Comments on: Development wishlist

By: nihal

nihal — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:08:07 +0000

there need to be a holistic approach to development. Development economics possibly meaning material development may not hold a complete solution.It is necessary for donor nations to respect culture and exisiting economic fabric of the recipient and support the system for organic development while using appropriate technology for synergistic growth.Every culture has it’s unique value system and effort to globalise or impose norms and systems of the donor nations may lead to more problems whether it is from the schools of free market or centrally planned economies.Initially deep understanding of each economic activity must be given to the target group of development. Thus the education in the targetted activity and synchronising it socially is and important facet to development. Care must be taken not to completely dismantle the exisisting structure. In sri lanka a mainly agro based society with rice as staple diet had it indigenous practices which should have been respected eg earlier rice farmer did not use weedicides and uprooted the weeds manually, further they used only bio fertiliser. The multinational marketed their weedicides chemical fertiliser etc which had led series of issues compounded by the lack of necessary traing.Some prawn farmers have uprooted mangroves to construct ponds as they lacked the knowledge that mangroves sucks in ammonia and ferrous which are harmful to prawn culture. My contention is grassroot level education needs to be undertaken in tandem.Use the education system and children as a change agent. Bring in traditional value systems at school levels to deal with corruption.Thus sustainable economic development is more than an aid factor. This really deals with the micro aspect.

By: rachelstrohm

rachelstrohm — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:56:11 +0000

Ah, congrats on finishing at Harvard soon! That must be profoundly gratifying. I hadn’t heard of Davis’ work on El Nino, but I’m looking it up now – from your description it sounds like a fascinating insight. I think that’s what I’m also primarily looking forward to about grad school – getting to draw on the experience of other practitioners more consistently than is possible now. Thanks so much for sharing yours with me!

By: Karen

Karen — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:31:47 +0000

Hi Rachel,

Enjoying your blogs and insights. I’m working on getting into remission with my Crohn’s disease. On a happier note, I’ve completed all the work for my degree and will shortly become an alum of Harvard. I want to expand my study into incorporating the environment into development, including the engineering side, in new ways and work on my ‘treatise’ on population. Have you seen Mike Davis, “Late Victorian Holocaust: El Nino famines and the Making of the The Third World,” It is about the environmental impacts of a series of devastating El Ninos at the turn of the 20th Century and how many places are still in recovery not only from the environemntal degradation but from the mismanagement of the crisis from a policy perspective.

Kindest regards,

Karen

By: rachelstrohm

rachelstrohm — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:47:04 +0000

Hi Karen!

You’re very right – it is common to ignore the broader environmental context of economic development, to our peril. I’ll definitely check out Herman Daly’s work, which I hadn’t heard about before.

How have you been? And what are you working on now? Hope you’re well!

Cheers,

By: Karen

Karen — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:54:09 +0000

Herman Daly, the World Bank economist turned heretic, has written several works on steady state development economics and sustainable development that provide good insight into international institutions such as the World Bank with an alternative view of development. Beyond Growth, H. Daly, Beacon Press, 1996. Also, Walter Rodney’s classic, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” which explores how European practices in the 18th an 19th century disrupted natural social, economic and political communities and devastated their patterns of development. Also, works on state formation in Africa; how European boundry drawers made a mess out of Africa and how that has contributed to African complexities in state formation, the state and governance.

By: Karen

Karen — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:39:08 +0000

I’ve enjoyed your thoughtful, insightful blogs on development. I would like to suggest another sense of connectedness for the development practitioner, which is an economic determinism defined by an environmental paradigm within which we make choices. How much ‘development’ we’ve gotten wrong because we ignored the environmental paradigm. For example, a World Bank project in Western Africa thought sound A sector development would be to add a cotton crop. There was not an analysis by an ecologist as to the environment impacts to the ecological system. Cotton was planted; it attracted a type of loqust that devoured not only the cotton crop, but all the crops in the field. Attempts to eradicate the loqust failed. The subsitence livelihoods of the farmers were devasted. They now earn a living tree logging; rain forest deforestation is now their livelihood. There is an environmental, resource base component to all that we do and still we don’t require the educational coursework in development to understand it and it’s still an internal battle in most NGO’s, including World Bank, to obtain the environmental assessment necessary to proceed on a project to better protect the vulnerable and to do ‘less harm’ or do ‘no harm.’ I hope you find a graduate program in development that incorporates the environmental constraints within which you work. Environmental degradation and population pressures were so tragically a factor in the Rwandan genocide and the seeds of the conflict are germinating today; wiser policy may avoid the chain of events that precipitated the tradegy, but some of the root cause analysis is stil there, sadly.

By: rachelstrohm

rachelstrohm — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:42:15 +0000

I’ll be looking forward to your book post – was just thinking that that would be valuable. I think many of the books that I’ve found most useful in my thinking about development, or about interactions between the North & South in general, have often been somewhat tangentially related to the subject. A definite reminder of the importance of reading broadly!

By: Ranil Dissanayake

Ranil Dissanayake — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:29:41 +0000

cool – Bayly’s book is magnificent, but just to warn you – it’s a long book, and only one section deals directly with the economic development of the West (and why it happened there and why Africa and S. Asia fell behind). The rest of it is still brilliant and gives an amazingly rich view of how the world interacted as it became modern, and how it developed in the broadest sense.

will actually do a post soon on books on development that more people should read.

By: rachelstrohm

rachelstrohm — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:22:29 +0000

Hi Ranil,

I completely agree! This made me realize that I had written the post more narrowly than I intended – I had in the back of my mind the idea of non-economic factors (such as the political, racial & geographic situations that led in the American West before the Homestead Act), but I didn’t articulate that very clearly. Thanks for pointing this out.

(Also, I’m ordering a copy of Bayly’s book right now – it sounds like required reading for dev’t practitioners.)

By: rachelstrohm

rachelstrohm — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:13:46 +0000

Very true!