Broad-Based Black Economic
and human rights violations 416–19 Empowerment (BBBEE) 702
and networks 421–2 Child Support Grant 189
social class 175, 680–1, 790 Congress of South African Trade Unions
middle 643, 649, 664 (COSATU) 700, 704, 709, 711
working 175 democracy 874
social contract 101 Development Community (SADC) 703
social damage 247 diamonds 401, 407
social enterprises 809–10 education 704
social inclusion see inclusion Employment and Redistribution
Social Institutions and Gender Index (GEAR) 699, 700–1, 704, 709, 711
(SIGI) 144 exchange rate 701
social insurance 188, 190, 200, 201 FDI 702
social market 777 fiscal policy 701, 709
social media 458 growth 698
social mobility 100 health 520, 704
social protection 170, 175, 188–201 Human Rights Commission 702, 707
and development 191 ICT 622
and economic growth 192 inequality 633, 699, 708, 710
future of 200–1 inflation 701
as institutions 190 informal economy 706
934 index
South Africa (cont.) Spantchak, Y. 11, 770

land 484–6, 706 special and differential treatment (S&D)
National Economic Development and 818–19, 824
Labour Council (NEDLAC) 705 Spence Commission, Growth Report 832
net donor 868 Spencer 857
New Growth Path (NGP) 697, 699, Spender, P. 851
708–9, 710 Sri Lanka 154–5, 357, 373, 885
overview 697–711 Srinivasan, T. N. 134, 280
philanthropy 803 Staatz, J. M. 435
political stability 703 stability, macroeconomic 282, 283, 832, 834, 859
poverty 699, 706, 710 stagflation 775
RDP 709, 711 Stand Up and Take Action 792
regional integration 703 state 11
represented at DAC 877 building 390
social assistance 193, 195 capacities 774
social indicators 705 capitalism 162
Social Security Agency (SASSA) 702 capture 776
South African Communist Party changing meaning of 169–70
(SACP) 704 cohesive capitalist 44
trade liberalization 703 collapse 348–9, 350, 355
truth commission 414, 422 constitutions 794
unemployment 705, 708, 710 control 51
see also BRICS and economic transformation 773
South Asia 433, 775 failure 347–50, 351, 383
South Korea 243, 329 fragile 349, 383, 857
drivers of development 25, 42, 43–4 fragmentation 350
and the East Asian model 636–8, 641 origins of 772
ICT 624 overview 771–84
industrial policy 554, 555, 557, 558 planning styles 772–3
land 480, 482 post-colonial 347–50, 356
savings 643 quasi- 348, 349
water 452 rentier 756–7
whistleblowers 250 research support 547–8
see also East Asian Tigers; Korea risk-sharing 777
South Sudan 408 role of 4, 39–40, 45, 741–2, 745, 746–7, 760
South Vietnam 482 versus market 8, 19, 65–78
South-South cooperation 859 violence 381
Southall, R. 702 virtuous circle 780
sovereignty, empirical and juridical 348 weak 345, 356, 383
Soviet Union 117, 336, 348, 480, 716 see also government; nation-state
aid architecture 382 State Fragility Index 384
collapse 5, 71–2, 660, 718 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) 212, 654–5,
collectivization 482 656
equality 37–8 Stern, E. 886
heavy industry 554 Stern Report on Climate Change 840
land reform 481 Sternin, J. 156
see also Russia Sternin, M. 156
Spaceship Earth 429 Steuart, J. 3
index 935
Stewart, F. 8, 18, 84, 353, 369, 387 Sub-Siberian Asia 93–4
Stewart, M. 272 subcontracting 301
Stiglitz, J. E. 43, 146, 233, 236, 270, 286, 551–2, Sudan 354, 408, 754, 885
562, 578, 824, 833, 897 Suharto 347, 638
stock market capitalization 304 Sukarno 88
Strauss-Kahn, D. 843 Sumner, A. 76, 94
Streeten, P. 140, 146 Sundaram, J. K. 235
structural adjustment: sustainability 234, 428
definition 283–4 sustainable development 429, 437, 495, 681, 860
policies 121, 282 Sutz, J. 549
structural adjustment programs (SAPs) 278, Swaminathan, M. S. 10, 430
283–4, 519, 558–9, 853, 855 Swan, T. 54
structural change 258, 277–91, 653 Swaziland 703
see also industrialization Sweden 117, 126
structural functionalists 356 VINNOVA 572
structural transformation Swedish International Development
and entrepreneurship 312, 314–15 Cooperation Agency (SIDA) 389
and poverty 435 Swenson, L. 328
structuralism 84, 86–7, 280–1, 303, 324–6, Switzerland 820
566, 773–4 Syria 763
structure, meaning of 278 Syrquin, M. 278, 831, 838
sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) 11, 459, 488, 536 Szekely, M. 142, 143
agriculture 734–6, 738, 739, 740 Szirmai, A. 562
climate change 739
conflict 739, 748 tablet computers 621
corruption 742 Tabova, A. 61
FDI 733 Taiwan 42, 774, 888
growth 68, 739 Asian development model 636, 638
hunger 433 industrial policy 44, 554, 555
import substitution industrialization land 480, 482
(ISI) 734, 742 see also East Asian Tigers
inequalities 733 Tan, C. M. 55
leadership 742–4, 747 Tangri, R. 702
macroeconomic stability 743 Tanzania 72, 467, 504
manufacturing 735–6, 738, 740 Tarp, F. 857
New Partnership for Africa’s Development Task Force for Child Survival 519
(NEPAD) 744–5 taste formation 183
overview 732–48 Tata Trusts 805
poverty 733, 736, 737, 739, 744 tax havens 269
private sector 733, 736, 747 Tax Justice Network 789, 794
self-reliance 742 taxation 259–61
since independence 733–41 administration 265
state role 741–2, 745, 746–7 avoidance 264
Structural Adjustment Programs capital gains 259–60
(SAPs) 736, 737, 743 and corruption 272
structural transformation 734, 737 cross-border trade 270
see also Africa direct 272
Sub-Saharan Challenge Program 603 earmarking 263–4
936 index
taxation (cont.) Timor-Leste 385
effective 262 Tinajero, M. 319
efficiency 262, 268 Tinker, I. 7, 12, 18, 118
and equity 263 Tobin, J. 270
evasion 264–5 Tocqueville, A. de 789
externalities 269 Todo, Y. 471
and globalization 269–70, 271 Tomic, R. 688
income 259–60, 261, 263 Tommasi, D. 272
indirect 270 Tortajada, C. 10, 431
institutions 261–2, 271 Torvik, R. 758
international 270, 273 total factor productivity (TFP) 54–5, 57,
on international trade 261 59, 60
local autonomy 268 Toye, J. 308
luxury goods 269 Toye, R. 308
origin and destination 269–70 Toye, T. 566
reform 284 Toyota Production System 215
VAT 260, 263, 264 trade:
Tay, S. S. C. 10, 632 agreements 720
Taylor, C. 400, 421 and development 59–60
technical change 54–5, 571 and finance 258, 295–307
technological innovation 303 liberalization 302–4, 816
technology 540–9 manufactures 816
catching up 297, 572–3 North-South struggle 816
for development 600–3 policy 56–7, 303, 554, 556
endogenous change 61 protection 296, 299, 381
gaps 299 reform 72
transfer 55, 58, 59 rules of 599
see also information and communication terms of 298, 324, 325, 883–4
technologies; innovation; science South-South 307
Temple, J. 61, 62 see also exports; General Agreement on
Tendler, J. 45 Tariffs and Trade (GATT); World Trade
terms of trade 298, 324, 325, 883–4 Organization (WTO)
territoriality 228–9, 233 trade unions 226–7, 326, 793
textiles 821 traineeships 181
Thailand 639, 833, 834 Trans-ASEAN Gas Pipeline 642
currency devaluation 638 transitional justice:
growth 637 and civic trust 420–1
National Economic and Social definition 412, 413–14
Development Board 837 empirical verification 419
protest movements 645 impact on development 414–19
wages 647 in post-conflict situations 424
Thatcher, M. 169, 695, 887 and rule of law 422–3
thermoelectric power 455 see also justice
Third World approaches to international law transparency 9, 171, 198,
(TWAIL) 210–11 in aid 252
Thorbecke, E. 85 and corruption 405–6, 248, 249–51
Tilly, J. 271 industrial policy 561
Timmer, C. P. 435 in peace processes 367–8
index 937
in public finance 262 Digital Economy Act 625

and the resource curse 342, 395–408 Gender and Development Network
water 458 124
World Bank on 45, 252 health donor 543
Transparency International 171, 248, 249, 252, health inequity 522
399 industrial policy 553
Corruption Perception Index 397 London School of Economics and Political
trickle-down process 84, 109 Sciences 583
trilemma 74 monetarism 519
Trubek, D. 206, 211 neo-liberalism 887
Truman, H. 22, 32, 88, 600, 849, 851, 857 NHS 684
trust: philanthropy 802
and authoritarianism 419 Poor Laws 82
civic 420–1 post-WWII 716
fostering 419–22 Social Finance 610
and inequality 417 United Nations (UN) 11–12, 153, 298, 301,
in the political system 246–7 769–70, 793
and social capital 420–1 accountability 795
truth commissions 414, 415, 419, 420, 422 Advisory Committee on the Application of
tuberculosis 520–1, 530, 543 Science and Technology (ACAST) 601,
Tuncer, B. 563 602
Tunis Agenda for the Information aid target 852, 885
Society 625 on AIDS 520, 539
Tunisia 355, 422, 754, 760–1, 763 basic needs 191, 886
Turkey 458, 868 and BRICS 877
Tussie, D. 11, 769 Commission on Human Rights 225
Twain, M. 488 Commission on Macroeconomics in
Health 516, 520
Uganda 72, 121 commodity sanctions 390, 405–7
ul Haq, M. 18, 136, 886, 889 conferences 90, 118; on the Environment
uncertainty 312–13 and Development (UNCED) 230,
underdevelopment 26–8, 572–3, 577, 590–1, 429–30, 675, 681; global 449, 888–9;
750–1 high-level 886; on Human
underemployment 24, 86, 369 Environment 449; on Human
undernourishment 432–3 Rights 889; on indigenous peoples
unemployment 190, 369, 404, 678 (WCIP) 226; on innovation and
Arab region 753, 754 technology 540; on population and
Denmark 782, 783 food 449; on Science and Technology
and poverty 86, 134, 244 for the Benefit of Less-Developed
South Africa 697, 704–6, 707, 708, 710 Nations 601; on Science and Technology
Unilever 794 for Development (CSTD) 601; on Trade
United Arab Emirates 753 and Development (UNCTAD) 299, 300,
United Kingdom (UK) 176, 452, 687 302, 327–8, 558, 817, 818, 852; on
aid to India 94 Women 90, 125, 888
colonies 66–7, 759 Convention Against Corruption 398
Department for International Development Convention for the Elimination of all
(DFID) 154, 389, 390 forms of Discrimination Against
Department of Technical Cooperation 851 Women (CEDAW) 487, 890–1
938 index
United Nations (UN) (cont.) Millennium Declaration 91

core values 890 Millennium Project 260
Covenants of Civil and Political Rights 171 Millennium Summit 888, 891
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Office on Drugs and Crime
Peoples (UNDRIP) 226, 227, 228–9, 230, (UNODC) 245, 383, 389
233, 234 overview 881–97
Development Decade 18, 223, 851–2, 884–5; peace operations 365
first 81, 117; second 571 peacebuilding 366
development goals 234, 894, 895; Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) 368
Millennium (MDGs) 17, 27, 81, 90, 91–2, politics of 848–9
107, 137, 379, 429, 450, 500, 520, 532, 602, Programme of Action for Africa Economic
733, 737, 744, 800, 842, 852, 854, 892 Recovery and Development
Earth Summit 449–50, 888 (UN-PAAERD) 743
Economic Commission for Africa Programme of Action for the Reform of
(UNECA) 258, 323, 330–3, 335, 336, 742, International Economic Relations 886
745, 888; AAF-SAP 333–4, 743, 888 Research Institute for Social Development
Economic Commission for Latin America (UNRISD) 135
(ECLA) 37, 40, 41, 88, 258, 323, 324–6, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) 893
327, 328–9, 336 sanctions regimes 400, 401
Economic Commission for Latin America Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) 439
and the Caribbean (ECLAC) 223, 323, Sub-Commission on Prevention of
684, 773–4 Discrimination and Protection of
Economic and Social Council 117, 481, 808 Minorities 225
Economic and Social and Cultural Sustainable Development Goals
Rights 171 (SDGs) 854, 861
Environment Programme 499 The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice
Food and Agriculture Organization in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies
(FAO) 118, 433, 437, 481 414
Framework Convention on Climate three 894–5
Change (UNFCCC) 499–500 UNESCO 230–1, 233, 236, 548, 586
funding 367 UNICEF 5, 518, 775, 888, 891; GOBI-
Group of Experts on the Democratic FFF 519
Republic of the Congo (DRC) 400 UNIFEM 891
growth target 884 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
High Commissioner for Human Rights (UDHR) 88, 191, 201, 625, 794, 852
(HCHR) 889 Universal Health Coverage (UHC) 524
Human Development Report (HDR) 889– UNTAC 375
90, 891, 892 Working Group on Indigenous Populations
ICT Task Force 615–16 (WGIP) 225–6, 227
on indigenous peoples 222, 233–4 World Health Organization (WHO) 514,
Intellectual History Project 516, 518, 532, 533–4, 807; Framework
(UNIHP) 893–5 Convention on Tobacco Control 521
Inter-Agency Support Group on World Summits: for Children 90, 91, 888;
Indigenous Issues 233 for Social Development 888; on
International Decade for Action “Water for Sustainable Development 450
Life” 450 United States (US) 3, 5, 22, 37–8, 59, 176, 251,
Measures for the Economic Development 717, 834
of Under-developed Countries 882–3 Academy of Science 572
index 939
Agency for International Development non-profit organizations 805–6

(USAID) 117, 153, 483, 604, 851, 836, 389 philanthropy 802, 803, 804
agriculture 436, 820 Point Four Program 849, 851
aid architecture 382 pollution 458
anti-slavery movement 791 Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS
Bay-Dole Act 587 Relief 521, 536, 537, 602, 603
and Brazil 669–70, 674 protest movements 685
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) 532 relationship with China 648
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 328 research support 547–8
COMPETES Reauthorization Act 607–8 Rockefeller Foundation 601
corporate social responsibility Securities and Exchange Commission
(CSR) 807–8 (SEC) 404, 406
Dodd–Frank Act 390, 404–5, 406, 407 Social Sciences Research Council 40
Energy Information Administration 454 subsidies 821
Environmental Protection Agency 452 support authoritarian regimes 347
faith-based organizations (FBOs) 808 targeting 192
Financing System for Science and treasury bonds 639, 643
Technology for Development volunteerism 809
(UNFSSTD) 601–2 water resources 452–3, 455
fiscal deficit 283 whistleblowers 250
Ford Foundation 601 universalism 781
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act 249 universities 10, 582–96
foundations 805 for betterment of life 590, 595
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 398 of calculation 583, 587, 592
Global Health Initiative (GHI) 543 in development theory 588–90
global strategy 671 developmental 590–5
growth 52 enrolment gap 592
a health donor 543 evaluation 593–4
health inequity 522 history of 583–6
HIV/AIDS 539 and innovation 588
human rights 895 private-public partnerships 587
ICT legislation 625 research agenda 593
industrial policy 553 social duties of 593
industrial revolution 436 university-industry relationships 587
inequalities 778 urban concentration 471
on land reform 481–2 urbanization 175, 465, 644, 684
and Latin America 327 of rural regions 467–8, 470–2
law and development movement 206, 211 Uruguay 327, 594–5, 671, 833
Marshall Plan 799, 849 USSR see Russia; Soviet Union
Millennium Challenge Corporation Uvin, P. 376
(MCC) 856
monetarism 519 value chains, global 632, 643, 661
monetary policy 43 value for money (VIM) 152
multilateral institutions 768–9 Van Beveren, I. 62
National Institute of Mental Health 604 Van Eck, L. 707
neo-imperialism 336 Van Praag, M. 317
neo-liberalism 887 Van Staveren, I. 143
New Deal 23 van Tuinen, H. K. 185
940 index
Vargas, G. D. 632, 668, 669–70, 673–4, 680, over resources 406
682 political economy of 370–1
Veenhoven, B. 110, 177 religious 350
Velasco, A. 287 socio-economic costs 369
Venables, A. J. 475 on terror 857
Venezuela 625, 840 transformative effects 268–71, 364
Venkataraman, S. 313 see also conflict; post-conflict; violence
Verdier, T. 758 Warner, A. 304
Verdier-Chouchane, A. 632 Warriner, D. 480, 481
Vergara, C. 10, 632 Warschauer, M. 621
Verschoor, A. 110 Washington Consensus (WC) 5, 19, 24, 44,
Versloot, P.H. 317 61, 68, 72, 224, 301, 316, 372, 399, 550,
vetting 414, 421 602, 633, 710, 775
victims 416, 420 and Africa 743, 745
Vietnam 123, 156, 438, 454, 521, 583, 832, Arab region 760
837, 853 and Asia 639, 640
Viner, J. 297 and Chile 685–6, 691
violence 387–9 and the IMF 372, 399, 639, 743, 834
against women 389 International Monetary Fund 834
integrated approach 384–7 and Latin America 558–9
lethal 384–5 performance-based allocation 856
see also conflict; war on structural change 282, 284–5
Vishny, R. W. 314 and underdevelopment 750
Volcker, P. 43, 400 water 448–61
Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible accountability 458
Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and development 459–60
and Forests in the Context of National drivers of change 452–6
Food Security 489 and energy 454–5
voluntary organization 805–7 governance 451
volunteerism 809 history of thought 449–52
von Thünen, J. H. 470 India 717, 728
vulnerability 505 inequalities 507
definition 498–9, 506 infrastructure 451
and deliberative processes 506–7 irrigation 456, 502, 717
management of 451
non-convention sources 453
Wade, A. 748 and oil 455
Wade, R. H. 44, 60, 303, 562, 638, 819 and participation 458–9
wages 181, 647, 670, 687 quality 457–8
Waldburger, D. 618 spending on 452
Waldheim, K. 119 transparency 458
Wallis, J. J. 214 see also natural resources; resources
Wan, G. 475 Watts, M. J. 506
war 9 Webb, B. 584
civil 396–7 Webb, D. C. 315
ethnic 350 Webb, P. 468
impact on livelihoods 351 Webb, S. 584
new 350–2 Weber, M. 22, 170, 205–6, 750
index 941
Weidman, N. B. 353 Women’s Economic Opportunities Index

Weigel, G. 618 (WEOI) 144
Weingast, B. R. 214 Women’s International Democratic
welfare state 778, 780, 783–4 Federation (WIDF) 119
well-being: Woodward, S. 372
and economic growth 779, 781 Woolcock, M. 45
indigenous peoples 231, 233 worker cohesion 175
see also happiness World Alliance for Citizens Participation
Wen Jiabao 640 789
Werker, E. 857 World Bank 67, 214, 252, 262, 297, 298, 368,
Westad, A. 37 437, 501, 551, 616, 761, 801, 870, 889
whistleblowers 250 A Continent in Transition 744, 747
White, B. 10, 431 accountability 795
White, G. 42 advice 837–8
White, H. D. 38 and Africa 331–5, 871–2
Whitehead, N. L. 235 on agriculture 859
Whitley, R. 548 Agriculture for Development 487, 489
Wilford, W. T. 140 Atlas measures 76
Wilkenfeld, J. 355, 356 beneficiary assessment 156
Willemsen-Díaz, C. A. 225 Berg Report 743
Williams, D. 8, 19–20, 46, 61, 101 Bureaucrats in Business 838
Williamson, J. 61, 68, 284, 295, 371, 471, 710, 856 Commission on Growth and
Wilson, W. 768 Development 839
Winter, S. 279 cooperation with IMF 834, 835–6
Woessmann, L. 62 decentralization 843
Wolfensohn, H. 839, 840 Development and the Next
Wolfensohn, J. 252, 856, 860 Generation 487
Wolfowitz, P. 840 Development Reports 776
women 890–1 Development Research Group 352
abuse of 420 “Doing Business” 208
caring work 122 East Asia Miracle 25, 638, 774, 838
and climate change 506–7 on education 859
contribution of 12 Equator Principles 213
economic roles 116–27 establishment 769, 849
employment 121, 126, 143, 587, 781 Extractive Industries Review (EIR)
entrepreneurs 318 233, 403
impact of corruption on 244–5 Extractive Industries Transparency
incomes 434 Initiative (EITI) 403, 839
and land policy 486–7 Financial Sector Assessment Program
Latin America 182 (FSAP) 833–4
maternal mortality 885 Gender Action Plan 839
political participation 125–6 Gender Equality as Smart Economics
role of 7 campaign 124
self-employment 318 on governance 45, 399, 504, 860
violence against 389 on health 807, 859
working hours 117 influence of 831, 836–9
Women in Development (WID) projects 117, Integrated Rural Development Projects
119, 120, 122, 123 (IRDPs) 89
942 index
World Bank (cont.) World Life Fund 794

International Development Association World Meteorological Organization 499
(IDA) 836, 851 World Social Forum 792
on knowledge and learning 590, 592 World Summit on the Information Society
on land policies 481, 483 (WSIS) 616
lending target 882 World Summit on Social Development
losing influence 840–1 (WSSD) 90
and national security 382 World Trade Organization (WTO) 11, 58,
need for reform 640 234, 399, 615
neo-liberalism 887 Agreement on Intellectual Property Rights
new firm registration 317 (IPR) 823
Population, Health, and Nutrition Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of
division 519 Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) 211,
on poverty reduction 41–2, 85, 886; 563, 624
strategy papers (PRSPs) 44, 72, 853 Agreement on Trade-Related Investment
Public Expenditure and Financial Measures (TRIMs) 823, 824
Accountability (PEFA) program 834 China’s entry 655, 656, 660
Public Expenditure Reviews 836 coalitions 825–6
Report on Poverty and Hunger 433 concern with local conditions 827
the resource curse 405, 406 creation of 769
and security 389–90 Doha Round 822, 824, 826, 827
Social Risk Management 191, 201 established 301, 819
statistics 837–8 on global taxes 270
Stolen Asset Recovery initiative implementation costs 821–3
(StAR) 839 overview 815–28
structural adjustment 72, 281–3, 301–3, 775 services agreement 823–4
Structural Adjustment Loans (SALs) 835, 836 technical specialists 827
Structural Adjustment Programs unbalanced rules 820–1
(SAPs) 43, 329, 333–5, 349–50, 736, 737, World Vision 157, 806
743, 853, 855 World Water Fora 449
Sustainable Development Network 839 Wu Jinglian 655
values country knowledge 31 WWI 381, 847
World Development Reports 245, 372, 379, WWII 381
390, 412–13, 417, 465, 466, 475, 516, 520, 838
World Bank Group 847 Xi Jinping 659
World Climate Conference 499 Xue Lan 10
World Conference on Human Rights 122
World Conference on International Yamani, Sheikh 756
Telecommunications 623 Yang, M. C. 298
World Conservation Strategy 429 Yemen 355, 763
World Council of Churches (WCC) 224–5, 852 Yitshaki, S. 272
World Economic Forum 793 Yosef, S. 430
world economy: Young, A. 236, 277
center-periphery 279, 297–9 Young, O. R. 497
power structure 573 Yugoslavia 348, 414
World Food Conference 432, 433 Yunus, M. 70, 120
World Health Assembly 533, 534 Yusuf, S. 8, 18, 60, 84
index 943
Zalaquett, J. 424 Zhu Rongji 660

Zambia 193, 199 Zimbabwe 123, 354, 401, 486
Zanzibar 354 Zimmerman, B. 161
Zartman, W. 348 Zoellick, R. 840
Zeitlin, M. 156 Zou, H.-f. 110
Zemin, J. 619 Zuckerman, E. 7, 12, 18, 124
Zhao Ziyang 659 Zuma, J. 708

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What are some of the critical issues discussed in development thought?

What are some of the critical issues discussed in development thought?

What are some of the concepts and theories discussed that have influenced development thinking?

What are some of the concepts and theories discussed that have influenced development thinking?

international

International Development Research Centre

The State of Development Thought 1

A historical overview of thinking on development, including how development has been

1. The Study of Development 21

3. Fifty Years of Growth Economics 50

4. Development Strategy: Balancing Market and Government Failure 65

5. Poverty in Development Thought: Symptom or Cause 81

6. Inequality and Development: An Overview 98

7. Women’s Economic Roles and the Development Paradigm 116

8. Composite Indices of Development 133

9. Development Evaluation 151

The intellectual origin of concepts influencing current thinking on development; how

State and Society 169

11. Social Protection 188

12. Law, Regulation, and Development 204

13. Rooting Change: Indigeneity and Development 221

14. Corruption 239

1 6. The Evolving Paradigms of Structural Change 277

18. Entrepreneurship and Economic Development 311

19. Two Prophets of Regional Integration: Prebisch and Adedeji 323

Peace and Security 339

21. Peacebuilding and Development 362

2 2. Violence, Insecurity, and Crime in Development Thought 379

2 3. The Resource Curse and Transparency 395

2 4. Transitional Justice and Development 412

Environment and Health 428

2 6. Water Resources: An Evolving Landscape 448

27. The Rural Transformation 463

2 8. Land Reform 479

2 9. Climate Adaptation 495

3 0. Global Health 511

31. Targeting Diseases 530

Innovation and Technology 546

33. Innovation Systems and Development 566

34. Universities and Higher Education in Development 582

35. Innovation for Development 599

36. Information and Communication Technologies for Development 614

Geographic Diversity 631

38. China 651

39. Brazil 667

41. South Africa’s Quest for Inclusive Development 697

4 2. India’s Economic Development 714

43. Economic Development: The Experience of Sub-Saharan Africa 732

Development Actors 768

46. Civil Society 788

47. Foundations and Private Actors 799

4 8. The World Trade Organization and Development 815

49. The Role and Influence of International Financial Institutions 831

50. Development Assistance 847

51. Consultative Forums: State Power and Multilateral Institutions 866

52. Underestimated Influence: UN Contributions to Development Ideas,

preconceptions or prejudices, whether or not hallowed by alleged authority (past or

5.1 Incidence of reference to “poverty” in Google Books, 1700–2000 83

9.1 Different types of evaluation 163

The State of Development Thought 1

1. The Study of Development 21

3. Fifty Years of Growth Economics 50

4. Development Strategy: Balancing Market and Government Failure 65

5. Poverty in Development Thought: Symptom or Cause 81

6. Inequality and Development: An Overview 98

7. Women’s Economic Roles and the Development Paradigm 116

8. Composite Indices of Development 133

9. Development Evaluation 151

State and Society 169

11. Social Protection 188

12. Law, Regulation, and Development 204

13. Rooting Change: Indigeneity and Development 221

14. Corruption 239

1 6. The Evolving Paradigms of Structural Change 277

18. Entrepreneurship and Economic Development 311

19. Two Prophets of Regional Integration: Prebisch and Adedeji 323

Peace and Security 339

21. Peacebuilding and Development 362

2 2. Violence, Insecurity, and Crime in Development Thought 379

2 3. The Resource Curse and Transparency 395

2 4. Transitional Justice and Development 412

Environment and Health 428

2 6. Water Resources: An Evolving Landscape 448

27. The Rural Transformation 463

2 8. Land Reform 479

2 9. Climate Adaptation 495

3 0. Global Health 511

31. Targeting Diseases 530

Innovation and Technology 546

33. Innovation Systems and Development 566

34. Universities and Higher Education in Development 582

35. Innovation for Development 599

36. Information and Communication Technologies for Development 614

Geographic Diversity 631

38. China 651

39. Brazil 667

41. South Africa’s Quest for Inclusive Development 697

4 2. India’s Economic Development 714

43. Economic Development: The Experience of Sub-Saharan Africa 732

Development Actors 768

46. Civil Society 788

47. Foundations and Private Actors 799

4 8. The World Trade Organization and Development 815

49. The Role and Influence of International Financial Institutions 831

50. Development Assistance 847

51. Consultative Forums: State Power and Multilateral Institutions 866

5.1 Incidence of reference to “poverty” in Google Books, 1700–2000 83

9.1 Different types of evaluation 163

influential pamphlet entitled The Poverty of Development E conomics (1983), to which