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Fifty Key Thinkers on Development

January 2006

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Editor: David Simon
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David Simon

Royal Holloway University of London

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FIFTY KEY THINKERS ON

DEVELOPMENT

Fifty Key Thinkers on Development is the essential guide to the world’s most

influential development thinkers. It presents a unique guide to the lives and

ideas of leading contributors to the contested terrain of development stud

ies from both North and South. David Simon has assembled a highly

authoritative team of contributors from different backgrounds and disci-

plines to reflect on the lives and contributions of fifty leading development

thinkers from around the world. These include:

• Modernisers like Kindleberger and Rostow

• Dependencistas such as Frank, Cardoso and Amin

• Progressives like Hirschman, Prebisch, Helleiner and Streeten

• Political leaders enunciating radical alternative visions of development,

such as Mao, Nkrumah and Nyerere

•

Progenitors of religiously or spiritually inspired development, such as

Gandhi and Ariyaratne

•

Development-environment thinkers like Blaikie, Brookfield and Shiva

This invaluable reference is a concise and accessible introduction to the

lives and key contributions of development thinkers from across the ideo

logical and disciplinary spectrum.

David Simon is Professor of Development Geography and Director of

the Centre for Developing Areas Research at Royal Holloway, University

of London. He is the co-editor of The Peri-Urban Interface: Approaches to Sus

tainable Natural and Human Resource Use (Earthscan, 2005).

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Edited by Robert Benyon

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FIFTY KEY

THINKERS ON

DEVELOPMENT

Edited by

David Simon

First published 2006

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Fifty key thinkers on development/edited by David Simon

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Planners—Biography. 2. Economic development—Planning.

3. Economic development—Cross-cultural studies.

4. Economic policy—Cross-cultural studies.

I. Title: Key thinkers on development.

II. Simon, David, 1957–

HD87.55.F53 2006

338.9—dc22 2005012690

ISBN 0-415-33789-5 (hbk)

ISBN 0-415-33790-9 (pbk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s

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CONTENTS

Introduction David Simon vii

Adebayo Adedeji

Reginald Cline-Cole 3

Anil Agarwal

Tim Forsyth 9

Elmar Altvater

Henning Melber 14

Samir Amin

M.A. Mohamed Salih 20

A.T. Ariyaratne

Lakshman Yapa 25

Jagdish Bhagwati

V.N. Balasubramanyam 31

Piers Blaikie

Jonathan Rigg 35

James M. ‘Jim’ Blaut

Ben Wisner 40

Norman Borlaug

Katie Willis 45

Ester Boserup

Vandana Desai 50

Harold Brookfield

John Connell and Barbara Rugendyke 56

Fernando Henrique Cardoso

Roberto Sánchez-Rodríguez 61

Michael Cernea

Anthony Bebbington 67

Robert Chambers

Michael Parnwell 73

Hollis B. Chenery

Juha I. Uitto 78

Diane Elson

Sylvia Chant 84

Andre Gunder Frank

Michael Watts 90

Paolo Freire

Anders Närman 96

John Friedmann

Gary Gaile 101

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Rana P.B. Singh 106

Susan George

Cathy McIlwaine 111

Alexander Gerschenkron

Robert Gwynne 116

Gerald K. Helleiner

Christopher Cramer 121

Albert O. Hirschman

John Brohman 126

Richard Jolly

Jo Beall 132

Charles Poor Kindleberger

Jan Toporowski 138

Sir William Arthur Lewis Morris Szeftel 144

Michael Lipton

John Harriss 149

Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus

W.T.S. (Bill) Gould 155

Mao Zedong Ton van Naerssen 161

Karl Marx

Richard Peet 166

Manfred Max-Neef

Rita Abrahamsen 171

Terence Gary McGee

John P. Lea 176

Gunnar Myrdal

Sarah Radcliffe 181

Kwame Francis Nkrumah

Alfred Babatunde Zack-Williams 187

Julius Kambaragwe Nyerere

Dani W. Nabudere 192

Raúl Prebisch

Cristóbal Kay 199

Walter Rodney

James Sidaway 205

Walt Whitman Rostow

Ulrich Menzel 211

E.F. (Fritz) Schumacher

Tony Binns 218

Dudley Seers

Arturo Escobar 224

Amartya Kumar Sen

Stuart Corbridge 230

Vandana Shiva

Brenda S.A. Yeoh 236

Hans Wolfgang Singer

John Shaw 242

Joseph Stiglitz

Ben Fine 247

Paul Patrick Streeten

Francis Wilson 252

James Tobin

David Simon 258

Mahbub Ul Haq

Marcus Power 264

Eric R. Wolf

Reinhart Kößler and Tilman Schiel 270

Peter Worsley

Ronaldo Munck 275

About the contributors 281

Index 291

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The invitation to edit this book proved irresistible, despite several other

simultaneous editorial commitments. First, Routledge’s confidence in a

market for a development studies title in this well-established and success-

ful series that spans many fields of study and research was pleasing. More

particularly, though, I perceived the opportunity to address a long-felt gap

in the development studies literature, namely a good quality biographical

reference work that brings together leading figures from the various con-

stituent disciplines. Precisely because of its inter- (and to some extent but

still inadequately multi-) disciplinary nature, as well as the very contested

nature of both theory and policy, both of which have been evolving rapidly

in this young field, development studies still has a remarkably underdevel-

oped centre or core. Consequently, there is less sense of shared heritage or

of a widely agreed set of leading figures and personalities than in longer-

established fields.

Moreover, most academic research and teaching still take place within

traditional disciplines, a feature recently reinforced in the UK and several

other European countries as a result of the current discipline-based research

assessment and audit cultures alongside years of cutbacks and rationalisation

in higher education as a whole. Multidisciplinary institutes or centres of

development studies were established in various countries amid the opti

mism of the 1960s and early 1970s but their subsequent fortunes have been

mixed. In the USA, the primacy of conventional academic disciplines has

never been seriously challenged. At another level, the development field

was long beset by a veritable ‘town versus gown’ divide between academics

and practitioners. Michael Edwards’ (1989) polemic both reflected and

exacerbated the sense of division but did focus attention on the problem.

Although he moderated his views within a few years (Edwards 1993,

1994), suggesting that rapid progress towards rapprochement had been made,

the last decade or so has certainly seen more widespread interaction and

collaboration, resulting in a considerable narrowing of the divide.

vii

Attesting to the vitality of the field, numerous recent textbooks and

compendia have sought to keep pace with the rapidity of change in the

post-Cold War world and the profound debates over the very meaning and

future of ‘development’. Yet, despite harbingers of doom predicting its

demise, and whether we prefer to denote contemporary perspectives by

means of prefixes like anti- or post-, or to refashion and reinvigorate the

term ‘development’ itself, there is certainly much ongoing theoretical

debate, conceptually rigorous research and dynamism in policy-driven

practice.

As such, this volume aims to make a substantial contribution through

informed reflection on the life and work of seminal thinkers and actors in

the broadly defined field of development studies. The fiftieth anniversary

of President Truman’s ‘Point Four’ speech in 1999 was marked by several

retrospective and prospective works. This book will continue that trend,

given additional impetus by the recent deaths of several prominent, if in

some cases highly controversial, figures like Walt Rostow, Charles

Kindleberger and James Tobin. As some of the last survivors of the post-

World War II impetus to ‘develop’ the newly independent states, their

passing also symbolises the generational change that has been taking place

within development studies.

The most difficult challenge in producing this book came at the outset:

how to narrow down the long list of nearly 200 names that I jotted down in

a very short time to only fifty? It quickly became clear that no universal

consensus would be reached, regardless of the final choice. Indeed, this was

confirmed through a process of consultation with friends, colleagues, the

publisher and the subsequent suggestions of referees of the proposal for this

title. In reaching the final list, I have undoubtedly made a few decisions that

some people will find surprising. Several contributors have even admitted

to not knowing of all the fifty themselves, perhaps illustrating our indi

vidual disciplinary and regional biases. A bit of controversy in this diverse

and contested field may thus be both good and necessary.

Let me explain the selection process. One helpful factor was that a num

ber of leading lights whose contributions to development have been made

as practitioners or activists rather than as ‘thinkers’ could be excluded. This

applies for instance to Chico Mendes, the champion of the indigenous Bra

zilian Amazonian rubber tappers, who was brutally murdered in 1988 by

agents of the powerful ranchers and logging firms whose destruction was

being challenged. As it happens, he is included in Fifty Key Thinkers on the

Environment (Palmer 2001). Interestingly, five thinkers do appear in both

the above title and this volume (Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, Mohandas

Gandhi, E.F. Schumacher and Vandana Shiva), while Marx and Gandhi

also appear in Fifty Major Political Thinkers (Adams and Dyson 2003). In

viii

INTRODUCTION

such cases, the respective entries have been written by different authors and

bring out different aspects or interpretations of their contributions, so read

ers could usefully consult more than one.

Overall, the choice of Thinkers is intended to enhance the relevance

and contribution of this book by having a group who are broadly represen

tative of the diverse currents and movements in the world of development.

This has meant ensuring that the pervasive Anglo-American dominance of

development theory and discourse (not least by economists) is challenged

through the inclusion of people working in different disciplines, over dif

ferent periods of time and – crucially – hailing from different walks of life

and geographical regions. This volume is by definition therefore a very dif

ferent undertaking from the self-reflective studies by fifteen eminent

Northern development economists (with commentaries by younger econ

omists) commissioned by the World Bank some twenty years ago, when

economic development and development were still commonly conflated

(Meier and Seers 1987), although several of those economists are also

featured here.

Readers will also notice the sharp gender imbalance among the Think-

ers featured here; this reflects the strong male dominance in most areas of

development thought. Economics is a partial exception but efforts to bal-

ance the various disciplines and Northern versus Southern representation

made for a few difficult choices. One other possible woman contender,

Gro Harlem Brundtland, chair of the UN’s World Commission on Envi-

ronment and Development, is featured in the Environment title in this

series (Palmer 2001).

A few of the voices (both ‘Southern’ and ‘Northern’) included in this

book are far less well-known ‘internationally’ than they should be, pre

cisely because of the linguistic, cultural, disciplinary and geographical limi

tations under which many of us labour and which – however unwittingly

– sometimes serve to perpetuate the very simplifications and abstractions

that we claim to challenge. Their inclusion is therefore deliberate, as a small

contribution to overcoming insularity and promoting polyvocality in

development, as befits a postcolonial approach.

Similarly, one or two people like Norman Borlaug, progenitor of the

Green Revolution, are included because of their vision and the profound

impact of their work, even though this might arguably have been some

what more ‘technical’ than ‘conceptual’. Inevitably, though, some difficult

choices have had to be made in view of the artificial limit of fifty thinkers.

For instance, despite the undoubted influence of his ‘world-systems the

ory’, Immanuel Wallerstein has been omitted, in part because his ideas

integrate less directly with development issues than the closely related

work of Jim Blaut. Another important criterion for inclusion has been

INTRODUCTION

that, to allow ‘mature’ reflection on the significance of the lives and contri

butions of the Thinkers, they should be close to the end of their active

careers, if not yet retired or dead. Given the relative youthfulness of Devel

opment Studies – as evidenced by Malthus and Marx being the only

Thinkers included who predate the twentieth century – this still leaves

plenty of scope for topicality, while avoiding the temptation for authors to

make premature judgements or risk incurring personal embarrassment.

Personally, the process of editing the essays and melding them into a

hopefully coherent book has been fascinating beyond my most optimistic

expectations. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that it has been

the most rewarding editorial challenge I have undertaken to date. First and

foremost, it has brought me into direct contact with two diverse sets of

people, the authors and the Thinkers, some of whom I had never previ

ously met or had contact with. Some of these new relationships will doubt

less endure. Finding contributors willing to write about the identified

Thinkers was in itself a challenge, particularly as I was soliciting only one

entry per author. In most cases, the task proved remarkably easy, perhaps

because the idea of the book caught their imagination too. In a few

instances, it was difficult to recruit an author for a particular Thinker or to

match a willing contributor to an appropriate Thinker not already ‘taken’.

Nevertheless, I must acknowledge the efficiency with which commitments

were turned into well-crafted essays, and mostly by the agreed deadlines, as

a result of which it has proved possible to produce the book on schedule.

Many of the authors also found their research and writing most illumi-

nating. Some were actually able to communicate with, and occasionally

even interview, the figure on whom they were working. The manuscript

has benefited greatly as a result. Inevitably, trying to capture the essence of

full and fascinating lives, as well as assessing their lasting contributions, in

about 2,000 words has been a considerable challenge.

My second source of inspiration as editor has been how much I have

learned about the Thinkers and their lives and times, regardless of how

much I knew of them and their work beforehand. This reflects the formula

adopted for the book, namely to interweave their biographical ‘stories’ and

an appreciation of their work and legacies.

Third, however, a fascinating set of insights emerged as the essays were

edited and integrated into the book manuscript. Two in particular stand

out and exemplify the ‘added value’ of this compendium. The first was the

tremendous impact of the Nazi regime on the subsequent evolution of

Development Studies through the emigration or escape of many young

European Jewish (and some non-Jewish) refugees to the UK and USA,

where they later emerged through universities and political office as influ

ential contributors to the emerging ideas and approaches. Holocaust

INTRODUCTION

survivors and escapees are surprisingly numerous among the Thinkers rep

resented here. While many other implications of World War II for what

was to become Development Studies, such as the stimulus to colonial liber

ation struggles and formulation of the Marshall Plan, for instance, are quite

well known, this one has seemingly not previously been documented.

Second, and somewhat more broadly, the geopolitical shifts and rup

tures of the ‘end of empire’ represented by decolonisation opened up the

possibility of interesting, indeed important, new interregional and experi

ential connections that had important influences on the subsequent think

ing and work of the Thinkers concerned. This is exemplified by Arthur

Lewis and Walter Rodney, two natives of the Caribbean who studied at

the University of London (the former in the 1930s and the latter in the

1960s) and then worked for a time in Ghana and Tanzania respectively.

There are better-known examples too. Decades earlier, Gandhi’s experi

ence fighting racism in South Africa had proved seminal to his subsequent

strategy of non-violent direct action and resistance (Satyagraha) in India.

Similarly, most of the Northern voices in this collection were profoundly

influenced by growing up, travelling and/or working in parts of the South

at an early age.

The third important insight was the often close and influential intercon-

nections among some Thinkers whom most people today do not particu-

larly associate with one another (e.g. Boserup, Lipton, Myrdal and Streeten

with respect to the Asian Drama study in the 1960s) – something that may

help explain the processes of interactions that spawned and popularised key

ideas and theories at momentous times in the history of development

thinking.

Hopefully readers will find this volume both stimulating as a good read

and useful for reference purposes. Perhaps some will even seek to explore

the lives and contributions of other key figures in the field.

References

Adams, I. and Dyson, R.W. (eds) (2003) Fifty Major Political Thinkers, London and

New York: Routledge.

Edwards, M. (1989) ‘The Irrelevance of Development Theory’, Third World

Quarterly 11(1): 116-36.

—— (1993) ‘How Relevant is Development Studies?’, in F. Schuurman (ed.),

Beyond the Impasse; New Directions in Development Theory, London: Zed.

—— (1994) ‘Rethinking Social Development: The Search for Relevance’, in D.

Booth (ed.), Rethinking Social Development, Harlow: Longman.

Meier, G.M. and Seers, D. (eds) (1984) Pioneers in Development, Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

INTRODUCTION

Palmer, J.A. (2001) ‘Chico Mendes 1944-88’, in Palmer, J.A. (ed.), Fifty Key

Thinkers on the Environment, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 302-7.

David Simon

Egham, Surrey

March 2005

Note on cross-references

All cross-references between essays are indicated in the text by the relevant

Thinker’s name cited in bold.

xii

INTRODUCTION

FIFTY KEY THINKERS

ON DEVELOPMENT

ADEBAYO ADEDEJI (1930–)

Born in 1930 in Ijebu-Ode in southwestern Nigeria, Adebayo Adedeji

received his doctorate in Economics from the University of London in

1967, following initial training in Economics (BSc Hons, London, 1958)

and Public Administration (Diploma, University College, Ibadan, 1954

and MPA, Harvard, 1961). After working initially as a civil servant, he

joined the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife) in

1963, becoming Nigeria’s first Professor of Public Administration in 1967

and, concurrently, Director of the Institute of Administration. Between

1971 and 1975 he served as Nigeria’s (post-civil war) Minister of Economic

Planning and Reconstruction, before joining the United Nations as

Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA)

with the rank of Assistant Secretary-General in 1975. He was promoted to

Under-Secretary-General in 1978. He resigned from the UNECA in 1991

to return to Ijebu-Ode in Nigeria, where he established an independent

think-tank, the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies

(ACDESS), which he continues to head as Executive Director.

Adedeji was clearly influenced by his training in economics at a time

when development thinking was dominated by notions of teleology and

growth. However, this influence appears to have operated in a ‘malign’

way, in the sense of, first, instilling and, subsequently, reinforcing a seem-

ingly unshakeable belief in both the inability of inherited development

policy and the inappropriateness of conventional development practice to

respond adequately to the dynamic complexity of Africa’s post-independ-

ence circumstances and realities. It is therefore probably in his articulation

of a vision of a progressively ‘nationalist’ but increasingly (and variously)

integrated continent-of-regions, an Africa secure in itself and valued as an

integral member of the global community, that Adedeji’s most significant

contribution to development thinking lies. There is considerably more to

his contribution, however, for in promoting the case for the elaboration of

indigenous African development strategies, Adedeji has also illustrated the

vital demonstration effect that the skilful deployment of development

administration can contribute to policy and planning, to the rethinking of

practice and to the elaboration of strategy. Thus in the only comprehensive

and coherent analysis of Adedeji’s contribution to development thinking

and practice to date, Asante (1991) acknowledges the contribution of like-

minded colleagues at the UNECA to the formulation of the ideas about

African development which came to be closely associated with the person

of Adedeji. Asante also notes how Adedeji’s tenure as UNECA Executive

Secretary provided an indispensable platform for the dissemination of these

ADEBAYO ADEDEJI

ideas, pointing out that the start of Adedeji’s sustained challenge to ortho

dox development thinking from an African perspective was concurrent

with the emergence of the radical Latin American-based critiques by

Andre Gunder Frank and Michael Todaro, while Adedeji’s role at the

UNECA paralleled that played by Raúl Prebisch at ECLAC/CEPAL

(the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean).

Adedeji’s thinking on African development had its origins in the fer

ment of decolonisation, the emergence of post-war development as

planned socio-economic change and the growing lack of evidence for sig

nificant early post-independence trickle-down benefits (Adedeji 1977,

1981). It was also undoubtedly influenced by debates taking place in and

around ECLAC, and drew inspiration from the work of both Raúl

Prebisch and, to a lesser extent, Arthur Lewis, although he differed from

both in important respects and has almost certainly never considered him

self a dependentista (Asante 1991). Not surprisingly, he early on questioned

the wisdom of conflating economic growth and material change (readily

quantifiable indices – or means – of development) with the less-easily mea-

surable (because largely qualitative and continuously evolving) process – or

end – of development which, for him, was always complex, holistic and

people-centred, in addition to encompassing economic as well as social,

cultural, environmental, political and other forms of non-economic

change and transformation. ‘Development’, he is quoted as saying, ‘is a col-

lective responsibility in which all have to share in the labour as well as the

fruits’, for when ‘people become the end and the means of development,

their interests, values and aspirations necessarily determine the content,

strategies and modalities of [such] development’ and, in the process, serve

to ensure that development remains anchored to its socio-cultural, political

and historical bearings (Asante 1991: 6). For him, too, Africa’s actual post-

war experience of development diverged markedly from this ideal, partly

because, their various descriptive labels notwithstanding, the policies and

tactics adopted were inherited rather than home-grown, and thus over

whelmingly imitative rather than creative or locally responsive in nature.

Second, development efforts failed to alter the dependent status of, or

indeed to stimulate wealth or opportunity redistribution within, African

economies significantly despite the varied but always heavy reliance of

favoured strategies on external sources for inputs of all kinds and as markets

for the continent’s primary commodities (Adedeji 1981). Development

also routinely failed to consider people as subjects rather than objects, he

suggested, and, in so doing, neglected to engender a sense of ownership

among the vast majority of Africans who were supposed to be the targets

and beneficiaries of development intervention (Adedeji 1977).

ADEBAYO ADEDEJI

By the mid-1970s, therefore, and in Adedeji’s view, what was sorely

needed was a route to ‘economic decolonisation’, involving, among other

things, the ‘indigenisation’ of national and continental economic develop

ment, and the forging of an Africa which,

[h]aving inherited or borrowed development policy as well as politi

cal theory, [would subsequently be able] to revive its own economic

assumptions and design its own orientations, just as it ha[d] come to

reject much of its neo-colonial legal and organisational legacy.

(Adedeji and Shaw 1985: 3)

It is this vision, driven in part by a firm belief that economic growth was

merely a means to the more desirable end of economic restructuring, soci

etal reform and national/continental transformation for increased self-reli

ance (Adedeji 1977), which informed his insistence on the need for an

African-formulated alternative strategy for African development. Notable

among the elements of such a strategy, as detailed in the 1981 Lagos Plan of

Action (LPA), were its privileging of increased self-reliance (requiring

capacity building and the development of competence) and self-sustain-

ment (involving both rural–urban, sectoral and national market integra-

tion); its questioning of the role of foreign trade as an engine of growth (as a

prelude to the promotion of internal demand stimuli at the expense of

external market demand); its attempt to separate, at least conceptually,

internal socio-economic change from export market performance; and its

repudiation of the assumption of a positive – rather than negative – corre-

lation between the expansion of advanced and developing country econo-

mies (Adedeji 1985; OAU 1980).

Even though it did not advocate autarchy, the LPA was still tantamount

to development ‘heresy’ in its defiant foregrounding of its political-eco

nomic purpose. Not only did it represent ‘a political declaration, a devel

opment strategy, a set of priorities, sectoral programmes of action, and a

blueprint for regional and subregional integration’, but it also argued for ‘a

complete departure from the past … substitut[ing] … an inward-looking

development strategy for [an] inherited externally oriented one [and]

put[ting] the development of the domestic market rather than dependence

on foreign markets at the heart of … development …’ (Adedeji 1985: 15).

Such defiance mattered little; a key goal of the LPA was, after all, for Africa

and its peoples to recover, through the transformative power of a democra

tised/popularised development, a sense of self-confidence long under

mined by slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism (Adedeji 1977).

Furthermore, by striking a dynamic balance between autarchy and vulner

ability, the LPA was thought to possess sufficient flexibility and potential to

ADEBAYO ADEDEJI

indicate ways out of economic crisis (Adedeji and Shaw 1985). The LPA

stimulated widespread debate, generated critiques, and may even have pro

vided a framework for policy formulation and the implementation of strat

egies; it does need to be understood as part of a wider process of

constructing a philosophy of development for Africa, however, one which

also highlighted the UNECA’s role ‘in the international market-place of

ideas about Africa in particular and development in general’ (Asante 1991:

46).

Nonetheless, despite its capacity for addressing existing constraints and

potential for contributing to long-term sustainability (Adedeji and Shaw

1985), implementation of the LPA was slow, hampered in part by the eco

nomic crisis of the 1980s but partly also by the gradual nature of the policy

change/reform processes envisaged (Adedeji 1985). Confronted by the

crises of the 1980s and 1990s, African policy-makers, economies and soci

eties concentrated on immediate survival rather than long-term transfor-

mation, with key macro-economic policy being dictated by interpretations

and recommendations contained in the Berg Report (World Bank 1981),

the very antithesis of the LPA, with which it stood in fundamental contra-

diction, not least in its opposition to self-reliance and self-sustaining devel-

opment and in its preference for export-orientation, the market principle

and the minimal state (Adedeji 1985). In response, Adedeji and his col-

leagues at the UNECA produced the African Alternative Framework to

Structural Adjustment Programs for Socio-Economic Recovery and

Transformation (AAF-SAP), incorporating diagnoses of the root causes of

Africa’s economic underdevelopment and combined socio-economic and

political crises which had initially been set out in the LPA (UNECA 1989).

Like the LPA the AAF-SAP was considered crucial to Africa’s develop

ment future; it was a ‘launching pad into the ne[w] decade and beyond’

(Adedeji 1990: 112). Adedeji used the AAF-SAP as the basis for challeng

ing the logic, wisdom and ethics of orthodox reform/adjustment, particu

larly its mantra that ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA), by reiterating that

the AAF-SAP did represent an alternative which was human-centred, con

sistent with the development objectives identified in the LPA, and advo

cated combining ‘the short-term objectives of stabilisation and structural

adjustment [with] the requirements of long-term restructuring’ (Adedeji

1990: 71). He was adamant that it would be inadvisable for the orthodox

structural adjustment measures of the 1980s to be continued into the 1990s,

and warned that this would plunge the continent into a downward spiral

that would be extremely difficult to recover from. Taken together, the

LPA and AAF-SAP can, by extension, be considered among Adedeji’s

most seminal contributions to development thinking; indeed, he would

(and probably did) approve their joint message: ‘no programme of

ADEBAYO ADEDEJI

adjustment or development makes sense if it makes people indefinitely

more miserable’. It is not surprising, then, that Adedeji (2002: 4) was less

than sanguine that both the LPA and AAF-SAP were ‘opposed, under

mined and jettisoned by the Bretton Woods institutions’ who in this way

impeded Africans ‘from exercising the basic and fundamental right to make

decisions about their future’.

Adedeji’s departure from the UNECA in 1991 did not mark an end to

his contribution to development thinking and administration in Africa.

Certainly, in ACDESS, which, according to the late Julius Nyerere,

founding president of its Board of Trustees, was established in response to a

perceived ‘lack of opportunity to express, debate and test … ideas in an

open environment, in an African context, and under African leadership …

dedicated to thinking about and for Africa’s future’ (http://www.

acdess.org/), Adedeji has created a vehicle for the continuing pursuit of his

interest in ‘prospective and strategic thinking in and about Africa’ (Adedeji

1993). Just as significantly, perhaps, it is a vehicle which, like the UNECA,

and via its research/training programme, consultancy/advisory operations

and services, and its periodic national and international conferences, facili-

tates continuing interaction with (and between) politicians, policy-makers,

bureaucrats, planners, technocrats, NGOs, (sub-)regional organisations

and international institutions, universities and academic research institu-

tions (http://www.acdess.org/), thereby allowing Adedeji to continue to

‘combine theory with practical experience’ (Asante 1991), and research

with policy application (Adedeji 1999).

His recent reflections on the road travelled by Africa from the LPA to

NEPAD (New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development) are

instructive in this regard (Adedeji 2002). Following a favourable represen-

tation of NEPAD as a renewed pan-Africanist attempt to reactivate intra-

and inter-African integration as well as rejuvenate Africa’s partnerships

with the international community, he cautions against pursuing NEPAD’s

goals at the expense of the LPA’s principles of structural transformation and

socio-economic diversification. NEPAD, he suggests, should be about ‘the

resources and policies of … international partners being devoted to achiev

ing Africa-determined development goals’ (Adedeji 2002: 17). In this as in

so many of his earlier interventions he (re-)focuses attention on (collective)

self-preservation and political will. But he also reiterates another of his

enduring messages: that Africa’s pursuit of sustainable development needs

to begin with success in the long-running struggle to ‘indigenise’ the para

digms, strategies and agendas which must, of necessity, guide the nature,

pace, direction and dynamics of any such development. It is a struggle

which he will, hopefully, continue to wage for a while yet.

ADEBAYO ADEDEJI

Major works

Adedeji A. (1977) Africa: The Crisis of Development and the Challenge of a New

International Economic Order, Addis Ababa: Economic Commission for Africa.

—— (1989) Towards a Dynamic African Economy: Selected Speeches and Lectures 1975–

1986, London: Frank Cass.

—— (1990) Structural Adjustment for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation: The

African Alternative; Selected Statements, Addis Ababa: United Nations Economic

Commission for Africa.

Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) (1989) The African Alternative Framework

to Structural Adjustment Programs for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation

(AAF-SAP), Addis Ababa: ECA.

Organisation of African Unity (OAU) (1980) Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic

Development of Africa, 1980–2000, Addis Ababa: OAU, http://www.uneca.

org/itca/ariportal/docs/lagos_plan.pdf.

Further reading

Adedeji A. (1981) ‘General background to Indigenisation: The Economic

Dependence of Africa’, in Adedeji A. (ed.), Indigenisation of African Economies,

London: Hutchinson.

—— (1985) ‘The Monrovia Strategy and the Lagos Plan of Action: Five Years

After’, in Adedeji A. and Shaw, T.M. (eds), Economic Crisis in Africa: African

Perspectives on Development Problems and Potentials, Boulder, CO: Lynne

Rienner.

—— (1993) ‘Marginalisation and Marginality: Context, Issues and Viewpoints’, in

Adedeji A. (ed.), Africa within the World: Beyond Dispossession and Dependence,

London: Zed Books.

—— (1999) ‘Comprehending African Conflicts’, in Adedeji A. (ed.),

Comprehending and Mastering African Conflicts: The Search for Sustainable Peace and

Good Governance, London: Zed Books.

—— (2002) ‘From the Lagos Plan of Action to NEPAD and from the Final Act of

Lagos to the Constitutive Act: Whither Africa?’, keynote address to the African

Forum for Envisioning Africa, Nairobi, April 26-29, available at http://

64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:AEoDAGQW7l0J:www.worldsummit_

Hlt98338960_Hlt98338960 2002.org/texts/AdebayoAdedeji2.pdf+adebayo+

ade_Hlt107369836d_Hlt107369836ej_Hlt107369839i_Hlt107369839&

hl=en&ie=UTF-8.

Adedeji A. and Shaw, T. (1985) ‘Introduction: Africa’s Condition and Projections

for the Future’, in Adedeji A. and Shaw, T.M. (eds), Economic Crisis in Africa:

African Perspectives on Development Problems and Potentials, Boulder, CO: Lynne

Rienner.

Asante, S.K.B. (1991) African Development: Adebayo Adedeji’s Alternative

Strategies,

Borough Green, Sevenoaks, Kent: Hans Zell.

Onimode, B. (ed.) (2004) African Development and Governance Strategies into the 21st

Century: Looking Back to Move Forward. Essays in Honour of Adebayo Adedeji at 70,

London: Zed Books.

Onimode, B. and Synge, R. (eds) (1995) Issues in African Development: Essays in

Honour of Adebayo Adedeji at 65, Ibadan: Heinemann.

ADEBAYO ADEDEJI

Sanmi-Ajiki, T. (2000) Adebayo Adedeji: A Rainbow in the Sky of his Time. A

Biography, Lagos: Newswatch Books.

World Bank (1981) Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for

Action, Washington, DC: World Bank.

Reginald Cline-Cole

ANIL AGARWAL (1947–2002)

Activist, journalist and scholar, Anil Agarwal was a prominent Indian envi

ronmentalist who redefined environmental problems through the eyes of

poor people, and who was not afraid to challenge powerful organisations

and governments in order to do so. During the rise of global environmen

talism in the 1960s and 1970s, it became common to blame poor people for

environmental problems through acts such as population growth and

deforestation. Agarwal was one of the first critics to challenge these gener-

alisations, and to focus instead on questions of international justice in envi-

ronmental politics and the choices and risks faced by poor people. Agarwal

left various legacies. He founded the Indian think-tank, Centre for Science

and Environment, which today remains one of the foremost centres of crit-

ical thinking about environment and development. More conceptually,

however, Agarwal was a pioneer in debates that are today called political

ecology and science and technology studies. Rather than accepting envi-

ronmental explanations from large organisations as scientifically and politi-

cally neutral, Agarwal sought to expose the politics underlying each

statement of causality, and to show how such science legitimised or

delegitimised different policies. He demonstrated how justice, as a concept,

could be integrated into environmental policy between North and South.

Agarwal also brought his own style of influencing politics, through a

combination of scholarly work, acerbic journalism and careful political

campaigning.

Agarwal was born in Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh in 1947, the son of a local

landowner. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur,

where he studied mechanical engineering, and learnt information about

technology that was to characterise his later writings. In a change of career

direction, in 1973, Agarwal became a science correspondent at the

Hindustan Times. In 1974, he wrote about the Chipko movement in the

Indian Himalayas, where local villagers opposed logging, and which has

more recently become an icon for local environmental struggles in the

South. His writing attracted international attention, and in 1979 he won

the first A.H. Boerma Award given by the United Nations’ Food and Agri

cultural Organisation in Rome.

ANIL AGARWAL

In 1980, Agarwal founded the Centre for Science and Environment

(CSE) in New Delhi. The CSE was new because it was a non-governmen

tal organisation that focused on environmental matters, and which sought

to influence the Indian government and transnational corporations, a role

it continues to play today. At the time, mainstream environmental groups

in India tended to focus on conservation, and especially conservation of

wilderness and wildlife, as their main concern. The CSE, however, high

lighted environmental risks faced by poor people in India at a time when

livelihoods were being challenged by the decline in traditional biomass-

based rural economies and when industrialisation was growing. Agarwal

communicated these views widely by editing the CSE journal, Down to

Earth, which included a supplement for children known as the Gobar (or

Cowdung) Times. Much of the writing was translated into Hindi, Kannada

and other Indian languages.

The approach adopted by Agarwal and the CSE began to influence

wider debates about the meaning of ‘sustainable development’. His reports

on The State of India’s Environment, written with colleagues at the CSE from

1982, challenged the elitist basis of environmentalism, and sought to por-

tray the environment as a political problem partly reflecting international

and class-based divisions of power and wealth. Analysts have described this

approach as ‘red–green environmentalism’ – which acknowledges both

resources and livelihoods – rather than just the ‘green’ approach, which

highlights conservation alone. Agarwal also believed that orthodox devel-

opment thinking was wrong to place faith in rapid economic growth as the

chief means of achieving social development. He proposed that a new con-

cept of ‘gross nature product’ should replace ‘gross national product’ in

order to express the impact of growth on environment and livelihoods.

Agarwal was also sensitive to the roles of women in protecting resources,

and in being vulnerable to environmental hazards. He argued that poverty

and environment are interrelated, but that poor people were commonly

more protective of resources than commonly thought, and that economic

policy should be tailored more closely to address poverty.

Because of such writings, both Agarwal and the CSE quickly developed

international reputations. From 1983 to 1987, Agarwal chaired the Envi

ronmental Liaison Centre International (ELCI), a Nairobi-based network

of environmentalists. His work was reported in the UK-based New Scientist

and Economist magazines, as well as the broadsheets, Le Monde (France) and

Asahi Shimbun (Japan). In 1986, the then Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv

Gandhi, invited him to address the Union Council of Ministers, and hon

oured him with the Padma Shri Award. Agarwal was later asked to address

all twenty-seven Parliamentary Consultative Committees in India to edu

cate MPs about his concerns, and to initiate discussions to identify

ANIL AGARWAL

solutions. In 1987, he was elected to the Global 500 Honor Roll of the

United Nations Environment Programme.

Much of Agarwal’s writing included a critical stance on environmental

science, and especially statements that blamed poor people for causing

environmental degradation. Instead, he urged a more holistic appreciation

of the social and political conditions that make environmental changes

problematic, and how proposed solutions may aggravate social injustice.

Describing the oft-cited belief that upland deforestation causes lowland

flooding in the Himalayas, for example, Agarwal argued that the phenome

non of floods was caused by various factors including lowland water

demand, rather than simply deforestation in the uplands. Consequently,

policies need to consider how resources (and access to resources) have

changed, and for whom, rather than apply simple mechanistic controls on

water flow or forest use. He wrote in Down to Earth in 1987,

Floods and shifting of river courses is … inevitable. Deforestation

can aggravate the problem but afforestation cannot get rid of it.

Embankments and dams have become an important cause of floods.

We need better flood plain management, rather than flood control.

This criticism of popular scientific statements and concern about social

justice also affected Agarwal’s work in international environmental poli-

tics. In one of his most famous works, Global Warming in an Unequal World

(co-authored with Sunita Narain in 1991), Agarwal criticised the tendency

for some analysts to assume that anthropogenic climate change should be

addressed by controlling deforestation in developing countries. In particu

lar, Agarwal and Narain condemned a report issued by the Washington

DC-based think-tank, World Resources Institute, which allocated

national responsibilities for greenhouse gas emissions based on an index

largely dependent on current rates of deforestation and methane emissions

from wet rice and livestock. The report put the three developing countries

of Brazil, India and China among the top six emitting countries.

Agarwal and Narain contested the report on various grounds. First, the

report was based on total national emissions, rather than on per capita emis

sions, which, of course, were smaller in developing countries than in devel

oped countries. Second, the index used highly simplistic estimates for both

deforestation and methane emissions. For example, estimates of wet-rice

methane emissions were extrapolated globally from Italian figures; defores

tation was treated uniformly, with no distinction made between export-led

logging and smallholder food production; and no account was taken of the

impacts of vegetation that might replace forest. Third, the index focused

chiefly on current tropical deforestation, and did not consider historic

ANIL AGARWAL

deforestation in developed countries (which is important as greenhouse

gases can exist for many years). Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the

index did not refer to questions of social justice in greenhouse gas emis

sions, such as acknowledging that much deforestation in developing coun

tries may occur because of poverty and food production, whereas in

developed countries burning fossil fuels may be linked to affluence.

Agarwal and Narain’s criticisms of this index were a watershed in interna

tional environmental politics, and demonstrated that scientific reports

about environmental problems should not be considered politically neu

tral, but contain deep political implications about which activities are con

sidered damaging or not, and which countries or people may be considered

responsible. Agarwal worked on this theme during the approach to the

1992 Rio Earth Summit (the United Nations Conference on Environment

and Development), by advising both the Indian Prime Minister, P.V.

Narasimha Rao, and the former Tanzanian President, Julius Nyerere,at

the South Centre in Geneva, and by joining India’s official delegation to

the Rio conference. The Rio Summit contained much discussion of sus-

tainable development, and facilitated the signing of the United Nations

Framework Convention on Climate Change, and Convention on

Biological Diversity.

Agarwal’s work after Rio involved a new attention to urban environ-

mental problems, and to the justice of economic globalisation. In particu-

lar, he studied how trade and government policy can encourage the

provision of clean technology to poor people in cities. In 1996, the CSE

published a report on vehicular pollution in Indian cities, which blamed

petroleum companies, car manufacturers and regulators and planners. The

report was followed by a media campaign, and eventually by government

action to phase out polluting cars. In a typically acerbic editorial in Down to

Earth, Agarwal wrote (1996):

The western economic dream is a toxic dream. And don’t listen to

the typical tripe from Indian scientists and officials that India’s con

sumption and production of toxic substances per capita is zilch com

pared to Western countries. This is utter scientific nonsense trotted

out to make you apathetic. It is the exposure levels that matter,

which can be very high in India, because of among other causes, high

pesticide residue in our food and low quality of drinking water.

Agarwal wrote a series of editorials and writings urging greater global

democracy in how environmental problems were solved, and in the pro

cesses of globalisation. For Agarwal, it was unacceptable that trade should

be used as a means to control environmental misbehaviour by richer

ANIL AGARWAL

countries when poorer countries who suffer pollution or rising sea levels

because of these richer countries cannot impose trade sanctions. Yet,

globalisation – if conducted with attention to political conflicts and alli

ances between campaigners in North and South – could also bring oppor

tunities for strengthening the political role of developing countries in

international affairs.

Following some of his earlier writings, Agarwal and the CSE also con

tinued to seek ways to demonstrate decentralised rural governance via vil

lage communities. Under a campaign entitled ‘Making Water Everyone’s

Business’, the CSE supported experiments in water harvesting and land

management in Sukhomajri in Haryana, Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra

and the Tarun Bharat Sangh in Rajasthan. But despite these actions,

Agarwal was criticised by some for offering only muted support for the

Narmada anti-dam movement in western India, and for allegedly losing

some of his initial radical stances by becoming an adviser to the state, thus

raising the question as to whether it is possible for a recognised environ-

mentalist to remain radical. Many did not share these criticisms. In 2000, he

was given an Environment Leadership Award by the Global Environment

Facility – the multilateral funding agency for global environmental prob-

lems. In 2001, the Government of India bestowed on him the Padma

Bhushan Award, a status reserved for people who have performed distin-

guished service of a high order to the nation.

Anil Agarwal died in 2002 at just 54. He had experienced a long battle

with cancer, and had written about cancer care in India as another example

of inadequate attention to social welfare. He left an important legacy

through the creation of the CSE, and his personal writings pioneered cur

rent thinking about poverty and environment and the hidden politics of

environmental scientific assessment. Agarwal made it clear that local ques

tions of environment in developing countries were inherently linked to

international political economy, and argued that creating knowledge about

environmental problems should not be left to experts in developed coun

tries. He also achieved these aims through establishing a system of cam

paigning and communication that both harnessed and educated many in

poorer countries. Anil Agarwal was one of the most influential thinkers and

writers on questions of environment and development because he fought

to increase the representation of poor people in both the definition and

solution of environmental problems.

Note

1 From online source: http:www.cseindia.org/aboutus/anilji/anilji-book2.htm.

ANIL AGARWAL

Major works

Agarwal, A. (1982) The State of India’s Environment: A Citizens’ Report, with Sunita

Narain, New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment.

—— (1989) Towards Green Villages: A Strategy for Environmentally Sound and

Participatory Rural Development, with Sunita Narain, New Delhi: Centre for

Science and Environment.

—— (1991) Floods, Flood Plains and Environmental Myths, edited with Sunita

Narain, New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment.

—— (1991) Global Warming in an Unequal World, with Sunita Narain, New Delhi:

Centre for Science and Environment.

—— (1992) Towards a Greener World: Should Global Environmental Management be

Built on Legal Convention or Human Rights?, New Delhi: Centre for Science and

Environment.

—— (1997) Homicide by Pesticides: What Pollution does to our Bodies, edited, New

Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, State of the Environment Series 4.

—— Down to Earth, journal published by Centre for Science and Environment,

http://www.downtoearth.org.in/.

Further reading

There are, to date, no books specifically describing the life of Anil Agarwal, but

information about his life can be obtained from the publications and websites of

Down to Earth, and the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), and the

obituaries below.

CSE: http://www.cseindia.org/

CSE official biography: http://www.cseindia.org/html/au/_Hlt70072329_

Hlt70072330aBM_1_BM_2_nilji/anilji.htm.

Baviskar, A. (2002) ‘An activist–environmentalist, Anil Agarwal, 1947–2002’,

Frontline 19: 2, February 1, 2002. http://www.flonnet.com/fl1902/

19021210.htm.

Jupiter, T. (2002) ‘Anil Agarwal: India’s leading environmental campaigner’,

Guardian, 11 January, http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,

630852,00.html.

Tim Forsyth

ELMAR ALTVATER (1938–)

As a representative of the school of Critical Political Economy, Altvater has

analysed the limits of the dominant (capitalist) mode of production studi

ously and creatively. He stresses tirelessly that Fordist production structures

and patterns of consumption cannot be translated into a universally applica

ble avenue for the social development of all. Unusually among social scien

tists, he has opened himself to basic natural science laws in searching for

viable explanatory models for a future-oriented social development. He

insists that the entropy principle sets limits.

ELMAR ALTVATER

Born on 24 August 1938, Altvater studied economics and sociology in

Munich and wrote a dissertation on ‘Environmental Problems in the

Soviet Union’. Teaching political economy (or rather the critique of

political economy) since 1971 as professor in the Political Science Depart

ment of the Freie Universität in (West) Berlin, he has influenced whole

generations of students. Altvater’s diverse interests have not sustained any

damage from the turmoil of the later stages of a ‘student rebellion’ in

decline. As a representative of undogmatic Marxism, he filled his seminars

to capacity. Declining profit rates, the internationalisation of capital, and

theories of the world market featured as much among his courses as intro

ductions to Das Kapital by Karl Marx and seminars on state theories. The

wide thematic range of his work has always been focused on the creative

application of Marxist theory.

Altvater’s analyses of international financial capital, monetary and fiscal

policy as well as state interventionist questions regarding regulation of mar-

kets and societies have gained prominence since the early 1970s. During

the 1980s, the intensified debt crisis in the countries of the periphery made

him a powerful critic of development on loan (Altvater et al. 1991).

Inspired by a sabbatical in the eastern Brazilian Amazon region, he devoted

a rare case study to Brazilian issues but generalised them in a relevant way

by presenting a pioneering study on ‘the world market as a force of circum-

stances’ (Sachzwang Weltmarkt). In this groundbreaking analysis, he under-

stands space as a real substratum of economic and social processes and their

structuring and probes the systemic and systematic connection between

regional identity, state development policy and economic crisis tendencies

in the world market. Given the latter’s dominance over national develop

ment strategies and local conditions of ecologically adjusted production, a

Fordist catch-up industrialisation strategy must come to nothing. In a

chapter (in Sachzwang Weltmarkt) on ‘The Economy and Ecology’, he

explores the thermodynamic laws, for him an increasingly central argu

ment for the natural limitation of social development as processes of mate

rial conversion, production and consumption are subject to increasing

entropy. Hence the economic system and its tendencies cannot be imag

ined without limitation by natural laws.

Altvater’s approach benefited from the fundamental works of Nicholas

Georgescu-Roegen (1906–94), a Romanian mathematician, who also

studied at the Sorbonne and was apprenticed in economics at Harvard to

Joseph Schumpeter, one of the leading names in economic theory and in

particular the internationalisation of capitalism. Georgescu-Roegen, who

finally settled at Vanderbilt University in the USA, has gained increased

influence in recent economic theory because of his ability to combine a

new biological or evolutionary approach with economic theory. In his

ELMAR ALTVATER

magnum opus (Georgescu-Roegen 1971), he emphasised the limits to

growth in an economy on the basis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

(which can be translated as ‘useful energy gets dissipated’) (see also

Georgescu-Roegen 1976). Largely ignored by mainstream economics,

Georgescu-Roegen’s new approach to economic theory had lasting effects

on the likes of Altvater, who discovered its relevance from the perspective

of an environmentally sensitive school of thought, opening new discourses

in the field of evolutionary economics.

Another pioneer inspiring a few social scientists – and even fewer eco

nomists – like Altvater in the application of economic theories to develop

ment studies was the Russian-born Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003), the

Founding Director of the Centre for Statistical Mechanics and Thermody

namics at the University of Austin/Texas since 1967 (now the Ilya

Prigogine Centre for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Sys

tems). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1977. Like

Georgescu-Roegen, he contributed substantially to a new combination of

natural and social sciences in theories of relevance for environmental and

economic aspects in the reproduction of societies. His major works also

highlighted the relevance of dissipative structures and contributed signifi-

cantly to the understanding of irreversible processes, especially in systems

far from equilibrium (see Kondepudi and Prigogine 1998; Prigogine and

Stengers 1986, 1997).

Altvater derived environmental problems from the specific dynamic of

current capitalism, which in his view is not ‘the end of history’ in

Fukuyama’s sense of immanent future development but a demand for a

continuing search for sound alternatives for the reproduction of social sys

tems. In the course of this demand, Altvater harks back to the integration of

the entropy laws into social science theory as documented in his two

works, Die Zukunft des Marktes (The Future of the Market) and Der Preis des

Wohlstands (The Price of Prosperity). ‘Thermo-balance’ is a key concept in

his argument. Critics reproach him for a ‘thermo-dynamisation of the

social sciences’. Others scold him for utopian sandcastle games in which he

now urges a solar instead of a socialist revolution without stressing the

immanent contradictions of (post-)Fordist capitalist production or utilising

the ‘transformist’ renewal of the capitalist world order. These objections

can be countered by pointing to the merit of his introduction of a new

dimension into development discourse that considers the criterion of con

scious metabolism in the sense of social conduct and does not downgrade

the environment and nature to mere objects of boundless exploitation

(Köhn 1995). To some of the objections raised by a critic (Hein 1993),

Altvater responded directly by pointing out that ten human generations

have appeared since the ‘Promethean’ industrial revolution of the world

ELMAR ALTVATER

market. Nature is finite and has reached the limits of encumbrance and, as

Altvater maintains, theoretical approaches that do not strive to integrate the

ecological limit in their conceptual world are not up to date (Altvater 1994:

104). He challenges socio-economic theory to take into account the global

range of the capitalist social formation and the (similarly global) ecological

threat. He rejects the reproach for borrowing from thermodynamic physics

the categories of ‘entropy’ and ‘syntropy’ that are out of place in socio-

economic debate. Even if the cosmic process is understood as open and the

earth as an energetic open system, a thermodynamic restriction remains.

The existing material energy (fossil or nuclear) fuels industrial production

cycles and thereby contributes to a warming up (by emission) of the natural

environment (ibid.: 108). As he argues further, a consideration of the cate

gories of thermodynamic physics in socio-economic analysis is helpful in

revealing the consequences for production. Hence he insists on an expan

sion of socio-economic concepts since conventional theories today are

inadequate for comprehending the ecological problems and he refers to the

necessity for compatibility between the production and energy systems in

humanity’s history. His underlying thesis is that the epoch of production

based on fossil sources of energy will come to an end within a few decades,

that the transition to a solar society awaits and that the exchange of primary

sources of energy cannot occur without radical social changes in the social

systems of material and energy transformation (ibid.: 110). He describes the

process of a necessary social, economic and political restructuring as a ‘solar

revolution’ without any substantive concretion but vital as a future-oriented

vision.

Together with his lifetime companion, Birgit Mahnkopf, Altvater illu

minates the present Grenzen der Globalisierung (Limits to Globalisation) and

takes this further into the Globalisierung der Unsicherheit (Globalisation of

Insecurity). He analyses the worldwide socio-economic processes that

maintain competition between states and regions in an increasingly dereg

ulated world market, and at the same time lead to a global ‘club society of

the owners of financial assets’, through the globalisation of financial mar

kets and loss of state autonomy in the sense of its own regulatory possibili

ties. His reference to the limited character of the Fordist model of

development is also central to his argument. Neither the political nor the

socio-economic qualities of industrialised countries can be generalised

worldwide. He formulated the quintessence of this thematic approach in a

concise essay (Altvater 1996) by warning that, in a fatal way, the world is

finite and that catch-up development by Third World countries by means

of Fordist-type industrialisation of the sort undertaken by Western indus

trial countries is inconceivable. For Altvater, local social coherence is

proven in global economic restrictions through the overlapping of

ELMAR ALTVATER

functional spaces (see Sachzwang Weltmarkt, esp. chaps 2–5: 56–194).

Development is determined twice. The observance of restrictions can suc

ceed only when political institutions set limits. Development proposals

must both obey general rules and be very specific. He recognises that the

resulting political challenge consists in the lack of material prerequisites for

local decisional freedom. Interdependence cannot arise as dependence.

As the editors of the Festschrift for his sixtieth birthday conceded in their

introduction to the volume (Heinrich and Messner 1998), Altvater’s holis

tic approach might be controversial but accomplishes orientation and inte

gration in a very differentiated scientific world where we increasingly

understand details but less and less the comprehensive connections. His

ongoing work has so far been most influential in the debates concerning the

reproduction of capitalism and the world market, ecological constraints,

the theory of the state and more recently global public goods. Conse

quently, the contributions in honour of his sixty-fifth birthday centre on

this topical issue (Brunnengräber 2003). Altvater pleads for the regulation

of energy consumption, working conditions and capital movements at the

supra-national level. In one of his few texts published in English, he sum-

marised his position thus:

In an era of globalisation, the conventional paradigm of economic

policy is in need of radical rethinking. Such a paradigmatic shift,

however, will necessarily have to be accompanied by practical efforts

to re-embed the global economic system in qualitatively new social

relations and forms of political regulation, on both local and global

levels.

(Altvater 2002: 88)

Altvater’s contributions help us to keep sight of the essentials, including the

political-moral ethics of a theory of development, and provide motivation

to remain engaged. ‘At some time or other, we must begin,’ he said, in jus

tification of his own beliefs:

This sounds idealistic and the idealism reproach has been very harsh

since Marx. Nevertheless, a process is initiated through which the

fatal monetarisation and short-term materialism are revoked.

Hopefully we will have this time. This is not certain. Unfortunately,

catastrophe cannot be excluded. However, no leftist project for

catastrophe is developed but rather a project for avoiding catas

trophe.

(Altvater 2004: unpaginated)

ELMAR ALTVATER

Major works

Altvater, E. (1987) Sachzwang Weltmarkt. Verschuldungskrise, blockierte

Industrialisierung, ökologische Gefährdung – der Fall Brasilien, Hamburg: VSA.

—— (1991) Die Zukunft des Marktes. Ein Essay über die Regulation von Geld und

Natur nach dem Scheitern des ‘real existierenden Sozialismus’, Münster:

Westfälisches Dampfboot.

—— (1992) Der Preis des Wohlstands oder Umweltplünderung und neue

Welt(un)ordnung, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.

—— (2002) ‘The Growth Obsession’, in Panitch, L. and Leys, C. (eds), Socialist

Altvater, E. and Mahnkopf, B. (1999) Grenzen der Globalisierung. Ökonomie,

Ökologie und Politik in der Weltgesellschaft, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot

(4th, revised and enlarged edn; originally 1996).

—— (2002) Globalisierung der Unsicherheit. Arbeit im Schatten, schmutziges Geld und

informelle Politik, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.

Further reading

Altvater, E. (1994) ‘Tchernobyl und Sonnenbrand oder: Vom Sinn physikalischer

Kategorien in den Sozialwissenschaften. Replik auf die Kritik von Wolfgang

Hein’, Peripherie 14 (54): 101–12.

—— (1996) ‘Von möglichen Wirklichkeiten. Hindernisse auf der

Entwicklungsbahn’, Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit 37 (2): 44–9.

—— (2004) ‘Time Needs Radicalism and Radicalism Needs Time’, translated

from the German original of 1998, posted to the indymedia website on 10

January 2004 and accessed on 6 February 2004 (http://sf.indymedia.org/news/

2004/01/1671226.php).

Altvater, E., Hübner, K., Lorentzen, J. and Rojas, R. (eds) (1991) The Poverty of

Nations: A Guide to the Debt Crisis – From Argentina to Zaire, London: Zed Books

(originally published in 1987 as Die Armut der Nationen. Handbuch zur

Schuldenkrise von Argentinien bis Zaire, West Berlin: Rotbuch).

Brunnengräber, A. (ed.) (2003) Globale Öffentliche Güter unter Privatisierungsdruck.

Festschrift für Elmar Altvater, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.

Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process,

Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

—— (1976) Energy and Economic Myths: Institutional and Analytical Economic Essays,

New York and Toronto: Pergamon Press.

Hein, W. (1993) ‘Elmar Altvater: Entropie, Syntropie und die Grenzen der

Metaphorik’, Peripherie 13(51/52): 155–70.

Heinrich, M. and Messner, D. (eds) (1998) Globalisierung und Perspektiven linker

Politik. Festschrift für Elmar Altvater zum 60. Geburtstag, Münster: Westfälisches

Dampfboot.

Köhn, R. (1995) ‘Gesellschaftliche Grenzen der Entropie. Wider die

Thermodynamisierung der Sozialwissenschaften’, Peripherie 15 (59/60): 180–

93.

Kondepudi, D. and Prigogine, I. (1998) Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines

to Dissipative Structures, New York: Wiley.

Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1986) Order Out of Chaos, New York: Bantam.

ELMAR ALTVATER

—— (1997) The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, New

York: Free Press.

Henning Melber

SAMIR AMIN (1931–)

Samir Amin is the best-known Egyptian/Arab thinker in the field of

‘Marxist’ development theory, formidable critic of capitalism, radical

political economist, and one of the ferocious champions of anti-

globalisation activism. His contribution to political theory is comparable

only to those of contemporary Marxist critics of capitalism, including Paul

Baran, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein. Commonly,

they applied Marxist development theories in an effort to explain the con-

sequences of capitalist economic, political, cultural and military develop-

ment and expansion to the developing countries.

Amin’s earlier academic writings preceded the emergence of what is

now commonly known as development studies. As an economist, Amin

began his research (1957–70) with the study of the economies of individual

countries: Mali, Congo Brazzaville, Egypt, Senegal, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire

and the Maghreb countries. Since then, Amin’s work has been informed by

these early theoretical developments, which originated in historical

Marxism.

Influenced by the Cold War economic and ideological rivalry and a dis-

appointing first decade of development, Amin’s four empirically based

works, The Maghreb in the Modern World (1970), Neo-colonialism in West

Africa (1973), Unequal Development (1976) and The Arab Nation: Nationalism

and Class Struggle (1976), echoed the frustrations of a generation of intellec

tual leftists in developing countries who witnessed the obliteration of the

optimism of the decolonisation euphoria. Describing ‘independence’ as

neocolonialism, the relationship between the newly independent Maghreb

and West African states and the economically dominant former colonial

powers, Amin was able to foresee the overriding patterns of future eco

nomic development of these countries and the developing world in gen

eral. This realisation influenced his intellectual development for decades, as

reflected in his development theorising. His doctoral dissertation (Institute

of Economics, University of Paris, 1957) was entitled ‘The Structural

Effects of the International Integration of Precapitalist Economies: A theo

retical study of the mechanism, which has engendered the so-called

“under-developed” economies’.

Amin’s first major contribution to development theory was so powerful

that it continues to surface in most of his current intellectual works. The

SAMIR AMIN

two-volume work, Accumulation on a World-Scale (1974), was instantly

recognised as a major contribution, probably not for its originality, but for

its Marxist orientation that found resonance in the Cold War ideological

schism. In this study, Amin argues that one of the anomalies of capitalist

development theory is that it confuses underdevelopment with poverty

(ibid.: 261–2). Because it describes bare economic characteristics of devel

oping countries, capitalist development theory artificially separates eco

nomics from the sphere of social and political organisation, and by doing so

it ignores that underdevelopment consists of more than the outward

appearances of poverty. Underdevelopment is described as a cumulative

sum of the whole history of capitalist expansion structurally constructed as

a world system with centre and periphery. Amin calls this his ‘theory of

capitalist social formation’, which exhibits certain characteristics of under

development (ibid.: 15–20).

Amin explains underdevelopment as an outcome of three factors. (1)

Unevenness of productivity between spheres or ‘sectoral unevenness of

productivity’ between centre and periphery. (2) The disarticulation,

astructuration or distortion of the underdeveloped economies of the

periphery made up of non-integrated sectors, with less flow of internal

exchanges in the bid to satisfy the external demands imposed on them by

the economies of the centre. (3) The centre that dominates economically,

socially and politically over the periphery.

If dependence and integration into the world capitalist system engen-

ders underdevelopment, Amin’s alternative to disarticulation is delinking.

In essence, Amin’s theorising development is closely associated with

dependency theory and its intellectual heritage.

One of Amin’s major contributions to development theory is his ability

to reinvent the insights of Marxism–Leninism and Maoism (ibid.: 63 and

112–16) on the national question in order to explain the origins of under

development. Methodologically, he exhumed Marxism from its Western

antecedence and redeployed it to explain underdevelopment as an ultimate

result of past colonial experiences or the hegemony of the ex-colonial

powers, the centre over their ex-colonies – which constitute the periph

ery. As a historical process, underdevelopment is the cumulative result of

unequal exchange, unequal development and imperialism (Unequal

Exchange, 1973; Unequal Development, 1976; 1977). The central premise is

that while economic growth characterises the economic sectors at the cen

tre, it contributes to the development of underdevelopment and the

disarticulation of the social formations of the periphery.

SAMIR AMIN

For Amin,

Delinking has nothing to do with exclusion or autarkic withdrawal.

It is a matter of subjecting the mutual relations between the various

nations and regions of the whole world of the planet to the varying

imperatives of their own internal development and not the reverse.

Delinking is therefore a manifesto for change, a rejection of the idea that the

expansion of capitalism, and subsequently the currently dominant neo-

liberal paradigm, is inescapable and therefore leaves no possibility for

national autonomy. He offers polycentricity (i.e. one planet with several

competing systems) (Amin 1990: xii) as an alternative to neo-liberal

exclusionary and polarising development, also referred to as mal

development (ibid.: 80, 94–7, 129–36).

Amin’s theoretical strand, ideological bent and activism are best

described as a search for praxis or a theory of practice. Much of his writings

during the closing decade of the twentieth century and until today have

been devoted to the critique of globalisation, which he described as a pecu-

liar new form of managing the international economy. The implications of

globalisation for development and development theorising are horren-

dous. In Capitalism in the Age of Globalisation (1997), Amin revisits the idea

of polycentric globalisation and argues that there is the need for ‘renewing

the perspective of global socialism’ (ibid.: 6) in order to usher in an era of an

‘alternative humanist project of globalisation’ (ibid.: 10). Such an agenda

cannot be realised and the crisis of development resolved until popular,

democratic forces capable of dominating society get together again (ibid.:

135). In this scheme, the intelligentsia is assigned a vanguard role to estab-

lish bonds between its own productive thinking and the aspirations and

actions of the popular classes, making them social partners for change.

Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder (2003) is

Amin’s ultimate commentary on the expansion of capitalism from the

Thirty Years’ War (1914–45) to the current age of neo-liberal global

isation. Here, Amin draws much from his earlier writings, including

Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure (1990); Transforming the Revolu

tion: Social Movements and the World System (1990); Empire of Chaos (1992)

and Re-reading the Post-war Period (1994). The future of capitalism is ‘proph

esied’ with the main aim of answering one important question, ‘Are the

current developments of world capitalist systems permanent or transient’ or

‘rather, signs of obsolescence of a system that must be overcome if human

civilisation is to survive?’ (Amin 2003: 1). Theoretically, the volume offers

confirmation of Amin’s Marxist interpretation of the state of the World,

claiming that ‘Marx’s law of pauperisation resulting from capitalist

SAMIR AMIN

accumulation has been ever more strikingly confirmed on a world scale

over the past two centuries’ (ibid.: 3).

The realisation that former communist countries such as Russia and

China succumbed to the economic power of global capitalism (Empire of

Chaos, 1992) created the necessity for Amin to rethink development theo

rising. In his latest writings, he defines development as a concept that does

not connote ‘catching up’, but instead it ‘involves the project of a very dif

ferent (alternative) society’, whose twofold aim would be: (a) to free

humanity from economistic alienation; and (b) to end the legacy of polaris

ation on a world-scale. These objectives, according to Amin, cannot be

realised without the active participation of the whole world population

because the problems facing humanity have an ever-deeper global dimen

sion (ibid.: 3–4).

Capitalism is obsolete because it is an ageing system that has entered a

state of permanent disorder, leading to a long transition to socialism or

catastrophe and the suicide of humanity. Capitalism is obsolete because: (1)

the current scientific and technological revolution shows that capitalism

has exhausted its reliance on labour, thus hindering the possibility of con-

tinual accumulation; (2) the collective Triad

of imperialism operating on a

world-scale no longer allows the pursuit of dependent capitalist develop-

ment in the peripheries. In Amin’s view, if:

the collective triad imperialism, especially in its American centre of

centres, no longer functions as exporter of capital to the peripheries,

but [is] dependent on surplus generated throughout the world, the

triad is no longer a significant and dependent on manufacturing

media discourse to survive, ‘does this not symbolize the obsolescence

of a system that has nothing to offer 80 percent of the world popula-

tion?’

(2003: 93–4)

Because the US hegemony and its new right neo-liberal project thrive

on obsolescence capitalism, its alternative is a non-American twenty-first

century whose basic requirements include: (1) The dislocation of the cur

rent unipolar world system with a multipolar (democratic and regionalised)

one, implying that obsolescence capitalism corresponds to ‘the dictatorship

of transnational capital, attacks any idea of “self-reliance,” and treats

“delinking” and “national construction” as regressive protectionism’ (ibid.:

30). (2) The twenty-first century should be more radical than the twentieth

and instead of looking back to historical Marxism, historical Keynesianism

and national populism, neo-Marxism, neo-Keynesianism and post-

capitalism became the counter responses to globalised liberal capitalism

SAMIR AMIN

(ibid.: 136–8). (3) A non-American twenty-first century requires the build

ing of convergences of social and political movements that give expression

to the victims of global neo-liberal capitalism, a task which in turn demands

respect for diversity. Unlike the twentieth century, the twenty-first cen

tury requires building a Left with alternative strategies and tactics for a

united front in support of social and international justice (ibid.: 140–7).

Amin’s contribution to development theory could be summarised in

four points: First, critical and innovative application of classical Marxist

theory to explain underdevelopment or maldevelopment as phenomena

shaped by the capitalist system, implying that the fate of the underdevel

oped countries is inseparable from developments in the capitalist world.

Second, underdevelopment is a product of neocolonialism as transformed

during the late decades of the twentieth century into what he describes as

neoliberal global capitalism, which carries the insignia and genesis of obso

lescent capitalism. Third, delinking in a polycentric, regionalised world is

based on co-operation between ‘autocentric’ countries capable of directing

their economies not for ‘catching up’ with obsolescent capitalism but for

creating alternatives to its hegemony at best and assured demise at worst.

Fourth, transforming the current global order is possible only by building

convergence within diversity in a global justice society where social move-

ments create spaces for people’s participation (Amin 1987). The overall aim

of solidarity and engagement with social justice is to engender a ‘long tran-

sition to world socialism, implying the delinking of a system of criteria of

economic rationality from the system of criteria derived from the submis-

sion to the globalised world of value’ (Amin 2003: 159). Evidently, Amin is

still an ‘optimist Marxist’, hoping that development’s ultimate aim is the

long transition to world socialism, which would eventually displace obso

lescent capitalism.

Note

1 Triad refers to the Marxist dogma that human history is predetermined,

evolving in three basic stages (triads), with the two final stages being socialism

and communism.

Major works

Amin, S. (1970) The Maghreb in the Modern World, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

—— (ed.) (1972) ‘Modern Migrations in Western Africa’, Studies presented and

discussed at the Eleventh International African Seminar, Dakar, April.

—— (1973) Neo-colonialism in West Africa, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

—— (1973) Unequal Exchange, Imperialism and Underdevelopment: An Essay on the

Political Economy of World Capitalism, Ranjit Sau: Calcutta and Oxford

University Press.

SAMIR AMIN

—— (1974) ‘Accumulation and Development: A Theoretical Model’, Review of

African Political Economy 1: 19–26.

—— (1974) Accumulation on a World-Scale: A Critique of the Theory of

Underdevelopment, New York: Monthly Review Press.

—— (1976) The Arab Nation: Nationalism and Class Struggle, London: Zed Press.

—— (1976) Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral

Capitalism, Hassocks: Harvester Press.

—— (1977) Imperialism and Unequal Development, Brighton: Harvester Press.

—— (1978) The Law of Value and Historical Materialism, New York: Monthly

Review Press.

—— (1980) The Arab Economy Today, London: Zed Press.

—— (1981) The Future Maoism, New York: New Left Review.

—— (1987) ‘Democracy and National Strategy in the Periphery’, Third World

Quarterly 9: 1129–56.

—— (1990) Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, London: Zed Books.

—— (1990) Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure, London: Zed Books.

—— (1990) Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World System,

New York: Monthly Review Press.

—— (1991) ‘The Ancient World System versus Modern Capitalist World System’,

New Left Review 14(3): 349–85.

—— (1992) ‘Thirty Years of Critique of the Soviet System’, Monthly Review 44(1):

43–50.

—— (1992) Empire of Chaos, New York: Monthly Review Press.

—— (1993) ‘Historical and Ethical Materialism’, Monthly Review 45(1): 44–56.

—— (1994) Re-reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary, New York:

Monthly Review Press.

—— (1997) Capitalism in the Age of Globalisation, London: Zed Books.

—— (1998) Specters of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions, New

York: Monthly Review Press.

—— (2003) Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder,

London: Zed Books.

M.A. Mohamed Salih

A.T. ARIYARATNE (1931–)

A.T. Ariyaratne’s distinctive contribution as a key thinker lies in his life-

long efforts to follow a new path to development, independent of both

capitalism and socialism. He is the leader of the Sarvodaya Shramadana

movement, the largest non-governmental organisation (NGO) engaged in

development and poverty alleviation in Sri Lanka today. Sarvodaya’s vision

for a new society with ‘no poverty’ and ‘no affluence’ was based on

Gandhi’s philosophy of ‘truth’, ‘non-violence’, and ‘self-sacrifice’. The

term ‘Sarvodaya’ comes from two Sanskrit words ‘sarva’ (universal) and

‘udaya’ (awakening). Ariyaratne uses the word ‘sarvodaya’ in two ways, to

mean the awakening of all people and the awakening of individuals in all

spheres – psychological, moral and spiritual, as well as social, economic and

A.T. ARIYARATNE

political. The term ‘shramadana’ is also derived from two Sanskrit words,

‘shrama’ (labour) and ‘dana’ (gift), that is, the gift of labour.

In the Sinhalese language the two words ‘sarvodaya shramadana’ have

come to mean ‘the sharing of one’s time, thought, and energy for the

awakening of all’ (Dana, Feb. 1987: 15). Sarvodaya believes that develop

ment involves more than material growth. It involves psychological, moral

and spiritual dimensions as well as social, economic and political ones.

Shramadana or gift of labour implies both physical and mental labour.

Ariyaratne’s shramadana draws on social networks, donated labour, skills

and co-operation, showing how social capital can create material wealth.

Dr Ariyaratne was born in Unawatuna village, Galle District, and after

graduation worked as a teacher in Galle town before attending a teachers’

training college. In 1958, as a newly arrived science teacher at Nalanda

College, a Buddhist high school in Colombo (where he served till 1972),

along with his students he organised the first of several voluntary work

shops (a shramadana) in one of the poorest villages on the island. The

workshop consisted of digging wells, building pit latrines, planting gardens,

and opening up rural roads using the co-operative labour of students and

villagers. Performing manual labour alongside poor villagers was a

transformative experience for students who came from upper- and middle-

class urban homes. This was an early example of what we now call ‘service

learning’.

Ariyaratne received a Bachelor of Arts general degree from the

Vidyodaya University of Sri Lanka, graduating in economics, Sinhalese

language and education. Later he received an honorary doctorate from the

same university, and a doctor of humanities from Amelio Aguinaldo Uni-

versity in the Philippines. As the founder and leader of the Sarvodaya

Shramadana movement, Ariyaratne has received a number of international

awards including the Raman Magsaysay Award for Community Leader

ship from the Philippines (1969), Feinstein World Hunger Award from

Brown University in Rhode Island (1986), Niwano Peace Prize from

Japan (1992) and the Mahatma Gandhi Peace Prize from India (1996).

Although there are many publications under his name (Ariyaratne 1988,

1999) and many more about him (Bond 2004; Macy 1985), Ariyaratne is

not widely regarded as a development theorist. According to his own

homepage (www.sarvodaya.org), ‘he was not guided by theory. He

wanted to practice first and enunciate theory later. And the practice should

be meaningful; the theory should only follow it.’ Today at the age of

seventy-four, Ariyaratne has remained active in community development,

but increasingly has turned his attention to one of the central problems of

Sri Lanka, political violence and the long-drawn-out military conflict with

the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The Liberation Tigers have

A.T. ARIYARATNE

been fighting since 1983 for a separate state for minority Tamils on the

grounds that they have suffered discrimination at the hands of the Sinhalese

majority.

Since its inception in 1958, Sarvodaya seems to have evolved through

four phases (Bond 2004: 7–42). During the period 1958–67, Sarvodaya

was primarily a volunteer work camp movement. The work camp begun

by Ariyaratne and his students in 1958 was very successful and it launched a

larger social movement that quickly spread to other high schools and vil

lages. At this time resources came entirely from local donations and volun

tary labour. During the second period (1967–83), Sarvodaya became a

formal NGO. In 1972 the movement was recognised by an Act of Parlia

ment and incorporated as a legal body. It began to attract generous foreign

funding, became a fully fledged NGO with a large portfolio of projects for

village economic development, and adopted methods of cost accounting,

monitoring and evaluation. As it grew, Sarvodaya moved away from the

ideology of social revolution, co-operated more closely with the govern-

ment, and acted in the capacity of an extension agency. Apart from local

village schemes, Sarvodaya also undertook several well-funded national

projects for enterprise development, alternative technology and child care.

During the third period (1983–97), the conflict between the government

and the Liberation Tigers intensified and spread; civilian life for both Sin-

halese and Tamils was severely disrupted. With funding from overseas,

Sarvodaya operated a large programme offering rehabilitation and relief

work in villages most affected by the Tiger insurgency.

During this period the close co-operation with the government came to

an end because Ariyaratne opposed the policy of seeking a military solution

to the LTTE problem. Drawing on Gandhian and Buddhist principles of

non-violence, Sarvodaya laid out a plan for the peaceful resolution of the

conflict through spiritual means but the larger conflict continued. In the

final period (1997– ), we see clear evidence of Sarvodaya taking an even

stronger stand against a military solution. Sarvodaya publicly declared that

neither the government nor the LTTE could ‘win’ the war; all they can do

is to draw out the conflict (www.sarvodaya.org). On the other hand,

Sarvodaya claimed it knew how to help transcend the war. To that end it

organised a large-scale peace movement, announced an alternative frame

work of power for conflict resolution, and held several well-attended pub

lic peace meditations. It also started a programme of ‘sister villages’ with

villagers from the south travelling to the war-ravaged villages of the north

to do rehabilitation work repairing houses, wells, tanks, schools, toilets and

places of worship. Since Ariyaratne remains central to Sarvodaya, this brief

history shows the potential of his philosophy to achieve both personal

A.T. ARIYARATNE

empowerment and national reconciliation through non-violence, spiritu

ality, compassion and Buddhist principles of ‘right livelihood’.

The Sarvodaya philosophy has a strong moral and spiritual foundation.

Ariyaratne was well aware that religion, in its institutional form, historically

has not played a progressive role in the material transformation of society.

And yet he chose this vehicle for his programme of social advancement, a

path not unlike that taken by Gandhi in India, and by the worker priests of

the Catholic based communities in Latin America. Sarvodaya philosophy is

founded on Buddhist teaching; Ariyaratne’s contribution has been to show

that Buddhism can be used to address two principal problems facing contem

porary Sri Lanka – poverty and violence. The Sarvodaya philosophy is vast

but for the purpose of this exercise I shall present it under three headings.

Personal agency in structural change: Sarvodaya holds that structural change

in society must begin with personal change. According to Buddhism, the

principles of virtuous living include loving kindness, respect for all living

beings, compassion for others, sharing joy in the completion of projects

intended for someone else’s benefit and even composure in the face of both

joy and sadness. All Sarvodaya workers are urged to practise these in their

routine everyday engagements. Beginning with personal awakening

(puroshodaya), Sarvodaya expands outwards to community or village

awakening (gramodaya), and beyond that to the awakening of the country

(deshodaya), and finally to the awakening of the world (vishovodaya). All

social change must radiate out from the agency of the individual living and

practising a righteous life.

Buddhist theory for overcoming suffering: central to Sarvodaya philosophy is

the Buddhist notion of four ‘noble truths’. The first states that the normal

condition of existence is suffering (Dukkha). Second, the root cause of suf

fering is greed, craving and desire (Thanha). Third is the claim that suffer

ing can be overcome (Niradha). Finally is ‘Marga’, the Buddhist path to

overcome suffering in the world. ‘Marga’ contains eight elements: right

understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood,

right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. The ‘Eightfold

Path’ points to the centrality of personal agency in both Buddhist and

Sarvodaya philosophy. Ariyaratne uses the first of the ‘Four Noble Truths’

(there is suffering in the world) by starting from an actual village with great

poverty. This becomes the basis for analysis and reflection on the realities of

the village. The second principle (craving as a cause of suffering) is pre

sented to villages by describing how distrust, competition, enmity and

egocentricity sap the energy of villagers. The third principle (suffering can

cease) is translated into a discourse on affection, compassion, kind words,

sharing and mutual self-help. Finally, the eightfold path of ‘Marga’ recom

mends the avoidance of two extremes – the pleasure of sensual indulgence

A.T. ARIYARATNE

and the pain of self-mortification. Ariyaratne adapted this Buddhist con

cept of the ‘Middle Way’ by recommending a development path of ‘no

poverty, no affluence’. Sarvodaya does not believe that poverty can be

eradicated through creation of wealth and economic development.

Sarvodaya begins this task by stating a manifesto of ten basic human needs

which includes: a clean and healthy physical environment, water, clothing,

food, housing, health care, communication, fuel, education, and spiritual

and cultural needs (www.sarvodaya.org). These needs can be satisfied by

using local resources, self-reliance, and shramadana. Sarvodaya believes

that the dominant models of economic development constitute obstacles

to meeting basic needs because such models emphasise increased

production, expansion of desire, unlimited growth and open markets.

Non-violence in conflict resolution: a core principle of Buddhism and Hin

duism is non-violence which advocates respect for all sentient beings. Fol

lowing the examples of Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave in India, Ariyaratne

argued that fundamental social change can be achieved through non-

violence. The adoption of the eightfold path of right livelihood automati-

cally excludes the use of physical violence as a means of achieving objec-

tives. Sarvodaya has reached out to the Tamils through membership of the

organisation and by doing relief and rehabilitation work in villages of the

North. It has organised peace marches, mass meditations, and offered to

mediate between the government and the LTTE.

Ariyaratne attributes Sri Lanka’s current economic problems to British

imperialism which destroyed self-reliant village economies. In that regard

his analysis is very similar to that of dependency theorists like Andre

Gunder Frank (Frank 1966) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

Ariyaratne also believes that unequal global structures and giant transna-

tional organisations are responsible for increasing poverty, armed conflict

and ecological destruction in Sri Lanka and throughout the world. Despite

that structural analysis, his proposals do not focus on changing global struc

tures but on personal agency and right living. By rejecting the notion that

human behaviour is the result of larger forces which actors neither control

nor comprehend, Ariyaratne’s views are consistent with Western social

theories such as structuration (Giddens 1984) and post-structuralism

(Foucault 1980).

Sarvodaya’s material critique of development arises from its explicit

rejection of affluence. The rejection of capital-intensive, high-technology,

open economies is clearly at odds with the dominant models of develop

ment. Economic growth requires the constant expansion of consumption

and desire, which according to the Buddhist theory of craving is what leads

to suffering. Economists measure living standards principally by how much

people consume. Sarvodaya rejects this path of development.

A.T. ARIYARATNE

Even though the concept of no affluence has the potential to yield a

serious critique of development, Sarvodaya has weakened the argument by

enframing it entirely within the context of Buddhist advocacy of control

ling one’s craving. Craving is presented in Sarvodaya philosophy as an

intrinsic human condition that must be overcome through reflection and

moral advancement. But it is not enough to advocate the voluntary limit

ing of consumption without also addressing the myriad forces of modern

capitalism that drive consumption.

Sarvodaya’s advocacy of a non-violent solution to the ethnic problems of

Sri Lanka is very courageous. A number of Tamil Sarvodaya workers have

been killed by the Liberation Tigers, and Ariyaratne himself lives under con

stant threats to his life. But there are some ironies to Sarvodaya’s offering

non-violence as a solution to the ethnic problem. Despite its ecumenical

outlook, Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka is perceived primarily as a Buddhist organi-

sation. The current conflict in Sri Lanka arises from Tamil reaction to what

they perceive as the hegemony of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. The identity

of the Sinhalese and their perception of self, are both intricately tied to Bud-

dhism, its social history and its myths. Conversely, the Sinhalese perception

of the Tamil is that of ‘the other as non-Buddhist’, a dynamic which the

Tamils in turn have incorporated into their perception of the Sinhalese and

of themselves. Given the signification of Buddhism to the two main parties

in the conflict, it is important to reflect on the limits of a social movement

that uses Buddhist theology to bring about a non-violent resolution of the

protracted ethnic conflict. Nevertheless, Sarvodaya philosophy can contrib-

ute to peace in Sri Lanka in two important ways. First, as evidence shows, it

provides a means for engaging in peaceful negotiation. Second, the emphasis

of the middle path on no affluence and no poverty removes the intensive

competition for resources which is one of the driving forces of the ethnic

conflict in Sri Lanka.

Major works

Ariyaratne, A. T. (1988) The Power Pyramid and the Dharmic Cycle, Ratmalana, Sri

Lanka: Sarvodaya Vishva Lekha Press.

—— (1999) Collected Works, 7 vols (ed. by N. Ratnapala), Ratmalana, Sri Lanka:

Sarvodaya Vishva Lekha Press.

Further reading

Bond, G.D. (2004) Buddhism at Work: Community Development, Social Empowerment

and the Sarvodaya Movement, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press.

Dana: Journal of the International Sarvodaya Shramadana, 1987.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books.

Frank, A. G. (1966) ‘The Development of Underdevelopment’, Monthly Review

18: 17–31.

A.T. ARIYARATNE

Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society, Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press.

Macy, J. (1985) Dharma and Self Development: Religion as Resource in the Sarvodaya

Self-Help Movement, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press.

Lakshman Yapa

JAGDISH BHAGWATI (1934–)

Jagdish Bhagwati is currently a University Professor at Columbia Univer

sity and Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations. He was born

and brought up in Bombay and was educated at Cambridge, Oxford and

MIT. Bhagwati has been an advisor to a number of international organisa

tions, including the WTO. His vast published output extends to more than

300 articles and fifty volumes. Jagdish Bhagwati’s work has so dominated

thinking on a number of economic policy issues in our own time that Paul

Samuelson has referred to it as ‘The Age of Bhagwati’. This essay provides a

brief overview of Bhagwati’s work centred on his advocacy of free, non-

discriminatory trade, his assault on misguided protectionist policies and his

analysis of the so-called phenomenon of the brain drain.

Bhagwati’s relentless advocacy of free trade is often referred to as mili-

tant and aggressive. This may be so, but his perspective is grounded in eco-

nomic theory and his analysis and observation of the welfare costs of India’s

protectionist trade and investment regime.

Students of international economics are familiar with the gains from free

trade based on the comparative advantage of trading nations. There is,

though, a long list of theoretical exceptions to the case for free trade,

including the infant industry argument, arguments based on distortions in

the labour and product markets in the domestic economy, and externali

ties. These and other arguments have so often been invoked for the institu

tion of protection in both developed and developing countries that

protection appears to be the rule and free trade the exception. In a seminal

article (1963), co-authored with the late V.K. Ramaswami, using the con

ventional tools of the trade theorist, Bhagwati demonstrated that the best

way to address distortions or domestic market failures was through domes

tic policies while maintaining free trade. The best policy in the presence of

various distortions is an appropriate subsidy which rectifies the distortion at

its source but leaves the international price unchanged and avoids the loss

of consumer surplus associated with a tariff. If the distortion is in the trade

sphere, such as monopoly/monopsony power in international trade, it

should be rectified with appropriate trade policy instruments such as an

export tax or an import tariff.

JAGDISH BHAGWATI

This message relating to trade carries over to policies regarding foreign

capital inflows. It is that capital inflows in the presence of a tariff can be

immiserising. Bhagwati enunciated the concept of immiserisation in an

article (1958) written whilst he was an undergraduate student reading for

the Economics Tripos at Cambridge. The message of the article is that eco

nomic growth may so worsen a country’s terms of trade that it may actually

reduce economic welfare. Extensions of the idea by Bhagwati himself

(1968, 1973) and others demonstrate that capital inflows in the presence of

a tariff on an importable good in a two-good two-country mode can be

immiserising. Whilst the capital inflow induces growth at a constant tariff

inclusive of domestic prices, the tariff imposes the familiar production and

consumption costs, and the rewards accruing to foreign capital must also be

reckoned as a cost.

Yet another of Bhagwati’s policy prescriptions relating to trade and

capital flows is that countries pursuing an export promotion (EP) policy are

likely to attract both a higher volume of foreign direct investment (FDI)

and experience substantially higher rewards from it than countries pursuing

import substitution (IS) policies (1978). An EP policy here is defined as one

which is neutral in terms of the protection it provides for importables and

the incentives it affords exportables. In such an environment investment

decisions of foreign firms would be based on comparative advantage dic-

tated by market forces and not artificial and uncertain policy inducements.

Econometric tests suggest that Bhagwati’s twin propositions are robust

(Balasubramanyam, Salisu and Sapsford 1996). It is worth noting that

Bhagwati’s interpretation of the EP policy does not rule out tariffs, it

merely requires that investment decisions should be based on comparative

advantage and should not be influenced by artificial policy incentives

which distort labour and product markets.

Bhagwati is known for identifying a variety of policies which reduce

welfare and labelling them in memorable phrases. Immiserising growth, in

relation to FDI and Directly Unproductive Profit Seeking (DUP, pro

nounced DUPE) are all now a part of the lexicon of economics. DUP, as

defined by Bhagwati (1982), refers to ways of making profits by undertak

ing activities which do not produce goods and services. A whole array of

activities including tariff-seeking, lobbying, tariff evasion, procuring

import licences and seeking premium prices for such licences and smug

gling constitute DUP. All such activities, with rare exceptions, decrease

welfare by drawing resources away from production-oriented, utility-

enhancing activities into non-production-oriented, profit-seeking enter

prise. Most DUP activities arise because of various sorts of distortions

induced by policy interventions in trade.

JAGDISH BHAGWATI

An arresting feature of Bhagwati’s work is its enduring quality; his

insights into trade policy are applicable to the ever-changing scenarios in

the world economy. One such scenario, which Bhagwati refers to as ‘ironic

role reversal’, is the growing fear of globalisation in the developed coun

tries, which mirrors the fears expressed by developing countries. The fears

of developing countries concerning trade and foreign investment are well

known; integration with the global economy would exacerbate income

inequalities, perpetuate backwardness and result in dependency. The

opposition of developed countries to free trade with the developing coun

tries is based on the relatively low wages and poor standards relating to pro

tection of the environment in the developing countries. Bhagwati has

relentlessly questioned the wisdom of these arguments for protection and

restated the proposition, which he enunciated in the 1960s, that market

failures should be fixed with appropriate domestic policies and free trade

should be maintained externally. His provocative latest book on

globalisation (2004) denounces many popular fallacies associated with

globalisation current in both the developed and developing countries.

During the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Bhagwati produced a series of

articles and books analysing the welfare implications of emigration of tal-

ented people from developing countries to the developed world (1974,

1977). Here again his analysis questions received wisdom encapsulated in

the so-called ‘cosmopolitan model’ of brain drain, which argues that the

emigration of talented people improves welfare all round – of the emi-

grants, the countries from which they depart and those which receive

them. Bhagwati detects a variety of situations in which the emigration of

talented people could impose welfare costs on the countries from which

they depart. These include situations in which the wage paid to the pro

spective emigrants is less than their social marginal product and in some

cases less than their private marginal product also, and in cases where those

who leave have to be replaced by others in the labour market with state-

funded subsidies for training and education.

These and other welfare-reducing effects of the brain drain underlie

Bhagwati’s advocacy of a brains tax or what is now known as the ‘Bhagwati

tax’, which requires skilled migrants to pay a special tax in addition to the

taxes they pay in the countries to which they emigrate. The proceeds of the

tax are to be transferred to their home countries. The economic rationale for

a brains tax is that immigration of skilled people benefits developed coun

tries, there are capital flows imbedded in the flow of skilled people from

developing to developed countries and the former deserve to be compen

sated for this transfer of capital received by the latter. It is worth noting that

Bhagwati’s advocacy of a tax on skilled emigrants is based on considerations

of equity and efficiency and not as a device for restricting emigration. The

JAGDISH BHAGWATI

advocate of free trade is also an advocate of free flows of labour, be they of the

skilled or the unskilled variety. He has frequently championed a liberal

humanitarian approach to the regulation of illegal immigrants into the USA.

This brief overview of Bhagwati’s contribution to the literature on

international economics hardly does justice to the breadth of his scholar

ship, his many insights and his economic philosophy developed over three

decades of research and teaching. His crusade for free trade, grounded in

the belief that free trade is an important moral force for good, has evolved

over long years of theoretical work and analysis of trade policy of both the

developed and developing countries. These ideas have influenced eco

nomic policy both in India and abroad.

Major works

Bhagwati, J.N. (1958) ‘Immiserising Growth: A Geometrical Note’, Review of

Economic Studies 25 (June): 201–5.

—— (1968) ‘Distortions and Immiserising Growth: A Generalisation’, Review of

Economic Studies vol. 35, no. 104: 481–5.

—— (1971) ‘The Generalised Theory of Distortions and Welfare’, in J.N. Bhagwati

et al. (eds), Trade, Payments and Growth, Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. 69–90.

—— (1973) ‘The Theory of Immiserising Growth: Further Applications’, in

Swoboda, A. and Connolly, M. (eds), International Trade and Money, London:

George Allen and Unwin, pp. 45–54.

—— (1977) ‘The Brain Drain: International Resource Flow Accounting,

Compensation, Taxation and Related Policy Proposals’, Prepared for the

Division of Transfer of Technology, UNCTAD.

—— (1978) ‘Anatomy and Consequences of Exchange Control Regimes’, Studies

in International Economic Relations, 1(10): 232, New York: National Bureau of

Economic Research.

—— (1982) ‘Directly Unproductive Profit Seeking (DUP) Activities’, Journal of

Political Economy 90(5): 988–1022.

Bhagwati, J.N. and Hamada, K. (1974) ‘The Brain Drain, International Integration

of Markets for Professionals and Unemployment: A Theoretical Analysis’,

Journal of Development Economics 1(1): 19–24.

Bhagwati, J.N. and Ramaswami, V.K. (1963) ‘Domestic Distortions, Tariffs and

the Theory of Optimum Subsidy’, Journal of Political Economy 71(1): 44–50.

Further reading

Balasubramanyam, V.N. (ed.) (1997) Jagdish Bhagwati: Writings on International

Economics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Balasubramanyam, V.N., Salisu, M.A. and Sapsford, D. (1996) ‘Foreign Direct

Investment and Growth in EP and IS Countries’, The Economic Journal 106(434):

92–105.

Bhagwati, J.N. (1998) A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade,

Immigration and Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

—— (2004) In Defense of Globalisation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

V.N. Balasubramanyam

JAGDISH BHAGWATI

PIERS BLAIKIE (1942–)

Piers Blaikie has the reputation of an iconoclast. Frank Ellis, in a tribute

when Blaikie retired from the School of Development Studies at the

University of East Anglia (UEA) in 2003, wrote of a ‘totally over-the-top

character, given to extravagant gestures and even more extravagant juxta

positions of ideas’.

A second characteristic of Blaikie’s academic career is

his willingness, even delight, in up-ending and challenging his own

assumptions and writings in order to push the research frontier on to new

ground.

Blaikie took a first degree in Geography at the University of Cambridge

in 1963. In 1964, funded by a Hayter Studentship, he began a PhD at Cam-

bridge under the supervision of Professor Benny Farmer, spending a year in

India and undertaking fieldwork in the Punjab and Rajasthan. He success-

fully defended his thesis on the ‘Spatial organisation of some villages in

Northern India’ in 1967 (see Blaikie 1971). He then went on to join the

Department of Geography at the University of Reading as a Lecturer,

where he stayed until 1972. From 1972 through to 2003 Blaikie was suc-

cessively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and, from 1990, Professor in

the School of Development Studies at UEA. It was here that he made his

mark. He has also held visiting positions at the Norwegian University of

Science and Technology in Trondheim; the Department of Geography at

the University of California, Los Angeles; the Department of Geography at

Berkeley; the East–West Center in Hawaii; and the Department of Geog-

raphy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Since he published his first

book in 1975, Blaikie has authored or co-authored nine major volumes.

His journal output has been, by contrast, relatively modest: just thirty

mainstream academic papers since 1970. It would seem, therefore, that

Blaikie successfully resisted the publication demands of the UK’s Research

Assessment Exercise.

Blaikie’s contributions to development thinking have been, in order of

importance, in three key areas: environment, environmental processes and

environmental change; agrarian change, particularly in Nepal; and AIDS

and family planning.

Of all Blaikie’s books, the one that has had the greatest impact on the

most people is his Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries

(1985). Like many influential books, the core idea on which the wider

argument rests seems, with hindsight, to be so obvious and unremarkable

that it is difficult to believe that nobody had thought of it earlier. It is that

soil erosion is not due to mismanagement, overpopulation or environmen

tal context, but due to the tendency for surplus to be extracted from

PIERS BLAIKIE

farming households by the nature of the political and economic system,

requiring that farmers, in their turn, extract surplus from the land, leading

to erosion and degradation. In this way, class relations become centrally

implicated in the process. ‘A principal conclusion of this book’, Blaikie

writes, ‘is that soil erosion in lesser developed countries will not be substan

tially reduced unless it seriously threatens the accumulation possibilities of

the dominant classes’ (ibid.: 147).

Another surprising aspect of the book is that it was marketed as an intro

ductory text for ‘colleges and universities’, is written in clear and accessible

prose, and is just 188 pages in length. Despite its lack of pretentiousness, I

can remember my own excitement when I read the book having just com

pleted my PhD. Here was a social scientist invading the traditional turf of

natural science to argue that a physical process – soil erosion – could only

be understood in terms of political economy. Even now students in my lec

ture classes of 200 first-year undergraduates sit up and think afresh when I

suggest to them that physical processes like soil erosion and land degrada-

tion require more than technical solutions and are products and reflections

of the political, social and economic domains. This, of course, is common

currency now but the book was seminal in bringing such views into the

mainstream and helping to spawn a whole new subset of intellectual

endeavour under the mantle of political ecology. Scholars like Nancy

Peluso, Raymond Bryant, James Fairhead, Jules Pretty and Melissa Leach

all owe an intellectual debt to this low-key and simply expressed under-

graduate textbook. The book has been criticised for its rather essentialist

and non-dynamic approach to politics (see Watts in PIHG 1997) but this

seems to me to be expecting too much of a volume that was marketed as an

introductory text for undergraduates and even harboured the hope that

sixth-form school pupils would use it! There can be few seminal works (in

1997 it was labelled a ‘classic’ in human geography, see PIHG 1997) that

have been so modestly clothed.

Blaikie further developed these ideas, with Harold Brookfield,in

their part-jointly authored, part-edited Land Degradation and Society (1987).

In this book the argument that land degradation is an interdisciplinary issue

par excellence is promoted with vigour and the authors also propose that the

task of explanation lies, in major part, with social scientists for the reason

that natural scientists have extracted the process of land degradation from

its political, social and economic context. The first sentence of the first

chapter brazenly lays the authors’ cards on the table: ‘Land degradation

should by definition be a social problem’ (1987: 1).

More recently still, Blaikie co-authored with Terry Cannon, Ian Davis

and Ben Wisner At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disas

ters (1994). Like the earlier two volumes, At Risk arose out of shared

PIERS BLAIKIE

dissatisfaction with prevailing views that disasters ‘were “natural” in a

straightforward way’ (ibid.: xiii). In the book the authors connect risk to

vulnerability and vulnerability to livelihoods and normal living: ‘The

crucial point about understanding why disasters occur is that it is not only

natural events that cause them. They are also products of the social, politi

cal, and economic environment because of the way it structures the lives of

different groups of people’ (ibid.: 3). This book was updated and revised in

2003 (Wisner et al. 2003).

Less well known, but just as influential among a smaller group of schol

ars and development practitioners, is Blaikie’s work (with collaborators) on

Nepal. The main value, as I see it, in this series of books and papers is the

longitudinal dimension. By longitudinal I don’t just mean in the usual sense

that Blaikie and his collaborators have returned to the field to update their

work, but longitudinal also in terms of the explanatory framework

employed to account for the patterns and processes identified.

In 1973 the Overseas Development Group at UEA were awarded fund-

ing from the Economic and Social Committee for Overseas Research

(ESCOR) of the Ministry of Overseas Development (MOD) to evaluate

the impact of roads in West-Central Nepal. The funders got more than

they bargained for. The three project directors wrote a long, three-volume

report which, as well as detailing the impacts of roads, also placed this

squarely within a broader politico-economic context. The reports were

later condensed into a single, more digestible summary, The Effects of Roads

in West-Central Nepal (1977). Three years on from this, Nepal in Crisis:

Growth and Stagnation at the Periphery (1980) was published. Neo-Marxist in

vision and using the language of dependency, this book was a profoundly

pessimistic view of Nepal’s present and likely future. Blaikie and his co-

authors believed that road-induced and market-led integration would ‘not

deliver the benefits of increased agricultural production, increased com

mercialisation, and trade as forecast in the economic appraisal documents’

(Blaikie et al. 2002: 1256). Rather, the outcome would be a deepening

dependency and growing underdevelopment. (One reason why the

authorities banned it for a time was that Nepal’s leftists scrambled to get

hold of a copy and the UK’s ambassador in Kathmandu wished it had never

been written. It became, as the authors put it with understatement in a

2001 reprint, ‘somewhat of a political “hot potato” ’ (Blaikie et al. 2001:

276).)

Blaikie and his collaborators returned to the hills of Nepal in 1998 to

review and update their conclusions (Blaikie et al. 2002). While not saying

that they were wrong in their 1980 diagnosis (they were correct in predict

ing that agriculture would not be invigorated and that dependency would

deepen), they do admit that events did not evolve in quite the way they

PIERS BLAIKIE

anticipated. In particular, they failed to appreciate how the development of

non-farm opportunities would make stagnation in agriculture less critical

in livelihood terms. They conclude: ‘The original model underestimated

the capacity of the global labour market to provide work and remittances

to sustain rural life and to stave off a more generalised crisis …’ (2002:

1268–9). This admission also, and interestingly, provides a valuable lens for

looking again at The Political Ecology of Soil Erosion. Just as Nepal in Crisis

failed to gauge the trajectory of global and national change and the degree

to which individuals would be able to benefit rather than classes lose out

(but who did?), so too with the soil erosion volume. The dependency per

spective, the general pessimism, and the view that individuals as members

of classes would be squeezed and controlled looks rather dated in the light

of what has actually happened over the intervening years.

The final area where Blaikie has made a contribution to development

thinking – although not, in my view, to the same level – is in family plan-

ning and AIDS research. Blaikie’s interest in family planning can be traced

back to 1970 when he took leave of absence to work on the diffusion of

family planning (and agricultural) technologies in Bihar (India). Following

a paper in Population Studies in 1970 (Blaikie 1970), Blaikie published a

research monograph on Family Planning in India: Diffusion and Policy (1975).

With its strong locational, model-building approach it was very much a

product of its time. We see, once again, resonances with Blaikie’s other

work in his pessimistic take on the future and his view that people do not

plan for families in the poor, rural Indian context largely for structural rea-

sons. This research also provided the inspiration for a paper in Progress in

Human Geography on innovation diffusion (Blaikie 1978). Blaikie’s main

contribution to research on AIDS was a book, co-authored with Tony

Barnett, AIDS in Africa: Its Present and Future Impact (1992). This book was

one of the first to draw on thorough fieldwork (in this instance in Uganda)

to map out the likely dynamic of the disease.

Stepping back from the minutiae, it is possible to make three general

statements about Blaikie’s work and his contribution to scholarship. First,

his publications show a clarity of argument and expression which is becom

ing increasingly rare. It would seem that his confidence that he has some

thing important and valuable to say means he is not scared to say it simply.

Second, Blaikie’s work is invariably a careful blend of the empirical and the

theoretical. He gets into the field, collects data and is involved at the sharp

end of development thinking. But, as an academic and not a consultant, he

also made it his mission to theorise up (as well as down) and to embed his

results in wider considerations and perspectives. The third feature of his

work is a common thread that runs through and links his best publications,

whether on land degradation or agrarian change: a desire to challenge those

PIERS BLAIKIE

who might apply simple solutions of a technical or managerial nature to

‘problems’ that have complex politico-economic roots. Time and again his

work emphasises that ‘space is what the political makes it’ (1978: 289).

Note

1 Frank Ellis, ‘Farewell to Piers Blaikie and Stephen Biggs’, www.uea.ac.uk/der/

newsletter/ellis.htm.

Major works

Blaikie, P. (1975) Family Planning in India: Diffusion and Policy, London: Edward

Arnold.

—— (1985) The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries, Harlow,

Essex: Longman.

Blaikie, P. and Barnett, T. (1992) AIDS in Africa: Its Present and Future Impact,

London: Belhaven Press.

Blaikie, P. and Brookfield, H. (1987) Land Degradation and Society, London:

Methuen.

Blaikie, P., Cameron, J. and Seddon, D. (1980) Nepal in Crisis: Growth and

Stagnation at the Periphery, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

—— (2002) ‘Understanding 20 Years of Change in West-Central Nepal:

Continuity and Change in Lives and Ideas’, World Development 30(7): 1255–70.

Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., Davis, I. and Wisner, B. (1994) At Risk: Natural Hazards,

People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, London: Routledge.

Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T. and Davis, I. (2003) At Risk: Natural Hazards,

People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, London: Routledge, 2nd edn.

Further reading

Blaikie, P. (1970) ‘Implications of Selective Feedback in Aspects of Family

Planning Research for Policy-makers in India’, Population Studies 26(3): 437–

44.

—— (1971) ‘Spatial Organisation of Agriculture in Some North Indian Villages’,

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 53: 15–30.

—— (1978) ‘The Theory of the Spatial Diffusion of Innovations: A Spacious Cul-

de-sac’, Progress in Human Geography 2: 268–95.

—— (2000) ‘Development, Post-, Anti-, and Populist: A Critical Review’,

Environment and Planning A 32: 1033–50.

Blaikie, P., Cameron, J. and Seddon, D. (1977) The Effects of Roads in West-Central

Nepal, Norwich: University of East Anglia.

—— (2001) Nepal in Crisis: Growth and Stagnation at the Periphery, New Delhi:

Adroit Publishers, 2nd edn.

PIHG (1997) ‘Classics in Human Geography Revisited’, Progress in Human

Geography 21(1): 75–80.

Jonathan Rigg

PIERS BLAIKIE

JAMES M. ‘JIM’ BLAUT (1927–2000)

Jim Blaut was an early and rigorous critic of modernisation theory and

development policy. In common with another geographer, David Harvey,

Blaut’s work has influence far beyond that discipline. However, Blaut’s cri

tique of Eurocentrism and diffusionism as essential pillars of Western impe

rialist ideology and world view is quintessentially geographic. The works

he produced during the last ten years of his life (Blaut et al. 1992; Blaut

1993, 2000; but see also his earlier embryonic works, 1969, 1970a, 1976,

1987a) were detailed, scholarly, yet polemical treatments of the origins and

trajectory of a world system we know today as neo-liberal globalisation. In

this he was a pioneer, with such authors as Immanuel Wallerstein, Edward

Said, Franz Fanon, Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin, in concep-

tualising the world from the point of view of the subaltern, the colonised,

and the oppressed.

Blaut argues that diffusionists believe that ‘independent invention is

rather uncommon, and therefore not very important in culture change in

the short run and cultural evolution in the long run’ (1993: 11). In fact, he

finds that many historians and proponents of modernisation-as-develop-

ment believe that ‘only certain select communities are inventive’ (ibid.: 12).

Diffusionism’s basic model assumes that Greater Europe has been, and is,

the Inside (source of modernity and innovation) and that non-Europe is

the Outside. This division and the supposedly innate superiority of Europe

are based on the assumption that Europe enjoys a better mode of thinking

(rationality) as well as better climate and better soils (Blaut 1994).

Diffusionism then makes seven claims (ibid.: 14–17; see also Blaut 2000: 3–

12):

•

Europe naturally progresses and modernises.

•

Non-Europe naturally remains stagnant, unchanging, traditional and

backward.

•

The basic cause of European progress is an intellectual or spiritual factor,

a system of values.

•

Likewise, the backwardness of non-Europe is attributable to the absence

of these values, in particular the lack of rationality.

•

Non-Europe progresses by the diffusion of innovation from Europe.

•

The historical reverse flow of material wealth from non-Europe to

Europe is justifiable as a partial repayment for the priceless gift of

rationality, innovation and modernity.

•

Non-material reverse flow from non-Europe to Europe is entirely made

up of ideas that are ancient, savage, atavistic, uncivilised, or even evil.

JAMES M. ‘JIM’ BLAUT

This model of the world began to take shape in the fifteenth and six

teenth centuries, flowering fully in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu

ries. Although these propositions may seem extreme, a look at recent best-

sellers such as Ben Barber’s (1996) Jihad vs. McWorld or Thomas Barnett’s

(2004) The Pentagon’s New Map reveals what Blaut exposed as ‘inside’ and

‘outside’ alive and well. Barnett calls these the ‘core’ and the ‘gap’.

Blaut’s treatment is characterised by an exceptional level of detail and

meticulous historical research. Although only two of the planned three

volumes in his project to demolish Eurocentrism were finished by the time

of his death (Blaut 1993, 2000), he went a very long way toward that goal.

For students of development, these two volumes provide essential vaccine

against a new, virulent Crusader Virus that began to sweep the world from

the US White House and Pentagon shortly after 11 September 2001.

Although the notion of ‘spatial modernisation’ was unique to geography,

and therefore a specialist and obscure concept, assumptions about diffusion

and innovation run like fat throughout the marbled meat of development

theory and practice. Probably the best-known canon of that school is Walt

Rostow’s (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Mani-

festo. Blaut’s critique, therefore, provides as important a corrective lens as,

for example, Wolfgang Sachs’s archaeology of the concept of ‘develop-

ment’ (Sachs 1999) or of Said’s deconstruction of the idea of ‘orientalism’

(Said 1988).

What also sets Blaut’s contribution apart is its range and methodological

complexity, as well as its unity over nearly fifty years. Beginning his career

in the 1950s and 1960s as a cultural geographer concerned with the

practicalities of tropical agricultural production, he quickly began to criti-

cise top-down attempts to ‘modernise’ peasant agriculture by

‘tropicalising’ the techniques of European and North American farming

(Blaut 1967, 1970b). He also appreciated before many others the impor

tance of what has become known as indigenous technical knowledge – and

he employed, as did a few other geographers and anthropologists of his

generation, techniques that would later become standard for researchers

and NGOs alike under its contemporary name, participatory research. A

good example is Blaut’s study of farmer perceptions of the causes of soil

erosion in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains (Blaut 1959). Blaut had a life-long

preoccupation with methodological and theoretical questions that bal

anced and informed his ‘mud on the boots’ fieldwork and approach to the

practice of development. Therefore he also theorised his early work with

peasant farmers (Blaut 1979).

His experiences with the rich knowledge possessed by farmers in Singa

pore, Jamaica, St. Croix, Costa Rica and Venezuela led Blaut to more gen

eral questions. How do children learn, informally, to become farmers?

JAMES M. ‘JIM’ BLAUT

How do children learn to map and to navigate about on the surface of the

planet? These spawned a series of empirical studies and theoretical debates

that began in the 1970s and were still ongoing at his death.

The significance for Blaut’s contribution to development studies of this

work on place learning is twofold. First, he and his close colleague, David

Stea, discovered that mapping skills learned spontaneously very early in

childhood are actually ‘unlearned’ during formal schooling (Blaut and Stea

1974; Blaut 1997; Sowden et al. 1997). Second, Blaut built on a series of

cross-cultural studies of children’s place learning (Blades et al. 1998) to

develop a theory of mapping as a human universal (Blaut 1991; Stea et al.

1996). Eurocentrism and diffusionism – bedrocks of Western imperialism

to the present day – necessarily privilege one group’s knowledge and skill

over another’s. Just as those assumptions denigrated and ignored peasant

farmers’ local knowledge, so they also tend to ignore and, indeed, to

destroy early childhood mapping skill. Some of the fiercest academic

polemics to involve Jim Blaut centred not on his overt political ideas or

anti-imperialism, but over whether (following the Swiss psychologist

Piaget) children have built-in stages and limitations in their ability to

understand spatial relations. Seeing this as yet another Western, rationalist

idea, the roots of which go back to the eighteenth-century philosopher

Kant, Blaut coined the phrase ‘Can’tianism’ – employing a rather esoteric

pun (thus, the belief that ‘children can’t …’) and attempted to refute it,

asserting, ‘Children Can!’ (Sowden et al. 1997).

Ultimately, Eurocentrism must deny human universalities such as map-

ping and spontaneous, local innovation by peasants. Contemporary impe-

rialism may give lip service to the universality of human rights, but its

Eurocentric assumptions demand that the West name, enumerate, and

protect them. African philosophers – whose work Blaut knew – have also

countered the claim by Western academic philosophy that African cultures

have produced no ‘philosophy’ in the strict sense, only ‘folk wisdom’. Thus

one sees a unity in Blaut’s contribution that embraces his studies of tropical

agriculture, of place learning, and his critique of Eurocentrism.

Blaut integrated these themes nicely in a conference paper (Blaut 1994),

noting that Eurocentric diffusionism leads to certain typical claims about

tropical soils and family farmers in the tropics, namely:

•

Soils are difficult to manage, and small-scale farmers destroy them when

they try.

•

European guidance is necessary to bring these soils into sustainable

production.

JAMES M. ‘JIM’ BLAUT

From the 1930s onwards, tropical soil science was producing data that

contradicted these claims, yet the dominant assumptions remain and still

influence policy. In one striking example, he shows how ‘irrational’ refusal

to drain hillside farms on the contour is based on local knowledge that such

drainage is likely to lead to landslides.

Blaut’s contribution to development studies is also noteworthy for the

way in which he put his ideas into practice. He was a strong advocate of

Puerto Rican independence from the United States and wrote extensively

on the national question, publishing in both Spanish and English, in aid of

that struggle (Blaut 1987b; Blaut and Figueroa 1988). He also wrote a good

deal about ghettos as internal colonies, his intellectual efforts again guided

by his solidarity with the cause of Puerto Ricans (and other minority,

oppressed groups) (e.g. Blaut 1974). Blaut was also active promoting the

rights of the Palestinian people and in support of the anti-apartheid struggle

in South Africa.

Jim Blaut was born in New York City in 1927 and attended the Univer-

sity of Chicago at the young age of 16 (Matthewson and Stea 2003). He had

the unique experience of studying at the Imperial College of Tropical

Agriculture in Trinidad during the twilight of the British Empire. He then

completed his PhD at Louisiana State University – writing at great length

on a one-acre family farm in Singapore (Blaut 1953). While undertaking

this fieldwork, he was an instructor at the University of Malaysia (1951–3).

Blaut later held academic positions at Yale (1956–61), Cornell (1960),

Clark (1967–71) and the University of Illinois – Chicago Circle Campus

(1972–2000). He maintained a strong interest in the Caribbean, often

teaching and consulting there. Blaut served as agricultural consultant to the

Venezuelan Government (1963–4) and as UNESCO advisor to the

Dominican Republic’s Planning Board in 1964. He taught at the Univer

sity of Puerto Rico from 1961 to 1963 and again in 1971–4. He directed

the Caribbean Research Institute based in the Virgin Islands from 1964 to

1966 and acted as a consultant to the institute from 1966 to 1967. As late as

1982, Blaut was back in the field, climbing on foot into the mountains of

Grenada to interview young rastamen who produced charcoal for sale in

Georgetown, once again using the gifts he had been developing for three

decades for conversational-style interviews.

Blaut says of himself that he was an ‘activist as a teenager in the Old Pro

gressive Party (of Henry Wallace), working in Georgia’ (Blaut 2005). He

was later an activist in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and was arrested

(with a number of his graduate students) for blocking a draft board entrance

in Worcester, Massachusetts as a Vietnam War protest (ibid.). Blaut was an

enormously gifted and effective teacher who has left behind several

JAMES M. ‘JIM’ BLAUT

generations of left-wing intellectual workers, spread throughout the world

(Matthewson and Stea 2003; Wisner and Matthewson 2005).

The rewards for scholar-activism in bourgeois society include academic

censure. Blaut was denied promotion and tenure at Clark University

despite arriving at the decisive faculty meeting literally with a wheelbarrow

filled with his publications. The Graduate Student Association at Clark

University responded by voting no confidence in the then director of the

Graduate School of Geography, Saul Cohen. Later in life Blaut did receive

recognition, receiving the Association of American Geography’s ‘Distin

guished Scholar of the Year’ award in 1997.

Major works

Blaut, J.M. (1953) ‘The Economic Geography of a One-Acre Farm in Singapore: A

Study in Applied Microgeography’, Journal of Tropical Geography 1(1): 37–48.

—— (1983) ‘Nationalism as an Autonomous Force’, Science and Society 46: 1–23.

—— (1987a) ‘Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique’, Annals of the Association of

American Geographers 77: 30–47.

—— (1987b) The National Question: Decolonising the Theory of Nationalism, Atlantic

Highlands, NJ: Zed Books.

—— (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and

Eurocentric History, New York: Guilford Press.

—— (1994) ‘Eurocentrism, Diffusionism, and the Assessment of Tropical Soil

Productivity’, paper read at the International Conference on Advances in

Tropical Agriculture in the Twentieth Century and Prospects for the Twenty-

First Century, University of the West Indies, Trinidad, 4–9 September.

—— (1997) ‘Piagetian Pessimism and the Mapping Abilities of Young Children’,

Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, 1: 168–77.

—— (2000) Eight Eurocentric Historians, New York: Guilford.

—— (2005) ‘My Legacy (Assessed by Me, Jim Blaut, on 16 September, 2000.

Incomplete and Hasty with Some Redundancy)’, in Wisner, B. and

Matthewson, K. (eds), The Work and Legacy of J.M. Blaut, special issue of

Antipode, 37(5), November.

Blaut, J.M., with contributions by S. Amin, R. Dodgshon, A.G. Frank, and R. Palan,

and with an introduction by P.J. Taylor (1992) Fourteen Ninety-Two: The Debate

on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and History, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Further reading

Barber, B. (1996) Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the

World, New York: Ballantine.

Barnett, T. (2004) The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century, New

York: Putnam.

Blades, M., Blaut, J.M., Darvizeh, Z., Elguea, S., Sowden, S., Soni, D., Spencer,

C., Stea, D., Surajpaul, R. and Uttal, D. (1998) ‘A Cross-Cultural Study of

Young Children’s Mapping Abilities’, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers

NS 23: 269–77.

JAMES M. ‘JIM’ BLAUT

Blaut, J.M. (1959) ‘A Study of Cultural Determinants of Soil Erosion and

Conservation in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica’, Social and Economic Studies 8:

403–20.

—— (1967) ‘Geography and the Development of Peasant Agriculture’, in Cohen,

S.B. (ed.), Problems and Trends in American Geography, New York: Basic Books,

pp. 200–20.

—— (1969) ‘Jingo Geography: Part I’, Antipode 1(1): 10–13.

—— (1970a) ‘Geographic Models of Imperialism’, Antipode 2(1): 65–85.

—— (1970b) ‘Realistic Models of Peasant Agriculture’, in Field, A.J. (ed.), Town

and Country in the Third World, Boston: Schenkman, pp. 213–24.

—— (1974) ‘The Ghetto as an Internal Neocolony’, in Morrill, R. and

Eichenbaum, J. (eds), New Perspectives in Urban Location Theory, special issue of

Antipode 6(1): 37–42.

—— (1976) ‘Where Was Capitalism Born?’, Antipode 8(2): 1–11.

—— (1979) ‘Some Principles of Ethnogeography’, in Gale, S. and Olsson, G. (eds),

Philosophy in Geography, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 1–7.

—— (1991) ‘Natural Mapping’, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers,NS

16(1): 55–74.

Blaut, J. and Figueroa, L. (1988) Aspectos de la cuestión nacional en Puerto Rico, San

Juan: Editorial Claridad.

Blaut, J.M. and Stea, D. (1974) ‘Mapping at the Age of Three’, Journal of Geography

73(7): 5–9.

Matthewson, K. and Stea, D. (2003) ‘James M. Blaut (1927–2000)’, Annals of the

Association of American Geographers 93(1) (March): 214–22.

Rostow, W.W. (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sachs, W. (1999) ‘Archeology of the Development Idea’, in Sachs, W. (ed.), Planet

Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development, London: Zed Books,

chap. 1, pp. 3–22.

Said, E. (1988) Orientalism, New York: Vintage.

Sowden, S., Blaut, J., Stea, D., Blades, M. and Spencer, C. (1997) ‘Children Can’,

Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87(1): 152–8.

Stea, D., Blaut, J.M. and Stephens, J. (1996) ‘Mapping as a Cultural Universal’, in

Portugali, J. (ed.), The Construction of Cognitive Maps, Boston: Kluwer.

Wisner, B. and Matthewson, K. (eds) (2005) The Work and Legacy of J. M. Blaut,

special issue of Antipode 37(5), November.

Ben Wisner

NORMAN BORLAUG (1914–)

During the 1960s, rapid increases in agricultural yields, particularly in

wheat and rice, in parts of Asia and Latin America were heralded as a solu

tion to the problems of hunger facing millions of the world’s poorest peo

ple. The use of high-yielding varieties (HYVs), chemical fertiliser,

irrigation and machinery was termed ‘the Green Revolution’. Debates

about the relative successes and failures of these changes in agricultural

NORMAN BORLAUG

production continue, but Norman Borlaug, sometimes termed ‘the Father

of the Green Revolution’, remains almost unknown.

Borlaug was born in Cresco, Iowa, USA on 25 March 1914 and grew

up on a farm. His future interests were strongly influenced by this environ

ment. During the 1930s he studied at the University of Minnesota, where

he gained a BSc in Forest Management in 1937, followed by a Masters in

Plant Pathology in 1939 and a doctorate in 1942. His doctoral thesis was on

a common fungus, rust, which attacks a wide variety of crops. His work

focused on the movement of rust spores and found that they could travel

vast distances. He then worked as a microbiologist for the du Pont de

Nemours Foundation in Delaware, where his research concentrated on

agricultural chemical products such as fungicides and bactericides.

Borlaug’s scientific research focused on how technology could improve

agricultural yields. His convictions regarding the role that science could

play in agriculture were based not only on this work, but also on his obser

vations growing up in the US Midwest. The ‘Dust Bowl’ of the 1930s is

often used as an example of how farming methods inappropriate for a par-

ticular physical environment can cause long-term environmental, as well as

social, damage. As the economic depression of the 1930s worsened, farm-

ers sought to increase yields by intensifying production. This left large areas

of land without appropriate vegetation cover, leading to high levels of soil

erosion. Borlaug observed that it was not the use of scientific agricultural

techniques which caused these problems, but their misuse or lack of use.

He argued that those farmers who adopted appropriate scientifically

informed practices did not suffer the same losses.

The 1940s saw the beginning of large-scale ‘development assistance’

from the global North to global South. In 1943, the Rockefeller Founda-

tion, in conjunction with the Mexican government, set up the Compara

tive Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico. Borlaug went to

Mexico in 1944 to become head of this Program. This provided him with

the opportunity to put his ideas into practice.

The Program was meant to concentrate on teaching Mexican farmers

how to improve their agricultural techniques, but under Borlaug’s leader

ship it also developed a very strong focus on innovation. Borlaug was

determined to breed new forms of wheat that would help increase yields

and reduce risk for poor farmers. These innovations included developing a

strain of wheat (ceredo) which was insensitive to the number of hours of

sunlight in a day and, most famously, varieties of dwarf wheat. Borlaug and

his fellow researchers argued that traditional wheat’s long stalks limited

yields, partly because of the energy expended on growing the inedible long

stalks rather than the ears of wheat, and also because tall stalks often got

damaged in wind or rain, so making harvesting more difficult. Dwarf

NORMAN BORLAUG

strains had much higher yields if grown with appropriate fertiliser and irri

gation. Experiments on dwarf rice strains were being conducted at the

same time at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines

and at China’s Human Rice Research Institute.

In 1963 the Mexican Program was transformed into a new institution

known as the International Centre for the Improvement of Maize and

Wheat, often referred to by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT (Centro

Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo). Given the success of the

dwarf wheat programme in Mexico, Borlaug was impatient to transfer the

technology and practices to other parts of the world where starvation and

hunger were much more widespread. This led him to focus on India and

Pakistan. At that time, seed distribution was controlled by state companies,

so he focused his attention on these organisations. Borlaug’s focus on

wheat, rather than indigenous crops of the subcontinent, was driven not

because he felt that wheat was intrinsically better than lentils or other local

staples, but rather because high-yielding varieties of indigenous crops had

not been developed, wheat can grow in a wide variety of physical environ-

ments, and it provides significant calories. This latter point was key as

Borlaug’s mission was to address the perceived mismatch between popula-

tion size and food supply.

Unsurprisingly, there were significant obstacles to his attempts to intro-

duce HYVs to India and Pakistan as it represented a mammoth shift in

cultural acceptance and understandings of the role of particular foodstuffs,

as well as farming methods. Borlaug would not give up and eventually the

governments agreed to limited adoption of HYV wheat because of the

widespread famine in parts of their countries. Borlaug often argued that the

military hostilities between India and Pakistan in 1965 meant that he was

able to introduce his ideas with little government interference once

approval had been given. As well as using HYVs, irrigation was important,

as was the use of inorganic fertiliser.

Yields increased very rapidly and by 1968 Pakistan was self-sufficient in

wheat and by 1974 India was self-sufficient in all cereals. These figures

were particularly timely as neo-Malthusian ideas about the ‘population

timebomb’ were becoming increasingly widespread in the global North.

India was often used as an example of how rapid population growth was

outstripping food supply and would lead to widespread famine, disease and

war. Borlaug argued that Malthus’s predictions did not take into account

scientific advances in food production such as those he promoted. How

ever, Borlaug was, and continues to be, concerned about population

growth and its implications for food security.

In 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This reflected the

awareness that precarious food supply can lead to major tensions and

NORMAN BORLAUG

violence between individuals, communities and countries. In his accep

tance speech, Borlaug stated that ‘food is the moral right of all who are born

into this world’. He acknowledged that people had other rights as well, but

that ‘without it [food] all other components of social justice are meaning

less’. The acceptance speech demonstrates his passion for practical and

effective research, and his drive to address problems of food supply

throughout the poorest regions of the world. His commitment to develop

ing research capacity in the countries of the South is also apparent. For

example, in his overview of the early work of the Mexico Program, he

stressed the provision of training and fellowship programmes, emphasising

that ‘researchers in pursuit of irrelevant academic butterflies were discour

aged’ (Borlaug 1970). Borlaug’s own career focus on the practical imple

mentation of scientific developments, rather than the writing of academic

papers, perhaps partially explains his low profile among the academic com

munity working on ‘development’, particularly in the global North.

Borlaug retired in 1979, but this did not represent an end to his work.

Since then he has been particularly involved with research and projects to

promote improved agricultural practices in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite

earlier financial support from charitable organisations such as the

Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and multilateral agencies including the

World Bank, a significant amount of Borlaug’s more recent work has been

funded by a Japanese foundation. In 1986 he helped launch the Sasakawa-

Global 2000 Program. The work of this Association involves Green

Revolution-style projects in numerous countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Borlaug is also Distinguished Professor in the Soil and Crop Sciences

Department at Texas A & M University.

Borlaug and supporters of his methods claim that the increasing reluc

tance of US-based organisations to fund his work reflects the growing

power of environmental movements. The use of non-indigenous crops

and HYVs, as well as the increased use of irrigation, pesticides and inor

ganic fertiliser has been blamed for decreasing soil fertility, water pollution,

soil erosion and other environmental problems, particularly in marginal

environments. In addition, while the Green Revolution may have made

dramatic increases in yields at the start, these increases are impossible to sus

tain. Finally, the social impacts of the Green Revolution have been high

lighted. In the vast majority of cases Borlaug is not criticised directly, but

rather the changes in agricultural practices which he promoted. For exam

ple, given the costs of HYVs, pesticides and inorganic fertilisers, the Green

Revolution, it is argued, has often exacerbated existing class and caste divi

sions. While richer farmers can afford these new inputs and benefit from

increased yields, poorer farmers are left behind and may have to sell their

land and become landless labourers or urban migrants.

NORMAN BORLAUG

Hunger and starvation remain daily realities for millions of people in the

global South today. New agricultural technologies and the possibilities

opened up by genetic modification are, some argue, the answers to these

problems. Borlaug supports the use of genetic modification, arguing that

opponents who claim such processes are ‘unnatural’ fail to understand the

genetic mixing that happens in nature without human interference. He is

also passionate in his criticisms of many groups and individuals who, he

claims, lobby against the use of pesticides, fertilisers and GM crops from the

‘comfort’ of Europe or the USA.

These views, however, do not necessarily reflect the criticisms that cer

tain forms of agricultural practice and the use of GM seeds, in particular,

have received from people living in the global South. In India and Mexico,

for example, despite past crop yield increases, there have been widespread

protests against GM crops. Borlaug admits that at times scientists have not

been successful in presenting their work effectively, implying that if people

were presented with the ‘facts’ then there would be no protests.

When discussing his current work in sub-Saharan Africa, as in an inter-

view in 2000 (Bailey 2000), Borlaug mentions continued obstacles to

meeting individuals’ food needs. While agricultural technology may

improve yields, there are issues of distribution to consider. This involves

not only physical distribution in terms of infrastructure, but also social dis-

tribution, encompassed in Amartya Sen’s ideas of entitlement. Sufficient

food may be produced, but if you do not have enough money to buy it

then you will still starve. For some development theorists and practitioners,

it is these issues of distribution which should now get far greater attention

than the focus on increasing global food supply.

Norman Borlaug’s commitment and passion in addressing a key devel

opment debate of how to feed an increasing population with a finite

amount of land is admirable. His focus on implementing projects, influ

encing governments and working with local people demonstrates not only

his scientific credentials, but also his ability to adapt and work within spe

cific social and cultural contexts. While the enthusiasm that greeted the

‘Green Revolution’ in the 1960s and 1970s may have been overly optimis

tic, the Green Revolution’s contribution to saving millions of people from

starvation cannot be underestimated. Borlaug’s Nobel Prize acceptance

speech stressed that he was just one part of a large team which deserved rec

ognition. This is certainly true, but without Borlaug’s vision and determi

nation the team’s results may have been less successful and much less widely

implemented.

NORMAN BORLAUG

Major works

Borlaug, N. (1970) ‘The Green Revolution: Peace and Humanity’, speech on the

occasion of the awarding of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Available from

www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jan/borlaug/speech.htm.

—— (2002) ‘Agriculture and Peace: The Role of Science and Technology in the

21st Century’, U Thant Distinguished Lecture Series, United Nations

University Tokyo, October. Available from www.unu.edu/uthant_lectures/.

Further reading

Bailey, P. (2000) ‘Billions Served’, Reason, April. Available from reason.com/

0004/fe.rb.billions.shtml.

CIMMYT www.cimmyt.org/.

Easterbrook, G. (1997) ‘Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity’, The Atlantic, January

1997. Available from www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jan/borlaug/borlaug.

htm.

The Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation: www.normanborlaug.org.

The Sasakawa Africa Association: www.saa-tokyo.org.

Katie Willis

ESTER BOSERUP (1910–99)

Ester Boserup was a development economist, who worked as a civil servant

for two decades and later as an independent researcher and consultant for

the United Nations and its agencies concerning issues and problems in

developing countries.

Boserup was born in Copenhagen on 18 May 1910, joined the Univer-

sity of Copenhagen in 1929 and graduated in 1935 as ‘cand. polit.’. The

main emphasis of her studies during the Great Depression was theoretical

economics but she also attended lectures in sociology and agricultural pol

icy. Part of her degree work led to a paper comparing Marx and Keynes, a

shorter version of which was published in the Danish economic journal,

Nationaløkonomisk tidsskrift (Boserup 1936). She involved herself for a time

with a small group of independent socialist intellectuals and later continued

to participate in the socialist Danish Clarté movement.

After graduation she worked for twenty years as a civil servant, first a

decade in the Danish economic administration

and then, from 1947, in

Geneva with the Research and Planning Division of the Economic Com

mission for Europe, where her work contributed greatly to the early suc

cess of the annual Economic Surveys.

In 1957 she and her husband, Mogens, moved to New Delhi, accepting

a proposal from Gunnar Myrdal to engage in a joint study of South and

Southeast Asian agriculture. She travelled extensively within India,

ESTER BOSERUP

discussing with Indian agricultural experts and advisers and experiencing

unfamiliar agricultural systems. She soon came to the opinion that ‘the gen

erally accepted theory of zero marginal productivity and agrarian surplus

population in densely populated developing countries was an unrealistic

theoretical construction’ (Boserup 1999). Her and her husband’s develop

ing scepticism towards prevailing development theory put them at odds

with Myrdal’s evaluation of the Asian situation. Unable to continue in the

joint study, they returned to Denmark when their contract expired in May

1960, after delivering the agreed chapter to Asian Drama (Myrdal 1969).

Thereafter, she accepted short-term consultancies but continued to

reflect on her experiences from Asia and consequently wrote the contro

versial book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (1965). In this book she

argued that population growth is the major cause of agricultural change and

that the principal mechanism of change is the intensification of land use

through increases in the frequency of cropping. While such intensification

would not occur without population growth, which reduces labour pro-

ductivity – a contentious claim that remains unproven (Grigg 1979) – it is,

she argues, a necessary collective response to population pressure. Further-

more, such intensification leads to technological advances, such as the

adoption of new fallowing systems, which require new tools and tech-

niques and which shape institutions, land tenure systems and settlement

forms (Grigg 1979). This theory overturns the direction of causation

implicit in Malthusian and neo-Malthusian approaches, which see tech-

nological change as an autonomous process inducing rather than proceed-

ing from population growth. Economists were generally unenthusiastic

about Boserup’s model but it refocused many modern debates and stimu

lated further thought on the issues (Giovanni 2001). Other responses, such

as expansion at the extensive margin, adoption of new crops or out-migra

tion, can also relieve population pressure, and other influences such as

urban growth or development of trade can stimulate agrarian change, yet

the thesis remains ‘a fruitful interpretation of agrarian change’ (Grigg

1979). In spite of all its shortcomings, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth,

which Boserup was invited to discuss at the International Geographical

Union in 1967, remains a small masterpiece of enduring importance.

In 1964–65 she spent a year in Dakar, where her husband was director

of the United Nations Institut de Développement Economique et de

Planification (IDEP). During this period she also became a consultant to

the Center for Industrial Development (later UNIDO) and started focus

ing on the linkages between industry and agriculture and both rural–urban

and rural–rural migration. Her earlier work had denied the Malthusian

claim that marginal productivity would be reduced to zero on agricultural

land and she now emphasised the role of desire for money incomes rather

ESTER BOSERUP

than land shortage in generating the large labour migration from poor sub

sistence villages to urban, mining and export-producing centres. She was

intrigued by the importance of the gender division of labour to the pattern

of African migration. Predominantly male migrants could leave wives and

children to take care of themselves for long periods, since in traditional vil

lages it was the women and children who supplied nearly all the subsistence

food and fetched water and fuel for cooking. Her interest led her to gain

funds to gather data on the hours worked by men and women in both paid

and unpaid work, including domestic services, the gathering of fuel and

water and so on, in addition to agricultural work and non-agricultural

production and services.

Many students of gender studies will have first come across Ester

Boserup’s work through her well-known book, Woman’s Role in Economic

Development (1970), which formed the output of this project and provided

intellectual inspiration for awareness of this important topic. Her work

sought to make the ‘invisible woman’ visible by drawing attention to the

economic contribution made, for example, by women in agricultural fami-

lies, virtually all of whom, despite their economic productiveness, were

formally classified as outside the labour force, as housewives or ‘non-active’

persons. She highlighted the role of what she called the ‘bazaar and service

sector’, stressing that what many considered as largely concealed unem-

ployment was in fact production of necessary goods and services with

preindustrial technology catering largely for the market of low income

groups (1970: 175–86). Such activities were later coined as the ‘informal

sector’ by the United Nations’ International Labour Organisation (ILO).

This highlights how effortlessly she integrated into theory, analysis and pol-

icy prescription the roles of women as both producers and entrepreneurs

and as consumers and reproducers, thereby demonstrating her ability to

bring the theoretical rigour of a critical economist to bear on case study

material.

In 1970 she received the Rosenkjaer Pris of the Danish Broadcasting

Company and took the opportunity to popularise her ideas on economic

development and the sexual division of labour in six radio broadcasts. She

also suggested that improvement of women’s education and status might

lead to a reduction of family size (Boserup 1970: 224–5). Such ideas have

been gradually moving into the mainstream among agencies concerned

with development and the empowerment of the poor. This had influence

on her being appointed as a vice chairman in 1972 of the UN Symposium

on Population and Development in Cairo, in preparation for the UN

World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974.

In 1981 she published the book Population and Technological Change: A

Study of Long-Term Trends, in which she extended the scope of her earlier

ESTER BOSERUP

theories on population growth and adoption of new tools and techniques

in agriculture to include non-agricultural activity. Throughout history,

both the invention of new technologies and their spread have been

demand-induced. Even the most ‘primitive’ people speculate and experi

ment with new methods, materials and weapons, when the motivation for

change becomes strong. Here population growth plays a significant role.

She suggested that many technologies can be properly exploited only if the

population is dense enough. Population growth makes urban civilisation

possible. Population size enables labour specialisation and thus allows

economies of scale to be realised in industrial production.

Through the following years she continued to research the interrela

tionships between population, family structure, status of women, national

culture and economic development, both in rural and in urban areas,

always arguing for recognition of the complexity of the issues taking all the

relevant determinants into consideration, instead of using simplified demo-

graphic models. The role of fertility remained a central concern and she

argued that high fertility may result in both higher agricultural production

and higher investments and savings in kind.

Her contribution was recognised through the award of three honorary

doctorates: in Agricultural Sciences by the Agricultural University of

Wageningen, The Netherlands, in 1978; in economics by the University of

Copenhagen in 1979; and in Human Sciences by Brown University, Prov-

idence, USA in 1983. In 1989 she was elected Foreign Associate of the

National Academy of Sciences in Washington on an interdisciplinary vote.

She spent the rest of her career as a consultant and independent researcher.

It is important to put her work into the context of the period when she

worked. She was in a small minority both as a female civil servant and

development economist.

Much of her work appeared as discussion papers

which informed UN publications and lectures at symposia and invited

conferences. She challenged conventional wisdom first with regard to the

relations between agrarian systems and population, and later with regard to

women in development and technological change. Her models have stood

the test of time. Her ideas and arguments were mainly exposed to the aca

demic community through her much later work in the 1970s and 1980s

(aged in her sixties and seventies) mainly through her three books (1965,

1970, 1981) and some journal articles. All this was managed without the

benefit of a university post. Shortly before her death on 24 September

1999, she published an unpretentious and objective historical account of all

her published work (Boserup 1999). Ester Boserup’s work provoked

multidisciplinary debates and has influenced various disciplines, particu

larly anthropology, demography, agricultural economics, geography and

sociology.

ESTER BOSERUP

Though she was an economics graduate, she saw the limitations of nar

row economic analysis. She emphasised this especially for least-developed

countries for which the use of monetised transactions for production, con

sumption, investment and income (both personal and national income) as

proxies for totals including non-monetised transactions led to false conclu

sions (Boserup 1996). She was at times very critical of classical economics

and its assumption of fixed capacities of land, labour and capital, all subject

to variable capacity utilisation. She argued for long-term analysis focusing

on changes in the capacities themselves and emphasised the need for this to

address changes in those structures which economists usually leave to be

studied by other scientific disciplines, for instance national cultures. Such

models therefore need – like her own – to be based on interdisciplinary

understanding and in later papers she attempted to lay out an overarching

framework for long-term interdisciplinary modelling (Boserup 1996).

Such a framework involves delineation of the flows of pressure between six

structures: environment; population; technology level; occupational

structure; family structure; and culture.

Her work concentrated on examining human society and its processes

of social change, especially in the context of dynamic relationships between

natural, economic, cultural and political structures, while evaluating both

economic and non-economic factors. Her analyses of rapid technological

change are even relevant today in the context of the processes of

globalisation and social change in developing countries. Reflecting on

technological changes in the 1970s and 1980s, she concluded that rapid

technological change has created conflicts with national culture through its

radical influence on the way of life: cultural attitudes and behaviour, which

may have been rational before, are no longer so. But many groups and gov

ernments attempt to bring about economic development and technologi

cal change without cultural change, and this leads to serious conflicts

within and between countries. The importance of these problems for eco

nomic development is overlooked by economists, when they make the

assumption that rational behaviour is the rule whatever the circumstances

(Boserup 1995). She elaborated on the positive and negative effects of tech

nological change both in the short and long run, and on the need for gov

ernment control of the private sector, both nationally and internationally,

to ensure that it uses sustainable technology.

Notes

1 As a chief of the planning office she was responsible for estimating future export

earnings and suggesting the distribution of import licences by commodity and

country, discriminating against luxuries and items that could be obtained by

ESTER BOSERUP

Danish production and against countries which did not buy much from

Denmark.

2 Women have probably made greater inroads into rhetoric, but there are still

concerns regarding the inclusion of women in the material as well as the

personnel of economics. See website of the Royal Economic Society, Women

in Economics www.res.org.uk. At the 2002 World Bank ABCDE seminar,

Ravi Kanbur pointed out that most of the economics profession still adheres to

and teaches the unitary ‘black box’ model of the household, which effectively

makes gender allocations a private matter.

Major works

Boserup, E. (1936) ‘Nogle centrale økonomiske spørgsmål I lys af den marxistiske

teori’ (Some Central Economic Issues in Light of Marxian Theory),

Nationaløkonomisk Tidsskrift 75: 421–35.

—— (1965) The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agriculture under

Population Pressure, London and Chicago: George Allen and Unwin. (Reprinted

by Earthscan, London, 1993.)

—— (1970) Woman’s Role in Economic Development, Earthscan, London.

—— (1981) Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—— (1995) ‘Obstacles to Advancement of Women during Development’, in T.

Paul Schultz (ed.), Investment in Women’s Human Capital, Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press, pp. 51–60.

—— (1996) ‘Development Theory: An Analytical Framework and Selected

Applications’, Population and Development Review 22(3): 505–15.

—— (1999) My Professional Life and Publications 1929–1998, Copenhagen:

Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen.

Further reading

Giovanni, F. (2001) ‘Review of Ester Boserup, “The Conditions of Agricultural

Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure’’ ’,

Economic History Services 16 April 2001 (URL: http://www.eh.net/

bookreviews/library/federico.shtml).

Grigg, D. (1979) ‘Ester Boserup’s Theory of Agrarian Change: A Critical Review’,

Progress in Human Geography 3(1): 64–83.

Myrdal, G. (1969) Asian Drama: An Enquiry into the Poverty of Nations, 3 vols, New

York: Twentieth Century Fund.

Schultz, T.P. (1990) Economic and Demographic Relationships in Development,

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Articles selected, edited and

introduced by T. Paul Schultz.)

Vandana Desai

ESTER BOSERUP

HAROLD BROOKFIELD (1926–)

It is rare for geographers to be seen as critical thinkers on development

issues. Indeed, even this collection, edited by a geographer, includes just

three. Of these Harold Brookfield is assuredly the doyen. Indeed, one of

the others, Terry McGee, described Brookfield as ‘the acknowledged

“guru” of development geography’ (1978: 71). His contributions to devel

opment studies range from a much lauded book on interdependent devel

opment, which emphasised the necessity for development to be seen in a

diversity of interlocking ways, a longstanding focus on local studies (tied to

the belief that indigenous knowledge is a key to development) and the

environment and sustainability. Such diverse interests were shaped around

a search for pragmatic solutions and the eschewing of arid theorising,

dogma, ever-changing semantics and political correctness. While some

contemplate the lives and livelihoods of those they refer to as ‘others’,

Brookfield preferred the language of everyday life, of ordinary people and

their problems, and was unafraid to use words such as poverty.

Harold Brookfield grew up in southern England, completing his BA

and PhD degrees at the London School of Economics. The topic of his

PhD thesis, post-eighteenth-century urban development in coastal Sussex,

completed in 1950, may partly have accounted for the peripatetic life that

ensued. After briefly being Lecturer in Geography at Birkbeck College,

London, he became Lecturer in charge of the infant Department of Geog-

raphy at the University of Natal. There he first began to engage with devel-

opment and social justice issues concerning South Africa and Mauritius.

After nearly three years he left for the University of New England (UNE)

in Australia, the first of many moves to and within Australia that eventually

led to him spending over half his life in Australia, and has made him the

most distinguished of contemporary Australian geographers. At UNE, in

the small town of Armidale, he found attitudes to the indigenous Australian

population very similar to those in South Africa (Rugendyke 2005). From

there he went on to the Australian National University (ANU), eventually

his longstanding academic home, though Chairs soon followed at Pennsyl

vania State University, McGill University and Melbourne University, with

a two-year period as a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies,

University of Sussex. By 1982 he had returned to ANU where he

remained, publishing substantial works well into official retirement.

Early work on the historical geography of southern England and Ireland

was soon followed by detailed work in South Africa, where he wrote an

early critique of apartheid (Brookfield 1957), and in Mauritius where he

continued his interest in the evolution of plural societies. The shift to ANU

HAROLD BROOKFIELD

in 1957 brought the start of a lifelong fascination with Papua New Guinea

and detailed fieldwork in the highlands of PNG where contact had been

relatively recent. Collaboration with the anthropologist Paula Brown

brought his first major book on the region (Brookfield and Brown 1963).

Other books on Pacific market places, and the extraordinarily innovative

and successful text Melanesia (Brookfield with Hart 1971), marked his asso

ciation with the region and emphasised his own commitment to both

small-scale local studies and the comparative method, ‘characterised by the

careful collection of data and intimate knowledge of a region built up

through many years’ (McGee 1978: 70). In some respects that commit

ment became the hallmark of work on the Pacific region, celebrated in his

edited collection The Pacific in Transition (1973) – mainly the work of his

own students and colleagues. The focus on PNG was so strong that the

prominent American geographer, Marvin Mikesell, identified a ‘New

Guinea syndrome’ where ‘this once remote and mysterious island has

played a role in the recent history of cultural geography comparable to the

influence of Sauer and his students from Mexico’ (1978: 8).

As his colleague Oskar Spate observed, this work was valuable because

of ‘the realisation that other people also had ways of life which were not

based on classical economics, but were not irrational and were tied up with

their culture and environment and hence the Brookfield style with its close

links to anthropology’ (Rugendyke 2005). A focus on problems, the com-

parative method and indigenous authority was innovative. Brookfield

himself believed that a key contribution was the ‘bringing of geographers

and geographical work into contact with that of other disciplines which

were concerned with people and land, anthropology and pre-history, in

particular’ (ibid.). Despite a focus on comparison, Brookfield largely

avoided quantitative research methodologies. He was critical of the study

of patterns and processes of development derived from statistical methods,

arguing for ‘a process-oriented discipline in which the question “How?”

should be at least as important as the question “Why?” ’. In addressing the

former question, he ‘found that it was far easier to seek cause and effect at

microscale, where individual decision makers could be seen in action. I

therefore advocated this scale of work to my colleagues’ (Brookfield 1984:

35). Remarkably, in this sense, his empirical focus at the local scale, on the

interactions between people, their cultures and their environments, rather

than on quantitative methodologies and spatial models, pre-empted post-

modern reflections that ‘there is no universal or unique understanding of

development or the environment’ (Simon 2003: 35).

Brookfield’s work in Papua New Guinea especially was with a thor

oughly multidisciplinary group of prehistorians, economists and anthro

pologists and, while at the research school in Canberra, ‘transdisciplinary

HAROLD BROOKFIELD

exchange was as important as interdisciplinary discussion’ (Brookfield

1984: 27). He has said, ‘I became very much associated with anthropolo

gists, so much that at one stage Anthony Forge said to me that “you are an

anthropologist who earns his pay masquerading as a geographer” ’

(Rugendyke 2005). Indeed, it is not surprising that Brookfield chose to

title his recollections of that period of geography the ‘Experiences of an

Outside Man’ – an iconoclast tangling with anthropology and other disci

plines and aghast at the irrelevance of the quantitative revolution. Culture

is written on the land and Brookfield has said he would most like to be

remembered for his work in cultural ecology.

Soon afterwards his work extended to the smaller islands of the Carib

bean (though he wrote little directly on this) and later to the smaller eastern

islands of Fiji. Perhaps surprisingly he never directly addressed issues related

to size other than in one book chapter (Brookfield 1975b). Simultaneously

the wide-ranging reflections on development that were evident in Melane-

sia were developed further in the companion volume Colonialism, Develop-

ment and Independence: The Case of the Melanesian Islands in the South Pacific

(1972). Together they drew together strands of culture, history and geog-

raphy, in a broad political, social and economic context, at a time when the

Melanesian nations were taking the first faltering steps towards independ-

ence. These diverse issues came together at a world scale in his magisterial

Interdependent Development (1975a) a tour de force later to become a ‘classic in

human geography revisited’ (Corbridge 1996; O’Connor 1996). That

book began a theoretical backlash against the irrelevance of several geo-

graphical traditions, and argued the case for a more historical and environ-

mental perspective, allied, however, to an empirical position that was to

become stronger in the future.

Brookfield always emphasised that his own principal long-term interest

was the ‘adaptation of the use and management of land to variability and

change in society, economy and natural environment’: the ‘soul’ of geogra

phy (Brookfield 2004: 40). That was evident and two further books estab

lished his reputation in this area. The first, largely neglected because of its

seemingly peripheral focus, was an intricate account of the lives of villagers

in the eastern islands of Fiji which brought together a number of human

and physical geographers, while drawing on the preliminary work of eco

nomists and others (Bayliss-Smith et al. 1988). In some respects that was a

local version of the jointly written Land Degradation and Society (Blaikie and

Brookfield 1987) that had appeared in the previous year. There and else

where Brookfield stressed the interdisciplinary analysis of environmental

issues, arguing that processes of land degradation cannot be understood if

divorced from their political, social or economic contexts. In its turn it too

became a classic to be reprinted three times (see Blaikie in this volume). By

HAROLD BROOKFIELD

then the focus on the environment, the leitmotiv of Brookfield’s work, had

been drawn into wider debates over development. Interdependent Develop

ment was described as ‘a striking anticipation of green development think

ing’ (Corbridge 1996: 86) and what sounded ‘remarkably like a call for

what would now be called “sustainable development” ’ (O’Connor 1996:

88).

While Brookfield never lost interest in the Pacific, and especially PNG,

his interests began to shift towards Asia, and a long period of work in

Malaysia brought a renewed focus on environmental issues. It also heralded

work on both urbanisation and industrialisation (Brookfield et al. 1991;

Brookfield 1994) in a nation that was changing much faster than the island

states of the Pacific and elsewhere. Renewed focus on the environment

resulted in a book on environmental change in Borneo and Malaysia

(Brookfield et al. 1995) and a growing emphasis on agrodiversity. That led

to Brookfield’s commitment to the more than decade-long United

Nations University’s project on People, Land Management and Environ-

mental Change (PLEC) that has preoccupied him ever since.

The PLEC project, an acronym very close to the Tok Pisin (PNG)

word for village, ples, began in 1992 – the year of the Earth Summit in Rio

de Janeiro – as an initiative to examine relationships between population

and environmental change in rural areas. The original focus was on

research, centred around five ‘clusters’ – PNG, Amazonia, West and East

Africa and montane south-east Asia – but it evolved into a practical con-

cern for agrodiversity, defined in 1994 as ‘the many ways in which farmers

use the natural diversity of the environment for production, including not

only their choice of crops but also their management of land, water and

biota as a whole’ (Brookfield and Padoch 1994: 9). Four years later, PLEC

joined the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and became a large demon

stration and capacity-building project, involving the participation of small

farmers as experts in conservation and sustainable development, alongside

indigenous researchers and institutions. Again this project invoked the

comparative method, to ‘bring together “bottom-up” research in different

regions’ (ibid.), and enable hypothesis generation, with an emphasis on

indigenous management practices. At a time when others might have

retired, or merely gazed from distant offices, Brookfield continued to

emphasise and demonstrate the value of fieldwork and commitment.

Amidst many papers and reports, three more books emerged from the

PLEC project (Brookfield 2001; Brookfield et al. 2002, 2003); these are

most unlikely to be the last words.

For half a century Brookfield has worked in the people-environment

tradition, with one reviewer noting his ‘many original and insightful con

tributions to issues of tropical human ecology and development’ which

HAROLD BROOKFIELD

‘furnishes significant conceptual gunpowder for the long-awaited resurrec

tion of the human-environment tradition in geography’ (Airriess 1996: 3).

As many geographers sometimes uneasily shifted their focus from troubling

development issues, Brookfield remained true to the needs of the disci

pline, and allied disciplines, ever seeking to raise their focus beyond their

navels. He emphasised the necessity for theory to be closely linked to prac

tice, triumphed the ethnographic method that gave voice to the partici

pants in development, cherished interdisciplinary approaches, led the way

in recognising the relationship between cultural ecology, the environment

and development and raised awareness of humanistic values.

Major works

Bayliss-Smith, T.P., Bedford, R.D., Brookfield, H.C. and Latham, M. (1988)

Islands, Islanders and the World: The Colonial and Post-colonial Experience of Eastern

Fiji, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blaikie, P. and Brookfield, H. (eds) (1987) Land Degradation and Society, London

and New York: Methuen.

Brookfield, H.C. (1957) ‘Some Geographical Applications of the Apartheid and

Partnership Policies in Southern Africa’, Transactions of the Institute of British

Geographers 23: 225–47.

—— (1972) Colonialism, Development and Independence: The Case of the Melanesian

Islands in the South Pacific, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—— (1973) The Pacific in Transition, London: Arnold.

—— (1975a) Interdependent Development, London: Methuen.

—— (1975b) ‘Multum in parvo: Some Questions about Diversification in Small

Countries’, in P. Selwyn (ed.), Development Policy in Small Countries, London:

Croom Helm, pp. 54–76.

—— (1984) ‘Experiences of an Outside Man’, in Billinge, M., Gregory, D. and

Martin, R., Recollections of a Revolution: Geography as Spatial Science, London:

Macmillan Press, pp. 27–38.

—— (1994) Transformation with Industrialisation in Peninsular Malaysia, Kuala

Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

—— (2001) Exploring Agrodiversity, New York: Columbia University Press.

—— (2004) ‘American Geography and One Non-American Geographer’,

GeoJournal, 59: 39–41.

Brookfield, H.C. and Brown, P. (1963) Struggle for Land: Agriculture and Group

Territories among the Chimbu of the New Guinea Highlands, Melbourne: Oxford

University Press.

Brookfield, H.C., Hadi, A.S. and Mahmud, Z. (1991) The City in the Village, Kuala

Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

Brookfield, H.C. with Hart, D. (1971) Melanesia: A Geographical Interpretation of an

Island World, London: Methuen.

Brookfield, H.C. and Padoch, C. (1994) ‘Appreciating Agrodiversity: A Look at

the Dynamism and Diversity of Indigenous Farming Practices’, Environment

36(5): 6–45.

Brookfield, H.C., Padoch, C., Parsons, H. and Stocking, M. (2002) Cultivating

Biodiversity, London: Intermediate Technology Publishing.

HAROLD BROOKFIELD

Brookfield, H.C., Parsons, H. and Brookfield, M. (2003) Agrodiversity: Learning

from Farmers Across the World, Tokyo: United Nations University Press.

Brookfield, H.C., Potter, L. and Byron, Y. (1995) In Place of the Forest:

Environmental and Social Transformation in Borneo and the Eastern Malay Peninsula,

Tokyo: United Nations University Press.

Further reading

Airriess, C. (1996) Review of Brookfield, H.C., Potter, L. and Byron, Y., 1995: In

Place of the Forest: Environmental and Socio-Economic Transformation in Borneo and

the Eastern Malay Peninsula, in The Geographical Review 86: 611–13.

Connell, J. (1998) ‘Development Studies in Australian Geography’, Australian

Geographical Studies 26: 157–71.

Connell, J. and Waddell, E. (2005) ‘Introduction: That Most Remarkable of

Outside Men – Harold Brookfield’s Intellectual Legacy’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint

46(2): 192–33.

Corbridge, S. (1996) Classics in Human Geography Revisited, on Brookfield, H.,

1975, Interdependent Development, Commentary 1, Progress in Human Geography

20: 85–6.

McGee, T. (1978) ‘The Geography of Development: Some Thoughts for the

Future’, Australian Geographer 14: 69–71.

McTaggart, D. (1974) ‘Structuralism and Universalism in Geography: Reflections

on Contributions by H.C. Brookfield’, The Australian Geographer 12: 510–16.

Mikesell, M. (1978) ‘Tradition and Innovation in Cultural Geography’, Annals of

the Association of American Geographers 68: 1–16.

O’Connor, A. (1996) Classics in Human Geography Revisited, on Brookfield, H.,

1975, Interdependent Development, Commentary 2, Progress in Human Geography

20: 87–8.

Rugendyke, B. (2005) ‘W(h)ither Development Geography in Australia?’,

Geographical Research 43(3): 306–18.

Simon, D. (2003) ‘Dilemmas of Development and the Environment in a

Globalising World: Theory, Policy and Praxis’, Progress in Development Studies

3(1): 5–41.

John Connell and Barbara Rugendyke

FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO (1931–)

Fernando Henrique Cardoso was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1931

and trained as a sociologist at the University of São Paulo. He became a

prolific author and one of the most distinguished social scientists in the

world, but also a successful political leader who served as President of

Brazil. His contributions to development thinking are often referred to his

study of dependency and development in Latin America during the late

1960s and early 1970s. Less attention has been devoted to the evolution of

his ideas around development during his transition from scholar to political

leader since the 1980s. Many of those ideas appeared in speeches,

FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO

interviews, and in the column he wrote regularly in newspaper Fohla de São

Paulo for many years. They can also be found in the policies he imple

mented during his administration as president of Brazil. His academic and

political careers have generated considerable scholarly commentary.

Cardoso’s work includes more than 200 articles, books and book reviews,

as well as hundreds of speeches, interviews and journalistic notes. His most

important speeches are available through the internet and many publica

tions focusing on his work are available in English. A large database of his

life and work is available at the Instituto Fernando Henrique Cardoso

(http://www.ifhc.org.br/acervo_i.htm).

His best-known book, Dependency and Development in Latin America,

written with Enzo Faletto in 1969, addresses the problems of economic

development through an interpretation emphasising the political character

of the process of economic transformation. Cardoso and Faletto (1969)

incorporated in their analysis the historical situation in which the economic

transformations occurred in order to better understand these changes and

their structural limitations. Cardoso argued that the situation of depen-

dency was neither stable nor permanent. Although he recognised that the

dynamic elements of international capitalism lie outside the periphery and

its control, he argued that dependent development should not be inter-

preted as a lack of dynamism in parts of the periphery (Resende-Santos

1997). Cardoso recognised the changing nature of international capitalism

and that the reconfiguration of the international distribution of labour

opened opportunities for the periphery (Cardoso 1973; Goertzel 1999).

For Cardoso, dependency was about position and function within the

international economy, about how Latin American countries participated

in the global economy (Cardoso 1982). He rejected the assertion that

dependency produced underdevelopment. For him, dependency was fun

damentally a question of power and domination, internationally and locally

(Cardoso and Faletto 1969; Cardoso 1973).

The dependency and development thesis has had a significant impact on

generations of scholars concerned with development, but as mentioned

above, it would be a mistake to base Cardoso’s contribution to the study of

development only on that thesis. Cardoso developed further elements of

his thesis as central elements in his understanding and practice on develop

ment. His attention to social as well as institutional analysis allowed him to

identify that politically, dependent development in Brazil produced insti

tutional deformities that constituted important obstacles to democracy and

development (Font 2001). Brazil’s political system was characterised by its

clientelism, corporatism and corruption and Cardoso was an outspoken

advocate of fundamental institutional restructuring in Brazil. He was con

vinced of the importance of strengthening democratic practices in order to

FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO

assure a stable transition to the next stage in Brazil’s development. For him,

many of the solutions to the defects in Brazil’s political and economic sys

tem were bound up in his notion of social democracy (Resende-Santos

1997).

Cardoso became progressively drawn to an active role in the pro-

democracy movement in Brazil during the 1970s. His commitment to

open opportunities for development in Brazil led him to take an active role

in the restructuring of political institutions. This approach was conducive

to the political career he initiated in 1978 when he was elected an alterna

tive senator, and later a senator in 1983. Cardoso’s involvement in under

standing and shaping the process of political and structural reform in Brazil

led him to become a founder member of the Brazilian Social Democratic

Party (PSDB) in 1982 and to a successful career as a senator. Following a

short spell as Foreign Minister in 1992/3, his successful performance as

Brazil’s finance minister in controlling hyperinflation in the early 1990s

positioned Cardoso as a popular presidential candidate. Cardoso was

elected and served two terms as President of Brazil (1995–2003). His poli-

tical philosophy stressed change and the need continuously to redefine

ideas and political agendas as circumstances change. That philosophy

allowed him to maintain an efficient relationship between ideas and policy

choices.

It is precisely the bridge between ideas and the practice of development

that targeted criticism at Cardoso. For many of his critics, Cardoso aban-

doned his Marxist roots to become a defender of liberal democracy and

capitalist development. One set of criticisms accused him of embracing

political institutions he once criticised. This is direct reference to his early

work in the 1960s and 1970s when Cardoso allegedly regarded political

parties and other political institutions as formal expressions of class domina

tion; he is criticised for becoming involved in those same political institu

tions since the late 1970s (Packenham 1992).

A second set of criticisms focuses on Cardoso’s term as president of

Brazil, labelling him as a neoliberal serving the interests of the multinational

business elite. These criticisms focused on Cardoso’s macro-economic pol

icies, including the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (Lesbaupin

1999). Scholars studying Cardoso’s work and life have suggested these

criticisms are based on misconceptions of Cardoso’s ideas. For Goertzel,

Cardoso was interested in Marxism as social theory, not as a political dogma

(1999). The analysis of Cardoso’s presidential administrations in Brazil

documents his achievements in critical areas for national, regional and local

development (Amann and Baer 2000; Dantas 2003; Goertzel 2003).

Resende-Santos (1997) suggests that Cardoso’s critics had a difficult

time reconciling the progressive social philosophy and reformist idealism

FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO

that in their view defined Cardoso’s early years as a scholar with the

neoliberal political leader. For Resende-Santos, this is due to a misunder

standing of Cardoso’s political philosophy that stresses change and the need

for constant redefinition of ideas and political agendas as circumstances

change:

Cardoso has always rejected dogmatic thinking, especially as dis

played in the political projects of both the left and the right in Latin

America. He has always maintained that ideas must change as cir

cumstances change … Cardoso is, and has always been, much more a

pragmatist than a revolutionary. His is a moderate, gradualist agenda

that stresses what is viable, rather than one committed to absolutes.

(Resende-Santos 1997: 146)

Cardoso’s scholarly work and political career illustrate his contributions

to the study of development and invite reflection on our own understand-

ing of this concept. Cardoso conceptualises development as a dynamic

multidimensional process that does not propose a finished model but a road

towards the transformation of society. He emphasises three central dimen-

sions of that process: social equity, institutional rebuilding leading to

democracy, and alternatives leading to sustainable economic growth.

Cardoso’s attention to the dynamic interactions among these dimensions

illustrates his understanding of the complex reality that development seeks

to address.

For Cardoso, the deficiencies in Brazil’s political and economic system

are central to understanding the problem of social equity. Social democracy

makes it possible to correct those deficiencies and improve social equity.

But social democracy has only an instrumental value in the sense that it

creates a path towards the transformation of society (Resende-Santos

1997). A central element in addressing Brazil’s economic and political defi

ciencies is the role of the state. For Cardoso, the main reason for state

reform is not neoliberal ideology, as many critics have suggested, but rather

a profound general crisis of the state. The state remains an important actor

in development, but it needs to redefine its mission, refocus, and increase

its effectiveness according to the changing conditions in the world econ

omy and within Brazilian society (Font 2001). Cardoso realised that in

order to compete successfully in the global economy, Brazil required inter

nal reforms to enhance the process of international insertion.

He considers that the periphery is more in danger of being left behind

and excluded from participating in the global economy than of remaining

dependent as a supplier of raw materials. For him, Brazil’s best chances of a

successful future lay in a strong market economy, an efficient regulatory

FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO

state and effective social programmes. The development policies that he

implemented during his presidency of Brazil reflect those ideas. Cardoso

accepted the leading economic role of the market while maintaining that it

does not address all the needs of society, creates problems of its own, and

tends to dissolve human solidarity. For him, the state plays a fundamental

role in reducing inequalities, poverty and other social problems. But

Cardoso understood that development also needed a strong civil society:

One has to overcome the simplistic notion that what is in the best

interest of the citizenry has to originate necessarily in the State. The

mechanism for regulating ‘privatised public’ activities must be

guided by the needs of the people, and to that end, the direct partici

pation by representatives of civil society in the bodies concerned is

fundamental. The State must be porous and permeable to the needs

of the citizens. The identification of the State with national interest is

a political construction work that requires major efforts to reach

consensus … In sum, politics is less ‘the art of the possible’ and more

the ‘art of making possible that which is necessary’.

(Cardoso 2001: 286)

In summary, Cardoso has made two significant contributions to our

understanding and practice of development that have not yet been ade-

quately assessed. In terms of ideas, Cardoso has had remarkable clarity in

conceptualising development as a dynamic multidimensional process,

clearly identifying its critical dimensions and the interactions among them.

There are two principal reasons why scholars have not devoted enough

attention to Cardoso’s perspective on development. First, he has not taken

the time to present his conceptual framework explicitly in an integrated

form. Second, the evolution of his critical thinking around development

has not appeared in traditional academic publications. The most interesting

part of that evolution is when he became a practitioner of development and

had the opportunity to confront, first-hand, his ideas with reality. Of

course, the best way he had to express his thoughts on development as

president of Brazil were his speeches in domestic and international events.

The second contribution is his experience and performance as a devel

opment practitioner. The practice of development in the context of crises

deserves better attention to enhance our understanding of opportunities

and obstacles for social change. Poverty, inequality, deficiencies in the

political system, financial crises and the pressure from a challenging range of

domestic and international interests created obstacles to putting his ideas on

development into practice. Clearly his administration was not perfect, but

it is encouraging to see positive results conducive to social change in Brazil.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO

The lack of attention to Cardoso’s legacy in the practice of development is

in part due to the focus on the short-term performance of his administra

tion’s policies rather than to their contribution to a comprehensive process

of development. Time is proving Cardoso right. Despite criticisms of his

social and economic policies, many of these have been maintained by Luiz

Inacio Lula da Silva, Cardoso’s successor as president and leader from the

political left.

A final issue worth noting about Cardoso’s legacy is his remarkable bal

ance in resisting the corrosive effect of power and pursuing good gover

nance. He regarded the presidency as a political institution with the

obligation to account for its acts. This contrasts with many other Latin

American presidents. In times when development is contested as a concept

guiding transformations of society, Cardoso’s legacy should be considered

an inspiration to strengthen the ideas and practice of development as a tool

for social change. Cardoso himself insists on having his performance judged

on its ability to set Brazil on a new course.

Major works

Cardoso, F.H. (1973) Estado y Sociedad en America Latina, Buenos Aires: Ediciones

Nueva Vision.

—— (1982) Politicas Sociales para la Decada en America Latina, Montevideo: Centro

Latinoamericano de Economia Humana.

—— (2001) ‘Radicalizing Democracy’, in Font, M. (ed.), Charting a New Course;

The Politics of Globalization and Social Transformation: Fernando Henrique Cardoso,

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 284–8.

Cardoso, F.H. and Faletto, E. (1969) Dependencia y Democracia en America Latina,

Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. A Portuguese version (Dependencia e

Desenvolvimiento na America Latina) appeared in 1970, while the University of

California Press published an updated English version (Dependency and

Development in Latin America) in 1979. The book has also been translated into

French, German and Italian.

Further reading

Amann, E. and Baer, W. (2000) ‘The Illusion of Stability: The Brazilian Economy

under Cardoso’, World Development 28(10): 1805–19.

Dantas, F. (2003) ‘After Eight Years, Lula Inherits a Better Country. Brazil

Advanced During Fernando Cardoso’s two terms as President but it is still

fragile and unequal’, http://www.estadoa.com/eleicoes/governolula/noticias/

2003/jan/01/24.htm. Last accessed 20 September 2004.

Font, M. (2001) ‘Introduction. The Craft of a new era: the intellectual trajectory of

Fernando Henrique Cardoso’, in Font, M. (ed.), Charting a New Course; The

Politics of Globalisation and Social Transformation: Fernando Henrique Cardoso,

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 1–34.

Goertzel, T. (1999) Fernando Henrique Cardoso: Reinventing Democracy in Brazil,

Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO

—— (2003) ‘Eight Years of Pragmatic Leadership in Brazil’, a supplement to

Fernando Henrique Cardoso: Reinventing Democracy in Brazil, http://

crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/fhc.htm. Last accessed 10 September 2004.

Lesbaupin, I. (organizador) (1999) O desmonte da nacao. Balanco do Governo FHC,

Petropolis: Editora Vozes.

Packenham, R. (1992) The Dependancy Movement: Scholarship and Politics in

Development Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Resende-Santos, J. (1997) ‘Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Social and Institutional

Rebuilding in Brazil’, in Domínguez, J. (ed.), Technopols: Freeing Politics and

Markets in Latin America in the 1990s, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State

University Press, pp. 145–94.

Roberto Sánchez-Rodríguez

MICHAEL CERNEA (1934–)

‘Development anthropology is a contact support,’ Michael Cernea tells his

students. His career, from Researcher in the Romanian Academy of Sci-

ences in the late 1950s and early 1960s to Senior Social Advisor for Soci-

ology and Social Policy in the World Bank in the 1990s, is testament to this

observation. Cernea’s has been a professional life characterised by constant

high-stakes struggles over social development ideas within different

bureaucratic and political settings. His has been a career where the thinking

through of ideas, and the acting upon them, have been one and the same

process – as a thinker in development, Cernea has to be understood as

much in terms of his relationships to particular institutions as to develop-

ment anthropology and sociology. Indeed, many might argue that Michael

Cernea’s most critical contribution has not been just the body of intellec

tual work that has elaborated on the place of culture, social relationships

and institutions in development, on participation and local knowledge, or

on the inherence of risk in the development process, but rather the embed

ding of those ideas in that behemoth of development, the World Bank.

From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, Cernea contributed more than anybody

in pushing the ‘social envelope’ at the Bank, his mantle now arguably

assumed by one-time co-author, co-conspirator and good friend, Scott

Guggenheim. He had the ear of Presidents and Vice-Presidents in the pro

cess, and from time to time was unrepentant in giving those ears a good

chewing. He has been one of those quintessential reformists (and at times

small ‘r’ revolutionaries) inside the Bank recognised by outside commenta

tors and analysts as critical to any form of pro-poor, pro-environment and

pro-civil society change in the institution (Fox and Brown 1998).

How far personal history determines subsequent careers is always a mat

ter of interpretation but in Michael Cernea’s case there are at least apparent

MICHAEL CERNEA

continuities. He grew up as part of the Jewish community in Jassy (Iasi), a

Romanian town close to the Russian border. Persecution was early, real

and immediate: he was kicked out of primary school for being a Jew, and

during the infamous pogrom of Jassy witnessed – albeit as a child – mass

killings and his father badly beaten. The experience of persecution and

resettlement was immediate and palpable – he was resettled twice himself,

first by the pogroms and then in the face of the advancing German army.

The experiences left him politically active and sensitised and after the war

he became a member of the Socialist Youth Movement and a young jour

nalist. Though initially a supporter of the Romanian Left’s rise to govern

ment power in the post-war years, he grew more concerned with time at

the directions taken by the regime and the society it governed. His PhD

thesis, ‘About Dialectics in the Socialist Society’ (University of Bucharest,

1962), in which he tried to legitimise theoretically the persistence of con

tradictions, conflicts and tensions within Romania’s allegedly homoge-

neous society and structures, reflected these growing concerns. That he

chose such a topic also presaged strategies of enquiry later in life at the

World Bank – strategies in which he aimed to change an institution by

challenging its foundational ideas from within that same institution.

As would later be the case at the Bank, this strategy generated resistance

and so – coupled with the effects of anti-Semitism in the Romania of the

late 1950s – he had to wait four years simply to schedule the defence of his

PhD. Still, by the time he made his defence, the effects of the Khruschev

thaw had changed the political context in Romania again, and Cernea was

finally able to address the topic that really moved him, peasant economic

rationality, although not without political fallout. This early work (Cernea

1970, 1971) operated at the boundaries of anthropology, sociology and

rural economics, exploring cultural dimensions of productive strategies,

and the relationships between peasant rationalities and co-operative agri

culture. This concern for the socio-cultural foundations of the economy

would reappear later in a different guise in his sustained questioning of

what he referred to as the ‘economic reductionism’ of the World Bank (see

Cernea 1994 and below).

As the thaw continued, foreign scholars visited Romania in increasing

numbers, a process that ultimately came to define a turning point both in

Cernea’s career (see his Malinowski Award lecture, Cernea 1996) and in

the future that the World Bank was yet to have. Cernea was nominated by

one of these visitors for a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in

the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford, one of the most prestigious

academic fellowships in the USA. The politics behind Cernea being able to

assume the fellowship were equally convoluted, but shortly following the

meeting of Ceau

¥escu and Nixon (a meeting itself triggered by Ceau¥escu’s

MICHAEL CERNEA

resistance to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia), Cernea finally

received the visa allowing him to travel to California, albeit only in time for

the latter part of the fellowship. His time there (1970–1) led to the distilla

tion in English of his ideas on peasant society, but more importantly, to a

friendship with US sociologist, Robert Merton, and a growing reputation

in the USA.

The links between the year at Stanford, his initial contacts with the

World Bank, and his being interviewed for a position in Washington are

neither direct nor without intrigue, but were very real. Whatever the case,

in 1974 – following a talk given at Bank headquarters on the role of the

family plot in collective farms – he was offered a job. His position was to be

the first sociologist to work in McNamara’s newly created central Rural

Development Division, a division that in many respects occupied the piv

otal piloting role in McNamara’s rural development-led approach both to

poverty reduction (and, if more implicitly, to the taming of rural radicalis

ation) and to changing the Bank. Cernea took the Bank – much as he did

Romania – as simultaneously an institution he worked (and largely lived)

in, as an object of analysis and as something he wanted to change. He

believed – then and still now – that such change could (only?) come from

the injection of sociological knowledge into the very foundations of the

institution’s way of interpreting and acting on the world.

In time these convictions led him to study the Bank’s project cycle in

depth and explore the entry points for sociological knowledge in the pro-

cesses through which the Bank designed and implemented its operations.

As part of this project, he seized on the seminar as an instrument of institu-

tional change and began inviting outside social scientists to speak on the

different ways in which sociological knowledge and an awareness of the

social dimensions of development could be brought into the project cycle.

This cycle of seminars culminated in Putting People First (Cernea 1985),

which – notwithstanding its focus on the World Bank – became one of the

early foundational texts on participatory rural development. Cernea’s

introduction to the collection argued that the World Bank was in the busi

ness of financially induced development, but that for any such induced

change to be successful it was imperative that the Bank understand the

social structures that existed in the area of intervention and that could play

the roles required of them in this process of induced development: echoes

of Merton’s influence (Cernea 1985). Social science knowledge – and

social scientists – were thus essential for the Bank (Cernea 1994).

This was a recurrent theme in his work: social science was to be con

ducted not for its own sake but for development’s sake, and one of the key

purposes of such social science was to challenge, constantly, the ideas

underlying economists’ and others’ models of development. While the

MICHAEL CERNEA

argument would be made intellectually – and Cernea has been a prolific

writer – most strategically for him, it had to be made bureaucratically. His

analysis was that if arguments about social science (or anything else) were to

have any teeth in the Bank, they had to be turned into bureaucratic instru

ments that made such knowledge a requirement of normal practice in the

institution. Thus, another area in which Cernea contributed greatly was in

developing and implementing operational directives and operational poli

cies that required projects to have social appraisals. This contribution, if less

visible to outside readers, was critical if any institutional change was to

derive from his ideas. The easier part of this process was to generate the

ideas and write them; the harder part was to get them through the Bank’s

approval process and then, once approved, keep them alive in the face of

the constant pressure from other parts of the Bank to get rid of them.

The culmination of these arguments was a series of events beginning in

late 1995 on the occasion of the Bank’s formal recognition of Cernea’s

twenty years working for the institution. At the event, he caught the new

Bank President, James Wolfensohn, and managed to persuade him of why

it was that social development had to be central to the poverty orientation

Wolfensohn was promoting. This led to a series of exchanges in which

Cernea convinced Wolfensohn to create a social development task force

that would report on the state of social development work in the institu-

tion. Again negotiated and contested – ‘development anthropology is a

contact support’ – this was a process that the Development Economics

Vice-Presidency and two Managing Directors were able to contain and to

some degree capture. But not entirely, for in 1997, and against the advice of

the Bank’s Chief Economist, Wolfensohn approved the creation of a

Social Development Department in the Bank.

Cernea’s work has also pushed thinking on the links between culture

and development, on cultural patrimony and on the environment, on the

concept of social policy and on articulating various social policies. How

ever, of most significance perhaps – both intellectually and also for human

welfare – has been his work on involuntary resettlement, risk and vulnera

bility. Cernea joined the Bank during the period in which the large-scale

rural development and infrastructure programmes that would later bring

the institution into such criticism, were being hatched. As early as 1978 he

began work on guidelines on resettlement, subsequently issued as Bank

policy (1980). Not long after came a sharp fight within the Bank over the

provisions for resettlement in India’s infamous Narmada Dam project. This

became the seed for a review of the Bank’s overall performance on resettle

ment (Cernea 1986) and two subsequent documents giving policy guide

lines for involuntary resettlement (Cernea 1986, 1988). This latter piece

has been translated into Bahasa, Turkish, Chinese, Italian, Spanish and

MICHAEL CERNEA

French and has had over a dozen print runs. If the 1986 review was critical,

a later 1993–94 review (Cernea, Guggenheim and Associates 1994) pulled

even fewer punches. It systematically drew attention to the failures of the

Bank to follow its own policy. It also constituted one of Cernea’s key –

empirically sustained – statements on the way in which development

inherently brings risk to people at the same time as bringing possibilities of

opportunity.

The resettlement reviews were not anti-development statements in any

sense at all, but they were statements that made clear – empirically, intellec

tually and with forceful bureaucratic power – that development processes

handled irresponsibly, without adequate social science insight, without

adequate consultation and involvement of poor people, are likely to

increase vulnerabilities, and very often for the poorest. The intellectual

core of this argument was later captured in his ‘Impoverishment Risks and

Reconstruction Model’ (Cernea 1997, 2001, 2002, 2004; Cernea and

McDowell 2000) of the eight risks that he came to identify as inherent in

the process of displacement: landlessness, joblessness, homelessness,

marginalisation, food insecurity, loss of access to common property

resources, increased morbidity and community disarticulation (Cernea

1997; also Mahapatra 1999). The model typifies Cernea’s intellectual and

professional project in that it offers a framework intended not only to help

understand risk, but also – through identifying and making explicit such

risks – to trigger a response to such risk such that it might be mitigated even

before its effects fully manifest themselves. Its purpose is to be at once ana-

lytical, predictive and methodologically useful. It has become a leading

model used internationally in research and policies about development-

triggered involuntary resettlement (Koenig 2002).

Cernea’s lasting contributions to development are many, reflected in a

long list of publications, advisory roles and academic honours. Perhaps the

most important among them, however, will be to have changed an institu

tion through the sustained and forceful insistence on a few ideas: that social

science knowledge is critical to development, that induced development

will fail in any meaningful sense if ordinary people are not involved in shap

ing the forms it takes, and that the cherished disembodied concepts of so

much development theory cannot be considered separately from the social

structures in which they are embedded. Whether and for how long the

Bank will continue to reflect these victories on the battlefields of knowl

edge depends on geopolitics as much as intellectual debate, but even if there

is a reversal in the shifts that Cernea helped win, to have changed the insti

tution’s practices during the three decades he has spent there means that his

ideas, and his work, will have affected literally millions of lives forever.

MICHAEL CERNEA

Note

1 I am very grateful to Michael Cernea for the interviews, materials and time he

gave me during the preparation of this entry.

Major works

Cernea, M. (1970) Two Villages, Social Structures and Technical Progress (in

Romanian, senior author, research co-ordinator), Bucharest: Edit. Politica.

—— (1971) Changing Society and Family Change: The Impact of the Cooperative Farm

on the Traditional Peasant Family, Stanford, CA: Center for Advanced Studies in

Behavioral Sciences.

—— (ed.) (1985) Putting People First: Sociological Variables in Rural Development

Projects, New York: Oxford University Press.

—— (1986) Involuntary Resettlement in Bank-Assisted Projects: A Review of the

Application of Bank Policies and Procedures in FY79-95 Projects, AGR, Operations

Policy Staff, World Bank, February.

—— (1988) Involuntary Resettlement in Development Projects: Policy Guidelines for

Bank-Financed Projects, Washington, DC: World Bank.

—— (1994) ‘A Sociologist’s View on Sustainable Development’, in Serageldin, I.

and Steer, A. (eds), Making Development Sustainable: From Concepts to Action,

Environmentally Sustainable Development Occasional Paper Series No. 2.

Washington, DC: World Bank.

—— (1996) Social Organization and Development Anthropology. The 1995 Malinowski

Award Lecture, ESD Studies and Monographs Series, No. 6. Washington, DC:

World Bank.

—— (1997) ‘The Risks and Reconstruction Model for Resettling Displaced

Populations’, World Development 25(10): 1569–88.

—— (2001) ‘Eight Main Risks: Preventing Impoverishment During Population

Resettlement’, in de Wet, C. and Fox, R. (eds), Transforming Settlement in

Southern Africa, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press for the International

African Institute, pp. 237–52.

—— (2002) Cultural Heritage and Development: A Framework for Action in the Middle

East and North Africa, Washington, DC: World Bank.

—— (2004) ‘The Typology of Development-Induced Displacements: Field of

Research, Concepts, Gaps and Bridges’, paper to the US National Academy of

Sciences Conference on the Study of Forced Migration, 22–23 September,

Washington, DC.

Cernea, M. and Guggenheim, S. (eds) (1993) Anthropological Approaches to

Resettlement: Policy, Practice, and Theory, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Cernea, M., Guggenheim, S. and Associates (1994) Resettlement and Development.

The Bankwide Review of Projects Involving Involuntary Resettlement 1986–1993,

Washington, DC: World Bank.

Cernea, M. and McDowell, C. (eds) (2000) Risks and Reconstruction: Experiences of

Resettlers and Refugees, Washington, DC: World Bank.

Further reading

Fox, J. and Brown, D. (eds) (1998) The Struggle for Accountability: The World Bank,

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

MICHAEL CERNEA

Koenig, D. (2002) Toward Mitigating Impoverishment in Development-Induced

Displacement and Resettlement, Oxford: Refugees Studies Centre, University of

Oxford.

Mahapatra, L.K. (1999) Resettlement, Impoverishment and Reconstruction in India, New

Delhi: Vikas.

Anthony Bebbington

ROBERT CHAMBERS (1932–)

Robert Chambers has been at the forefront of attempts since the early

1980s to place the poor, the destitute, the marginalised, the excluded and

the powerless at the heart of the processes of development problem identi

fication, decision making, policy formulation and project implementation.

He popularised the notions of ‘farmer first’ and ‘putting the last first’, and

has been highly influential in challenging professionals in all echelons of the

development sector to foster critical self-awareness in their approach to

their role and activities. In so doing, he has played a catalytic role in the

introduction, refinement and dissemination of the participatory develop-

ment ideology and associated methodologies. His ‘new paradigm’ has

rapidly become the new orthodoxy.

Robert John Haylock Chambers was born on 1 May 1932. He received

an Open Scholarship to Cambridge in the natural sciences in 1949, but this

was interrupted by National Service from 1950 to 1952, when he was

commissioned in the Somerset Light Infantry. Studying at St John’s Col-

lege, he graduated with a Double First in the BA History Tripos in 1955,

and was awarded an MA in 1959. His life-long appetite for travel and dis

covery was whetted in 1955 as a member, and short-term leader, of the first

scientific expedition to Gough Island in the South Atlantic – then one of

the last places in the world about which little was known. He still lists run

ning, mountaineering and rock-climbing as his principal recreational

pursuits.

Chambers was appointed a District Officer in Kenya between 1958 and

1962, in the process gaining valuable insight into both colonial administra

tion and local rural development. He then shifted his emphasis towards

training and research, becoming a Lecturer in Public Administration at the

Kenya Institute of Administration, and then a Research Officer at the East

African Staff College. After receiving his PhD from the University of Man

chester in 1967 for a thesis on settlement schemes in tropical Africa, and

after short teaching appointments at the Universities of Manchester and

Glasgow, he returned to Kenya to become a Senior Research Fellow in the

Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi from 1969

ROBERT CHAMBERS

to 1971. From 1972 until 1997 he was a Fellow at the Institute of Develop

ment Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, where he established an interna

tional reputation as a leading advocate for and promoter of appropriate and

just forms of development. During the 1970s, Robert Chambers contin

ued to work on the management of rural development in eastern Africa,

later extending his areal expertise to include India and Sri Lanka. Also,

while at the IDS, he spent a period in the mid-1970s with the UNHCR

working with rural refugees in eastern Africa and southeast Asia.

He continues to work at the IDS in the role of Research Associate. He

was awarded the OBE in 1995, and has received Honorary Doctorates

from the University of East Anglia (1995) and the University of Edinburgh

(1998). The two principal influences on his way of looking at the develop

ment world were E.F. Schumacher and Ivan Illich, although he professes

not to have been in total agreement with their ideas.

Although Chambers’ journey on the path towards appropriate develop-

ment probably started in the late 1950s, it was a paper published in the jour-

nal World Development, in 1981, entitled ‘Rural Poverty Unperceived:

Problems and Remedies’, that, in his words, ‘started all this off’. A number

of themes and issues that recur in his later work were first introduced in that

article. Its central argument, and that of much of Chambers’ work, is that

history has presented us with particular ways of looking at and approaching

the poor and the disadvantaged, and ‘development’ more generally, which

are often far removed from frequently unseen and unperceived realities.

‘Doing development’ typically falls to outsiders – people who, however

well-intentioned, are neither from the target areas nor have directly expe-

rienced the problems of poverty, deprivation, insecurity, vulnerability,

exploitation and so on. Their visions, interpretations and actions are thus

built upon preconceptions and misperceptions about the rural poor, and

are often influenced by stereotypical views of their circumstances and capa

bilities. Their interventions are also frequently constrained by a number of

institutionalised biases that are influenced by practical realities (time, access,

resources), attitudes (planning arrogance, political correctness, timidity),

inequalities (hierarchies, differentials of power), segmentation (sectoral

isation, project focus) and so on which determine that those who are in

greatest need, or who are less visible and vociferous, remain unseen,

unheard and unhelped. The result is that mountains of cash, eons of effort

and one of the world’s largest ‘industries’ have collectively failed to make

much more than a dent in deprivation and destitution.

The paper sets the challenge to the principal actors in development to

retrain and reprogramme themselves. Chambers emphasises the need for a

series of ‘reversals’ where practitioners, academics, administrators, scien

tists and the like step away from what he pointedly calls ‘rural development

ROBERT CHAMBERS

tourism’ and start to bring about a revolutionary change in forms of cogni

tion and behaviour. One of the principal reversals – now a mantra for the

burgeoning non-governmental sector – is in the learning process, with the

outside expert becoming the unimportant pupil who learns from and with

those in need of development assistance, as opposed to the hitherto perva

sive ‘I talk, you listen’ approach and attitude. The challenge is to see rural

poverty as it really is, rather than as it is perceived to be, and to tailor actions

accordingly in order truly to make a difference. The need is to confront

global cores and peripheries of knowledge by looking for, being receptive

to and finding means of incorporating local forms of knowledge that, time

and again, have been shown to be tried and tested, appropriate but woe

fully overlooked by outside ‘experts’ and seriously compromised by the

predilection for modern science and technology. Imagination and inven

tiveness are needed to find ways of reaching the poorest of the poor, the

socially excluded, the politically voiceless, the geographically peripheral

and the environmentally marginal.

The ideas in the World Development article were developed, honed and

expanded in a series of accessible books produced during the 1980s and

early 1990s, most of which were published via the Intermediate Technol-

ogy Group founded by E.F. Schumacher. Rural Development: Putting the

Last First (1983) emphasised the need for new professionals and a new pro-

fessionalism with which to rise to the challenge of an inclusive and

emancipatory development. The emphasis was placed squarely on ‘the

last’: the hundreds of millions of largely unseen people in rural areas who

are poor, weak, isolated, vulnerable and powerless. The book also exposed

the gulf between the two principal cultures involved in the development

project - the academic and the practical – and the tension between scien

tific/technical and local/indigenous knowledge. It looked at tactical means

of confronting the ‘superiority complex’ of the development profession, of

bringing about reversals in learning and of underpinning effective practical

action.

Farmer First (1989) fleshed out a ‘new paradigm’ centred on localised,

particularistic, contextualised, sympathetic, democratic and participatory

means of supporting people in marginal contexts. The idea was not to

come up with ‘another development’ of the kind advocated by

postdevelopment writers such as Manfred Max-Neef, Arturo Escobar

and Wolfgang Sachs, but forms of intervention involving a ‘new profes

sionalism’ that complemented and enhanced existing science and technol

ogy-based approaches. The solutions to farmers’ problems lay, in part,

within their own capacities and capabilities. The challenge was to find ways

of unlocking their development potential by creating a suitable enabling

environment. The targets of development were to assume increasing

ROBERT CHAMBERS

control of the development process. Outsiders were to become the facilita

tors, not the paternalistic controllers, of local development. New institu

tions and institutional practices were to become established in order to

allow the new paradigm to flower and flourish.

Farmer First adopted a holistic view of rural people’s development chal

lenges, introducing for the first time a concept – ‘sustainable livelihoods’ –

that has become the leitmotiv of the development industry in the early part

of the new century. The principles of the sustainable livelihoods approach

were first put forward in an IDS Discussion Paper (1992) jointly authored

by Robert Chambers and Gordon Conway, and centred on ideas of capa

bility, equity and sustainability. The livelihoods approach to rural develop

ment has subsequently been adopted by the UK’s DFID (Department for

International Development), Sweden’s SIDA (Swedish International

Development Co-operation Agency), the United Nations Development

Programme (UNDP) and several other bilateral and multilateral develop-

ment agencies. Chambers’ work on the hidden facets of poverty and depri-

vation, and the need to inform our understanding of these problems based

on the experiences of those who are beset by them, inspired a large-scale

body of work, leading up to the production of the World Bank’s World

Development Report 2000/01: Attacking Poverty, entitled ‘Consultations

with the Poor’ and ‘Voices of the Poor’ where, for perhaps the first time,

the Bretton Woods institutions’ understanding of the poverty phenome-

non became to some extent informed by the experiences and opinions of

the poor themselves.

Robert Chambers became increasingly involved in rising to the meth-

odological challenge that had arisen from the need to understand poverty

and deprivation from the perspective of the poor and deprived. The first

challenge was to find a cost-effective means of probing and penetrating

beneath the apparent surface within target rural communities. Up until the

late 1970s, constraints of time, resources and willingness had contributed to

the prevalence of what he called ‘quick and dirty’ local survey methods,

where outside experts or support teams engaged in superficial and uncriti

cal rural appraisal as a precursor to project development, often using ques

tionnaires (survey slavery) that reflected their preconceived ideas about

rural areas and the challenges of development. Chambers helped pioneer

the tool of Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) which was neat and nimble, but

most importantly incorporated a range of devices to ‘include the excluded’

and to obtain a broad, flexible, insightful and locally contextualised under

standing of poverty and the poor, or of other local development challenges.

RRA came to constitute not just a new research methodology but also a

new way of understanding development. It centred on developing and

using a range of imaginative techniques – key informants, group appraisal,

ROBERT CHAMBERS

triangulation, progressive learning, identification and incorporation of

indigenous knowledge. These both yielded an insightful understanding of

local conditions as revealed by a representative cross-section of the com

munities themselves and freed up time for learning with and from local

people, and for searching out the poor, the marginal and the excluded.

RRA steadily evolved into Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), and

subsequently into a wider set of participatory tools that now constitutes the

dominant development methodology and ideology. PRA was presented in

Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last (1997) (the sequel to Rural

Development: Putting the Last First) as a methodological solution to the chal

lenge of building development efforts around local knowledge, experi

ences and capabilities. It is based on the observed ability of local

communities across the developing (and developed) world to express and

analyse their own complex realities in a way which has often been shown to

be at variance with the perceived realities held by professionals operating

from the top down. PRA centres on a raft of recipes for including the

excluded and enabling local communities to express their development

realities in ways which were suitable to their own cultures, literacy levels

and so on. Much PRA, Participatory Action Research and Participatory

Learning and Action in recent years has been driven by innovative devel-

opment workers in and from the South. A prerequisite for practitioner/

facilitators is critical self-awareness: a reflexive sense of the baggage of val-

ues and behaviour that they bring to the table of development courtesy of

their background and identity. A key word in PRA is ‘empowerment’.

Robert Chambers sees participatory development as an ‘exciting revolu-

tion in learning and action’, and claims that the turn of the twenty-first cen

tury has been one of the most stimulating and challenging periods to be

involved in the development profession.

Robert Chambers would, I’m sure, be the first to emphasise that his

contribution to the reversal of development directionalities and the con

struction of appropriate methodological tools has been a collaborative and

participatory endeavour, be that with colleagues and passers-through at the

IDS, practitioners in the field and in big offices, or the poor and the periph

eral themselves. Nonetheless, his thumbprint is everywhere one looks in

the modern development field: bottom-up development, participatory

development, sustainable livelihoods, the redefinition of poverty, the

strengthening of civil society, and the entire ethos of appropriate develop

ment. In both the developing and development worlds, Robert Chambers

has become one of the best-known, most influential and most widely fol

lowed persons in contemporary development over the last three decades.

So many of us who, as outsiders, work on development issues genuinely

but forlornly hope that our efforts will make a difference to the problems

ROBERT CHAMBERS

with which we are concerned; Robert Chambers is one among very few

who can confidently claim to have made a profound difference to the

ideology, paradigm and practice of development.

Major works

Chambers, R. (1981) ‘Rural Poverty Unperceived: Problems and Remedies’,

World Development 9(1): 1–19.

—— (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First, Harlow: Longman (translated

into Arabic, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Vietnamese).

—— (1989) Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research, ed. with Arnold

Pacey and Lori Ann Thrupp, London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

—— (1992) ‘Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st

Century’, with Gordon Conway, IDS Discussion Paper 296.

—— (1993) Challenging the Professions: Frontiers for Rural Development, London:

Intermediate Technology Publications.

—— (1994a) ‘The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal’, World

Development 22(8): 953–69.

—— (1994b) ‘Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA): Analysis of Experience’, World

Development 22(9): 1253–68.

—— (1994c) ‘Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA): Challenges, Potentials and

Paradigms’, World Development 22(10): 1437–54.

—— (1997) Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last, London: Intermediate

Technology Publications.

Michael Parnwell

HOLLIS B. CHENERY (1918–94)

Hollis Chenery’s importance as a development economist reaches beyond

his contributions to the academic debate, which were considerable. As

Vice-President of the world’s premier multilateral development institu

tion, the World Bank, Chenery’s ideas and work widely influenced devel

opment thinking and practice during the 1970s and 1980s.

Hollis Chenery was born into a wealthy family in Richmond, Virginia,

USA, in 1918. His father was an oil and gas magnate. He grew up in

Virginia as well as Pelham Manor in New York state. His upbringing in

affluent suburban settings there would leave a permanent mark on him. A

private passion of his was racehorses and one of those he owned would

once win the Triple Crown.

Before World War II, Hollis Chenery attended the universities of Ari

zona and Oklahoma, earning undergraduate degrees from both. During

the war, Chenery served as an Army Air Officer in the US military. He

then went on to earn two master’s degrees from the California Institute of

Technology and the University of Virginia respectively, before gaining a

doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 1950.

HOLLIS B. CHENERY

From the outset, Hollis Chenery’s career combined academia with

positions in international development. After World War II, Chenery

served as a Marshall Plan economist in Europe, throwing himself into the

European reconstruction programme. This job and being part of the post-

war reconstruction process greatly influenced his thinking regarding indus

trial development, economic growth and societal change. It was decisive in

focusing Chenery’s considerable intellectual energies on development

economics, the field which he would make his life’s work.

Chenery’s initial academic position after returning to the United States

and receiving his PhD was as Professor of Economics at Stanford, a post

which he held from 1952 until his appointment as a Guggenheim Fellow in

1961. That same year he joined the newly-established United States

Agency for International Development (USAID), which was created by

decree in terms of President John F. Kennedy’s Foreign Assistance Act.

Chenery quickly rose through the Agency’s ranks to become an Assistant

Administrator. Yet, he stayed with USAID only until 1965, when he

returned to academia. He was appointed Professor of Economics at the

university where he had earned his doctorate fifteen years earlier. Harvard

would remain Chenery’s academic home for the rest of his life, and one to

which he would return after his tenure at the World Bank.

Chenery’s academic work prior to joining the international develop-

ment institutions was focused on empirical studies regarding factors of

growth and development. His work was concerned with the role of invest-

ments and industrialisation in the development process, and the design of

development projects and programmes (e.g., 1953, 1955, 1958, 1959).

Chenery’s book with Paul Clark on Interindustry Economics (1959) com-

bined the qualities of a textbook with a systematic reader for professionals.

His 1961 ‘Comparative Advantage and Development Policy’ was received

as a significant examination of the debate on resource allocation in less-

developed economies and the classical principle of comparative advantage.

The paper considered development policy from an economic theory

standpoint, yet based on an analysis of actual government policies. He con

cluded that much of the confusion resulted from the failure to distinguish

theoretical and operations research.

Hollis Chenery joined the World Bank in Washington, DC, in 1970 to

serve as Economic Adviser to the Bank’s then President, Robert

McNamara, the former US Secretary of State. Two years later, McNamara

handpicked Chenery as Vice-President for Development Policy at the

Bank, a position he would hold for more than a decade until 1983. In this

position, Chenery played an important role, influencing both the World

Bank’s internal operations as well as its lending policy towards developing

countries.

HOLLIS B. CHENERY

Hollis Chenery was one of the first development economists to suggest

that there was no linear path to development, thus rejecting the views of

earlier development theorists such as economic historians Alexander

Gerschenkron and Walt W. Rostow. Their ‘stage theory’ had stipulated

that all countries passed through the same historical stages of economic

development that the now industrialised had done earlier. According to

this view, the developing countries were only at an earlier stage of develop

ment, i.e. primitive versions of developed countries. Furthermore, this

view tended to equate development simply with industrialisation and eco

nomic growth, which would lead to a trickle-down effect increasing the

overall wealth of the population. Based on his broad empirical work,

Chenery recognised that there were differences in the experiences of indi

vidual countries, while he at the same time acknowledged that there were

similar patterns that could be identified in different countries’ paths to

development. He understood that it was not inevitable that countries

would all pass through the same linear phases. For that reason, he saw it as a

major task for development economists to suggest ways in which develop-

ing countries could leap-frog over certain stages to catch up with indus-

trialised countries. These shortcuts would be based on a systematic learning

from the development histories and experiences of developed and more

advanced underdeveloped countries.

Hollis Chenery brought these more nuanced views of the development

process with him to the World Bank. His worldview coincided well with

that of Robert McNamara, reflecting the liberal developmentalism of the

era. This thinking was conditioned by the idea that poverty was the key

factor in the spread of communism and it was, therefore, essential to com

bat poverty in Asia, Latin America and Africa to prevent them from falling

into the communist bloc. Poverty reduction and distribution of the fruits of

economic development, not growth at an aggregate level, thus became

important to the World Bank. An influential book on Redistribution with

Growth edited by Chenery with others (1974) epitomised this change in the

Bank policy.

As the Vice-President for Development Policy in the mid-1970s,

Chenery initiated a study on the role of the Bank in promoting economic

development since 1950. The study, which was carried out by an outside

consultant, David Morawetz, found that economic growth around the

world had been swift and spectacular. However, its results were generally

poorly distributed. At the same time, time-series data showed that eco

nomic growth was essential for poverty reduction and that poverty levels

only exceptionally rose with growth (Ahluwalia, Carter and Chenery

1979). As a consequence, governments and the World Bank as an interna

tional financial institution needed to refocus their efforts on poverty

HOLLIS B. CHENERY

eradication, even at the cost of increasing indebtedness. During

McNamara’s tenure, supported by the empirical research and theoretical

thinking under Chenery’s leadership, the World Bank’s lending was

expanded considerably and an explicit poverty alleviation focus was

brought to its operations. Chenery chaired an in-house task force estab

lished in 1981 that articulated the Bank’s poverty focus.

When the first oil crisis hit from 1973 onwards, Chenery was concerned

with its impacts on the world economy. In the spirit of the era, as exempli

fied by the studies of the Club of Rome and writings of Paul and Anne

Ehrlich, Chenery had adopted a view that the rapid growth in the world

economy was pushing against the productive capacity and the potential

rate of expansion of world supplies of many raw materials. He wrote an

article in the influential Foreign Affairs journal in which he argued that the

‘symptoms of underlying stress have been manifested … in the form of

raw-material shortages, a food and fertiliser crisis, a dramatic rise in petro-

leum prices, and finally, worldwide inflation and threats of impending

financial disaster’ (1975b). His worst fears did not materialise, although a

second oil crisis in 1979–80, also triggered by political events in the Middle

East, forced further adjustments in global energy policies. Chenery pub-

lished a subsequent article in Foreign Affairs (1981), in which he argued,

with hindsight over-optimistically, that the need for this adjustment was

bringing forth an energy transition that would reduce the need for formal

international agreements that had proven to be elusive.

Overall, Chenery had a dramatic impact on the World Bank’s research

programme and its influence on the Bank’s policy-making. According to

him, the World Bank’s best research was in the field of empirically based

comparative studies. He saw that the World Bank’s research programme

could optimally combine micro-oriented studies based on its own lending

operations in various countries with more theoretical, speculative macro-

economic research. He pursued this policy successfully, getting the Bank’s

Board to accept the approach as a legitimate way of influencing policy.

Chenery took it upon himself to build up the research capacities within the

Bank by recruiting a number of highly qualified economists, many from

academia. He bridged the gap between research and operations by estab

lishing a rotational system for staff. The in-house research capacity was

complemented by bringing in outside expertise through consultants and

academics participating in research work. A Research Committee was

established and research findings were widely disseminated internally

through management seminars and internal discussions based on the cases

of individual borrower countries. These all were tools intended to improve

the Bank’s analysis and its consequent lending policies.

HOLLIS B. CHENERY

During Hollis Chenery’s time, the World Bank started producing a

wide variety of policy papers that became authoritative statements on

development issues. The Bank, jointly with the International Labour

Organization (ILO), worked on the ‘basic needs’ concept and its implica

tions for lending operations. Hollis Chenery initiated the work that would

lead to the preparation of the first annual World Development Report, the

Bank’s flagship publication to date.

After Robert McNamara’s retirement from the World Bank presidency

in 1981, the new management under Alden Winship (Tom) Clausen

changed course. This coincided with the emergence of neoliberal ideology

as personified by the rise to power of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher

in the USA and UK respectively. At the World Bank, Anne Krueger was

hired to replace Hollis Chenery, with the result that neoliberal dogma

replaced the poverty alleviation focus. However, while the official policy of

the Bank changed, at the operational levels many staff economists still main

tained their pragmatic approaches to development policy.

After leaving the Bank, Hollis Chenery returned to Harvard where he

continued to put his empirical experiences with international development

to good use in writing and teaching. He collaborated with T.N. Srinivasan

in editing a Handbook of Development Economics (1988, 1989), which became

the most comprehensive sourcebook on development economics

available.

International development theory has undergone considerable changes

since the 1970s and 1980s, when Hollis Chenery was an active participant

in its making. Some of his work has inevitably been overtaken by events

and advances in our understanding of the development process. Neverthe-

less, Chenery made a lasting impact on international development theory,

policy-making and praxis. Despite significant ups and downs since his

move from the World Bank, his legacy lives on and is today, perhaps para

doxically, more evident again in the institutional policies than immediately

after his departure, because of the sharpened poverty focus of its current

activities.

Major works

Adelman, I. and Chenery, H.B. (1966) ‘Foreign Aid and Economic Development:

The Case of Greece’, Review of Economics and Statistics 48(1): 1–19.

Arrow, K.J., Chenery, H.B., Minhas, B.S. and Solow, R.M. (1961) ‘Capital–

Labor Substitution and Economic Efficiency’, Review of Economics and Statistics

43(3): 225–50.

Chenery, H.B. (1952) ‘Overcapacity and the Acceleration Principle’, Econometrica

20(1): 1–28

—— (1960) ‘Patterns of Industrial Growth’, American Economic Review 50(4): 624–54.

HOLLIS B. CHENERY

—— (1961) ‘Comparative Advantage and Development Policy’, American

Economic Review 51(1): 18–51.

—— (ed.) (1971) Studies in Development Planning, Harvard Economic Studies,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—— (1975a) ‘A Structuralist Approach to Development Policy’, American Economic

Review 65(2): 310–16

—— (ed.) (1979) Structural Change and Development Policy, A World Bank Research

Publication, New York: Oxford University Press.

—— (1983) ‘Interaction Between Theory and Observation in Development’,

World Development 11(10): 851–903.

Chenery, H.B. and Clark, P.G. (1959) Interindustry Economics, New York: John

Wiley and Sons.

Chenery, H.B., Duloy, J.H. and Jolly, R. (eds) (1974) Redistribution with Growth:

Policies to Improve Income Distribution in Developing Countries in the Context of

Economic Growth, London: Oxford University Press.

Chenery, H.B. and Strout, A. (1966) ‘Foreign Assistance and Economic

Development’, American Economic Review 56(4): 679–733.

Syrquin, M. and Chenery, H.B. (1989) Patterns of Development, 1950–1983.

Discussion Paper, Washington, DC: World Bank.

Further reading

Ahluwalia, M., Carter, N. and Chenery, H.B. (1979) ‘Growth and Poverty in

Developing Countries’, in H.B. Chenery (ed.), Structural Change and

Development Policy, New York: Oxford University Press.

Asher, R. (1983) ‘Chenery, Hollis B. (Tenure: 1970–1983)’, World Bank Group

Oral History Program Record Series: S4100, Washington, DC: World Bank.

Chenery, H.B. (1953) ‘The Application of Investment Criteria’, Quarterly Journal of

Economics 67(1): 76–96.

—— (1955) ‘The Role of Industrialization in Development Programs’, American

Economic Review 45(2): 40–57.

—— (1958) ‘Development Policies and Programmes’, Economic Bulletin for Latin

America 3(1): 51–77.

—— (1959) ‘The Interdependence of Investment Decisions’, in M. Abramovitz et

al. (eds), The Allocation of Economic Resources: Essays in Honor of Bernard Francis

Haley, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

—— (1975b) ‘Restructuring the World Economy’, Foreign Affairs, 53(2): 242–63.

—— (1981) ‘Restructuring the World Economy: Round II’, Foreign Affairs, 59(5):

1102–20.

—— (1982) ‘Industrialization and Growth: The Experience of Large Countries’,

World Bank Staff Working Paper, No. 539, Washington, DC: World Bank.

Chenery, H.B. and Srinivasan, T.N. (eds) (1988 and 1989) Handbook of Development

Economics, Vols I and II, Amsterdam: North Holland.

Easterly, W. (2001) The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and

Misadventures in the Tropics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pace, E. (1994) ‘Hollis B. Chenery Dies at 77; Economist for the World Bank’,

New York Times, 5 September.

Juha I. Uitto

HOLLIS B. CHENERY

DIANE ELSON (1946–)

Since the late 1970s, and throughout numerous institutional and disciplin

ary incarnations, Diane Elson has been at the forefront of gender and devel

opment (GAD) scholarship at a world scale. Under the broad umbrella of

analysing socio-economic processes from a gender perspective, Elson’s

work has spanned a diverse range of themes. These include women’s posi

tion in the international division of labour, gender dimensions of structural

adjustment, the significance of gender inequality and unpaid labour within

the household or ‘reproductive economy’ (sometimes called the care eco

nomy, or sphere of social reproduction) for the operation of national

economies and international trade and finance, gender budget initiatives

(GBIs), and gender and globalisation. As one of a still relatively small num

ber of feminist economists able to draw from an impressive

multidisciplinary expertise encompassing sociology and politics as well as

economics, Elson’s work has been distinguished, inter alia, by its ability to

challenge and make accessible to non-economists the concepts underlying

thinking and modelling in the predominantly male field of macro-

economics. Macro-economic models often masquerade under the guise of

gender neutrality, but in reality emanate from gender-blindness, in turn

resulting in gender bias. As Elson has so eloquently argued, the need to ‘talk

to the boys’ (Elson 1998a), in the form of making gender heard in an arena

where there are few feminist voices conversant with the language and con-

cepts deployed within international development economics has been an

abiding principle in much of her work over three and a half decades. The

call to ‘engender’ macro-economics and international economics has not

only featured in Elson’s numerous academic publications and policy

reports, but in major curriculum innovations in the UK and overseas.

Elson was born on 20 April 1946. She grew up in the English Midlands,

attending Nuneaton High School for Girls. She was the first member of her

family to go to university, and graduated from Oxford with a BA (Hons) in

Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1968. Elson then worked for three

years as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at

Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford and was a member of St Antony’s Col

lege. In 1985 she was appointed as Lecturer in Development Economics at

the University of Manchester (where she later attained her PhD by publi

cation and became Professor of Development Studies and Research and

Graduate Dean). In the meantime, Elson held a range of teaching and

research positions at the Universities of Sussex, York and Oxford, as well as

fitting in consultancy and lecturing at the Open University and Manchester

with the birth and pre-school care of her son, Paul. After fifteen years of

DIANE ELSON

full-time employment at Manchester, Elson moved to a Chair in Sociology

at the University of Essex, where she teaches predominantly on gender, the

sociology of development and human rights.

Elson stands out as an agenda-setting individual in her own right, parti

cularly in opening up and establishing new lines of enquiry and conceptual

development, but she has also conscientiously and productively engaged in

numerous collaborations with fellow academics and with writers and

researchers from other disciplines and backgrounds, both in the UK and

internationally. This has included prominent GAD scholars such as Ruth

Pearson, Nilufer Cagatay, Caren Grown and Debbie Budlender, as well as

more junior research teams. Some of Elson’s collaborative ventures have

resulted from her consultancy, advisory and research work for major devel

opment institutions such the Swedish International Development Co-

operation Agency (SIDA), the United Nations Development Programme

(UNDP), and UNIFEM (The United Nations Development Fund for

Women), where between 1998 and 2000 she was a special advisor to the

Executive Director, Noeleen Heyzer. Elson has also maintained substantial

involvement in women’s groups and networks, and in several forms of

public service. The latter includes membership of the Management Com-

mittee of the UK Women’s Budget Group, of the Board of Directors of the

NGO ‘Women Working Worldwide’, and in UN teams and committees

such as the UN Taskforce on the Millennium Development Goals. In the

interests of advancing gender equality through changing the ways in which

public revenue is raised and expended, Elson has also helped to co-found a

global network of gender budget initiatives comprising civil society groups

and government personnel.

Elson’s longstanding commitment to movements and initiatives for

change outside as well as within academia has strengthened the applied as

well as the theoretical aspects of her work. Her writings are distinguished,

for example, by a remarkable accessibility given the complexity of some of

the issues she has dealt with, especially in the realm of macro-economics,

trade and finance (Elson et al. 2000). In turn, a keen commitment to policy

relevance, to judicious and critical interrogation of empirical data, and to

linking the macro with the micro, has lent itself to an enviable capacity to

bridge the often wide divide between analysis and action. This has helped

to earn Elson credibility across several different sets of stakeholders in the

development field as a whole, including policy makers, grassroots activists

and countless PhD students who, under Elson’s tutelage, have between

them worked on gender issues in most parts of the world. Among GAD

scholars and practitioners more generally, Elson is recognised as having

been one of the movement’s most valuable assets in respect of establishing

DIANE ELSON

gender as a legitimate and enduring issue, both conceptually and

pragmatically.

Elson is the author and editor of numerous books, including the widely

cited Male Bias in the Development Process (1991), as well as special journal

editions, papers and policy documents. Many of her writings have rapidly

assumed the status of ‘classics’ in the GAD field, as evidenced inter alia by

their extensive reprinting and translation into other languages. In the light

of the prolific nature of Elson’s work, it is clearly hard to do justice to the

vast repertoire of ideas which she has injected into different debates, and

which indeed have spawned debate in their own right. One of her earliest

and most significant contributions was a co-authored article (Elson and

Pearson 1981), which not only provided one of the first comprehensively

researched yet concise accounts of women’s involvement in export-ori

ented industrialisation, but also introduced the idea which, contrary to

conventional WID (Women in Development) orthodoxy that women had

been ‘left out’ of the development process, drew attention to the need to

focus on the frequently exploitative ways in which women were actually

integrated. More specifically, Elson and Pearson identified the need to dis-

tinguish between three, non-mutually exclusive, tendencies in the relation

between the disproportionate concentration of women in un- and semi-

skilled jobs in export-oriented factories, and their subordination as a gen-

der. These were, respectively: ‘a tendency to intensify the existing form of

gender subordination; a tendency to decompose existing forms of gender

subordination; and a tendency to recompose new forms of gender subordina-

tion’ (ibid.: 110, emphasis in original). Various possibilities for how women

workers could challenge these different forms of subordination were

drawn out. Even if women made few instrumental gains in their positions

(for example, improvements in pay and in working conditions), evaluation

of women’s struggles as a gender should be made in relation to the way that

‘the struggle itself develops capacities for self-determination’ (ibid.: 105). In

the rich and ever-growing literature on gender and export manufacturing

to which Elson herself has continued to contribute (Elson 1996), the 1981

paper remains a central point of reference.

Emphasis on the potential for women’s resistance, despite considerable

barriers to their mobility and empowerment, also appears in Elson’s pio

neering work on gender and neoliberal restructuring, which became a

major new genre of enquiry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Highlighting

how women frequently absorbed the costs of structural adjustment policies

by increasing their loads of paid, and in particular, unpaid labour, Elson

argued not only for the need for macro-reforms such as the democratisa

tion of states and the restructuring of the international financial system, but

emphasised how seeds for transformation also lay at the level of women’s

DIANE ELSON

involvement in self-help groups at the community level (Elson 1992a).

Yet, Elson’s contribution to feminist critiques of structural adjustment

went far beyond this insofar as she synthesised the observations drawn from

localised case studies, linked the micro with the meso and macro, made the

most convincing case for economies being gendered structures, and dem

onstrated the extreme gender bias inherent in structural adjustment

programmes (along with macro-economic models more generally) (Elson

1993). More particularly, Elson drew attention to the fact that failure to

incorporate gender in the macro-economic modelling of restructuring,

marked above all by complete disregard for women’s extensive unpaid

labour in the ‘reproductive economy’, led to pernicious effects on not only

women’s own quality of life, but, given their role in (re)producing human

resources (and ipso facto, the labour force), to economically inefficient out

comes (Elson 1995; Cagatay et al. 1995). Out of this came the conclusion

that any macro-economic model which neglected gender and the repro

ductive economy was not only fundamentally flawed on conceptual

grounds, but could exacerbate social inequality and render possibilities for

sustainable economic growth untenable. As articulated in her widely cited

World Development article:

Though maintaining gender inequality may sometimes lead to

higher profits in the short run, it also tends to generate negative feed-

backs which hamper the process of restructuring to a development

path which is sustainable in the long run. The outcome of macro-

economic policies depends upon the gendered social matrix in

which they are introduced. But that gendered social matrix could in

principle be changed in ways that promote both more effective

macro-economic policies and greater gender equality.

(Elson 1995: 1865)

Her continuing enthusiasm for taking on big ventures, and for trans

forming policy, includes her lead authorship on the 2000 and 2002

UNIFEM reports on The Progress of the World’s Women (Elson 2000; Elson

with Keklik 2002), and her work on GBIs (Elson 1998b, 2002, 2004). The

2002 UNIFEM report, which is impressively detailed yet accessibly

presented, concentrates on the third UN Millennium Development Goal

(MDG), namely to ‘promote gender equality and empower women’.

Elson criticises the four indicators selected to represent the target (the ratio

of boys to girls in primary, secondary and tertiary education, the ratio of lit

erate women to men in the 15–24 age group, the share of women in non-

agricultural employment, and the proportion of parliamentary seats held by

women), for their inherent weaknesses as well as continued data

DIANE ELSON

deficiencies, and also argues that more targets should be included, such as

gender equality in the labour market. This constitutes an important contri

bution to a larger and growing body of feminist critique of the gap between

rhetoric and genuine commitment to addressing gender inequality in the

MDGs.

With regard to her work on GBIs, Elson’s contributions not only

include key justifications for integrating a gender perspective into national

budgetary processes, but also provide important guidelines for ‘engender

ing’ budgets, as well as documenting several case study examples from

among the forty or so countries in which such initiatives have thus far taken

place.

It should also be noted that Elson’s writings have embraced more gen

eral development issues outside GAD, including development theory

(Elson 1998b), the socialisation of markets (Elson 1992b), and the UN

Global Compact (Elson 2003). Often richly informed by Elson’s feminist

and socialist political perspectives, such contributions have made her a

major name in the development field in general, as well as within GAD

circles.

It is within GAD, however, that Elson’s pioneering and enduring con-

tribution to scholarship is most apparent. No student of gender and devel-

opment today completes a course at undergraduate or postgraduate level

without some exposure to Elson. Given Elson’s ongoing ventures into cut-

ting-edge issues in the GAD field – currently comprising fiscal policy in

relation to women’s economic and social rights, and globalisation and gen-

der equality – and with their hallmark rigour and vision, this situation is

unlikely to change for a long time to come. Elson will also be present as one

of GAD’s outstanding scholars and ambassadors in any retrospective review

of gender and development that may be compiled in the future.

Major works

Cagatay, N., Elson, D. and Grown, C. (eds) (1995) Special Issue ‘Gender,

Adjustment and Macro-economics’, World Development 23(11): 1825–2017.

Elson, D. (ed.) (1991) Male Bias in the Development Process, Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1st edn, chaps 1, 7 and 8 written by Elson, pp. 1–28, 164–210;

2nd edn 1995, with two additional chapters written by Elson, pp. 211–79.

Chapter 7 ‘Male Bias in Macro-economics: The Case of Structural Adjustment’

reprinted in A.V. Dutt (ed.) (2002) The Political Economy of Development, Vol. 2,

Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

—— (ed.) (2000), Progress of the World’s Women 2000, New York: UNIFEM,

pp. 1–164. Also in French and Spanish translation.

Elson, D., Budlender, D., Hewitt, G. and Mukhopadhyay, T. (2002) Gender

Budgets Make Cents, London: Commonwealth Secretariat.

DIANE ELSON

Elson, D., Cagatay, N. and Grown, C. (eds) (2000) Special Issue ‘Growth, Trade,

Finance and Gender Inequality’, World Development 28(7): 1145–1390.

Elson, D., Faune, M., Gideon, J., Gutierrez, M., Lopez de Mazier, A. and Sacayon,

E. (1997) Crecer con La Mujer, San Jose, Costa Rica: Embajada Real de los Paises

Bajos.

Elson, D. with Keklik, H. (2002) Progress of the World’s Women 2002, New York:

UNIFEM.

Further reading

Elson, D. (1992a) ‘From Survival Strategies to Transformation Strategies:

Women’s Needs and Structural Adjustment’, in Beneria, L. and Feldman, S.

(eds), Unequal Burden: Economic Crisis, Persistent Poverty and Women’s Work,

Boulder, CO: Westview, pp. 26–48.

—— (1992b) ‘The Economics of a Socialised Market’, in R. Blackburn (ed.), After

the Fall – The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, London: Verso.

—— (1993) ‘Gender-Aware Analysis and Development Economics’, Journal of

International Development 5(2): 237–47. Reprinted in Jameson, K.P. and Wilber,

C.K. (eds) (1996) The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment,

New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 70–80 and in Benería, L. and Bisnath, S. (eds)

(2001), Gender and Development: Theoretical, Empirical and Practical Approaches,

Vol. 1, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

—— (1995) ‘Gender Awareness in Modelling Structural Adjustment’, World

Development 23(11): 1851–68. Reprinted in Benería, L. and Bisnath, S. (eds)

(2001), Gender and Development: Theoretical, Empirical and Practical Approaches,

Vol. 2, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

—— (1996) ‘Appraising Recent Developments in the World Market for Nimble

Fingers: Accumulation, Regulation, Organisation’, in Chhachhi, A. and Pittin,

R. (eds), Confronting State, Capital, and Patriarchy: Women Organising in the

Process of Industrialisation, London: Macmillan, pp. 35–5.

—— (1998a) ‘Talking to the Boys: Gender and Economic Growth Models’, in

Jackson, C. and Pearson, R. (eds), Feminist Visions of Development, London:

Routledge, pp. 155–70.

—— (1998b) ‘Integrating Gender Issues into National Budgetary Policies and

Procedures: Some Policy Options’, Journal of International Development 10: 929–

41.

—— (2000) ‘Theories of Development’, in Janice Peterson and Meg Lewis (eds),

Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics, Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Reprinted in

Benería, L. and Bisnath, S. (eds), Gender and Development: Theoretical, Empirical

and Practical Approaches, Vol. 1, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2001.

—— (2002) ‘Gender Responsive Budget Initiatives: Key Dimensions and Practical

Examples’, in Judd, K. (ed.), Gender Budget Initiatives, New York: UNIFEM.

—— (2003) ‘Human Rights and Corporate Profits: The Case of the UN Global

Compact’, in Benería, L. and Bisnath, S. (eds), Global Tensions: Challenges and

Opportunities in the World Economy, London: Routledge.

—— (2004) ‘Engendering Government Budgets in the Context of Globalisation(s)’,

International Feminist Journal of Politics 6(4): 623–42.

Elson, D. and Pearson, R. (1981) ‘Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers: An

Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing’,

Feminist Review Spring: 87–107.

DIANE ELSON

Jackson, C. and Pearson, R. (eds) (1998) Feminist Visions of Development, London:

Routledge.

Molyneux, M. and Razavi, S. (eds) (2002) Gender Justice, Development and Rights,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rai, S. (2002) Gender and the Political Economy of Development, Cambridge/Oxford:

Polity in association with Blackwell.

Sylvia Chant

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK (1929–2005)

Indisputably one of the world’s most prominent and productive radical

political economists, Andre Gunder Frank’s massive corpus of work

–

forty-four books in 140 different editions, 169 chapters in 145 edited books

covering thirteen languages, and 400 articles translated into twenty lan-

guages – has left an indelible mark on the critical study of development and

the world system. Frank led an extraordinarily peripatetic and interesting

life, brushing shoulders with everyone from Milton Friedman to Che

Guevara. His name will always be associated with the body of radical schol-

arship that emerged from Latin America in the 1960s operating under the

sign of dependency theory, but his most enduring contributions reside

elsewhere (see below). A combative and iconoclastic intellectual, Frank’s

work has always been controversial and provocative, drawing as much fire

as it has acclaim. It is a measure of his stature and influence that in a collec-

tion of essays published upon his retirement, his interlocutors included

Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, and Eric Wolf. His stature as a the-

orist of the world system – certainly the equal of Fernand Braudel – is irre

futable (Frank et al. 1996).

Born in Berlin in 1929, Frank left Germany aged four. His parents fled

to Switzerland as political exiles (his father was a novelist and pacifist) in the

wake of Hitler’s ascent. Frank would return to Germany forty years later in

exile himself, fleeing the military coup in Chile. This early exile marked the

beginning of a nomadic life which has no equal in the world of the aca

demic activist: he became an internationalist à la lettre. By his own reckon

ing, Frank rarely stayed more than one to two years in any one place (Chile,

England, the US and Holland are the exceptions) and since 1961 he had

been pursuing what he calls his ‘Oddissey around the world’.

His

nomadism was to some extent a product of his own restless, inquisitive

nature; but in equal measure he was in a sort of permanent exile, at once

too radical, too ornery and too unconventional for most universities on

both sides of the Atlantic. His life was intimately shaped by the Cold War

and the rise of Third World development policy and practice.

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

As a young boy, he migrated across Switzerland’s three principal lan

guage areas and this laid the foundation for what became his multilingual

fluency (he has control over seven languages). In 1941 he moved with his

parents to the USA, where he remained until he was thirty-one years old.

As a teenager his life was equally mobile – California, Idaho, Michigan,

New York. He finished school at Ann Arbor High in Michigan

and

entered college at Swarthmore, where he became – by his own admission

– a ‘Keynesian economist’.

It is one of the enduring paradoxes of radical social science that Frank

was educated in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he studied

with Milton Friedman. He was awarded the PhD in 1957 for a dissertation

on Soviet agriculture in the Ukraine. Not surprisingly, his career at Chi

cago was unorthodox. Bert Hoselitz in Anthropology introduced him to

development and modernisation theory on which he was to unleash his

ferocious critique. Walt Rostow, whom he later met at MIT in 1958, was,

of course, his bête noire. Frank wrote little on his dissertation during the

period 1957 to 1962 when he taught at Michigan State University, Wayne

State and the University of Iowa. He visited the Soviet Union in 1960 but

as he put it ‘all official doors in Moscow and Kiev were closed to me’. He

later returned to the question of socialism but this time to its vulnerabilities

in relation to the world system and the unevenness of its cyclical develop-

ment. Frank was sometimes credited with having predicted the collapse of

the Soviet Union in 1989.

In 1961 Frank resigned from his position at Michigan State, disillu-

sioned by both the impress of the Cold War on academia and by the realisa-

tion that most social science research was ‘part of the problem’. His

radicalisation had begun earlier, largely through self-discovery and what he

calls ‘years of wandering through the woods’. His resignation marked the

beginning of a world-wide trek across many countries, universities and dis

ciplines. In 1962 he taught at the University of Brasilia (unable to teach at

Leipzig or Havana as he intended), and thereafter successively at UNAM in

Mexico City, George William University in Montreal, and the Interna

tional Labor Organisation (ILO) in Chile (from where he was fired). In

1968, at the instigation of Salvador Allende, he was appointed to the Facul

ties of Sociology and Economics in Santiago. Any return to the US was

foreclosed by a 1965 decision to deny him entry on the grounds of his writ

ing for Monthly Review and ‘his identification with the Chinese Communist

position’ as the Immigration and Naturalisation Department put it. His

Chilean sojourn was foundational for his work on dependency theory but

it also marked the beginning of a new concern with the need for global

resistance to the crisis of capitalist accumulation that in his view had begun

in 1970. Frank’s Latin American sojourn was brought to a dramatic halt,

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

however, with the overthrow of the Allende government in 1972 and his

flight into exile. For three unhappy years he moved between Berlin,

Munich and Frankfurt, before being appointed Professor of Development

Studies at the University of East Anglia in 1978. From there he moved to

Amsterdam in 1983. Over this period Frank claimed to have applied

unsuccessfully for eighty positions in the USA.

Frank taught in at least sixteen universities and across ten different disci

plines. In 1994 he went into mandatory retirement from the Faculty of

Economics at the University of Amsterdam. At the time of his death, he

was a member of the Graduate Faculty in Sociology at the University of

Toronto but between 2000 and 2004 he held visiting appointments at the

Universities of Miami, Nebraska, Northeastern and Calabria. For almost

half a century – a stretch of time that included the death of his first wife,

Marta Fuentes, in 1993, the divorce from his second, Nancy Howell, and

four major medical operations – his productivity and intellectual vitality

did not wane. He is survived by his two sons and third wife, Alison

Candela.

Frank’s large body of work was all directly shaped by Marx (though he

has rarely engaged with the larger body of modern Marxist theory from

Luxemburg to Lenin to Trotsky to Gramsci to Horkheimer). The central-

ity of accumulation, and particularly accumulation on a world scale,

encompasses the five major themes in his corpus. The first addresses the

socialist bloc, beginning with his earliest work on socialist productivity in

the Soviet Union and the question of political economic organisation in

relation to economic flexibility and rigidity. He returned to the socialist

economies in the 1970s to explore how they were being transformed by

the world economic crisis outside of the socialist bloc (Frank 1980, 1983).

This led him to explore both the internal contradictions within eastern

Europe generated by the world crisis and how the former socialist econo

mies are being transformed under the influence of the IMF, and the conse

quences of the destruction of COMECON (Council for Mutual

Economist Assistance) on the global division of labour. A second theme

was social and anti-system movements, a project initiated with Marta

Fuentes and developed further in a collective project (1990) with Samir

Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi. The argument

turned on the decline of Left parties and organisations and the flowering of

social movements of all sorts which carried the hopes of social transforma

tion without the capture of state power. These movements were placed on

a larger canvas of world historical mobilisation, and confronted the

uncomfortable fact that much of the flowering of civil society could be

markedly ‘uncivil’ (i.e. unprogressive).

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

The third theme – world system development and underdevelopment

– began with his move to Latin America. He first deployed the term world

system and dependence in the mid-1960s and these ideas shaped his under

standing of Third World underdevelopment. Using case studies of Mex

ico, Chile and Brazil, Frank laid out a historical account of the creation of

complex dependent relations linking the metropole and the periphery in

the wake of the fifteenth-century conquest. Rejecting the idea that Latin

America was or had been feudal, Frank explored the processes of incorpo

ration into the capitalist world market and the structures of dependence

(from inter-state to intra-village) so created. A number of other key theo

rists – especially Fernando Cardoso – developed these ideas through

detailed case studies, and the ideas were picked up and developed in other

ways by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and

UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development),

and came to have enormous influence in academic and policy circles.

Dependency emerged from both the Marxist and structuralist antecedents

(Love 1990), especially the trade-based theorists like Raúl Prebisch at

ECLA, but the Marxist-inspired work of Frank (1967, 1969) and Cardoso

and Faletto (1969) provided its foundations. Frank’s work, in particular,

unleashed a firestorm of debate from both Right and Left. His work was a

direct challenge to the Latin American Communist Parties but also, of

course, to the modernisation theorists. Dependency was also attacked from

within Marxian theoretical circles for its ‘circulationist’ (i.e. exchange-

based) view of capitalism, its functionalism, and its failure to engage with

the structural Marxism of Althusser and his colleagues in France (see

Brenner 1977; Laclau 1971; Bernstein and Nicholas 1983). Whatever one

thinks of this 1960s dependency theory (and its promotion of autarchy),

Frank had identified the existence of a system of world accumulation

marked by the rupture of the fourteenth century and linked what he called

the development of underdevelopment to its rhythms, crises and conjunc

tures. Here he had independently arrived at a similar point to that of Samir

Amin (1972) and Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), who were to lay out their

respective visions of the world system a little later.

By the time dependency had reached the elevated levels of policy, Frank

was already troubled and was moving toward his fourth theme, contempo

rary international political economy (1978). In the early 1970s, Frank pre

dicted a worldwide economic crisis that would both integrate the socialist

bloc into its capitalist orbit and impose export intensification on the Third

World through force rather than consent; he also anticipated the ‘oil shock’

as the harbinger of a series of successive and ever deeper recessions within a

world economic crisis (see 1980, 1982, 1983). Here much of his work

addressed such questions as the regionalisation of the world economy, the

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

consequences of Thatcherism and Reaganism for the 1979–82 world

recession, and successfully predicted some of the world-historical changes

in the late twentieth-century political economy.

Having spent more than two decades exploring (and forecasting) con

temporary political economy on the world scale, Frank returned, in his

fifth theme, to world history. His earlier concern had been with 500 years

of capitalist world development but this time he sought to recast this period

by breaking irrevocably with its Eurocentrism, and by pushing backwards

the origins of the world system 5000 years (and in so doing came to aban

don completely the category of capitalism itself and break irrevocably from

his old adversaries Wallerstein, Amin and Braudel). His book ReOrient

(1998) starts from the pathbreaking work of Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) on

the thirteenth-century world system, and of Jim Blaut (1992) on the flaws

of Eurocentric history (all of Weberian and Marxist history is deemed to be

Eurocentric by Frank), and endeavours to reinterpret the modern age and

the rise of Europe. ReOrient makes two broad arguments. One demolishes

the pillars of Eurocentrism by showing that Asia was outpacing Europe

until the mid-1700s and its decline came about because of internal crisis,

not the rise of Europe. The second turns on the conjunctural circumstances

that permitted the rise of Europe around 1800. His major thesis is that

‘there was a single global world economy with a worldwide division of

labor and multilateral trade from 1500 onward’ (1998: 52). But the core of

the system was Asia; it dominated the intense and tight trade linkages in

such a way that the whole was not a ‘European world system’. Inevitably

this book has been received in highly polarised ways (for example, the

responses to it by Wallerstein 1999, Amin 1999 and Arrighi 1999) but the

broad lineaments of the argument are consistent with some of the more

important and original work emerging from the study of China

(Pomerantz 2000).

Andre Gunder Frank remained as productive as ever until shortly before

his death from cancer. His return to world history launched his final pro

ject, which was a tripartite analysis of first what he called the ‘new world

[dis]order’, second the ‘reOrienting of the Nineteenth century’ (explaining

why the relative powers of the Orient and the West were inverted, build

ing upon Pomerantz’s The Great Divergence (2000)), and finally ‘Bronze Age

World System Cycles’ in which he attempted to chart global accumulation

(as he understood it) into the fourth and fifth millennia BP. Frank ended his

writing career surrounded by the same sort of debate, the same sort of

iconoclastic style, and the same controversy that marked his entry into the

staid world of the academy four decades earlier.

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

Notes

1 His bibliography covering the period 1955–95 contains 880 publications in

twenty-seven languages; by 2003 the total figure exceeded 1000 publications.

The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam received Frank’s

papers in 1995; they cover 35 metres of shelf space (the inventory is available

online at: http://rrojasdatabank.info/afgfrank/IISG_Pubs.html). His work has

been cited in journals on average over the period 1975–present about 200 times

per annum.

2 All quotations by Frank, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from his ‘Cold

War and Me’ essay and his short political memoir published on his website.

3 He changed his name from Andrew (anglicised by his parents from Andreas) to

Andre, adopting the appellation Gunder in high school (a nickname derived

from a Swedish world record distance runner).

Major works

A vast amount of work in many languages is available at Frank’s website: http://

rrojasdatabank.info/agfrank/personal.html.

Frank, A.G. (1967) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, New York:

Monthly Review.

—— (1969) Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution, New York: Monthly

Review.

—— (1978) World Accumulation: 1492–1789, New York: Monthly Review.

—— (1980) Crisis in the World Economy, New York: Holmes.

—— (1982) Reflections on the World Crisis, with S. Amin, G. Arrighi and I.

Wallerstein, New York: Monthly Review.

—— (1983) The European Challenge, Nottingham: Spokesman.

—— (1990) Transforming the Revolution, with S. Amin., G. Arrighi and I.

Wallerstein, New York: Monthly Review.

—— (1998) ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press.

Frank, A.G., Chew, S.C. et al. (1996) The Underdevelopment of Development: Essays

in Honor of Andre Gunder Frank, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Further reading

Abu-Lughod, J.L. (1989) Before European Hegemony, New York: Oxford University

Press.

Amin, S. (1972) Accumulation on a World Scale, New York: Monthly Review.

—— (1999) ‘REORIENTALISM? – History Conceived as an Eternal Cycle’,

Review 22(3): 36.

Arrighi, G. (1999) ‘REORIENTALISM? – The World According to Andre

Gunder Frank’, Review 22(3): 28.

Bernstein, H. and Nicholas, H. (1983) ‘Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the

Will – a Response to Andre Gunder Frank’, Development and Change 14(4):

609–24.

Blaut, J.M. (1992) 1492: The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and History,

Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

Brenner, R. (1977) ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development’, New Left Review,

104: 25–92.

Cardoso, H. and Faletto, E. (1969) Dependencia y Desarallo en America Latina,

Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores.

Laclau, E. (1971) ‘Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America’, New Left Review 67:

19–38.

Love, J.L. (1990) ‘The Origins of Dependency Analysis’, Journal of Latin American

Studies 22(1): 143–68.

Pomerantz, C. (2000) The Great Divergence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World System, Vol. 1, New York: Academic

Press.

—— (1999) ‘REORIENTALISM? – Frank Proves the European Miracle’, Review

22(3): 18.

Michael Watts

PAOLO FREIRE (1921–97)

In his struggle for liberation of the poor and voiceless, Paolo Freire was

something of a refugee searching for a state that would accept his basic

thoughts. His life journey started in Recife, northeastern Brazil, where he

was born in 1921. In spite of his middle-class background, the prevailing

economic hardships made him suffer from hunger and poverty. This per-

sonal experience made him realise the close relationship between social

class and knowledge. Freire started to wonder about the apparent indiffer-

ence by the poor towards their obvious oppression. The Latin American

people had basically subsumed to what Freire called a culture of silence,

quietly accepting the superiority of the elite over the people. To be able to

strike back, the people had to regain their language.

As his family’s economic conditions improved, Freire was eventually

able to enter the University of Recife to study law, which he initially con

sidered as useful in his struggle for the poor. However, at the time he was

also influenced by philosophy and language. His own way of thinking

developed through reading Catholic ideologies, as well as Karl Marx and

French existentialists such as Sartre. Parallel to legal studies, his interest in

educational matters grew, and after completing his degree he turned to

social work and education. Within the field of education he was also greatly

influenced by his wife since 1944, Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, who was a

school teacher.

Working on social welfare he came into close contact with the plight of

the urban poor. It was at this early stage that the basic concepts for his dia

logue method in adult education started to take shape. He was eventually

awarded a PhD degree in 1959 for his subsequent work in education at the

PAOLO FREIRE

University of Recife. From his base at that university, he was able to initiate

a very successful literacy programme that was diffused to the whole of

Brazil. In the midst of a radical excitement, the Freirean foundation of

building his pedagogy on resistance was in demand across a wide sector of

the population. In today’s terms, we could say that the literacy courses

offered were an instrument for empowerment. The open defiance created

was not desired by the new Brazilian regime then emerging from the mili

tary coup of 1964. To Freire, the coup was caused by inconsistencies

within the Left in its claim for power that was not really available to them.

That scared the Right into building a force that eventually led to this mili

tary take-over (Freire 1998). After spending a period in prison, Freire

embarked on his long journey by being sent into exile in Chile via a short

spell in Bolivia.

The adult education programme he was involved in at that time was

recognised internationally by UNESCO among others. After some five

years in Chile, he was invited to the USA and Harvard University as a Visit-

ing Professor. What he now experienced provided a new input to his

thinking in education, and its part in the process of social change. It was in

the USA that Freire realised that exclusion was not only part of what was

called the Third World, but was very much part of life in the North. Con-

sequently, liberation was not only a struggle confined to the people of Latin

America, Africa and Asia, but the USA and Europe as well. It is with these

new experiences in mind that Freire (1970) finalised his most influential

book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As with his other books, this one can

be seen as building directly on his own practice.

In 1970 Freire continued his journey to carry his mission further, as he

ended up at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. During this period

he was given an opportunity for lecturing and promoting his concepts on

education in Africa and Asia. Undoubtedly Freire’s intellectual work

proved a major encouragement in attempts to establish a new kind of edu

cational thinking in many of these countries. However, many regimes

found the practice of this education for liberation difficult to accept. Ivan

Illich (1971), his close friend and collaborator, commented on this by say

ing that Geneva was an exile for Freire, while his friends and followers had

been imprisoned or exposed to torture. It is difficult for any government to

incorporate the Freire agenda but it is a very powerful alternative for the

poor in society to decide on their own future.

In 1979 Freire was invited back to his native Brazil to take up a position

at the University of São Paolo. Some years later he was even appointed to

the position of Minister of Education for São Paolo state, which gave him

authority to direct school reforms in a major part of the country. He passed

away in 1997, leaving a legacy of an educational theory but an even more

PAOLO FREIRE

powerful practice. To Freire, education could never be neutral; it was

always to constitute part of a political agenda.

Freire’s significance is that his work has provided essential inputs to the

theoretical debate on education, but at the same time the practice he has

generated is even more important. The protest against the culture of silence

is summarised in a critique against the banking methodology, as a conven

tional custom in school. According to the Banking Model of Education,

teachers have all the necessary knowledge and make deposits as to a bank.

The students are the depositories that receive and memorise the informa

tion given to them passively. As in a bank, information stored in this way

can be withdrawn as required at any time. This pedagogy is a reflection of

the oppressive society against which Freire reacted at an early stage of life.

Some of the obvious contradictions in this methodology were brought out

by Freire:

• the teacher teaches – the students are taught

• the teacher knows all – the students know nothing

• the teacher thinks – the students are thought about

• the teacher talks – the students listen

• the teacher disciplines – the students are disciplined

• the teacher chooses and enforces the choice – the students comply

• the teacher acts – the students have an illusion of acting

• the teacher chooses the programme content – the students adapt to it

• the teacher is the subject – the pupils are mere objects (adapted from

Freire 1970).

By this methodology, students store the knowledge that in actual fact

oppresses them – making them accept things as they are. Part of the teach

ing by means of the banking method is to conceal certain facts that could

demystify our entire existence. Therefore, they will not develop a critical

consciousness that would make them able to intervene in world affairs.

Banking education does not stimulate the critical thinking needed to chal

lenge their oppressors.

Contrary to Illich, this does not lead Freire to the conclusion that the

way out is deschooling, but rather to a way to change education. His pro

posed alternative is an educational model that is problem-posing that would

replace the banking education. A key element in this is a changed relation

ship between the teacher and the student, in which they are involved in a

dialectical dialogue. In this new pedagogy, teachers and students are turned

into both teachers and learners at the same time, now all being subjects

exchanging and recreating knowledge. In a dialogue, a question or a con

cept can be raised by the teacher, which in return will be answered by

PAOLO FREIRE

another question or idea. From this a synthesis will be found that, in itself,

will pose a new question or thesis. Both teachers and students will learn,

teach each other, as well as critically find a new way of thinking.

From a practical point of view, the pedagogy was built on the reality of

the oppressed themselves, often illustrated by using a set of pictures to spark

a discussion. This was combined with selecting words that could be divided

into some commonly used syllables. From this, new words were con

structed, gradually going from the simple to the more complex. It must be

noted here that this was easy in the case of Portuguese and Spanish, but is

difficult to adapt to other languages. Finally, the words were structured in

such a way that it was possible to contextualise them in terms of the social

and political realities. In Freire (1973), some graphic expressions of his

practical approach to education are given.

The purpose of the dialogue education was to achieve a kind of political

literacy – a process of conscientisation. With a critical pedagogy, educators

and learners were to be involved jointly in a practice to demystify reality.

When oppressed persons begin looking critically at the world through a

joint dialogue, it constitutes a challenge to the culture of silence. The

oppressed person will no longer be an object accepting the status quo of

society, but becomes a subject reacting more actively by questioning sur-

rounding social forces. Overcoming a state of dependency is initiated by

realising that dependency exits.

Freire was a contemporary of some of the early dependistas in Latin

America, and they were inspired by a similar intellectual tradition. In both

cases, a starting point could be found in Marxism or neo-Marxism. We can

also see how Freire uses the example of Che Guevara, as a revolutionary

who practised a constant dialogue with the people to achieve an authentic

strategy for liberation action (Freire 1998). On the other hand, he is highly

critical of most existing socialist societies, except Cuba and China, because

they were unable to go beyond bourgeois education to create a critical mass

of the new breed of people.

In Latin America the closed society, based on a culture of silence, took

shape with the conquest by the Spanish and Portuguese. Since that time,

only the centre of decision-making has changed – Spain, Portugal, Eng

land and the USA. To Freire, the economic dependence is obvious, but he

also focuses on the educational system that serves the status quo. This posi

tion is not created in a specialised laboratory and brought down to Latin

America. It is part of the whole relationship between the dominated in the

Third World and the dominant forces of the affluent North. To aid under

standing, it is necessary to analyse connections between the culture of

silence and the culture that has a voice (Freire 1972).

PAOLO FREIRE

It has been natural that much of the practical influence of the Freire

pedagogy has been concentrated in Latin America. Apart from his native

Brazil, we can note that Chile under Allende’s socialist government (1970–

73) was inspired by Freire’s thinking. Another important example is the

Sandinista period in Nicaragua (1979–90), which signifies one of the sin

cere attempts to create a revolutionary transformation, not least with an

educational system appropriate to that agenda. In Africa his ideas were first

taken up by some of the former Portuguese colonies, such as Angola and

Guinea Bissau, both of which had a similarly progressive approach to their

educational practice at an early stage. The practical experiences in Guinea

Bissau have been elaborated on in Freire (1978).

One of the outstanding proponents of an alternative development phi

losophy for Africa was Julius Nyerere, in his capacity as president of Tan

zania. Early on, the country was praised for its achievements in adult

education, which were largely a product of the Freirean concept. Even if

there were some drawbacks as Tanzania was forcefully brought into main-

stream neoliberal global politics, there was a return to a new progressive lit-

eracy agenda in the late 1990s – the Integrated Community Based Adult

Education (ICBAE). In addition, these kinds of programmes – the Freirean

approach to education – have been adopted by various grassroots organisa-

tions and liberation movements. Among others, the Oromo Liberation

Front (OLF) in Ethiopia has used this pedagogy to increase awareness

among its cadres. In the North, we find that Freire has been of influence to

the Black Panther Movement and feminist groups in the USA, among oth-

ers. This illustrates the usefulness of these pedagogical concepts to the

industrialised world as well, and to the oppressed people found in the midst

of plenty.

Major works

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury.

—— (1972) Cultural Action for Freedom, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

—— (1973) Education for Critical Consciousness, New York: Seabury.

—— (1978) Pedagogy in Progress: The Letters to Guinea Bissau, New York: Seabury.

—— (1985) The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation, London: Macmillan.

—— (1998) Pedagogy of the Heart, New York: Continuum.

Further reading

Illich, I. (1971) Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution, London:

Marion Boyars.

Anders Närman

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JOHN FRIEDMANN (1926–)

John Friedmann is a key development thinker notable for both the quality

and quantity of his contributions and for a remarkable career in which he

continues to provide insights on the intellectual frontiers of development.

Friedmann’s line of original and formative thought over half a century is

distinctive in its breadth, depth and originality. His work helped define the

new field of ‘regional development’ and in addition he both originated and

facilitated key development concepts such as core–periphery, urban fields,

agropolitan development, world cities, hyperurbanisation, polarised devel

opment, empowerment and civil society – these will be explained below.

Distinctively, he has always been able to bring an interdisciplinary

breadth and innovative perspective to topics at the forefront of develop-

ment thinking. He understands power, space, sociology and economics.

He continually derives innovative ways of combining these rich intellec-

tual concepts to elucidate new and important meanings in our understand-

ing of development.

Wander through the administrative halls of today’s academia and the

word ‘interdisciplinary’ brings forth positive affirmation in every corridor.

It is noteworthy that John Friedmann was trained in a unique interdisci-

plinary tradition half a century ago and that much of his life’s work can

honour that tradition.

John Friedmann was born in Vienna, Austria in 1926. His family fled

the Nazis in 1940 and, after a somewhat peripatetic existence (during

which he became a US citizen in 1944), he earned his MA and eventually

PhD from the University of Chicago in 1955. It is notable that his PhD was

undertaken in ‘a short-lived Program for Education and Research in Plan

ning’ under the direction of Harvey Perloff (Friedmann 2002: 119).

Uniquely, this programme was interdisciplinary and his PhD was conferred

in the fields of ‘planning, economics and geography’.

It is important to realise that John Friedmann and his mentors were

among the first scholars formally to break disciplinary boundaries. Nor

mally, planners were trained within schools of architecture. Instead, John

Friedmann received significant training in the social sciences and began to

think of planning as an applied social science. This approach resounds in his

life’s work.

In a personal retrospective (ibid.: 2002), Friedmann acknowledges sev

eral important early influences. His father, Robert Friedmann, was a histo

rian and philosopher who introduced him to the works of American

urbanists Reinhold Niebuhr and Lewis Mumford, and the political theorist

Hannah Arendt, and encouraged him to wander through the intellectual

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minefields of the philosophy of science. He also engaged with the Jewish

philosopher, Martin Buber. ‘I inherited from this a strong sense of moral

purpose, a philosophical disposition, and (ultimately) a strong sense of his

tory that questioned the possibilities of reason as an active force in history’

(Friedmann 2002: 120). Linking the large concepts of society, power and

space established Friedmann as a ‘new thinker’ in development.

Friedmann’s unique degree at the University of Chicago carried a fine

pedigree – the new degree programme having been started by the former

Governor of Puerto Rico, Rexford Tugwell. Tugwell brought in many

scholars, including planner Harvey Perloff, who was to become

Friedmann’s Advisor and eventual colleague at the University of California

at Los Angeles (UCLA). John Friedmann also worked with urban designer

Melville Branch, economic planner Julius Margolis, technology specialist

Richard Meier and housing expert Martin Meyerson during his graduate

years. Friedmann was also a witness to the inception of neoliberalism (a

firm conservative belief in the market system) by economists Milton Fried-

man and Theodore W. Schultz that led the University of Chicago’s

Department of Economics (and the country and the globe) on a political

economic course that today dominates global policy.

Regional development was a very new concept at the time, and

Friedmann’s dissertation study of the Tennessee Valley Authority was a

pioneer effort to indicate how decisions could be made in ‘regional’ ways

that included multiple states, counties and local authorities. Friedmann

showed that ‘watershed’ boundaries were not necessarily appropriate to a

dynamic post-war economy. The effect on cities was a key, but so, too, was

the persistence of rural poverty.

Following the award of his PhD, Friedmann spent six years in Brazil and

Korea working with US development agencies. He taught, he wrote, he

absorbed, he planned (alas, his plans did not gain support from the United

States Agency for International Development – USAID). In 1960, the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – a premier institution in the

planning field – recruited Friedmann to its faculty. He quickly became

engaged in a joint research programme in Venezuela focused on regional

development.

In 1964, Friedmann left MIT to be the Director of the Ford Foundation

programme in Chile. As for most planners, the trade-off between taking

action and simply thinking is a true challenge, although they can be happily

and appropriately interspersed. Friedmann accomplished this. During this

period he identified the concept of hyperurbanisation, which he defined as a

doubling rate in the size of urban population in less than twenty years. He

accurately noted that this process would lead to a new situation of political

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awareness that would substantially change the status quo. The political his

tory of Chile proves his case.

In 1965, Friedmann and John Miller (his graduate student) published an

article on ‘Urban fields’ that extended Jean Gottmann’s (1961) analysis out

of a single case and showed how urban areas across the United States were

coalescing in a variety of important ways in economic and spatial dimen

sions. They predicted that 85–90 per cent of the American populace

would soon be living in an ‘urban field’.

The core–periphery concept has its strongest origin, especially at the

regional scale, in Friedmann’s (1966) work during this period. He showed

clearly that core–periphery relationships worked strongly on the regional

scale, and brought space, power and society into unequal relationships.

This concept eventually became a critical component for world systems

theory as formulated by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974). Friedmann devel

oped the concept of nearly immutable power relationships that transcend

scales between rich and poor and translate into economic/development rela-

tionships. Indeed, his work was somewhat scale-related to regional levels.

Nonetheless, these relationships soon proved to be scale-transcending and

proved to be the basis of a large corpus of local–global theory on scale

relationships.

In 1969 John Friedmann accepted an academic position in planning at

UCLA. He clearly helped build UCLA into one of the best planning

programmes in the country. Graduate students were mesmerised by the

onslaught of knowledge he provided, both in his classes and in the

programme. Somehow he managed to have the likes of David Harvey,

Samir Amin, Janet Abu-Lughod, Manuel Castells and other famous fig-

ures visit for a whole week. They would give a colloquium, but graduate

students would also meet with them after reading their works, and they

would participate in scheduled seminars. Many of the graduate students

interviewed admitted they felt they were at the centre of the intellectual

universe. Through this process, Friedmann not only gave many students a

special education but also provided a model for how best to teach graduate

students.

During this period, John Friedmann engaged the popular concept of

growth centres. His work on polarised development (1972) called into question

the spatial dynamics and possible patterns of growth centre implementation

and harkened back to his earlier arguments on the core–periphery concept.

This work was further elucidated in Urbanisation, Planning and National

Development (1973) which addressed questions of the role of the nation-

state in urban and regional planning.

A pragmatist is someone who has an approach to the world that asks two

questions: (1) is there a problem? and (2) can we help solve it? As a probable

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pragmatist, Friedmann wrote Retracking America (1973). In this book he

introduced the ‘communicative turn’ into planning and emphasised the

possibilities of transactive planning. One real question is whether

Friedmann is a simple pragmatist or a ‘radical’ as he claims himself to be.

We will return to this.

John Friedmann has always been engaged with urban questions that

involve space, society and economy. In Territory and Function (Friedmann

and Weaver 1979), the concept of agropolitan development acknowledged the

rural–urban linkage that was of vital importance in the economics of the

developing world and spoke to the importance of the agricultural hinter

land that supported a city’s economic existence and viability. In this con

cept, Friedmann refocused planning on rural development as the engine

that drives urban development in small- and medium-scale urban centres.

Again, he re-emphasised the region as a critical factor in development.

As John Friedmann himself notes, ‘ “World City” was an idea waiting

to be born’ (2002: 145). As a major development concept, World City

received an initial formalisation by Friedmann and Wolff (1982) and was

further elaborated as Friedmann’s (1986) ‘The World City Hypothesis’.

Simply, the ‘World City’ exploded the nation-state-based urban hierarchy

to reflect major city roles in a new globalising economy. This is a powerful

extension of urban thought, reflected, for example, in a major evaluative

and prospective conference on the hypothesis and its application in 1993, at

which he was guest and keynote speaker (Friedmann 1995; Knox and Tay-

lor 1995).

Empowerment (1992) encapsulated Friedmann’s approach to develop-

ment. As the world changed with the collapse of regimes in the Soviet

Union and Eastern Europe, Friedmann argued for an alternative develop

ment theory. He explicitly inserted the human development link to eco

nomic development, asking important questions that once again link

political power and economic development. Disempowerment is seen as

coming from poverty. This disempowerment has social, political and psy

chological components. This is very much in line with Amartya Sen’s

(1999) later work on Development as Freedom that provided a ‘morally

informed framework’ for embedding policies that are pro-poor in the

structure of mainstream development planning. Friedmann’s empower

ment work benefits from a ‘creative tension’ between mainstream and

poverty initiatives that outlined viable futures for the poor of the world.

John Friedmann (2000) even engaged the sustainable city initiative with

his work on Mexico City. This is just another instance in which he is not

following, but leading the debate on important urban and regional issues.

His current research focuses on the power of the household in develop

ment, the significance of livelihoods research, and also inspects the

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increasing importance of civil society. The Prospect of Cities (2002) contin

ues to raise important questions, while his latest volume (Friedmann 2005)

surveys the unprecedented urban transition in China.

John Friedmann not only continues to make major contributions to the

field of development, but he does so with a remarkable persistence, resili

ence and a wise person’s sense of what is needed. His book on philosophy,

The Good Society (1979), should be required reading by all who have some

allegiance to the pragmatic tradition.

John Friedmann made the ‘regional’ important to development. His

interdisciplinary focus provided numerous signal intellectual contributions

that ranged across disciplines. He is clearly a ‘key thinker’ in development,

but he is best recognised for his role as an ethical and moral leader in

development.

Major works

Friedmann, J. (1966) Regional Development Policy: A Case Study of Venezuela,

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

—— (1972)‘A General Theory of Polarised Development’, in N.M. Hansen (ed.),

Growth Centers in Regional Economic Development, New York: Free Press, pp. 82–

107.

—— (1973) Retracking America: A Theory of Transactive Planning, Garden City, NY:

Doubleday/Anchor.

—— (1973) Urbanisation, Planning and National Development, London: Sage.

—— (1979) The Good Society: A Personal Account of its Struggle with the World of Social

Planning and a Dialectical Inquiry into the Roots of Radical Practice, Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.

—— (1986) ‘The World City Hypothesis’, Development and Change 17(1): 69–84.

—— (1992) Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development, Oxford: Blackwell.

—— (1995) ‘Where We Stand: A Decade of World City Research’, in Knox, P.L.

and Taylor, P.J. (eds), World Cities in a World-System, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

—— (2000) Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability: The Case of

Mexico City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

—— (2002) The Prospect of Cities, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

—— (2005) China’s Urban Transition, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Friedmann, J. and Miller, J. (1965) ‘The Urban Field’, Journal of the American

Institute of Planners 31(4): 312–19.

Friedmann, J. and Weaver, C. (1979) Territory and Function: The Evolution of

Regional Planning, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Friedmann, J. and Wolff, G. (1982) ‘World City Formation: An Agenda for

Research and Action’, International Journal for Urban and Regional Research 6(3):

309–44.

JOHN FRIEDMANN

105

Further reading

Gottmann, J. (1961) Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United

States, New York: The Twentieth Century Fund.

Knox, P.L. and Taylor, P.J. (eds) (1995) World Cities in a World-System, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf.

Wallerstein, I. (1974) Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World

Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Vol. 1 of the Modern World System, New York:

Academic Press.

Gary Gaile

MOHANDAS (MAHATMA) GANDHI (1869–1948)

If you cannot change yourself, how can you change the World?

Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known as ‘Mahatma’, meaning ‘great-

souled’ as people called him, was born on 2 October 1869 in Western India

and went to England in 1888 to study law. He returned to India in 1891,

and after practising law for some time he moved to South Africa in 1893,

where he was a determined opponent of the ‘pass laws’ and other kinds of

racial discrimination. There he organised ‘Satyagraha’ (non-violent action,

or ‘passive resistance’) in 1906, 1908 and in 1913. With a view to serving

his country of birth, he returned to India in 1914 and soon became a lead-

ing figure in the cause of Indian nationalism and development movements.

In 1915 Gandhi established the Satyagraha Ashram at Ahmedabad, and in

1917 moved it to the Sabarmati River. On 30 January 1948 Gandhi was

shot dead by a Hindu fanatic, while holding a prayer meeting in Delhi.

In the late 1940s, the term ‘development’ was not in currency as it is

today. Gandhi had, therefore, used the term ‘progress’ for development,

more with respect to ethics and cosmic integrity. He said, ‘by economic

progress we mean material advancement without limit, and by real prog

ress we mean moral progress, which again, is the same thing as progress of

the permanent elements in us’ (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi

(WMG), vol. 87: 249). He never made an academic contribution to ‘devel

opment’; instead he pleaded for an organised effort to change the ruling

paradigm and move towards a superhuman stage. The Gandhian idea of

development is based on the foundational ethics of ahimsa (non-violence,

which he interpreted as ‘firmness in the truth’). Perhaps Gandhi’s most

important influence has been on the black civil rights movement in the

USA led by Martin Luther King.

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In the cosmic-moral organisation, faith is the path of spirituality, and

spirituality in its true sense is the motive force behind development.

Gandhi suggested ‘Seven Social Sins’ to be avoided. Of course, these are

ideals, but they are more relevant in the present era of desperation and

could easily be accepted. According to Gandhi, the ‘Seven Social Sins’ are:

(i) Consumption without conscience. The means and symbols of

consumption are the 3Ps, namely property, power and prestige.

Without conscience or moral responsibility, consumption always

turns to evil, in other words, eating food is consumption, but

without conscience it leads to sickness. Consumerism is one of the

basic root causes of social conflict.

(ii) Knowledge without character. Knowledge is power, but without

morality it is hypocrisy. With a lack of morality knowledge becomes

a heavy burden on humanity.

(iii) Wealth without labour. In the modern era, wealth is the highest symbol

of projecting the level of personality and status. This promotes the

tendency of the ‘rich becoming richer and the poor becoming

poorer’. Such rich people never realise their social responsibility; this

leads to social crisis.

(iv) Business without morality. According to the philosophy of welfare

economics, the basis of economic success is morality. Gandhi said,

‘Economics that hurt the moral well-being of an individual or a

nation are immoral and, therefore, sinful’ (WMG, vol. 13: 317, also

cf. WMG, vol. 75: 158).

(v) Religious duty without sacrifice. Compassion, service, sacrifice and

altruism are the basic rules of dharma (righteous duty). Lacking the

sense of sacrifice promotes individualism, egocentricity and

selfishness. Serving the poor is service to God.

(vi) Science without human sense. Science has the power of both creation

and destruction; its nature depends on the way in which it is used by

mankind. Misconception of science as a tool and technique for the

use of resources has promoted the philosophy of consumerism,

which finally resulted in environmental disorder, pollution and loss

of peaceful life. Science is the means, but the end is human kindness!

(vii) Politics without principles. Politics without principles is the cause of the

global crisis and destruction of social harmony. Gandhi emphasised

the need for spirituality as the first step of politics and governance.

Whenever the ethical code of a society is lost, civilisation will end. In

such a situation, a cultural tradition is unable to find a balance between the

needs and expectations of society, and that is how it fails to illuminate a path

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of revolution. In this way, the road to progress and development comes to a

dead-end. Gandhi proposed a philosophy of revival and peace which he

called Sarvodaya (‘well-being for all’). Enhancing personal welfare (sva-) to

the level of communal well-being (sarva-) is the cultural code of Sarvodaya.

History has proved that the alternative to war and conflict is ahimsa (‘non-

violence’), i.e. peaceful agitation, creating mass awareness of cultural unity.

There are two ideas inherent in the philosophy of Sarvodaya:

(i) Democracy is a life style. Democracy is not only a way of governance, it

is also a way of life. Gandhi warned that a process of dialogue and

criticism must always be maintained between the public and ruling

powers. The continuing trend towards loss of public awareness is a

sign of the decline of democracy.

(ii) Machines have a cultural value. The use of machines (a product of

science) also has a cultural value. The application of science, or its

tool, the machine, depends on human intention. Science is like a

machine, the effects of whose use depend upon the attitude and

motives of the person who has control over it. The path on which

science is presently advancing will lead to a great dissolution.

Cultural values are imposed upon machines by human beings (cf.

WMG, vol. 25: 251–2).

Gandhi’s view of non-violence, ahimsa, vegetarianism and karma (right

action) is based on the idea of the total spiritual interconnectedness and

divinity of life as a whole. All natural phenomena are, therefore, divine,

sacred and of equal value. As human beings, we have to take the main

responsibilities towards nature through a moral-ethical-religious approach.

His theory of ahimsa was not strict like a sectarian rule; he said: ‘whoever

believes in ahimsa will engage himself in occupations that involve the least

possible violence’.

Committed to non-violence (ahimsa) and self-realisation (svachetana),

Gandhi wanted to solve India’s problems from the perspective of indi-

vidual conversion and with the ideology that ‘every man has an equal right

for the necessities of life even as birds and beasts’. According to him, the

‘right thing’ is a moral order (dharma) operated by right action (karma).

Gandhi’s emphasis upon self-realisation and rules of conduct and virtues is

essential for spiritual life and also for the maintenance of the social order.

Gandhi warned politicians about the social and political evils of which they

become part!

Gandhi said, ‘every human being has a right to live and, therefore, to

find the wherewithal to feed himself and where necessary to clothe and

house himself ’ (WMG, vol. 38: 197). He said, ‘there’s enough in the world

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MOHANDAS (MAHATMA) GANDHI

to meet the needs of everyone but there’s not enough to meet the greed of

everyone’. If every little village became self-sufficient then one would have

an ideal setting for life. Therefore he did not advocate macro-economic

policy. All villages should become self-sufficient. It must work from the

bottom upwards and not the top down.

As we work in different walks of life, we should continue to be inspired

by his words that we must ‘recall the face of the poorest and the weakest

man (and woman) whom you have seen and ask yourself if the step you

contemplate is going to be of any use to him (and her)’ (WMG, vol. 89:

125).

Gandhi practised what he preached. If he was concerned about the

‘poorest of the poor’ he adopted a life style which reflected his constitu

ency. And if he preached ‘cleanliness’ and the uplifting of Harijans

(‘untouchables’), he himself undertook the scavengers’ work, and

emphasised the importance of inner and outer cleanliness. To follow Gan-

dhi is difficult and yet millions did. He emphasised throughout that we

must change ourselves before we can change others and that our real ene-

mies are within.

The essence of natural cures is that we learn the principles of hygiene

and sanitation and abide by those laws as well as the laws relating to proper

nutrition. If rural reconstruction does not include rural sanitation, our vil-

lages will remain the dung-heaps that they are today.

Gandhi’s twenty-one years of experience in South Africa transformed

his views on life and human existence, which he again experimented with

in India. He started to look at the world from a poverty-trapped peasant’s

perspective, rather than from a middle-class bourgeois perspective. This led

him to the creation of three principles of sustainable development:

Sarvodaya, Swadeshi and Satyagraha. The other very important feature of

sustainable development which he propagated was the whole question of

local economy where everybody in the area would be self-sufficient. They

would be employed and could sustain themselves and their families with

dignity and work.

For Gandhi the swadeshi spirit extended to all the elements composing

the desh (community) and implied a love of not only the traditional way of

life but also the natural environment and especially the people sharing it.

Gandhi used the term swaraj to describe a society run in the swadeshi spirit.

It meant self-rule or autonomy and implied not only formal independence

but also cultural and moral autonomy.

The removal of untouchability, an end to Hindu–Muslim enmity, eco

nomic self-sufficiency, and making non-violence effective were funda

mental elements of his vision. Gandhi offered a viable alternative for self-

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rule and self-government. He focused on the welfare of all – sarvodaya –

and the method he followed was that of satyagraha.

Sarvodaya (‘the uplifting of all’) was a philosophical position that Gandhi

maintained. Society must strive for the economic, social, spiritual and

physical well-being of all, not just the majority. He favoured a holistic

approach to well-being, and a total approach to the community. For him

the well-being of every individual was an important concern.

He advocated that the locus of power must be situated in the village or

neighbourhood unit. He believed that there should be an equitable distri

bution of resources and that communities must become self-sustaining

through reliance on local products instead of large-scale imports from out

side. Gandhi was opposed to large-scale industrialisation, and favoured

small local industries that promote local self-sufficiency, which he called

Swadeshi. In current terms, it means buy local, be proud of local, support

local, uphold and live local. Economic equality should never mean posses-

sion of an equal amount of worldly goods by everyone. It does mean, how-

ever, that everyone should have a proper house, an adequate and balanced

diet, and sufficient cloth(ing). It also means that the cruel inequality that

obtains today will be removed by purely non-violent means.

Finally, Gandhi’s best-known theory of satyagraha, ‘truth force’ or non-

violent direct action, is actually a way of life, not just an absence of vio-

lence. It also entailed respect for all beings regardless of religious beliefs,

caste, race or creed, and a devotion to the values of truth, love and respon-

sibility. Mass awakening exemplified by the satyagraha movement, is ‘the

perfect example of how one could confront an unjust and uncaring,

though extremely superior power’ (WMG, vol. 9: 118, and cf. Gandhi

1990: 21). The achievement of political and moral ends through ahimsa is

what Gandhi called satyagraha. This notion of non-violent action is the cru

cial part of Gandhi’s political theory. Satyagraha, in fact, is a theory of

action. It calls for courage, strength of character and positive commitment

to a righteous cause. In some circumstances, e.g. inhuman acts like moles

tation or killing, it might be better to choose violence than craven submis

sion to injustice. Gandhi thought that ‘total non-violence’ might be

feasible only when mankind has acquired superhuman qualities.

The spectres of global warming, lack of water through deforestation,

and continued depletion of natural resources and diversity on Earth, are

some of the results of ‘unsustainable development’ and economic growth.

Should we not follow the path of Gandhi? He corrected himself over and

over in his striving for moral-spiritual perfection while doing his best to

reform existing institutions and social practices. He wrote in 1932, ‘I do not

accept defeat but hope, with God’s grace, to melt the stoniest heart and,

therefore, continually strive to perfect myself ’ (WMG, vol. 50: 451).

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We are slowly realising that reducing poverty or moving towards sus

tainable development is not just an economic or a technical problem or one

of acquiring greater financial inputs. All these are important but achieving

these goals also needs an inner awakening, an inner transformation of man

– a path already paved by Gandhi. If we ignore Gandhi ‘we ignore him at

our own peril’, Martin Luther King once said.

Major works

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1927) An Autobiography or the Story of My

Experiments with Truth, Ahmedabad: Navajivan.

—— (1928) Satyagraha in South Africa, Ahmedabad: Navajivan.

—— (1958–94) The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols, New Delhi:

Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt of India.

—— (1990, 1997) Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. A.J. Parel, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Further reading

Adams, I. and Dyson, R.W. (eds) (2003) ‘Mohandas Gandhi’, in Fifty Major Political

Thinkers, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 196–9.

Bondurant, J.V. (1965) Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict,

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hick, J. and Hemple, L. (1989) Gandhi’s Significance for Today, New York: St.

Martin’s Press.

Parekh, B. (1997) Gandhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Parel, A.J. (2000, 2002) Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule, Lanham, MD: Lexington

Books; Indian edition, New Delhi: Vistaar Pubs.

Pyarelal (1986) Mahatma Gandhi: The Birth of Satyagraha, Ahmedabad: Navajivan.

Singh, R.P.B. and Singh, R.S. (2002) ‘Development in India: Scenario and

Ideology’, in Anders Närman and K. Karunanayake (eds), Towards a New

Regional and Local Development Research Agenda, Dept of Geography, Göteborg

University, Sweden, Series B, No. 100 and Centre for Development Studies,

University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, No. 1, pp. 65–78.

Swan, M. (1985) Gandhi: The South African Experience, Johannesburg: Ravan.

Tendulkar, D.G. (1951–4) Mahatma: The Life of M.K. Gandhi, 8 vols, New Delhi:

Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

Terchek, R.J. (1998) Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy, Lanham, MD and New

York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Rana P.B. Singh

SUSAN GEORGE (1934–)

Susan George is unique among her contemporaries within the world of

development thinking in having consistently identified the most funda

mentally important global issues of our time before they were universally

SUSAN GEORGE

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recognised. As a progressive scholar-activist, her highly innovative work

has ranged from a focus on world hunger, poverty, debt, and North–South

relations, to a series of critiques of the world capitalist system and the major

players within it, particularly the World Trade Organisation, World Bank

and other international financial institutions. A deep-seated concern

throughout all her work has been with global injustice. Inherent in this has

been a practical preoccupation with campaigning for change in the world

at large, reflected particularly in her more recent work on the corporate-

led neoliberal globalisation and the global justice movement. Indeed, it is

probably safe to say that Susan George has had an unrivalled prominence as

a development thinker over the past four decades. This reflects her ability

to engage not just with academics, but with activists, journalists, as well as

untold thousands of school children and university students whose lives

have been changed by her work. Her influence is not just restricted to the

English-speaking world as her work has been widely translated and pub

lished in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, four Scandinavian

languages, as well as Thai, Korean, Bengali, Estonian and Japanese. While

she communicates her research through books and journals, she also writes

for, or is interviewed frequently for, newspapers and other media around

the world, as well as speaking at scores of influential conferences, notably

successive World Social Fora and European Social Fora. Also significant is

that George is listened to by a range of different constituencies; unlike so

many scholars, her work is read by world leaders, politicians, great thinkers

of our time, as well as the general public and those specifically interested in

development issues.

Born in the USA, Susan George has lived all her adult life in France,

gaining French citizenship in 1994. While her early academic career was in

the USA, where she studied for her BA degree in French/Government

from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts in 1956, she later

attained her doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1978 with a thesis

focusing on the transfer of the food system from the USA to the rest of the

world. This was later published (George 1981). She is currently the Associ

ate Director of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam where she has

been based non-residentially since its foundation in 1973; this is a global

network of scholar-activists who work together to analyse, challenge and

provide alternatives to global inequality, poverty and injustice. She is also

the Vice-President for ATTAC France (Association to Tax Financial

Transactions to Aid Citizens) which was founded in France in 1998 and

which currently operates in fifty-one countries. ATTAC is an ‘action-

oriented education movement’ that aims to tax both financial markets and

transnational corporations with a view to redistributing income across the

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SUSAN GEORGE

world. George has also served on the board of Greenpeace International

(1990–5) as well as Greenpeace France.

Not surprisingly, and by her own admission, Susan George is not a

scholar in the conventional sense of being an economist or development

theorist. Rather than hindering her career, however, this has been her

greatest strength. Free of the strictures of academia where, in her view,

orthodoxy is revered, George has been able to challenge the injustices of

the world system with a passion and foresight often missing from academic

writing. This talent for adopting a powerful, yet unconventional approach

is reflected in her first book, How the Other Half Dies (1976). Based on her

work with a team set up to write a report for the World Food Conference

held at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome in 1974,

the book provides a critique of the standard accounts of why world hunger

prevailed at the time. Focusing on how the reasons for hunger are part of a

wider capitalist system based on unequal power relations between North

and South as well as between the poor and the elites within countries, she

criticises a host of phenomena hitherto viewed as benign. These include

the functioning of agribusiness, the Green Revolution, and the corrupt

operation of food aid. However, her most path-breaking point in the book

is to highlight that famine, poverty and hunger have little to do with natural

disasters, but rather with global politics and exploitation on the part of the

world’s powerful.

As well as the content of the book, the context of its publication and

aftermath are also significant. In her latest book, Another World is Possible if

… (2004), George explicitly acknowledges that she was writing against the

grain of contemporary opinion at the time, and that while it was acclaimed

by the general public, it did not receive a warm reception in academic cir-

cles. For this reason, she began to study for her doctorate to counteract the

‘pompous, usually male, professors proclaiming that “this woman has no

credentials for saying all these terrible things she’s saying”’ (ibid.: 205).

With these credentials duly earned, George continued to work on issues

that others were either afraid or unable to identify as central to world poli

tics. With her flair for presenting the facts in bold terms, and for using sim

ple, yet sophisticated arguments, she carried on her pioneering work

exposing the powerful actors benefiting from the inequalities of the global

system, as well as the exploitative nature of the system itself. Again ahead of

her time, Susan George began to work on the issue of debt through the

publication of A Fate Worse than Debt (1987). This highlighted the debili

tating effects of IMF and World Bank lending, together with loans from

private banks or so-called ‘money mongers’, to the South. Caught in a

vicious circle of debt and loan servicing, Southern countries had no choice

but to institute the conditionalities imposed on them, often in the form of

SUSAN GEORGE

113

Structural Adjustment Programmes. George also noted how the overall

flow of money ended up in favour of the North in that the Southern coun

tries remitted more in debt repayments and dividends to the North than

the latter transferred in aid. Again, George pioneered work that high

lighted the deleterious effects of these policies on the poor and marginalised

of the South.

George and her associates at the Transnational Institute recognised too

that debt also affected ordinary citizens of the North. In The Debt Boomer

ang (1992), George identified six so-called ‘debt connections’ which

affected the North: the environment; the drugs industry; Northerners pro

viding huge subsidies to private banks; the loss of jobs and markets; immi

gration; and conflict and war. While few of these issues had been

highlighted previously, the consideration of the ecological damage of debt,

also discussed in A Fate Worse than Debt, was especially important. Indeed,

George maintains to the present day that ‘capitalism and environmental

sustainability … are logically and conceptually incompatible’ (ibid.: 29),

with transnational corporations being responsible for much environmental

destruction in the world, bolstered by the policies of the international

financial institutions. Indeed, she views the ecological future of the planet

in truly apocalyptic terms; only systematic public spending on the part of all

countries of the world can halt the world’s destruction.

The role of the international financial institutions and the potential evil

of the capitalist system if not controlled are other enduring themes of

George’s work. While these issues were identified in her early publications,

she focused more specifically on them in later writing, first, in Faith and

Credit with Fabrizio Sabelli (1994), and later, in The Lugano Report (George

1999). The former focuses on the World Bank, interpreted as a religious

institution with the ultimate goal of being ‘the visible hand of the

programme of unrestrained, free market capitalism’ (1994: 248). The

Lugano Report is a partly fictitious account purportedly based on the views

of a ‘working party’ commissioned to examine the future of capitalism,

focusing on the threats and obstacles to preserving it. At times rather fanci

ful and certainly very entertaining, it also illustrates why Susan George’s

work has such large public appeal; she is able to write in innovative ways

and does not flinch from using iconoclastic devices to make her point.

The Lugano Report also follows the other thread in her writing, which is

to highlight potentially apocalyptic scenarios (see above). In this case, she

suggests that by the year 2020 capitalism cannot be preserved without the

elimination of two-thirds of humanity, made possible through restricting

reproductive freedom, war, famine, limiting access to land and water, and

ultimately allowing diseases of poverty to flourish, not least AIDS.

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SUSAN GEORGE

However, despite the pessimism that sometimes afflicts George’s work,

she is also careful to offer strategies for change. In a Fate Worse than Debt, for

instance, she outlined her ‘3-D solution of debt, development and democ

racy’ otherwise known as ‘creative reimbursement’ where, among other

things, debtor countries can pay back their loans in local currencies over a

long period of time (1988: 243–62). However, George’s ideas about

change for the future are most concisely outlined in Another World is Possi

ble if … As well as providing an insightful analysis of neoliberal global

isation, this work also acts as a handbook for those wishing to contribute in

some way to challenging global inequalities. While she supports and pro

poses such initiatives as taxing financial markets, including the Tobin Tax

(see James Tobin) (as in her work with ATTAC), she also provides some

clear practical guidelines for those wanting to become involved in the

global justice movement such as her ‘seven commandments’ that include

how to plan meetings and produce leaflets (2004: 164–6).

Ultimately, however, it is important to stress that while Susan George’s

work has been invaluable in highlighting the potentially catastrophic path

that capitalist development might lead us down, and to press home the

inordinate injustices that plague the world, she remains optimistic. Not

only does she have faith in people working and organising at the grassroots

in particular, she also truly believes that hope is the key, however tenuous.

To end with her own words: ‘Despite everything, however, I don’t just go

about mouthing the slogan “Another world is possible”. I actually believe

it, while recognising that it’s a very long shot and a fragile hope’ (ibid.: 116).

Major works

George, S. (1976) How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger,

London: Penguin.

—— (1981) Les Stratèges de la Faim, Geneva: Grounauer with the Institut

Universitaire d’Études de Développement, University of Geneva.

—— (1987) A Fate Worse than Debt, London: Penguin.

—— (1990) Ill Fares the Land, London: Penguin.

—— (1992) The Debt Boomerang: How Third World Debt Harms Us All, London:

Pluto Press with the Transnational Institute.

—— (1999) The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century,

London: Pluto Press.

—— (2004) Another World is Possible if … , London: Verso.

George, S. and Sabelli, F. (1994) Faith and Credit: The World Bank’s Secular Empire,

London: Penguin.

SUSAN GEORGE

115

Further reading

George, S. (2002) ‘ATTAC: A Citizen’s Movement for Global Justice Responds to

September 11th’, Development 45(2): 97–8.

www.tni.org/george

Cathy McIlwaine

ALEXANDER GERSCHENKRON (1904–78)

Alexander Gerschenkron was born in 1904 in Odessa, Russia. His family

moved to Vienna after the Russian Revolution and here he received his

doctorate, at the University of Vienna in 1928, later becoming an academic

at the Austrian Institute of Business Cycle Research (then headed by

Friedrich Hayek). He left for the USA in 1938 on the day of the German

invasion of Austria, and after working in Berkeley and Washington,

became a Professor at Harvard University in 1946, where for many years he

directed economic research in the Russian Research Centre (Blaug 1998:

82). He retired in 1974 and died in 1978. His thinking was heavily influ-

enced by his association with, and analysis of, the economies of Russia and

Eastern Europe, and he stressed the need for broad geographical frame-

works in the study of economic history and development. ‘Insularity is a

limitation on comprehension,’ he argued in his seminal essay

(Gerschenkron 1962: 6). At Harvard he was joined by other European

émigré scholars such as Bert Hoselitz and Albert Hirschman, whose

theories of unbalanced growth have strong connections with

Gerschenkron’s ideas.

It is over half a century (1951) since Alexander Gerschenkron wrote his

seminal essay, ‘Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective’. The

essay was published eleven years later in a slightly revised form as the first

chapter of a book of his essays with the same title (Gerschenkron 1962).

The essay addressed the Marxian generalisation that the history of

advanced industrial economies traced out the pathway to development for

more backward countries. Gerschenkron (1962: 7) thought that this was a

half-truth because in many crucial respects ‘the development of a backward

country may, by the very virtue of its backwardness, tend to differ funda

mentally from that of an advanced country’.

Gerschenkron saw a tension between the actual state of economic

activities in a backward country on the one hand and the great promise

inherent in industrial development on the other. He asked the question:

what does it take for a ‘latecomer’ country to industrialise and become like

the early industrialisers such as Britain and Germany? He took the ‘late

comer’ economies of late nineteenth-century central and eastern Europe as

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his source and discussed their links and involvement with an increasingly

international economic system. His answer was essentially in the form of a

metaphor. Latecomer countries would need ‘to leap the gap of knowledge

and practice separating the backward economy from the advanced’ (Landes

1999). Economic history revealed that relative backwardness could be

overcome by novel strategies and pathways to industrialism and accelerated

growth. In his analysis, history could ride roughshod over any neat recipes

of prerequisites as outlined by Walt Rostow (1960). The rivalry between

Gerschenkron’s ideas and those of Rostow since the 1960s has been ana

lysed by a number of authors (Trebilcock 1981; Gwynne 1990;

Gootenberg 2001).

Gerschenkron’s main concept revolved around the complex nature of,

and opportunities provided by, economic backwardness and deprivation.

The model was concerned with the beginnings of industrial growth and

assumed under-endowment as the starting point. Gerschenkron argued

that as other countries advance and backwardness deepens, the underprivi-

leged society will become increasingly sensitive to the contrast. Intellectu-

als and politicians could transfer this into national ideologies ‘igniting the

imaginations’ of people and instilling faith that the ‘golden age lies not

behind but ahead’ (Gerschenkron 1962: 24). As social tension increases, a

vast effort is made to bridge the gap and a lunge for the benefits of industrial

growth occurs. Dore (1990: 359) followed Gerschenkron in arguing that

the sense of backwardness ‘provided a charter for state action to mobilise

resources and to take initiatives and risks’. From Dore’s comparative work

on Latin America and East Asia, he concluded that the urgency of the desire

to catch up had been stronger among the political leaders and intellectuals

of Asian countries after the Second World War due to cultural as much as

economic reasons.

According to Gerschenkron, rapid industrial growth was deemed possi

ble as backwardness could convey a number of economic advantages as

well. The more backward the country, the more sophisticated will be the

industrial equipment, technology and plant it can select for its manufactur

ing debut. The country can import technologically advanced machines

with the theoretical advantage of enjoying the most significant economies

of scale available and hence lower per unit costs. In theory, the costly stages

of technological development may be skipped and new industrial systems

installed.

This also provided the theoretical justification for a capital-intensive

industrial pathway in contrast to a more labour-intensive one.

Gerschenkron (1962: 9) emphasised the problems inherent in creating a

large and efficient industrial labour force. These ideas were influential in

the capital-intensive policies linked to import-substitution industrialisation

ALEXANDER GERSCHENKRON

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(ISI) in Latin America. Bennett and Sharpe (1985: 41) pointed out that

countries in Latin America entered into ISI not with Gerschenkronian

producer goods but with previously imported goods. Hence they coined

the phrase ‘late late industrializers’ for countries that had even further to

catch up and had to develop products and processes that were even more

costly, risky and technologically sophisticated than the ‘late industrialisers’

of Russia and Eastern Europe.

Gerschenkron’s comparative approach can be seen fifty years later in the

study of ‘duelling peripheries’ of the global economy. How apt and useful

are the development and historical comparisons between Eastern Europe

and Russia, East Asia and Latin America (Gwynne, Klak and Shaw 2003)?

One example of comparative work between Eastern Europe and Latin

America is Love (1996), who argues for a link between Romanian devel

opment debates (in their latecomer stage, 1880–1940) and the later Brazil

ian push towards rapid industrialisation. Gerschenkron had observed that

some industrial latecomers during both the nineteenth and twentieth cen-

turies grew at a faster rate than their predecessors. Gerschenkron relied on

the work of his colleague at Harvard, Henry Rosovsky (1966), for material

on the Japanese comparison. Since his essay, the rapid growth of South

Korean and Taiwanese industry in the 1960s and 1970s (Wade 1990) and

of China since the mid-1980s, has added more contemporary weight to

this thesis that benefits can be conferred on industrial latecomers.

Another key concept focused on the role of institutions in this eco-

nomic transformation. In situations of relative backwardness, the scales of

institutions, firms and plants loom large. Gerschenkron saw the importance

of large-scale ‘universal’ banks dedicated to long-term investment in heavy

industry. For example, he argued that these banks (in which commercial

and investment banking were combined) had been the key institution in

Germany’s rapid industrial growth in the late nineteenth century. Forsyth

and Verdier (2003) have recently shown that financial systems were

regionally more complex in European countries than in the interpretation

put forward by Gerschenkron but they still used his framework for com

parative purposes.

However, for more backward countries (and particularly his case study

of Russia, where ‘fraudulent bankruptcy had been almost elevated to the

rank of a general business practice’ – Gerschenkron 1962: 20) the creation

of universal banking institutions was inconceivable. Thus Gerschenkron

argued that under these conditions the role of the state became fundamen

tal for late industrialisation. He did not idealise this pivotal role of the state

and noted the inefficiencies, incompetence and corruption that had

occurred in the Russian experience. However, in spite of this, the role of

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the state became pivotal to generate the necessary finance for and growth in

large-scale heavy industry.

Indeed, as the input needed to launch industrialisation increased with

backwardness, it was argued that the process required a correspondingly

larger state response, particularly in terms of finance. This could be linked

to the wider concept of ‘substitutes’. If a key element for growth was lack

ing, such as access to finance, European societies ‘proved adept at develop

ing new institutions, such as state industrial banks’ (Gootenberg 2001: 57).

Thus, the greater the country’s initial deprivation, the more coercive and

comprehensive the state’s action would have to be. Wade’s (1990) thesis

that East Asian industrialisation can only be understood through the state

‘governing the market’ is distinctly Gerschenkronian in this context.

Gerschenkron’s theories did have an impact on the policies for promot

ing industrialisation in developing countries in the 1960s and 1970s, along

with those of the Latin American structuralists (such as Raúl Prebisch)

and students and former colleagues of Gerschenkron, such as Albert

Hirschman. Gerschenkron’s perspective had the distinct advantage of

recognising that the position of developing countries in relation to the

world market was fundamentally different to that of the core economies

(such as the UK and USA) on the eve of their industrialisation.

The subsequent industrial experience of developing countries in Asia,

Africa and Latin America did reveal some practical problems with the

applicability of the model. First, there was the problem of the assumed ben-

efits to the backward country of being able to import the latest technology.

The burden of development has grown over time as the initial costs of

technology and plant have increased due to rising capital intensity and the

scale of modern production. Second, because these new technologies are

capital-intensive, it seems irrational for them to be adopted by developing

countries in which cheap labour is normally plentiful (Landes 1999).

It is interesting to ponder why the work of Alexander Gerschenkron has

had such little resonance within development geography while attaining

much greater significance within the realms of economic and political soci

ology. Going back to Keeble’s (1967) early critique of models of economic

development, ample room was given to a discussion of Rostow’s theories

but none to those of Gerschenkron. Rostow was criticised for his unilinear

version of development but Gerschenkron’s more open theory of differen

tiated industrial transformations was basically ignored.

Such a pattern continues to this day. The Fourth Edition of The Dictio

nary of Human Geography (Johnston et al. 2000) can be seen as a guideline to

the value of which concepts are important for contemporary geography.

Gerschenkron gets but a passing mention in Michael Watts’s treatment of

growth theory. While Rostow has a section to himself under ‘stages of

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119

economic growth’, there is no reference to economic backwardness, late

industrialisation or ‘latecomer models’ in the dictionary.

One possible explanation for the lack of attention to Gerschenkron

within human geography in the 1960s and 1970s was that the discipline

moved strongly towards more nomothetic approaches. Meanwhile,

Gerschenkron was essentially developing historically-based ideas and mod

els from the strongly idiographic vision of the economic historian. As

geographers increasingly turned their back on the idiographic framework

and the detailed and nuanced studies of different cultural regions,

Gerschenkronian analysis may have appeared out of step.

For today’s development specialists, Gerschenkron could be seen as a

precursor of contingent capitalism or the idea of different pathways

towards capitalism. The direction of capitalism in any one country can be

seen as affected by the nature of ‘relevant’ institutions and ideologies that

will support and assist industrial and economic growth.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism, academics

have searched for new interpretations of development and policy initiatives

in what could be called the world’s peripheral economies (Gwynne, Klak

and Shaw 2003). It might be useful to go back to Gerschenkron’s nuanced

view on economic backwardness and the idea of many pathways out of

such a condition. He privileged historical discontinuity over linearly con-

ceived continuities and traditions. Furthermore, he was also explicitly rela-

tional in the sense that later industrialisers should be seen as different

precisely because they were affected, often through demonstration effects,

by the first-comers (Gootenberg 2001: 57).

Major works

Two main collections contain Gerschenkron’s major essays:

Gerschenkron, A. (1962) Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of

Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—— (1968) Continuity in History and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Further reading

Bennett, D.C. and Sharpe, K.E. (1985) Transnational Corporations versus the State:

The Political Economy of the Mexican Auto Industry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.

Blaug, M. (1998) Great Economists since Keynes, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Dore, R. (1990) ‘Reflections on Culture and Social Change’, in Gereffi, G. and

Wyman, D.L. (eds), Manufacturing Miracles: Paths of Industrialisation in Latin

America and East Asia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Forsyth, D.J. and Verdier, D. (eds) (2003) The Origins of National Financial Systems:

Alexander Gerschenkron Reconsidered, London: Routledge.

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Gootenberg, P. (2001) ‘Hijos of Dr. Gerschenkron: “Latecomer” Conceptions in

Latin American Economic History’, in Centeno, M.A. and López-Alves, F.

(eds), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America, Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 55–80 (excellent essay on the contemporary

applicability of Gerschenkron’s theories in Latin America).

Gwynne, R.N. (1990) New Horizons? Third World Industrialisation in an International

Framework, Harlow: Longman (analyses Gerschenkron and his policy links to

Third World industrialisation).

Gwynne, R.N., Klak, T. and Shaw, D.J.B. (2003) Alternative Capitalisms:

Geographies of Emerging Regions, London: Arnold.

Johnston, R.J., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (2000) The Dictionary of

Human Geography, Oxford: Blackwell, 4th edn.

Keeble, D.E. (1967) ‘Models of Economic Development’, in Chorley, R.J. and

Haggett, P. (eds), Socio-Economic Models in Geography, London: Methuen,

pp. 243–302.

Landes, D. (1999) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, London: Abacus.

Love, J. (1996) Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and

Brazil, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Rosovsky, H. (1966) ‘Japan’s Transition to Modern Economic Growth, 1868–

1885’, in Rosovsky, H. (ed.), Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of

Alexander Gerschenkron by a Group of his Students, New York: John Wiley,

pp. 91–139.

Rostow, W.W. (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trebilcock, C. (1981) The Industrialisation of the Continental Powers, 1789–1914,

London: Longman (strongly supports Gerschenkron’s ideas in terms of

industrialisation in eastern and southern Europe).

Wade, R.H. (1990) Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of

Government in East Asian Industrialization, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

Robert Gwynne

GERALD K. HELLEINER (1936–)

Gerry Helleiner’s contributions have taken in academic work, support to

the creation and success of a range of organisations, and policy advice. Ulti

mately, he is perhaps best known for his close involvement in policy advice

in African countries, above all Tanzania, and for the way that this involve

ment has played a central role in efforts to improve the relationship

between governments of low-income developing countries and interna

tional financial institutions and aid organisations.

Helleiner’s intellectual formation – like that of many of his generation –

was shaped by the upheavals of European and international politics from

the 1930s into the post-Second World War period. He was born in Austria

in 1936, to parents whose families had fallen foul of the Nazis and who

were forced to emigrate. He and his mother were on the last plane out of

GERALD K. HELLEINER

121

Vienna before the war began. The family went first to England and then

settled in Canada, where his father, Karl, lectured in economic history.

Gerald Helleiner graduated in 1958 from the University of Toronto,

studying political science and economics. He then went to Yale, where he

did a ‘straight’ economics PhD. Nonetheless, his interests were already

shifting to the plight and challenges of developing countries and he was

appointed, in 1961, to the new Yale Economic Growth Center where he

was based until 1965, including a year spent researching and teaching in

Nigeria. In 1965 he moved to the University of Toronto, where he, his

wife, Georgia, and three children have been based since, in a career inter

spersed with stays overseas.

His time at the Economic Growth Center at Yale produced a compre

hensive economic history of Nigeria from 1900 to the mid-1960s

(Helleiner 1966). The book was written just as it was becoming obvious

how dramatically oil production would change the economy and just

before the two coups of 1966 (cited in the preface) that initiated a cycle of

political instability in Nigeria. The principal emphasis of the book was on

the way in which extensive expansion of export-oriented peasant agricul-

ture had been the key to Nigeria’s economic dynamism, along with the

stimulus to expansion given by government spending, especially on infra-

structure (road and rail), education, and employment in the public sector.

Something of the wide sweep of the radar of Helleiner’s interests is also

shown by his pioneering work on intra-firm trade, organised, among other

places, in Intra-Firm Trade and the Developing Countries (1981). This book

argued for a greater acknowledgement of the huge significance of intra-

firm trade, since a ‘high proportion of the international flow in the markets

for goods and services … takes place within firms’ and built on the fact that

these transactions typically take place ‘in consequence of central commands

rather than in response to price signals and they are recorded at prices

which can be arbitrarily established and do not necessarily have anything to

do with market prices’. Of course an obvious source of interest in intra-

firm trade as it relates to firms operating in developing countries is the scope

for ‘transfer pricing’ by transnational firms as a ruse to evade taxation.

However, the book looked at a fuller range of issues than this. Overall, the

analysis was built on the argument that standard trade theory was shown by

the phenomenon and significance of intra-firm trade to be an inadequate

tool for understanding the reality of much international trade in goods and

services.

Many critics of orthodox economic theory and policy are technically

weak in economics. Gerry Helleiner has always – by contrast – sustained a

firmly independent analytical policy stance underpinned by an extremely

high level of technical capability as an economist broadly in the Keynesian

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GERALD K. HELLEINER

tradition. It is perhaps this strength as an economist, combined with his

enduring sympathy for the challenges faced by governments in low-

income countries, that has enabled him to play such an important role in

efforts to forge a realistic and progressive dialogue between ‘the West’ and

the developing world.

This role has partly involved serving on – and sometimes helping to

create – international organisations. These have included two Canadian

bodies – the International Development Research Centre and the North–

South Institute; acting as a member of the advisory board of the World

Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER, part of the

United Nations University and based in Helsinki, Finland); providing sup

port to the Intergovernmental Group of 24 on International Monetary

Affairs; acting as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Food

Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) from 1990, where he was credited with

resuscitating an organisation at the time in crisis; and advising the African

Economic Research Consortium (AERC). He was involved in the Cana-

dian mission to support the Democratic Movement in South Africa in its

formulation of post-apartheid economic policy and served on the advisory

board of the Macro-Economic Research Group (MERG) that produced a

policy report, Making Democracy Work: A Framework for Macroeconomic Policy

in South Africa in 1993. He has also worked on other policy reform mis-

sions, including, twice, to Uganda and also to Guyana and Nicaragua.

But above all, Helleiner is renowned for his long-term involvement in

and commitment to African economic development, especially in Tanza-

nia. From 1966 to 1968 he took leave from Toronto to become the found-

ing director of the Economic Research Bureau at University College in

Dar es Salaam. His involvement in Tanzania lasted through the years of

Julius Nyerere’s exercise in ‘African socialism’ and the fraught relation

ships with the IMF and World Bank and into the political and economic

reform years of the 1990s. Tanzania’s relationship with international lend

ers had broken down – not for the first time – in the mid-1990s. When

some kind of rapprochement began to look possible, the government and the

donors, with Danish assistance, agreed to appoint an independent team of

experts to analyse the relationship and to advise on a way forward. This

team, headed by Professor Helleiner, produced the ‘Helleiner Report’ in

1995. This report was not only hugely constructive in Tanzania but more

broadly it became a seminal contribution in the evolution of ideas that aid

would be more effective if there were greater ‘national ownership’ of the

reform process and the disbursement of aid funds. After this report, the

Tanzanian government and the donors agreed a series of initiatives to mon

itor the transparency and accountability of both parties to the aid

relationship.

GERALD K. HELLEINER

123

Helleiner’s concern with the ideals of ownership was stamped by his ear

lier experiences in Tanzania, his sympathy with much of what Nyerere was

trying to achieve, and a distaste for the high-handed behaviour of the IMF

and what he saw as its unthinking and inappropriate application of neo-clas

sical economic theory to conditions of extreme poverty. In a talk he gave on

his own reflections on the Nyerere years, at a conference celebrating

Nyerere’s legacy after his death, much of the humane and independent

approach Helleiner has taken to economic development is clear. Noting the

unpopularity of Nyerere’s villagisation programme, the unfeasibility of a

sweeping nationalisation programme, and the over-ambition of the basic

industries strategy, Helleiner nonetheless reminded the audience of

Nyerere’s emphasis on free education, on equity, on a leadership code for

politicians, and on targeting the poorest. He argued that economic failure in

Tanzania ultimately had very little to do with Nyerere’s socialism; rather, it

was rooted in external shocks (the oil price rises of the 1970s, the cost of war

against Idi Amin in Uganda, and adverse weather) and in bad macro-

economic policy management in response to these shocks.

This argument continued a theme Helleiner had long insisted on. His

‘The IMF and Africa in the 1980s’ (1983) was one of the earliest critiques of

IMF conditionality and lending policy in Africa. The essay bore a hallmark

fairness in tone and was all the more effective for the calm way it built its

argument. The essay, which foresaw a period of increasing conflicts

between African governments and the IMF, argued from the premise that

the key to African economic crisis lay in deteriorating terms of trade com-

bined with the rising cost of borrowed capital and, therefore, the desperate

shortage of foreign exchange to cover the import requirements of stability

and growth. Adjustment was inevitable.

The question is not whether there should be a difficult and painful

adjustment, on both the demand and the supply side, but how it

should be undertaken. With what assistance? Over what time hori

zon? With the burden distributed how? With what mix of policies

and what sequencing? With what terms for foreign borrowing?

(Helleiner 2000: 11)

His critique of the IMF focused both on the inequity of the IMF’s

liquidity expansion and on the analytical inadequacies behind conditional

ity (as well as on the gormlessness of sending missions that had little or no

knowledge or experience of Africa). The first argument was that IMF low-

conditionality finance had not grown fast enough to match the value and

significance of trade for poor countries while the terms of high-conditionality

loans were growing tougher. The second argument was that the IMF’s

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analytical models were blunt and impervious to the variety of sources of

balance of payments difficulties. Given this variety, as well as the more gen

eral lack of understanding of complex economic phenomena, Helleiner

argued that the ‘only possible professional stance in these circumstances is

of considerable humility and caution in the dispensing of advice’ (ibid.: 17).

He envisaged an alarming prospect for relations between African govern

ments and the IMF in the coming years: ‘badly prepared antagonists of

modest ability employing data of dubious quality and entering upon a series

of battles over very complex policy questions’ (ibid.: 22). This was a pretty

accurate vision of how the following decade unfolded in a number of cases,

although over time there was typically less and less effective resistance

within African governments to the model on offer.

Helleiner stressed a number of needs in this essay – more access to low-

conditionality liquidity for the poorest African countries, more flexible

conditional credit arrangements in the face of external shocks, a greater

variety in the types of aid delivered by donors, institutional innovation to

develop conflict resolution mechanisms to resolve tensions between the

Fund and debtor governments, and a surge in training and research and

data collection in Africa. Despite the HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Coun-

try) initiative, some new IMF lending facilities, the possibility of a shift to a

‘post-Washington Consensus’ in the World Bank, a range of data collec-

tion exercises, and a shift towards prioritising ‘national ownership’ of aid

programmes and policies, many might argue that these needs remain

unmet. A gulf remains. For example, what Helleiner and many others

understand by the term ‘ownership’ appears still to differ from how the

Fund sees it. In an IMF paper on ownership, ownership was defined as a

‘convergence of interests’ between debtor countries and the IMF. Specifi-

cally criticising the World Bank’s view of ownership, this effectively meant

that the IFIs (international financial institutions) ‘now want local policy

makers not simply to do what it recommends but also to believe in it’

(Helleiner 2000: 3).

The pragmatic and humane, moral and technically sure-footed

approach that has characterised Helleiner’s policy and organisational work

has stamped his academic writing, which has also been prolific. He has

written or edited close to fifty volumes as well as publishing many articles in

refereed journals and contributing chapters to edited books. His main aca

demic writings have been in the fields of developing country trade and

finance and the role of transnational companies in developing countries. As

with the rest of his work, this body of writing escapes glib ‘left’ or ‘right’

labelling, but is broadly within a Keynesian tradition drawing on elements

of structuralist economics. He has also served on the boards of fifteen aca

demic journals.

GERALD K. HELLEINER

125

Major works

Helleiner, G.K. (1966) Peasant Agriculture, Government, and Economic Growth in

Nigeria, Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin.

—— (1973) ‘Manufactured Exports from Less Developed Countries and

Multinational Firms’, Economic Journal 83(329): 21–48.

—— (1981) Intra-Firm Trade and the Developing Countries, London: Macmillan.

—— (1983) ‘The IMF and Africa in the 1980s’, Essays in International Finance

No.152, Dept of Economics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.

—— (1989) ‘Transnational Corporations, Foreign Direct Investment and

Economic Development’, in Chenery, H.B. and Srinivasan, T.N. (eds),

Handbook of Development Economics, Vol. II, Amsterdam: North-Holland.

—— (1990) The New Global Economy and the Developing Countries: Essays in

International Economics and Development, London: Edward Elgar.

—— (1994) From Adjustment to Development in Africa: Conflict, Controversy,

Convergence, Consensus?, ed. by Giovanni Andrea Cornia and Gerald K.

Helleiner, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

—— (2000) ‘Towards Balance in Aid Relationships: External Conditionality,

Local Ownership and Development’, produced by Brian Tomlinson, as an

amalgam of two earlier papers by Helleiner, for the Reality of Aid International

Advisory Committee meeting, Costa Rica, September. Available at http://

www.devinit.org/realityofaid/jcrpapers.htm.

—— (2001) Non-Traditional Export Promotion in Africa: Experience and Issues (edited

and Introduction), UNU/WIDER, London: Palgrave.

Selected mission reports

‘Financing Africa’s Economic Recovery’ (1988) for UN Secretary-General.

‘Guyana: the Economic Recovery Programme and Beyond’ (1989) report of a

Commonwealth Advisory Group.

‘The Helleiner Report: Report of the Group of Independent Advisors on

Development Cooperation Issues Between Tanzania and its Aid Donors’

(1995).

Further reading

Culpeper, R., Berry, A. and Stewart, F. (eds) (1997) Global Development Fifty Years

after Bretton Woods: Essays in Honour of Gerald K. Helleiner, Basingstoke:

Macmillan.

Christopher Cramer

ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN (1915–)

Most of the major academic contributions of the economist, Albert

Hirschman, fall within the political economy of development. In the com

munity of development scholars, he is perhaps best known for his theory of

unbalanced growth, whereby a pattern of quicker growth and more

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egalitarian development may eventually be stimulated by concentrating

development efforts on key industries and locations in hitherto lagging

regions, especially for the underdeveloped countries of the South.

Hirschman excels at placing economic phenomena and processes within

their broader social context. His work on economic development, collec

tive action, the political bases of economic thought, and attitudes toward

market society frequently addresses areas of thought unfamiliar to most

economists. His writing has illuminated a wide range of social behaviour

that lies beyond simplistic rational-choice models, and it characteristically

eschews attempts to overgeneralise in favour of a more nuanced approach

that pays special attention to the particular and the unique.

Hirschman is considered somewhat of a maverick within the field of

economics, especially for his adoption of an interdisciplinary approach to

development studies, unusual for contemporary economists. He has been

an iconoclastic trailblazer in his research on economic development, fre

quently stepping outside his own discipline in order to better address the

complexities and particularities of local development processes in various

areas of the world. He is the author of numerous influential and controver-

sial works, often adopting novel concepts and ideas in disagreement with

mainstream economic theory and major figures in the field. His work com-

monly exhibits an impatience with disciplinary boundaries that all too fre-

quently separate economists from other scholars in development studies,

limiting their ability to address fully the multifaceted nature of develop-

ment. He has been described as a playful genius, a person who loves being

unconventional and does not shy away from controversy.

Over his long, varied and distinguished career, Hirschman worked as an

economist with the US Federal Reserve Board; as an economic advisor in

Bogotá, Colombia; and as a professor at Yale, Columbia and Harvard,

where he was the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy. He

joined the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in

Princeton in 1975, becoming professor emeritus in 1985. His works have

been the subject of numerous symposia in economics and related disci

plines in development studies, and he has been the recipient of many

awards and honours, including the 1983 Talcott Parsons Prize for Social

Science from the American Academy of Sciences, the 1997–98 Toynbee

Prize, and the 1998 Thomas Jefferson Medal awarded by the American

Philosophical Society.

Hirschman was born on 7 April 1915 in Berlin. After attending the

Sorbonne and the London School of Economics, he obtained a PhD in

economic science from the University of Trieste in 1938. During and

immediately following his doctoral studies, much of his life was dominated

by the struggle against fascism in Europe, where he played an active role in

ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN

127

several countries. While in Italy in the mid-1930s, he joined the under

ground opposition to Mussolini. In 1936 he fought with the Spanish

Republican Army and later with the French Army until its defeat in June

1940. He remained in France for an additional six perilous months, taking

part in clandestine operations based in Marseilles to assist political and intel

lectual refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, until his escape to the USA in

January 1941 to avoid capture and arrest.

Following his arrival in the USA, Hirschman’s major focus in his early

career concerned the structure of world trade, and especially the political

implications of its asymmetries and patterns of concentration. These inter

ests determine much of the material around which his first book

(Hirschman 1945) is organised. In the immediate post-World War II era,

Hirschman was particularly occupied, like many other development schol

ars of his generation, by economic problems (e.g. the ‘dollar shortage’ in

countries such as France and Italy) associated with efforts to smooth Euro-

pean reconstruction and integration. The book became immediately nota-

ble for the interdisciplinary approach it adopted, characteristic of

Hirschman’s work throughout his career, situated in the ‘grey zone’

between economic and political theory. It asserted that economic power is

often the handmaiden of political power between states. It also generated a

good deal of controversy, another hallmark of Hirschman’s career, in that it

added to the growing scepticism of many development scholars over the

way in which the Marshall Plan was being implemented in post-war

Europe.

With the publication of his second book, The Strategy of Economic Devel-

opment (1958), Hirschman became widely recognised as a leading develop

ment scholar. The analysis upon which the book is based grew out of four

years of practical experience in Colombia as an economic advisor to the

government and several private firms. In the book, Hirschman strongly

rejected the wholesale and unquestioning importation of the formal con

cepts and ready-made, universal strategies of conventional neoclassical

economic theory, the application of which he believed inevitably sacrifices

necessary attention to local developmental particularities in order to con

form to the narrow strictures of modern scientific modelling. He con

tended that, rather than adopting conventional generalised prescriptions

for economic development, the developmental needs of particular regions

and countries ought to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, paying special

attention to the particularities of indigenous resources and structures to

achieve the desired developmental results. Efforts to impose formal univer

sal models and strategies, regardless of the historical and structural realities

of specific development contexts, were a sure-fire recipe for disastrous

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development policies and programmes, with many dire economic,

political and socio-cultural consequences.

In the book, Hirschman argued against both laissez-faire and ‘rational’

nationwide economic planning for developing countries. Especially in

underdeveloped countries, development ought to be spurred by policies

and programmes promoting ‘unbalanced growth’, in which governments

would deploy their scarce resources strategically to foster critical

disequilibria important to encouraging private investment and related

entrepreneurial activities in key industries and locations in lagging regions.

Previously hidden and underutilised resources would best be mobilised by

targeting development efforts on key industries with strong forward/back

ward linkages to the local economy. Such linkages would generate ‘spread’

effects, whereby the initial inequalities of unbalanced growth centred on

industrial complexes would give way to a more egalitarian pattern of terri

torial deconcentration of the benefits of modern development to sur-

rounding peripheral areas. If focused on dynamic industrial growth poles,

an initial emphasis on unbalanced growth and socio-economic/spatial

disequilibria would allow new governments in the South relatively quickly

to overcome the common historical legacy of polarising ‘backwash’ effects

inherited from previous (neo)colonial spatial structures. These were domi-

nated by outward-oriented primate cities delinked from much of the

stagnant domestic economy and outlying peripheral regions.

Hirschman’s concept of unbalanced growth underscores the particulari-

ties of resources and structures in peripheral regions upon which key indus-

tries could be constructed, thereby facilitating beneficial linkages to the local

economy. His approach criticises conventional doctrinal models of eco

nomic development that neglect local particularities. In a later article, ‘The

Rise and Decline of Development Economics’ (1982a), he expands this

focus into a more general critique of the rise of ‘mono-economics’ accompa

nying the ascendancy of neoliberal development strategies in the South.

According to Hirschman, development economists may be divided into two

basic types. On the one hand, there are those who take a mono-economic

perspective, whereby orthodox neoclassical theory is equally applicable in

both the North and South. Although the South may have peculiar character

istics, such as higher levels of uncertainty, its economic agents make decisions

and its markets function essentially according to the same logic as in the

North. Most importantly for neoliberals, individuals or firms respond simi

larly to structures of incentives, whether they are (properly) established by

the economic market or (improperly) set by the political market.

On the other hand, there are the followers of a ‘duo-economic’ approach

who believe that standard market economics is of limited relevance to the

special problems of development in the South. Without substantial

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129

theoretical modification, they see conventional economic models and strate

gies as incapable of addressing problems associated with underdevelopment

that arise from a series of particular Southern structural conditions. These

include: massive unemployment and underemployment, despite instances of

high growth and industrialisation; frequent market failures based on poorly

developed circulation systems, financial networks, and other economic

structures; the continuing influence of culture and tradition on common

forms of behaviour that detract from utility maximisation; the persistence of

extreme societal polarisation and inequalities, which are aggravated by

poorly articulated social, sectoral and regional structures; and a pronounced

vulnerability to externally generated crises due to high levels of foreign

dependency and economic concentration within the external sector.

In the article, Hirschman is especially critical of the mono-economic

approach of the conventional neoclassical paradigm. He claims that

neoliberals ought to remove their conceptual blinkers and methodological

straitjackets in favour of a broader, more flexible vision of development

capable of addressing the diverse realities of the South. The domination of

development studies by ‘grand theories’ has generated increasing tension

between the desire to formulate universally valid principles and formal

models, and the need to understand the variety of actual experiences and

potential alternatives of development in the South. Hirschman contends

that solutions to development problems must be sought in the

contextuality of development, which is a product of particular historical

processes. The context of development is constantly changing in scale, over

time and among societies – creating both new obstacles and new opportu-

nities for variations. Development frameworks, especially those designed

to contribute toward policy-making, need to devise ideas and methods

capable of accommodating this geographical and historical diversity.

In the editor’s introduction to another important book, A Bias for Hope:

Essays on Development and Latin America (1971), Hirschman coined the term

‘possibilism’ to describe his position against grand theorisation and over-

generalisation. In development studies, and the social sciences in general,

the search for general laws often obscures the role of the particular and

unique in human pursuits, which may produce much of the unpredict

ability that frequently confounds the scientific modelling of society. Typi

cally, such general formulations view development progress in Southern

societies linearly, based on formulations rooted in the history of the North,

and according to the application of universal laws developed in and for

Northern societies. The failure of development efforts, especially those of

external origin, is commonly attributed to the presence of some inescap

able obstacles to development unfortunately present in Southern societies.

However, the development trajectories of particular societies often take

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paths that are a priori quite unlikely and cannot be easily anticipated; obsta

cles may become opportunities and vice versa, confounding rules with

unexpected consequences. Hirschman’s work often uses this intellectual

starting point to get at the many complexities of development issues and

problems, always leaving open possibilities for unanticipated phenomena

and events to produce novel forms of social change.

In addition to his work in development studies, Hirschman also

employed his possibilist approach to address broader problems of social

theory. In Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), he offers an elegant and profound

rethinking of individual choice within institutions or organisations, com

paring the implications of dissatisfied clients alternatively exiting from an

organisation or giving voice to their complaints. In this volume and much

of his more recent work, including his latest book, Crossing Boundaries

(1998), Hirschman turns to social issues and problems which straddle the

border between economics and politics. But he shows no inclination to

follow the lead of many other economists who, via the reductionist frame-

work of public choice theory, have essentially turned politics into econo-

mics. Instead, his work stresses that conventional models of economic

behaviour based on rational choice cannot satisfactorily explain diverse

forms of ‘public-minded’ behaviour such as voicing one’s convictions on

public affairs, participating in demonstrations or working in support of

candidates for public office.

Hirschman’s disdain for reductionist, ideologically driven, and invariant

arguments is also clearly evident in his studies of historical views of capital-

ism (1977, 1982b). In recent years he has alluded to his penchant for ‘self-

subversion’ to stimulate intellectual inquiry (1995) – constantly and sys

tematically revisiting his principal ideas, concepts and theories in order to

add needed modifications, qualifications and complications in various

ways. In his studies of capitalism, a complex and highly variable dynamic of

development is portrayed, one in which capitalism under certain circum

stances may be a powerful civilising influence, but also may sometimes

destroy a people’s moral and social fabric, or may simply be too feeble to

overcome the constraints of prior social forms. These competing ideologi

cal views of capitalism, in which seemingly similar processes may produce

quite divergent results in different places and times, underscore

Hirschman’s overriding interest throughout his work to express rather than

conceal the full range of human and social complexities that influence

development processes, which can only be very partially addressed by using

standard methods of economic science based on formal concepts and a

priori models.

ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN

131

Major works

Hirschman, A.O. (1945) National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press.

—— (1958) The Strategy of Economic Development,NewHaven,CT:YaleUniversity

Press.

—— (1958) Development Projects Observed, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

—— (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and

States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—— (1971) ‘Introduction: Political Economics and Possibilism’, in A.O. Hirschman

(ed.), A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America,NewHaven,CT:

Yale University Press.

—— (1977) The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its

Triumph, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—— (1981) Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

—— (1982a) ‘The Rise and Decline of Development Economics’, in M. Gersovitz

et al. (eds), The Theory and Experience of Economic Development: Essays in Honour of

Sir W. Arthur Lewis, London: Allen and Unwin.

—— (1982b) ‘Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or

Feeble?’, Journal of Economic Literature, 20 (December): 1463–84.

—— (1982c) Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

—— (1984) ‘Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating some

Categories of Economic Discourse’, American Economic Review 74(2): 89–96.

—— (1986) Rival Views of Market Society and Other Essays, New York: Viking-

Penguin International.

—— (1987) ‘The Political Economy of Latin American Development: Seven

Exercises in Retrospection’, Latin American Research Review 22(3): 7–36.

—— (1995) A Propensity to Self-Subversion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

—— (1998) Crossing Boundaries: Selected Writings, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Further reading

Coser, A. (1984) Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences, New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Foxley, A. et al. (eds) (1986) Development, Democracy, and the Art of Trespassing:

Essays in Honor of Albert O. Hirschman, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre

Dame Press.

Meier, G. (1987) Pioneers in Development, Oxford and Washington, DC: Oxford

University Press and World Bank.

John Brohman

RICHARD JOLLY (1934–)

From his early studies of disarmament and education through to his more

recent dedication to the cause of water supply, sanitation and hygiene,

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RICHARD JOLLY

Richard Jolly’s unique combination of intense optimism and measured

pragmatism have earned him widespread admiration and acclaim in the

field of human development. As an economist with a passionate commit

ment to a people-centred approach, he has consistently argued that greater

attention should be paid to addressing basic human needs in development.

This he has always seen not only as morally desirable but also as beneficial

for medium and longer-term economic growth and global security. Jolly

was at the centre of debates on the relationship between economic growth

and social welfare, concluding – alongside others such as Dudley Seers

and Hollis Chenery – that it was not necessary to choose; instead, he

argued it was necessary to pursue both growth and poverty reduction in

order to produce sustainable economic development and stability. In a recent

statement on education for all, Jolly maintained that even in periods of stag

nation, huge gains in social welfare could be achieved without significant

increases in expenditure, through ‘determined leadership, cost-conscious

ness and ingenuity’.

This sentiment encapsulates much of his life’s work.

Born on 30 June 1934, Richard Jolly graduated from Cambridge Uni-

versity in 1956 with a degree in Economics, and later completed a doctor-

ate at Yale University, once again specialising in Economics. In 1969 he

joined the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of

Sussex as a fellow. In 1972 he followed Dudley Seers as Director, a position

that he held for nine years. During this period, on secondment from the

IDS, he acted as special consultant on North–South issues to the Secretary-

General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop-

ment (OECD) in 1978. Also, between 1978 and 1981, he had his first

experiences of working in the UN system when he acted as member and

rapporteur of the United Nations Committee on Development Planning.

In 1978 the first edition of Disarmament and World Development was pub-

lished, a volume co-edited by Jolly. This book, updated and republished in

1984, explored the potential for directing resources freed up by disarma

ment towards poverty-focused development through targeted restructur

ing policies. In this study, Jolly’s willingness to tackle huge global issues

with imagination and optimism is already evident, as is his rigorous explo

ration of examples from around the globe which disprove conventional

thinking about what is possible and achievable within the given constraints

of the international system. In his contribution, Jolly argued that the esti

mated financial costs of providing for many of the world’s basic needs

within the space of a decade were less that half of one year’s expenditure on

armaments; a fact which ‘underlines the disastrous and inhuman diversion

to armaments which might otherwise be turned to peace and humane

progress’ (Graham et al. 1984: 129). Contemporary policy makers would

be well advised to reflect on this. Jolly was never under any illusions that

RICHARD JOLLY

133

the financial aspect was the only dimension of the transformation necessary

to allow resources released by disarmament to be channelled into develop

ment. Despite the difficulties involved, he argued that there were many

examples from the past where such a fundamental restructuring of produc

tion had occurred, e.g. the run down of coal, textile and electronics pro

duction in many industrialised countries. Furthermore, he pointed out that

a focus on social welfare could prove a useful political tool even for

authoritarian and military regimes.

The themes developed in Disarmament and World Development recur in

later work, most notably the groundbreaking Adjustment with a Human Face

(Cornia et al. 1987), of which Jolly was co-editor. This was completed dur

ing his time as Deputy Executive Director for Programmes at UNICEF, a

position he held from 1981 to 1995. The context for the collection was the

pattern of contradictory global forces set in motion in the early 1980s and

that gave rise to a severe world recession. The Bretton Woods institutions

addressed these through advancing stabilisation measures and structural

adjustment policies, which sought to rectify balance of payments deficits

and improve macro-economic management. At the time, UNICEF was at

the forefront of renewed attempts to put basic child protection and poverty

alleviation measures in place. Central to the study’s argument was the idea

that efforts were necessary to ameliorate the effects of adjustment policies

on the most vulnerable sectors of society, particularly children. Jolly’s per-

sonal contribution to this work was in the field of education, following on

from themes explored in his doctoral research (Jolly 1969a). Jolly identified

the goal of universal primary education as the most significant educational

priority, arguing that it was possible to move towards this without any sig

nificant increase in total expenditure if existing institutions and income

structures were adapted significantly.

The main thrust of Adjustment with a Human Face was that growth-ori

ented adjustment in itself was not enough to ensure protection of the vul

nerable; and yet the vulnerable could be protected during adjustment if

targeted programmes were adopted. Furthermore, the book pointed to suc

cessful examples where such programmes had been adopted and growth

had not been damaged as a result: ‘the issue should not be adjustment or

growth, but adjustment for growth’ (Cornia et al. 1987: 5). In contrast to

much of the received wisdom at the time, Jolly and his colleagues main

tained that a ‘human face’ in adjustment policy was in fact a precondition

for long-term growth, insisting that a strategy ‘which protects the vulnera

ble during adjustment not only raises human welfare but is also economi

cally efficient’ (ibid.: 290). These sentiments were consistent both with

Jolly’s long-held view that investment in human resources exhibits high

economic returns and his basic needs approach to development.

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RICHARD JOLLY

During his time at UNICEF, Richard Jolly was also Vice-President of

the Society for International Development (SID) from 1982 to 1985, and

then Chairman from 1987 to 1996. In 1995, he left UNICEF to become

Special Advisor to the Administrator of the United Nations Development

Programme (UNDP). Here he was principal architect of the annual

Human Development Report between 1996 and 2000. Jolly championed

the ‘20/20 initiative’, which called for developing and donor countries to

devote 20 per cent of government budgets and 20 per cent of aid alloca

tions, respectively, to services targeted at basic needs. His commitment to

education remained strong, and in June 1996 he delivered the concluding

statement at the Mid-Decade Meeting of the International Consultative

Forum on Education for All in Amman, Jordan. The purpose of the meet

ing was to assess the advances made since the Jomtien Conference on Edu

cation in 1990. Although accelerated progress was necessary, ‘For the first

time in human history, the numbers of those without the ability to read or

write is beginning to fall. This is unprecedented, almost certainly since the

beginnings of mankind.’ Education for all and greater equality, he argued,

were ‘the two essential factors for ensuring rapid economic growth and

rapid advance in human development’.

Jolly is considered a pioneer of the concept of Human Development. In

2001 Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the UNDP, said of him:

‘Nobody has done more to help promote the concept of human develop-

ment, and provoke thoughtful discussion and debate about how best to

achieve it, than Dr. Richard Jolly.’

He was awarded the Rome Prize for

Peace and Humanitarian Action in 1999, in recognition of his work on the

Human Development Report and earlier contributions to shaping

programmes at UNICEF. He donated the $30,000 prize money to Jubilee

2000, the international coalition campaigning for debt reduction. Two

years later he was knighted (KCMG) by the United Kingdom for ‘long and

distinguished service for international development’. Since retiring from

UNDP in 2000, Richard Jolly has been Co-Director of the United

Nations Intellectual History Project at the City University of New York,

exploring – and in many cases defending in measured terms – the develop

ment legacy of the United Nations as part of a 12-volume history of its eco

nomic and social contribution. In the first co-authored volume of this

series, Ahead of the Curve, published in 2001, Jolly is dismissive of concerns

about the origin and ownership of ideas, emphasising instead their impact

and spread and he is firm that the UN has played an important role in this

regard. In a paper written in preparation for the Human Development

Report 2003, he appealed for a more nuanced and flexible interpretation of

success in terms of achieving UN goals. Too often, he argued, UN devel

opment projects are considered ‘failures’ because global goals are only

RICHARD JOLLY

135

partially or regionally met, when in fact huge progress has been achieved. If

setting global goals is to be valuable and successful, he contended, ‘it is

important now to plan for partial success and partial failure, not for the

extremes of either total success or total failure’ (Jolly 2003: 18), especially in

the cases of the least developed countries. In May 2004, during a talk at the

Overseas Development Institute in London, he also defended the UN

against accusations of being overpaid, resistant to reform and uncritical of

developing countries.

In recent years Sir Richard has also devoted himself to the cause of clean

water and sanitation for the global poor. As Chair of the Water Supply and

Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) from 1997 to 2003, he argued

for expenditure on water supply and sanitation (most of which goes to

wealthier urban areas) to be redirected towards the rural poor. ‘Improve

ments in water, sanitation and hygiene are at the core of human develop

ment and poverty alleviation,’ he said on World Water Day in 2001. As

with his earlier work in education, Jolly has argued for greater community

participation in processes to ensure success. With reference to an approach

termed ‘VISION 21’, which aimed to allow local people to plan and man-

age improved water and sanitation systems, he explained that ‘we let com-

munities themselves drive the process and it demonstrated that people had

ideas that were practical, economic and sustainable’.

An enduring feature

of Jolly’s legacy will be his emphasis on the benefits of community

involvement.

Jolly is likely to be remembered principally for his work as architect of

the Human Development Reports in the late 1990s, and the way he has

kept basic needs and poverty alleviation on the development agenda. Many

of the measures he has advocated have undoubtedly had an impact. Adjust

ment with a Human Face not only steered thinking within the UN system

but also influenced the World Bank’s three-pronged approach to poverty

reduction – addressing growth, human development and targeted social

safety nets. It also strongly informs the current Millennium Development

Goals (MDGs), which seek to reduce poverty significantly by the year

2015. The goals involving commitments to achieving universal primary

education and reducing by half the proportion of people without sustain

able access to safe drinking water by the year 2015 are particularly close to

Jolly’s heart. Nevertheless, many of his core passions have come under

extensive critical review. A focus on basic human needs has been criticised

by those wanting more emphasis on growth and by those wanting more

focus on redistribution. Some welfare economists are sceptical about the

efficiency and effectiveness of targeting, while the limits of community

participation are increasingly well known and ventilated. However, while

poverty elimination and redistribution of wealth might be nobler goals

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RICHARD JOLLY

than poverty reduction and addressing basic needs, nearly half a century

after the publication of Planning Education for African Development, the

MDGs are unlikely to be met on target.

Even more dismal is the slow uptake of Richard Jolly’s ideas on arms,

conflict and well-being, a cause that he is advocating once more. Twenty

years on, the relationship between development and global security has

become more pressing and complex than ever. Dismal though this context

is, Richard Jolly’s optimism and pragmatism might not be misplaced. At

the United Nations in New York on 30 April 2004, Ronnie Kasrils –

South Africa’s Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry – said of Jolly:

He is a man who has brought passion, commitment and immense

compassion to his work in the promotion of human development

and human dignity. He is a man with vision, but with the remarkable

skill of turning that vision into concrete reality.

These are respectful and touching words, not least because they come

from a man who was once a senior military figure in Umkhonto we Sizwe,

the armed wing of the African National Congress. If Kasrils has exchanged

the pursuit of arms for the pursuit of wells, then perhaps Jolly’s pragmatic

optimism is well placed and he is right about starting small and thinking big.

Notes

1 ‘Education for All: The Vision to be Grasped’ – Concluding statement by

Richard Jolly at the Education for All Forum, Amman, Jordan, 19 June 1996.

2 See http://www.undp.org/dpa/frontpagearchive/2001/january/23jan01/.

3 Message of Dr Richard Jolly on the occasion of World Water Day, 22 March

2001.

Major Works

Cornia, G.A., Jolly, R. and Stewart, F. (1987) Adjustment with a Human Face, Vols. 1

and 2, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Emmerij, L., Jolly, R. and Weiss, T.G. (c.2001) Ahead of the Curve?: UN Ideas and

Global Challenges, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Graham, M., Jolly, R. and Smith, C. (eds) (1984) Disarmament and World

Development, 2nd edn, Oxford: Pergamon.

Jolly, R. (1983) Third World Employment – Problems and Strategy: Selected Readings,

Harmondsworth: Penguin Education.

Streeten, P.P. and Jolly, R. (eds) (1981) Recent Issues in World Development: A

Collection of Survey Articles, Oxford: Pergamon.

RICHARD JOLLY

137

Further reading

Jolly, R. (1968) Costs and Confusions in African Education: Some Future Implications of

Recent Trends, IDS Mimeo Series No. 18, Brighton: Institute of Development

Studies, University of Sussex.

—— (1969a) Planning Education for African Development: Economic and Manpower

Perspectives, Nairobi: East African Publishing House for the Makerere Institute

of Social Research, East African Studies, No. 25.

—— (1969b) The Purpose of Manpower Planning and its Implications for Planning

Techniques, IDS Communications No. 45, Brighton: Institute of Development

Studies, University of Sussex.

—— (1970) Skilled Manpower as a Constraint to Development in Zambia, IDS

Communications No. 48, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies,

University of Sussex.

—— (2001) Jim Grant: UNICEF Visionary, Florence: UNICEF Innocenti

Research Centre.

—— (2003) ‘Global Goals – The UN Experience’, http://www.waterweb.org/

wis/wis6/papers/Global%20Goals%20v.030120.03.pdf

UNDP Human Development Reports, 1996–2000, http://hdr.undp.org/reports/

view_reports.cfm?type=1.

Jo Beall

CHARLES POOR KINDLEBERGER (1910–2003)

Charles Kindleberger was born in New York, the son of a lawyer. After

studies at the University of Pennsylvania he completed a PhD in economics

at Columbia University. From 1936 he worked with the Federal Reserve

Bank of New York, followed by the Bank for International Settlements,

the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, the Joint Economic Commit

tee of the United States and Canada, the US Office of Strategic Services,

and, from 1944 to 1948, the Department of State. In this last appointment,

he played a part in organising the post-World War II Marshall Aid

programme of reconstruction assistance for Europe, which subsequently

became the prototype for large-scale aid programmes to developing coun

tries. In 1948 he was appointed Associate Professor of Economics at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), obtaining a full professor

ship three years later. He proceeded to confute the widespread stereotype

of well-connected government officials honouring academic appoint

ments by their discretion, by pouring out a mass of publications on eco

nomic history, international trade and development, banking and finance.

He remained at MIT, becoming emeritus professor on his retirement in

1976 (Miall 2003). By the time of his death on 7 July 2003 he had published

twenty-nine books, excluding second and third editions. This essay con

centrates on his most original contributions to development economics.

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CHARLES POOR KINDLEBERGER

These, however, do not stand out of his extensive literature summaries.

Moreover, his service in government and central banking gave him a prac

tical approach to policy and the financial mechanics of economic adjust

ment that excludes simple theoretical solutions. Much of the time he reads

like the notorious two-handed economist, concluding too often that cir

cumstances alter cases (e.g. Kindleberger 1965: 387; 1969: 35–6). But even

this conclusion is never less than elegant or erudite, and betrays a genuine

commitment to finding out about a country before assessing its condition

or prospects.

Perhaps Kindleberger’s most distinctive contribution to the theory of

economic development processes is his argument in Economic Development

that ‘economic development depends upon an open class structure and is

particularly helped by the existence of a strong middle class’ (Kindleberger

1965: 23). The precondition for successful industrialisation was a ‘com

mercial revolution’ because ‘the growth of markets train(s) the entrepre

neur’ and ‘eases his tasks’. Indeed,

the commercial revolution does more. It starts the accumulation of

capital. Inventories and ships are two early and easy objects of and

outlets for capital accumulation. The productivity of capital becomes

evident, the habit of saving spreads, and accumulations of capital

capable of being converted to industrial use come gradually into

existence.

(ibid.: 163)

He concluded that

there is a strong argument to be made for the proposition that eco

nomic development through industrialization should be preceded

by commercialization, and the industrial by the commercial revolu

tion. To short-cut the evolutionary process and attempt forthwith to

turn a subsistence economy into an industrial economy may find a

society badly equipped in capacity for transport and distribution.

(ibid.)

For him, this was as much a political argument as it was an economic one.

Early on Kindleberger expressed the view, widespread among the upper

middle classes of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic, that the ruin

ation of the Central European middle classes in the 1920s had paved the

way for Hitler and fascism.

In Kindleberger’s view, the ‘prior commercial revolution’ was also

necessary to ensure adequate supplies of food and wage goods, as labour

CHARLES POOR KINDLEBERGER

139

shifted from agriculture to manufacturing industry, in the classic Arthur

Lewis model of development. Kindleberger considered that this ‘Ricardian’

model ‘neglects the central concern of Ricardo – how the price of food is to

be held down’ (Kindleberger 1965: 182). With characteristic even-handed

ness he was willing to concede that the economic development of Japan after

1868 ‘may be put in the balance on the other side. Industrialization moved

very rapidly …’. He concluded: ‘This is a remarkable case. In my judgement,

however, it provides the exception rather than the pattern’ (ibid.: 164). But it

is more difficult to see how a commercial revolution would provide a coun

try with transport infrastructure. Like many other development economists,

he argued against monumental projects, including these transport and energy

projects. He felt that such projects tended to have ‘a lower social marginal

product of capital’ and were typically ‘under-priced’ by governments (ibid.).

Recent ‘privatisation’ of public utilities may have changed attitudes towards

the supply by the private sector of such infrastructure, but has yet to prove

that, unaided by the state, the private sector can maintain large capital-

absorbing infrastructure. Kindleberger may have had in mind the privately

constructed railways and canals of Europe and North America. He could not

have been unaware of the speculative and frequently fraudulent nature of

these undertakings.

In Kindleberger’s view, the cultivation of commerce is, however, prone

to two ‘marketing pathologies’. The first is high mercantile profits with

price-fixing, resulting in over-capacity and under-utilisation in the retail

trade, leading to petit bourgeois conservatism and economic stagnation. The

other pathology is ‘speculative fever’ (Kindleberger 1965: 164–5). His

interest in the latter eventually resulted in Kindleberger’s most popular

work, Manias, Panics and Crashes.

Kindleberger considered that market competition was the best way of

combating mercantile conservatism. Later, he put this forward as an argu

ment in favour of liberal government policies in relation to foreign direct

investment. Indeed, he viewed opposition to such investment as mis

guided, ‘nationalist’ and ‘emotional’ (Kindleberger 1969: 145). In this

respect he was robustly internationalist, liberal and pro-business, while dis

claiming any ‘doctrinaire’ attachment to private enterprise as a sufficient

‘organiser’ of economic development. He followed the liberal Keynesian

consensus of his contemporaries in regarding government action as appro

priate in the provision of public goods and industries with external econo

mies and diseconomies. Even in competition with private companies,

governments have the advantages of risk-spreading, better information,

and ease of recruitment. In the process of starting economic development

in the least developed countries, Kindleberger regarded government action

as indispensable. Alexander Gerschenkron was an important influence

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CHARLES POOR KINDLEBERGER

on Kindleberger’s thinking, about not only the role of governments in eco

nomic development, but also the functions of financial institutions in that

process. But, at more advanced stages of economic development,

Kindleberger was sceptical of étatiste planning, which he thought tended

to over-centralise decision-making, resulting in excessively large projects.

He felt, in particular, that governments are prone to getting diverted away

from ‘economic objectives’ and to ‘welfare redistribution’ and the under-

pricing of governments’ ‘output’ (Kindleberger 1965: 132).

Kindleberger’s scepticism about government was explicit in his critique

of the import-substitution strategies advocated by Raúl Prebisch and

Hans Singer during the 1940s and 1950s. These strategies advocated the

expansion of the domestic market in developing countries by government

projects, in particular in transport, public utilities and government services,

behind import barriers to ensure that the resulting economic growth was

not dissipated in a surge of imports. On the face of it, such strategies would

induce precisely the kind of domestic ‘commercial’ revolution that

Kindleberger believed should precede successful industrialisation. How-

ever, he argued that, notwithstanding incidental benefits, such strategies

inhibit technological improvements that may be obtained by importing

more advanced manufactured goods. Above all, he considered that these

strategies may divert resources away from exports and to the domestic mar-

ket (Kindleberger 1963: 468). But he was typically sceptical too about

arguments in favour of free trade, which he regarded as being supported by

‘partial equilibrium’ efficiency arguments, when economic development

was about improving the efficiency of the economy as a whole. This con-

sideration led him to conclude that market prices are an unreliable guide to

economic decision-making where the process of economic development

alters the whole structure of the economy (Kindleberger 1965: 191–3).

There is a deeper meaning to his repeated conclusion that ‘circumstances

alter cases’.

Early on, Kindleberger was a critic of the application of Keynesian poli

cies of aggregate demand management to developing countries, which he

perceived to be especially prone to inflation that was not due to too much

demand in the economy at large, but more ‘structural’. By this he meant

that the rapid expansion of employment in the sectors leading the develop

ment of the economy (in particular foreign trade, light industry, and retail

services) would tend to raise earnings from employment more rapidly than

food production. At low levels of income, spending on food takes up a high

proportion of household budgets. The rise in food prices due to increased

non-agricultural employment was therefore not amenable to aggregate

demand management without bringing the process of economic develop

ment to a halt (Kindleberger 1965: 227–30).

CHARLES POOR KINDLEBERGER

141

Kindleberger robustly favoured foreign direct investment. During the

1960s, he urged the establishment of an international conference to pro

vide ways of promoting it (Kindleberger 1969: 206–8). He believed that

the absence of savings adequate to finance industrial projects is a major con

straint on the economic development of poorer countries. Indeed, in his

earliest writings on economic development he put forward a typology of

stages of economic development, according to capital inflow from abroad.

Poorer countries, he argued, use foreign capital inflows to augment their

domestic saving, before eventually achieving industrial maturity and expe

riencing capital outflows (Kindleberger 1963: chap. 23). This belief in a

savings constraint on economic development, in large measure, inspired his

enthusiasm for the thrifty middle classes.

However, he was ambiguous in his attitude towards the financial

liberalisation that came to characterise official US policy, and that of the

World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, towards banking and

finance in developing countries. During the 1950s and the early 1960s,

Kindleberger took Gerschenkron’s side in arguing that government can

more efficiently take the place of commercial banks early on in the devel-

opment process. He criticised Gurley and Shaw, the leading advocates of

such liberalisation in the 1950s, for underestimating the degree to which

investment can be financed in advance of saving by monetary expansion

(Kindleberger 1965: 234). Nevertheless, by 1970, Kindleberger was argu-

ing in favour of more lending by foreign and domestic commercial banks in

developing countries, because it ‘depoliticises’ commercial lending deci-

sions, and because private finance ‘adjusts to reality’ more quickly than offi-

cial, or government, lenders (Kindleberger 1970).

By 1976, Kindleberger was convinced that the expansion of interna

tional bank lending in developing countries had gone too far. He argued

that financial liberalisation exposes developing countries to integration

with international capital markets that are prone to illiquidity, which can

inflict crisis on countries without robust financial systems. He urged the

establishment first of domestic banking systems before developing coun

tries opened up their financial markets to foreign financial capital

(Kindleberger 1976). It was another six years before the 1982 international

debt crisis convinced international bankers and economists that financial

liberalisation can have painful consequences. In 1978, Kindleberger pub

lished what is arguably his most famous book, Manias, Panics and Crashes.In

subsequent editions, lending to developing countries, in particular from

the 1970s onwards, featured as a speculative mania leading to crisis. He

advocated prompt central bank lending to overcome such financial crises,

and urged the creation of an international ‘lender of last resort’ to avoid

them in the future.

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CHARLES POOR KINDLEBERGER

Kindleberger was arguably the most influential American development

economist of his time. His writings on economic development are authori

tative and judicious. Yet, his cosmopolitan studies of banking and eco

nomic history, his ideas on economic development ventured little beyond

the mainstream US academic literature of the mid-twentieth century. In

particular, the European tradition of viewing economic development as a

process of changing social and political, as well as economic, structures was

foreign to an American who professed himself to be an economist in a

somewhat narrower sense (Kindleberger 1969: vi). His admiration for the

thrift of the middle classes echoes that of John Stuart Mill a century earlier.

His advocacy of a commercial revolution preceding industrialisation was

rooted in his studies in the economic history of Western Europe and his

native USA. Alternative routes to development seemed problematic to

him. Japan, he wrote, must be an ‘exception’. The saving constraint he

identified in developing countries has a distinctly pre-Keynesian air, while

his notion that ‘mature’ economies export capital is at odds with the reli-

ance of the USA and the UK on capital imports at the start of the twenty-

first century. These limitations were redeemed by the scale of his output,

his work on Marshall Aid, his early recognition that financial liberalisation

leads to crisis for developing countries, and his exposure of the hubris of

banking and finance at the end of the twentieth century.

Major works

Kindleberger, C.P. (1953) International Economics, Homewood, IL: Richard D.

Irwin, 2nd edn 1958, 1963.

—— (1958) Economic Development, New York: McGraw Hill, 2nd edn 1965.

—— (1969) American Business Abroad: Six Lectures on Direct Investment, New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press.

—— (1970) ‘Less Developed Countries and the International Capital Market’, in

Markham, J.W. and Papanek, G.F. (eds), Industrial Organisation and Economic

Development: Essays in Honor of E.S. Mason, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin;

reprinted in Kindleberger, C.P. (1981) International Money: A Collection of

Essays, London: George Allen and Unwin.

—— (1976) ‘International Financial Intermediation for Developing Countries’, in

R.I. McKinnon (ed.), Money and Finance in Economic Growth and Development:

Essays in Honor of Edward S. Shaw, New York: Marcel Dekker; reprinted in

Kindleberger, C.P. (1981) International Money: A Collection of Essays, London:

George Allen and Unwin.

—— (1978) Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 3rd edn 1996 (2nd edn 1989).

Further reading

Kindleberger, C.P. (1950) The Dollar Shortage, New York: The Technology Press

of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley.

CHARLES POOR KINDLEBERGER

143

—— (1964) Economic Growth and France and Britain 1851–1950, Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

—— (1984) A Financial History of Western Europe, New York and Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2nd edn 1993.

—— (1987) International Capital Movements, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Miall, L. (2003) Obituary: ‘Charles P. Kindleberger; economic historian and

progenitor of the Marshall Plan’, The Independent, 10 July: 16.

Jan Toporowski

SIR WILLIAM ARTHUR LEWIS (1915– 91)

William Arthur Lewis was a pre-eminent figure in the emergence of devel

opment economics from the late 1940s until his death in 1991. He made a

singular contribution to its elaboration as a distinct branch of economics

and as a body of ideas informing the formation of public policy. His work

on problems of balanced sectoral growth, ‘unlimited’ surplus labour, agri-

cultural productivity and planning created an important framework and

agenda which shaped much subsequent research. His stature was perhaps

most succinctly summed up when Harberger called him ‘the patriarch’ of

development economics.

Arthur Lewis was born in St Lucia in 1915, the fourth of five sons of par-

ents who were both school teachers. His father died when he was seven and

his mother thus became the most powerful early influence in his life,

imparting her strong religious convictions and her love of music to her son.

Lewis left school at fourteen, having completed his school certificates, to

work as a civil service clerk in the St Lucia Department of Agriculture. At

seventeen, he won an island scholarship which took him to the London

School of Economics (LSE). He had hoped to be an engineer but the reali

ties of the colonial West Indies meant that there was no employment for a

black engineer. Instead he opted for a business administration degree, con

fessing later that ‘I had no idea in 1933 what economics was’ (Lewis 1979).

Nevertheless, he graduated in 1937 with ‘the highest marks ever obtained

in the history of the School’ (Downes 2003: 2). This opened the door to a

PhD in industrial economics (which he received in 1940) and to a lecture

ship at the LSE, making him its first black member of staff. Between 1938

and 1947 (by which time he had become Reader in Colonial Economics),

Lewis had short attachments at the Board of Trade and the Colonial Office,

allowing him research access to ‘reports from the colonial territories on

agricultural problems, mining, currency questions, and the like’. During

this period he also became a member of the executive of the League of Col

oured People, editing its journal, The Keys. He also published a pamphlet

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SIR WILLIAM ARTHUR LEWIS

on economic and social problems in the West Indies for the Fabian Society,

an association which would yield a number of publications. Although he

professed little interest in politics, describing himself as ‘a social democrat

who was interested in poverty eradication and economic and social devel

opment’ (Downes 2003: 5), this combination of scholarship and civic

activism characterised his life.

Lewis’s LSE research produced two significant books which introduced

themes that were to characterise his work. The first, Economic Survey,

1919–39 (1949) situated economic development in the context of world

economic history, viewing the world economy as a single interdependent

system. The second, The Principles of Economic Planning (1949), written for

the Fabian Society, set out his case for ‘planning through the market’, iden

tifying the ‘conditions under which the market would need to be supple

mented by intelligent state action’ (Bhagwati 1979: 15), and in the process

developing a powerful argument against both laissez-faire and, particularly,

‘planning by direction’. The latter he considered inefficient, inflexible,

undemocratic and ‘procrustean’, criticisms that would later be taken up by

many other commentators, many of them having little in common with

Lewis.

Lewis’s most important intellectual achievements came after he moved

to the University of Manchester in 1947 to become Stanley Jevons Profes-

sor of Political Economy. There, for the next ten years, he made a defining

contribution to the elaboration of the discipline of development econo-

mics. That contribution is encapsulated in two publications. The first was a

paper entitled ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of

Labour’, published in Manchester School in May 1954. The second was an

elaboration of it (and much else) in a broad treatise entitled The Theory of

Economic Growth (1955). Wrestling with the problems of poverty and poor

rates of growth in developing countries, Lewis felt increasingly that neo-

classical explanations for wages, profits and savings did not work in such

countries and that relative prices could not be explained within that frame

work. He thus took his point of departure from classical economic theory.

In his autobiographical statement for the Nobel committee, he recalled:

From my undergraduate days, I had sought a solution to the question

of what determines the prices of steel and coffee. The approach

through marginal utility made no sense to me. And the Heckscher-

Ohlin framework could not be used, since that assumes that trading

partners have the same production functions … Another problem

that troubled me was historical. Apparently during the first fifty years

of the industrial revolution, real wages in Britain remained more or

less constant while profits and savings soared. This could not be

SIR WILLIAM ARTHUR LEWIS

145

squared with the neo-classical framework, in which a rise in invest

ment should raise wages and depress the rate of return on capital.

One day in August 1952, walking down the road in Bangkok, it

came to me suddenly that both problems have the same solution.

Throw away the neo-classical assumption that the quantity of labour

is fixed. An ‘unlimited supply of labour’ will keep wages down, pro

viding cheap coffee in the first case and high profits in the second

case. The result is a dual (national or world) economy, where one

part is a reservoir of cheap labour for the other.

(Lewis 1979)

The ‘unlimited’ supplies of labour were made possible, first, by the sub

sistence economy of the ‘traditional’ agrarian sector in most developing

countries and, second, by the considerable underemployment and low

productivity of that sector. In a system of production where the marginal

productivity of cultivators approached zero, it was possible for large (‘un-

limited’) supplies of labour to move to the capitalist sector of the economy

without significantly raising industrial wages (since real wages were set by

the consumption levels of the traditional sector rather than by supply and

demand) or reducing profits, and without significantly reducing agrarian

production. Thus ‘dualism’ meant that high profits and rapid industrial

growth would not be limited by the same factors as in developed

economies.

What would limit the prospects for growth, Lewis concluded, was the

inability of the agrarian sector in such dual economies to trade with the

industrial sector so that industrialisation would need either a rapid increase

in agricultural productivity or export markets. Using a Ricardo–Graham

model, Lewis argued that the terms of trade (say between North and South)

were determined by relative labour productivities in food. Given the low

productivity of the traditional agrarian sector in developing countries,

there would be what Emmanuel was later to call ‘unequal exchange’.

Albert Hirschman (1982: 382) describes it thus: ‘as long as “unlimited

supplies of labour” in the subsistence sector depress the real wage through

out the economy, any gains from productivity increases in the export sec

tor are likely to accrue to the importing countries …’. This led Lewis to the

conclusion that there was a need for balanced growth: for rapid industrialis

ation and for a rapid increase in agrarian productivity so as to improve both

the terms of trade and to reduce rural poverty. There was also a need for

protection to permit this process to take place.

These two models, one explaining the problems and possibilities pro

duced by ‘dualism’ and the other by the terms of trade between economies

with different production functions, set the agenda for debate, discussion

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SIR WILLIAM ARTHUR LEWIS

and further research in development economics for a generation. As

Findlay (1980: 3) observes:

His own subsequent work, and in fact a large part of the literature of

development economics, can to a large extent be seen as an extended

commentary on the meaning and ramifications of this central idea.

Few other instances come readily to mind of an entire field being so

dominated by a single paper.

For twenty-five years from 1957, Lewis elaborated and reprised these

ideas in various ways. A volume on development planning appeared in

1966, extending the ideas first explored in 1949 and an edited collection,

Tropical Development, 1880–1913, published in 1970, re-examined various

issues of economic history and development in a global economy. In the

years after Manchester, Lewis became as much involved in administration

and policy as in academic research. From 1959 to 1963 he served as the first

West Indian principal of the University College of the West Indies, helping

to extend its reach beyond Jamaica to Barbados and Trinidad, and negotiat-

ing its autonomy from London University to become the independent

University of the West Indies. In 1967 he was appointed Chancellor of the

University of Guyana and in the mid-1970s he also lectured part-time at

UWI in Barbados. Among a number of roles as adviser to the leaders of

developing countries, Lewis served as UN economic adviser to President

Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana until 1963 (helping to produce Ghana’s sec-

ond national development plan), as deputy managing director of the UN

Special Fund, and as president of the Caribbean Development Bank from

1970 to 1974. In 1963, he became James Madison Professor of Political

Economy at Princeton, a tenure which lasted until his retirement in 1983.

His approach to economics and economic history gave him a broad per

spective and the capacity to look beyond the narrow models that domi

nated neo-classical economics. They also prompted him to address related

issues that lay outside the disciplinary boundaries of economics. Thus, his

Politics in West Africa (1965) explored the relationship between democracy

and development in West Africa. And, in 1982 he delivered the W.E.B.

Du Bois Lectures, which were published as Racial Conflict and Economic

Development (1985). Lewis was knighted in 1978 and received the Nobel

Prize for Economics (jointly with Theodore Schultz) in 1979. In his paper

for the Nobel Prize committee, Jagdish Bhagwati argued that Lewis had

made a singular contribution on three levels – to political economy,

historical analysis and the modelling of development problems.

In more sardonic vein, Albert Hirschman (1982: 377) observed that

the Nobel Prize for economics ‘is often split between one person who has

SIR WILLIAM ARTHUR LEWIS

147

developed a certain thesis [here Lewis] and another who has labored

mightily to prove it wrong’ [Schultz]. This comment highlights the fact

that Lewis – and development economics in general – came under persis

tent attack from the start from both left and right (‘the strange alliance of

Neo-Marxism and Monoeconomics against Development Economics’,

Hirschman calls it). For both sides, the relative failure of indicative plan

ning in countries like Ghana provided confirmation of their rejection of

development economics. For many in the neo-classical orthodoxy, the

Lewis models became ‘a privileged target’. The rise of neo-liberalism and

the new economic history (which in part grew out of Lewis’s ideas, accord

ing to Bhagwati) demonstrated little sympathy for his views on dualistic

markets or state intervention. For dependency and ‘development-of-

underdevelopment’ theorists, too, Lewis’s contention that economic

exchanges between rich and poor countries could, in some circumstances,

become antagonistic, missed the point. Rather, they insisted, this was the

essential character of the relationship, an iron law of centre–periphery

inequality in the global capitalist economy which made the hopes of bal-

anced growth an illusion. Lewis (1984) directly rejected this dependency

argument: it was appropriate, he suggested, as a description of what hap-

pened in the colonial context, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, but it made little sense in the second half of the twentieth century

when independent governments sought to restructure these relationships.

Nor is it likely, for all his courteous manner, that he would have had much

time for the Washington Consensus and neo-liberal agenda.

Even so, there is little doubt that the tide has run against Lewis and the

other important figures of development economics over the last twenty-

five years. The spiralling debt crisis and the increasing inequality and insta

bility characterising the global system have undermined ideas of promoting

balanced growth. What remains is the debate about whose fault it is. For all

that, Lewis’s personal and intellectual standing would seem to have

endured, perhaps one final testament to his stature as one of the leading

economists of his time.

Major works

Lewis, W.A. (1949) Economic Survey, 1919–39, London: Allen & Unwin.

—— (1949) The Principles of Economic Planning, a study prepared for the Fabian

Society, London: Allen & Unwin.

—— (1954) ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’,

Manchester School 22: 139– 91.

—— (1955) The Theory of Economic Growth, London: Allen & Unwin.

—— (1965) Politics in West Africa, London: Allen & Unwin.

—— (1966) Development Planning: The Essentials of Economic Policy, London: Allen

& Unwin.

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SIR WILLIAM ARTHUR LEWIS

—— (1970) Tropical Development, 1880– 1913, London: Allen & Unwin.

—— (1978) Growth and Fluctuations, 1870– 1913, London: Allen & Unwin.

—— (1978) The Evolution of the International Economic Order, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

—— (1985) Racial Conflict and Economic Development, the W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures

1982, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Further reading

Bhagwati, J.N. (1979) ‘W. Arthur Lewis: An Appreciation’, reprinted in M.

Gersovitz et al. (eds) (1982), The Theory and Experience of Economic Development:

Essays in Honor of Sir W. Arthur Lewis, London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 15–28.

Downes, A.S. (2003) ‘William Arthur Lewis: 1915–1991 – A Biography’, paper

prepared for D. Rutherford (ed.) (2004), The Biographical Dictionary of British

Economists, Bristol: Thoemmes Press.

Findlay, R. (1980) ‘On W. Arthur Lewis’s Contributions to Economics’, reprinted

in M Gersovitz et al. (eds) (1982), The Theory and Experience of Economic

Development: Essays in Honor of Sir W Arthur Lewis, London: Allen & Unwin,

pp. 1–14.

Gersovitz, M., Diaz-Alejandro, C.F., Ranis, G. and Rosenzweig, M.R. (eds)

(1982), The Theory and Experience of Economic Development: Essays in Honor of Sir

Arthur Lewis, London: Allen & Unwin.

Hirschman, A.O. (1982) ‘The Rise and Decline of Development Economics’, in

Gersovitz et al. (eds), pp. 372–90.

Ingham, B. (1991) ‘The Manchester Years, 1947–1958: A Tribute to the Work of

Arthur Lewis’, Salford Papers in Economics, University of Salford.

Lewis, W.A. (1979) Autobiographical statement to the Nobel committee, Nobel

Lectures, Economics 1969–80, http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/

1979/lewis-autobio.html.

—— (1984) ‘Development Economics in the 1950s’, in Meier, G.M. and Seers, D.

(eds), Pioneers in Development, New York: Oxford University Press for The

World Bank, pp. 119–37.

Morris Szeftel

MICHAEL LIPTON (1937–)

Michael Lipton has made distinguished contributions to development

research across a wide front. Most importantly, however, he is the principal

contemporary theorist and advocate of the role of agriculture in develop

ment, and one of the most significant leaders of research into the causes and

character of poverty. He has for long championed the role of small-scale

agricultural producers, emphasising how the agricultural sector generally,

and small farmers most specifically, are harmed by what he describes as ‘ur

ban bias’. For this he has sometimes been castigated (most memorably in

Byres 1979) as a populist. But he is no dewy-eyed romantic harking back to

the agrarian past. He is unusual among scholars working on development

MICHAEL LIPTON

149

issues for his deep engagement with the hard sciences, especially plant

breeding and nutrition. And he certainly does not envisage that all agricul

tural production is necessarily, and always, carried out most efficiently on

small farms.

Lipton was born in London in 1937, into a German Jewish family that

had left Hamburg in 1933. He went to Haberdashers’ Aske’s School in

Borehamwood, north London, and from there to Balliol College, Oxford,

to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, graduating with First Class

honours, winning several university prizes for economics, and subse

quently taking a prestigious Fellowship at All Souls’ College in Oxford. He

was taught as an undergraduate by Paul Streeten, and it was as a result of

some notes that he wrote for Streeten on Gunnar Myrdal’s Beyond the

Welfare State (1960) that Myrdal subsequently invited him to work on parts

of what was to become Asian Drama (Myrdal 1968). Ultimately published

in three large volumes, Asian Drama was in its time a pioneering study in

which an institutional approach was applied to the analysis of the develop-

ment problems of South Asia. ‘Mr Lipton’, Myrdal writes,

wrote the first draft of Appendix 10 on climate and prepared an

intensive analysis of national accounting in the South Asian countries

… [and his] … most difficult and time-consuming assignment was to

carry out a lengthy comparative analysis of the development plans in

the countries of the region.

(Myrdal 1968: xv)

It was this experience that drew Michael Lipton into development eco

nomics and gave him his life-long interest in the development of South

Asia, in particular.

According to his own account, he taught himself development eco

nomics as a young lecturer at Sussex University, and he studied mathemat

ics and econometrics for a year at MIT in 1963–4, alongside the future

Nobel Prize winners, Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerloff. Shortly after

this, in 1965, he took the very unusual step for an economist of going to

live for seven months in a village in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

In the work that he had done for Asian Drama, he had come to realise the

inadequacy of existing micro-level research for understanding problems of

agricultural development, and he set about making up for this lack. His

experiences in the village (called Kavathe) gave rise to a seminal article on

‘The Theory of the Optimising Peasant’ (1968a) and to an important cri

tique of India’s agricultural development policy that appeared in a major

book, The Crisis of Indian Planning, published in the same year (Streeten and

Lipton 1968, see Lipton 1968b). That year, 1968, is a remarkable one in

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MICHAEL LIPTON

Lipton’s career, for he published (at the age of only thirty-one) not just

these two outstanding contributions to understanding of peasant agricul

ture and of its role in development, but also a book on British economic

performance (Lipton 1968c), and a book of chess problems. Chess, as well

as poetry-reading (he enjoys, for example, the work of Emily Dickinson)

and music, have remained passions for Michael Lipton but – unfortunately

– he has not written on British economic policy since the 1960s. The

Kavathe experience taught him not only about the particular rationality of

small peasant farming but also stimulated his thinking about the significance

of the urban–rural gap, and the idea of ‘urban bias’ appeared for the first

time in his paper for The Crisis of Indian Planning (1968b). It appeared again

in another seminal paper, on land reform, published in 1974, and it was

finally elaborated, controversially, in the book Why Poor People Stay Poor in

1977. Meanwhile he had sought to put his ideas about redistributive land

reform to practical effect in his contributions to an influential ILO report

on the development of Sri Lanka, in 1971 (ILO 1971). All of this work was

done from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of

Sussex, where he was appointed as a professorial fellow in 1967, and

remained a leading figure for almost thirty years. His role in the establish-

ment of academic development studies was also reflected in his contribu-

tions as a managing editor of the still very young Journal of Development

Studies – though he staked out a more cautious view of the role of ‘Interdis-

ciplinary Studies in LDCs’ than some others have advocated, in an article

published in the JDS in 1970. At the time, Lipton was directing another

project that resulted from his Kavathe experience, the Village Studies Pro-

ject (VSP), which had the ambitions of generating general theory from sys-

tematic comparison of village studies, and of situating economic activity in

developing countries in its wider social context. Though the case for ana

lysing institutions that are situated between the conventional ones for eco

nomics of the household on the one hand, and the state on the other, is a

strong one, the VSP was not entirely successful, partly because of the very

uneven quality of the existing village surveys on which it was based. It gave

rise to several interesting outputs (for example Lipton et al. 1976; Connell et

al. 1976), but it was left to others to make more sense of ‘villages’ as

institutions (see, most recently, Krishna 2002).

Underlying much of Michael Lipton’s work are ideas that derive from

the Kavathe experience and from his appraisal of Indian agriculture in the

1960s. At that time thinking about peasant agriculture was influenced espe

cially by the (later, Nobel prize-winning) Chicago economist, Theodore

Schultz, whose book, Transforming Traditional Agriculture (1964), elaborated

the view that peasant farmers are ‘efficient but poor’. Schultz’s argument

was that peasant farmers, by maximising their profits, allocate their

MICHAEL LIPTON

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resources efficiently. But they are poor, and their resources are severely

limited – so achieving growth of output must involve changing the condi

tions of production through the application of new technology and new

inputs (such as chemical fertilisers). This is what the Indian government

was trying to do by the later 1960s, concentrating those resources that were

devoted to agriculture on areas that were thought to have a high potential

for such modern cultivation. Lipton’s ‘theory of the optimising peasant’,

however, held that it would be irrational for small peasant farmers to

attempt to maximise profits, for such a strategy would take no account of

the considerable risks and uncertainty associated with agricultural produc

tion. In their actual agricultural practices, Lipton showed, poor farmers

seek to insure themselves against failure, and they may well sacrifice poten

tial output or profit maximisation in the process. They have, he said, a ‘sur

vival algorithm’, pursuing – in terms of formal game theory – an optimising

‘minimax strategy’, rather than trying to maximise. The aim of public pol-

icy, therefore, should be to reduce the riskiness of agriculture. The dedica-

tion of resources to irrigation, for instance, rather than provision of

chemical fertilisers to farmers operating in more favoured areas, would

enable much broader-based, more egalitarian agricultural development.

Given appropriate policies the relative efficiency of small-scale, household

producers in the agricultural sector – reflected in the common observation

of the existence of an inverse relationship between farm size and the pro-

ductivity of land, and deriving from the fact that this mode of production

reduces many of the ‘transaction costs’ involved, and so encourages inten-

sive application of labour – can become the basis for dynamic and also well-

distributed growth. At the time, thinking about development policy was

still dominated by the idea that economic growth, necessarily involving

industrialisation in the longer run, was best pursued in poor countries

through planned, import-substituting industrialisation. This meant that

there was a strong tendency, as Lipton noted in the Indian case, for agricul

ture to be neglected in the allocation of public investment. Development

policy was characterised by an urban, industrial bias – a bias against what

could be shown to be more efficient and more equitable ways of using pub

lic resources, through investment, in the first instance, in small-scale agri

culture. Urban bias was underpinned, however, by a powerful political

alliance in which the urban classes, bourgeoisie and proletarians with inter

ests alike in cheap agricultural goods and the transfer of resources out of

agriculture (another aspect of urban bias) drew in also the more powerful

people in the rural economy through the transfer of some subsidies and the

offer of places in the political sun. This alliance worked against the possibil

ity of redistributive land reform that, in many rural economies, had the

potential to create both a more just and a more efficient rural economy.

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MICHAEL LIPTON

This is the case that Lipton set out in detail in the 1974 paper – revisited in

1993a – and that he tried to see implemented in Sri Lanka. Urban bias,

therefore, militated against a potentially more effective strategy for

development, based on the transformation of the rural economy as a whole

– an ‘agriculture first’ strategy for development.

Lipton has maintained his advocacy of small-scale producers and the

role of agriculture in development, while devoting most of his research in

the last twenty years to understanding the causes and conditions of poverty

(see Lipton 1983a–c, 1985, 1993a, 1993b). The two themes were brought

together in an authoritative book, New Seeds and Poor People (1989), on the

impact of the ‘modern seeds’ (or Higher-Yielding Varieties) that had

brought the ‘Green Revolution’. There had been a spate of influential

work in the 1970s that was critical of the effects of the introduction of the

new seeds, as contributing to the further impoverishment of large numbers

of rural people (see especially Griffin 1974). Lipton himself had been a little

sceptical in the early days (1968b: 118) – but he later showed that much of

the criticism of the Green Revolution had been premature and that, most

significantly because of its effects on both labour and product markets, the

new technology, in South Asia certainly, had brought real benefits for poor

people. The cultivation of the new seeds had absorbed more labour and

helped to tighten rural labour markets, imparting a push upwards to rural

wages, while increased output of cereals had tended to bring prices down.

The two factors together had benefited the poor, a majority of whom

depend on wages and on purchasing food rather than producing it them-

selves. Lipton has continued to emphasise the importance for poverty out-

comes of the ways in which labour markets function, and his continued

championing of small-scale agriculture is because of the ways in which this

mode of agricultural production can generate productive employment

while the process of the structural transformation of the economy takes

place. Ultimately, such small-scale production may well be replaced by

larger-scale commercial production, but it is mistaken to attempt to short-

circuit this historical process.

Interested in the relevance of Asian experience for Africa, and vice

versa, Lipton took up work on rural labour in Africa, initially in Botswana

in the later 1970s, and subsequently with his wife, Merle, in South Africa;

he began to engage more thoroughly with nutrition science (reflected first

in Lipton 1983c); he has continued to work on economic demography

(Lipton 1983a; and Lipton and Eastwood 1999); he undertook studies of

aid effectiveness; and most recently he has entered into the controversy

about the potentials and problems associated with the applications of bio-

technology. He is firmly of the view that this technology has enormous

potentials in regard to the livelihoods of poor people, and that much of the

MICHAEL LIPTON

153

criticism – like that of the Green Revolution three decades ago – is muddle-

headed. He remains an active researcher and, with his champion chess-

player’s style of argument, he is as engaging and formidable in debate as

ever.

Major works

International Labour Office (1971) Matching Employment Opportunities and

Expectations: A Programme of Action for Ceylon, Vol. 2, Working Papers, Paper 10.

Lipton, M. (1968a) ‘The Theory of the Optimising Peasant’, Journal of Development

Studies, 4: 327–51.

—— (1968b) ‘Strategy for Agriculture: Urban Bias and Rural Planning’, in

Streeten, P. and Lipton, M. (eds), The Crisis of Indian Planning: Economic Planning

in the 1960s, London: Oxford University Press.

—— (1968c) Assessing Economic Performance: Some Features of British Economic

Development 1950–65 In Light of Economic Theory and Principles of Economic

Planning, London: Staples Press.

—— (1970) ‘Interdisciplinary Studies in LDCs’, Journal of Development Studies 7: 5–

18.

—— (1974) ‘Towards a Theory of Land Reform’, in Lehmann, D. (ed.), Agrarian

Reform and Agrarian Reformism, London: Faber, pp. 269–315.

—— (1977) Why Poor People Stay Poor: A Study of Urban Bias in World Development,

London: Temple Smith.

—— (1983a) Demography and Poverty, Washington, DC: The World Bank.

—— (1983b) Labour and Poverty, Washington, DC: The World Bank.

—— (1983c) Poverty, Undernutrition and Hunger, Washington, DC: World Bank.

—— (1985) Land Assets and Rural Poverty, Washington, DC: World Bank.

—— (1989) New Seeds and Poor People, London: Unwin Hyman (with R.

Longhurst).

—— (1993a) ‘Land Reform as Commenced Business: The Evidence Against

Stopping’, World Development 21(4): 641–57.

—— (1993b) Poverty and Policy, Washington, DC: World Bank (M. Lipton and M.

Ravallion).

—— (1993c) Including the Poor, Washington, DC: World Bank (with J. van der

Gaag, eds).

Lipton, M. and Eastwood, R. (1999) ‘The Impact of Change in Human Fertility on

Poverty’, Journal of Development Studies 36(1): 1–30.

Lipton, M. et al. (1976) Migration from Rural Areas: The Evidence from Village Studies,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further reading

Byres, T.J. (1979) ‘Of Neo-populist Pipe-dreams’, Journal of Peasant Studies 6: 210–

44.

Connell, J. et al. (1976) Assessing Village Labour Situations in Developing Countries,

Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Griffin, K. (1974) The Political Economy of Agrarian Change, London: Macmillan.

Krishna, A. (2002) Activating Social Capital, New York: Columbia University Press.

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MICHAEL LIPTON

Myrdal, G. (1960) Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning in the Welfare States

and its International Implications, London: Duckworth.

—— (1968) Asian Drama, 3 vols, London: Penguin.

Schultz, T. (1964) Transforming Traditional Agriculture, New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press.

John Harriss

REVEREND THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS (1766–

1834)

Not many people widely quoted in the contemporary development litera

ture have given their name to a familiar concept and a word, as has Malthus.

‘Malthusian’ connotes a pessimistic and negative long-term prospect: a

‘Malthusian scenario’ is a frequent phrase anticipating an overuse of

resources driven by excess population and rapid population growth, with

the likelihood of serious demographic and economic collapse and ‘crisis’

(Graham and Boyle 2002). Similarly, the ‘Malthusian trap’ is often invoked

to argue that population growth is too rapid to permit savings and invest-

ment in national economic growth and thereby to raise standards of living;

‘neo-Malthusian’ is a term widely applied to views that identify the con-

temporary relevance of his ideas, first developed over 200 years ago, on the

relationship between population and resources, essentially that population

growth and sustainable resource use are fundamentally incompatible in the

long term.

Today we would call Malthus a political economist, though he was also

an Anglican clergyman. He studied mathematics at Cambridge during a

period much affected by the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment and

over the period of the French Revolution, when the nature of society and

the relationship between poverty and inequality were dominant in public

debate. Malthus was prominent in that debate, principally in two famous

essays in 1798 and 1803. The second essay, with several subsequent edi

tions, including as a contribution to the Encylopaedia Britannica in 1824

(Malthus 1830), was the more reasoned and is more widely quoted. It was

first published just before the beginning of Malthus’s long period as Profes

sor of Political Economy (from 1805 till his death) at the East India Com

pany’s Staff College, Haileybury, the major training institution for rulers of

British India throughout the nineteenth century. However, there is not

much about India in the essays and he himself never visited India (or went

out of Europe) (Flew 1970).

Malthus’s outstanding and long-lasting contribution to debates on the

nature of development has been to argue that, whereas population had the

potential to grow geometrically, the resource base to support that

REVEREND THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS

155

population with food and other essentials could only grow much more

slowly. Since he assumed a relatively fixed relationship between population

and resources, taking resources as givens so that they could not really be

created, ultimately population must outstrip resources unless its growth

could be controlled. Population control, Malthus argued, could be, and

had largely been, achieved by preventive measures – i.e. positive checks

controlling the birth rate, essentially through sexual restraint outside and

within marriage (but not the use of contraception). However, where these

failed (and he saw them failing in the England of his lifetime) then the bal

ance would inevitably be set by direct constraints – i.e. negative checks on

the death rate, by ‘natural’ factors, such as disease, famine and (not quite

‘natural’) warfare.

Population growth in most human societies is usually controlled by pre

ventive measures – humans do not breed to the limits of their fecundity,

and social institutions such as marriage and custom will affect family size

and childbearing patterns. However, Malthus believed, given the inequal-

ity and poverty of his own times (just after the French Revolution and the

Napoleonic wars, a time of rapid industrialisation in western Europe), that

the poor were showing insufficient restraint and that they were poor as a

result of having large families that they could not support. As a result their

mortality was raised, due to malnutrition and disease. The poor were

‘victims of their own passion’! These ideas represented a response to apolo-

gists for the French Revolution, commentators we would now see as

developing socialist or egalitarian arguments, who claimed that poverty

and degradation were due primarily to inequalities in wealth rather than

the absolute lack of resources to support any population, i.e. Malthus’s

position (Wrigley 1986). The debate on population between Malthusian

ideas and socialist, Marxian ideas persists today (Woods 1989).

Today we can appreciate some of the essential failings but also the

enduring strengths of Malthus’s arguments. The most obvious weakness is

in the argument that resources were largely given and could not really be

created beyond an arithmetic ratio. That this is not the case had become

evident in the early/mid-nineteenth century, with the great increase in the

availability of land, largely in the New World. This revolutionised the

global food supply, with densely populated Europe being increasingly sup

plied with cheaper food from overseas sources: the American plains, Aus

tralia and Argentina. New resources, of technology (e.g. refrigerated ships)

as well as land, were being created and were able to support the burgeoning

European and global populations at rising levels of living.

Technology continued to revolutionise food production throughout

the twentieth century, most evidently in the very substantial increases in

food production associated with Green Revolution technologies from the

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REVEREND THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS

1970s, to the extent that the erstwhile bread-basket ‘Malthusian’ cases of

India and Bangladesh are no longer major food-deficit countries, despite

their continuing – though now falling – high rates of population growth

(Dyson 1996). Malthusian attention in the food debate has now moved to

Africa, where there are serious food deficits. However, are these more

appropriately attributed to the rapid population growth of the last half-

century (the Malthusian view) or rather to inappropriate national and

global food policies and inadequate resources being allocated to agricul

tural development? Is the contemporary African food crisis Malthusian or a

political/economic crisis?

The prominence of Malthusian ideas in Development Studies peaked

during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of rapid population growth, especially

in the global South, and substantial economic growth in richer countries.

Population growth was seen to be a constraint on development, with many

poor countries caught in a Malthusian trap. In 1990, when fertility rates

were not thought to be generally declining in African countries and before

HIV/AIDS was taken to be the serious demographic problem that it now

is, the World Bank’s Annual Report could argue that ‘Population growth

is the biggest single development problem for Africa’. The neo-Malthusian

view is very much associated with the American commentators Lester

Brown (1998) and Paul Ehrlich (Ehrlich and Holdren 1971; Ehrlich and

Ehrlich 1990) and Norman Myers (1998) in the UK, who, quite separately,

in a series of influential books and articles from the 1970s, argued the case

for the necessity for preventive checks. These views were important for the

growth of the family planning movement, later ‘softened’ by the late 1980s

and 1990s into a concern for reproductive health and mother-and-child

programmes, and all integrated into global thinking through United

Nations declarations and objectives. These developed a widely accepted

neo-Malthusian agenda in that the main problems were seen to lie on the

population side of the equation, and solutions were to be sought in restrict

ing population growth rather than in expanding production. However, it is

not a matter of either/or: there is clearly a need to consider both simulta

neously, as in the case of the World Bank which has been a strong force in

the development of Green Revolution technologies as well as extending

major support for population programmes.

One further influential strand in the neo-Malthusian argument at that

time was associated with the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972). In a

series of alarmist simulations of current resource depletion and increasing

pollution, this largely European-based group predicted a serious overbur

dening of the global system by the year 2000, to the extent that economic

development would be thrown sharply into reverse. Globally, population

REVEREND THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS

157

growth and increasing consumption of physical resources with polluting

technologies seemed no longer sustainable.

These neo-Malthusian scenarios have proved to be largely unfounded.

Today, the world is much richer than thirty years ago, global agreements

have been promulgated to control pollution, new technologies have

brought new resources into the economic system, population growth rates

are everywhere falling, and there is a global awareness of the need to bal

ance population and resources at all scales. As a result of greatly increased

geological knowledge and higher oil prices, driven upwards by OPEC

principally for political reasons, there is now a world surplus of oil, and not

the imminent fuel crisis forecast by the Club of Rome. New resources are

being used (e.g. renewable energy from wind and solar power), while oth

ers (coal, copper) are much less in demand. As Julian Simon (1981) argued

persuasively in his polemic on population, the long-term prices for energy

and mineral resources have been falling, as a sign of long-term surplus and

sustainability rather than depletion and degradation. Simon’s position dia-

metrically opposes that of Malthus: for him people are themselves

resources, creators and managers of natural producers of resources, rather

than just mouths to feed. Simon (1981) agrees that low population growth

is preferable to high population growth, but argues that it may also be pref-

erable to zero population growth. Investment in people through education

and training and better health, as well as better access to technology and

resources, will lead to enhanced productivity for the poor as for the rich.

The perspective about population being both cause and effect – com-

mon to both Malthus and Marx – is also shared with the Danish agricul-

tural economist, Ester Boserup (Boserup 1990; Lee 1986). She is the most

prominent contemporary advocate of the view that population growth can

act as a stimulus rather than an impediment to economic change. For her,

population growth can be a critical stimulus for agricultural intensification,

with rising outputs per unit of input of land, labour and technology. Where

there is no population growth, there is no pressure to raise outputs, to

introduce new technologies or to raise labour inputs. We are now aware,

particularly through the work of Michael Mortimore and collaborators,

first in the Kano Close-Settled Zone in Nigeria, but more generally in

West Africa (Mortimore 1998), and subsequently in East Africa, most

famously in Machakos, Kenya, that there can be ‘more people, less erosion’

(Tiffen, Mortimore and Gichuki 1994), that long-term environmental

improvement and productivity gains are possible with the stimulus of

population growth, combined with commercialisation of the economy. In

the light of their evidence, any neo-Malthusian interpretation of the cur

rent African environmental, economic and political plight therefore needs

serious reassessment.

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REVEREND THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS

Given this range of qualifications and counter-arguments, why does the

neo-Malthusian discourse remain prominent in Development Studies? We

could cite four sets of reasons:

Empirical evidence: There is ample empirical evidence that high rates of

population growth, consistent over several decades, have been a major

constraint on development in some circumstances, and Malthus himself

adduced wide-ranging empirical evidence in his essays (Wrigley 1986).

However, alternative development scenarios may always be suggested that

seek to restore any population/resource imbalances by concentrating on

the resource side of the equation rather than population. How do we know

that population is the problem even in difficult environmental situations?

More specifically, is Africa over- or under-populated? This is a multivariate

problem that cannot be answered by considering the population factor

independently.

The long-term perspective: One school of thought sees the Malthusian sce

nario as merely having been postponed as a result of new lands and new

technologies, and that in the long term there is an essential logic about the

need to achieve a balance between population and resources. There are

limits to technology, and so there must be limits to population growth. The

threat of ‘standing room only’, of a very large global population living at

low and falling levels of consumption is a worst-case scenario. Current UN

projections are that the global population will grow from 6 billion in 2000

to stabilise at 9 billion in 2100. Can this population be sustained at current

(and hopefully rising) levels of consumption globally?

Environmentalist discourses: The widely accepted need to strive towards

‘sustainable development’ does require a balance between population and

resources. Much of the attention is towards having more efficient and less

polluting methods of resource use rather than lower consumption. How

ever, ‘deep Greens’, usually a vocal minority in the environmental move

ment, argue for a fundamental incompatibility between consumption

growth and long-term sustainability, essentially the Malthusian position. A

solution must involve preventive checks on population growth as well as

consumption changes.

Global poverty and inequality: Discussion of Malthusian scenarios is most

common for Southern countries. It is typically a view from the outside –

and has to be seen in the broader context of global inequality. The Malthu

sian threat has receded in the rich North; indeed there may be more

demographic threat from population ageing and below-replacement fertil

ity than from population growth, or even from excess consumption. But in

the poor South, in a globalising world of increasing economic inequalities,

population growth appears from the outside to continue to be a problem.

Do the poor continue to be victims of their own passion? As in Malthus’s

REVEREND THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS

159

time, a critical discourse for all of humankind revolves around production

and distribution, the ownership and use of resources, human rights and

environmental justice, as much as consumption, the number of consumers

and their levels of living.

Major works

Malthus, T.R. (1798) An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future

Improvement of Society, with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M.

Condorcet, and other writers, London: J. Johnson; reprinted in London: Macmillan

and the Royal Economic Society.

—— (1803) An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement

of Society; or a view of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry

into our Prospects respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it

Occasions, 2 vols, London: J. Johnson.

—— (1830) A Summary View of the Principle of Population, London: John Murray,

from Encyclopaedia Britannica (1824), reprinted in D.V. Glass, Introduction to

Malthus, London: Watts.

Further reading

Boserup, E. (1990) Economic and Demographic Relationships in Development/Ester

Boserup, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Brown, L.R. (ed.) (1998) State of the World, 1998, Washington, DC: Worldwatch

Institute.

Dyson, T. (1996) Population and Food: Global Trends and Future Prospects, London:

Routledge.

Ehrlich, P.R. and Ehrlich, A.H. (1990) The Population Explosion, New York:

Simon and Schuster.

Ehrlich, P. and Holdren, J. (1971) ‘The Impact of Population Growth’, Science 171:

1212–17.

Flew, A. (1970) ‘Introduction’, in T.R. Malthus, ‘An Essay on the Principle of

Population’ and ‘A Summary View of the Principle of Population’, London: Penguin,

pp. 7–55.

Graham, E. and Boyle, P. (2002), ‘Population Crises: From the Global to the

Local’, chap. 13 in Johnson, R.J., Taylor, P.J. and Watts, M.J. (eds), Geographies

of Global Change: Remapping the World, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 198–215.

Lee, R.D. (1986) ‘Malthus and Boserup: A Dynamic Synthesis’, in D. Coleman and

R. Schofield (eds), The State of Population Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 96–

130.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W.W. (1972) The

Limits to Growth, London: Pan Books.

Mortimore, M. (1998) Roots in the African Dust: Sustaining the Dry Lands,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Myers, N. (1998) ‘Global Population and Emergent Issues’, in N. Polunin (ed.),

Population and Global Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17–

46.

Simon, J.L. (1981) The Ultimate Resource, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, and Oxford: Martin Robertson.

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REVEREND THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS

Tiffen, M., Mortimore M. and Gichuki, F. (1994) More People, Less Erosion:

Environmental Recovery in Kenya, Chichester: Wiley.

Woods, R. (1989) ‘Malthus, Marx and Population Crises’, chap. 6 in Johnson, R.J.

and Taylor, P.J. (eds), A World in Crisis? Geographical Perspectives, Oxford:

Blackwell, pp. 151–74.

Wrigley, E.A. (1986) ‘Elegance and Experience: Malthus at the Bar of History’, in

Coleman, D. and Schofield, R. (eds), The State of Population Theory, Oxford:

Blackwell, pp. 46–64.

W.T.S. (Bill) Gould

MAO ZEDONG (1893–1976)

Mao was co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, first president of

the People’s Republic of China, prominent strategist of guerrilla warfare

and people’s struggle and a major communist theoretician. His ideas were

important for many revolutionary struggles, particularly in Third World

countries during the decades of the 1950s–1970s. His ideas about social

change and economic development turned out to be largely disastrous for

China but some of them, nevertheless, had an impact on development

thinking.

Mao Zedong was born on 26 December 1893 in Shaoshan village, near

Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. He was the son of a middle-

income farmer and his father wanted him to become a farmer as well. He

was forced to marry at the age of fourteen but his wife died some years later.

The young Mao showed great interest in reading and learning, something

that he maintained into old age. At sixteen, he began studying law and clas-

sical Chinese texts, first through private lessons and later in schools. He

developed an interest in Chinese history and literature, especially of the

Tang dynasty (eighth/ninth centuries), geography, social sciences and phi

losophy. He also read Western thinkers and philosophers.

Around the turn of the century, profound changes were taking place in

China. Western powers had forced the empire to grant them territorial

concessions in the south, most notably in Shanghai. Nationalists were

revolting against the imperial Qing dynasty that prevented any modernisa

tion of China’s economy and rigid social structure. In 1911 the empire col

lapsed and China became a republic with Sun Yat Sen as its first president.

In these turbulent years of revolution, Mao served for six months in the

nationalist army. However, the Republic did not succeed in bringing unity

and peace to the country. The country was divided among military war

lords who wielded absolute power in their respective areas.

In 1918 Mao graduated from the Changsha teachers’ training college.

He became a history teacher and later established a cultural book society.

MAO ZEDONG

161

For a short while, he published a weekly magazine in which he explained

his idea that China was on the eve of a social revolution. He also organised a

strike by secondary school pupils. He went twice to Beijing, where he

learned about Marxist socialist theories. His activities attracted the atten

tion of revolutionaries and he was invited to Shanghai where the Comin

tern, the international socialist union dominated by the USSR, initiated

the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which joined the Guomindang

nationalist party of General Chiang Kai-Shek.

Mao became an organiser of peasant and industrial unions in Hunan

province. There he married his second wife. In 1926 and 1927 Mao made

several visits to the countryside where he investigated the peasant rebel

lions on which he wrote in his famous Report of an Investigation into the Peas

ant Movement in Hunan. He explained that the peasantry constituted a

potential revolutionary force and that ‘a revolution is not a dinner party, or

writing an essay, or painting a picture’ (1971, vol. 1: 28). In the meantime,

the CCP had increased in force. Chiang and the warlords considered the

party a threat and in 1927 Chiang forcefully eliminated the CCP in Shang-

hai. Naturally this led to a split between the Guomindang and the CCP.

Strong disagreement existed within the CCP regarding the strategies to

be pursued. Mao represented the view that the establishment of soviets in

rural areas and the building up of the Red Army were indispensable in

order to capture the cities and, ultimately, the country. From 1928 until

1931 he and his comrades established and consolidated the Jiangxi soviet in

the border area of the southern provinces of Jiangxi and Fujian. Mao’s sec-

ond wife stayed behind in Changsha, where she was beheaded by the

nationalist troops in 1930. Meanwhile, in Jiangxi, Mao met his third wife.

Like his second wife, she seems to have had an independent character. This

corrresponded with Mao’s ideas about the role of women in society,

which, seen against the background of Chinese traditions and Confucianist

thoughts, can be considered as progressive. The first law he enacted in the

first Soviet Republic of China gave men and women equal rights in mar

riage and divorce. It would also be the first law enacted in the People’s

Republic twenty years later.

In Jiangxi, Mao’s star was rising. In 1931, he was elected as the first

Chairman of the Soviet. When Chiang’s troops forced the Red Army to

leave Jiangxi, Mao led the army to Yan’an in Shaanxi, North-West China,

a distance of some 9,600 km. This journey became famous as the Long

March of 1934–6. It included about 90,000 people, of whom only 20,000

survived. For eleven years Yan’an became the headquarters of the CCP.

Mao studied Marxist philosophy and wrote some important essays in

which he applied Marxist thinking to Chinese reality. In On Practice

(Mao 1937) he stressed the necessity to investigate empirically the socio-

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economic conditions in areas where the CCP wanted to be active. In On

Contradiction (Mao 1937), contrary to classic Marxist thinking that the eco

nomic base determines the political and cultural upper structures of the

society, he argued that the power of the human will could also determine

the material base.

For health reasons, Mao’s third wife went to the Soviet Union in 1936.

She would return after the proclamation of the People’s Republic but the

couple had already divorced in 1938. In Shaanxi Mao met his fourth wife,

Jiang Qing, who later became one of the leading figures of the Cultural

Revolution. Like his earlier wives, she was quite independent but the mar

riage was a failure and the couple ended by living separately. Mao emerged

as the major Communist leader and in 1943 became chairman of the

Politbureau and CCP’s Central Committee. With his growing power, he

became more dominant and less flexible towards people holding other

ideas. A personal cult developed around his life and he was called ‘the Great

Helmsman of the Chinese Revolution’. In the introduction to the mani-

festo of the CCP at the 7th Party Congress in 1945, it was stated that the

CCP must take the thoughts of Mao Zedong as guidelines for all its activi-

ties, and the history of the CCP was rewritten to give him a more promi-

nent place.

During the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), both the nationalists

and the CCP had to fight against the Japanese while continuing the civil

war. The civil war ended with the flight of Chiang Kai-Shek to Taiwan.

On 1 October 1949, Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. He

became the first president of the republic, as well as chairman of the CCP

and president of the military commission. He was re-elected to these posi

tions in 1954.

Mao and his comrades inherited a country of 9.6 million km

devastated

by decades of revolts and war. China’s population was 600 million, the

majority of whom were peasants living in extreme poverty and accustomed

to suppression by local landlords, regionally based warlords and Japanese

occupation forces. The first tasks of the CCP were to restore order and

security, and to rebuild the country. Land reform proved to be crucial.

Tenants and the rural landless received land while the landlords were exe

cuted. Nowhere in history had such a large-scale land reform ever taken

place. It was only logical that, after this period, China’s development policy

became based on the only socialist model known, namely the Stalinist

approach to development. Thus, the major features of the First Five Year

Plan (1953–7) were central planning, industrialisation – stressing large-

scale heavy industry – and mechanisation of the countryside.

The model was not uncontested. A real break with the Stalinist model

came in 1958, when Mao launched the Great Leap Forward policy in an

MAO ZEDONG

163

attempt to decentralise the economy by establishing self-reliant communi

ties. These communes each numbered 50,000 or more people and were

meant to co-ordinate the local economy. This concerned the organisation

of the smaller units of work brigades and teams for farm work, mass mobili

sation for infrastructural works, and rural industrialisation. The aim of the

policy was social as well, namely to eliminate differences in class, education,

sex and age. It lasted three years and coincided with natural disasters in vari

ous parts of the country, such as droughts, typhoons and floods. The policy

and natural disasters created chaos and starvation in the countryside. The

real size of the disaster will never be known but estimates of its human

victims range between 20 and 40 million.

This disastrous adventure revealed the existence of a serious struggle

within the CCP. Mao believed in the priority of politics above economics;

self-reliance; radical equality; and mass mobilisations for permanent revo

lutions. His opponents considered economic growth as the first priority

and adhered to the classical Marxist-Leninist idea of the party as a vanguard

of the proletariat. Among others, Mao had the support of Lin Biao, army

general and Minister of Defence. The latter ordered the composition of a

‘Little Red Book’ containing quotations from the work of Mao, and subse-

quently he ordered every soldier to use it as a guide book. In the Red Army

distinctions were abolished. Students followed with campaigns against

‘elite thinking’. In 1966, this resulted in the launching of the Great People’s

Cultural Revolution and the organisation of students in Red Brigades to

spread the thinking of Chairman Mao. They swarmed over the country,

attacking intellectuals and party officials, destroying cultural heritages and

forbidding ‘capitalist habits’ such as the reading of non-revolutionary liter-

ature. The Cultural Revolution disrupted the country totally and at the

end of 1967 the army had to restore order.

However, the party struggle continued. The so called ‘Gang of Four’,

with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, as one of its members, set the tone and con

tinued their campaigns against bourgeois habits. Mao died in September

1976. One month later the Gang of Four was arrested and with that the

Cultural Revolution came to its real end. Although officially Mao’s ideas

have never been denounced, since his death China has followed a different

development policy. In the Socialist Market Economy, households have

been restored as the basic production unit, private ownership in industry is

encouraged, and foreign investment in Special Economic Zones is wel

comed. The new policies have led to economic growth but also enlarged

the difference between the new rich and the poorer parts of the population,

especially in the countryside. Western China also now lags far behind the

east and southeast of the country.

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MAO ZEDONG

Three tendencies can be discerned in Mao’s thinking. The first is that he

succeeded in adapting Marxism–Leninism to Chinese realities. This

applies in particular to his idea that peasants and not the industrial proletar

iat constituted the revolutionary class. Second, as a leader, Mao was merci

less with his opponents within and outside the party. Third, he was a

visionary, utopianist thinker. Mao believed in permanent criticism and in

the power of the will of people, who did not need modern technology to

change the world.

Mao’s ideas were important for many revolutionary struggles, particu

larly in Third World countries. In Vietnam, rural guerrilla warfare led to

victory in 1975, but proved catastrophic in Cambodia. Today, rebel move

ments in the Philippines, Nepal and Peru still refer to Maoism as their

source of inspiration.

Indirectly, Mao’s thoughts and the Maoist development model in

China, as perceived by many Western intellectuals, stimulated ‘alternative’

models and strategies in development thinking. Concepts such as bottom-

up approaches, urban bias, decentralisation, self-reliance and primary

health care that are commonplace today, find their origin in debates of the

1960s and 1970s. Maoism certainly contributed significantly to these

debates.

Major works

Mao Zedong (1966) Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, Peking: Foreign

Languages Press (also known as the Little Red Book).

—— (1971) Selected Readings of Mao Tsetung, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

Among others, these selected readings contain major essays such as:

Mao Zedong (1926) Analysis of the Classes of the Chinese Society.

—— (1927) Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan.

—— (1936) Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War.

—— (1937) On Practice.

—— (1937) On Contradiction.

—— (1939) The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party.

—— (1942) Talks at the Yenan Forum in Literature and Art.

Further reading

Li Zhisui (1994) The Private Life of Chairman Mao – The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal

Physician, New York: Random House.

Short, P. (1999) Mao – A Life, New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Spence, J. (1999) Mao, New York: Viking/Penguin.

Ton van Naerssen

MAO ZEDONG

165

KARL MARX (1818–83)

Karl Marx was a revolutionary political and economic philosopher who,

together with Friedrich Engels, produced a materialist theory of the evolu

tion of societies. The theory was powerful enough that it influenced both

social theory and the geopolitical reality that theory tries to understand.

Marx was born in Trier and educated in philosophy at several German uni

versities. He served briefly as editor of the Cologne newspaper Rheinische

Zeitung in 1842 and 1843 but was forced to resign because of his radicalism

and left for Paris, and then Brussels, where he wrote The German Ideology in

1847, his first sustained statement of an overall philosophy. Marx and

Engels also organised a network of revolutionary groups into the Commu-

nist League, for which they wrote a statement of principles called Manifesto

of the Communist Party (1847). After being arrested and banished, Marx

finally settled in London in 1849, where he was active in the First Interna-

tional Workingmen’s Association formed in 1864. A series of works,

including A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Wages,

Price and Profit (1865), and the first volume of Das Kapital (1867, translated

into English as Capital volume 1, 1887), formed the core of Marx’s eco-

nomic writings. Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, edited by Friedrich Engels,

were published posthumously in 1885 and 1894, and translated in 1907–9.

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is regarded as Marx’s mature state-

ment on capitalist development.

Marx and Engels were Enlightenment modernists, who believed in

social progress and the perfectibility of humankind. They were optimists in

the sense of trust in the transformative potential of science and the material

plenitude made possible by technological advance. Yet they were also

highly critical of the particular social and political form taken by modern

ism – that is, capitalism. They saw capitalist development as a process of

human emancipation but also as alienation from nature, as a process of

human self-creation, but one directed by a few powerful people, as prog

ress in material life, but progress motivated by socially and environmentally

irrational drives, like competition. Marxian analysis thus became not the

scholastic pursuit of truth for its own sake, and certainly not legitimisation

theory for the rich and famous, but a theoretical guide to radical political

practice aimed at completely changing society. Development, they

thought, should meet the needs of the working class and should be socially

and democratically directed. Marx and Engels came to liberate modernism,

not to praise it.

In their early years, Marx and Engels were followers of the German phi

losopher, G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel thought that a kind of transcendental

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KARL MARX

reason, the Absolute Idea, or World Spirit, was the hidden source of

human consciousness, and the guiding force behind historical develop

ment. Yet, whereas in religion, Spirit is all-knowing from the start, in

Hegelian idealism the Spirit’s uncertainties were sources of the oppositions

and crises inherent in every real thing. In the Hegelian dialectic, the nega

tive element (the anti-thesis) is the living source of dynamic process. For

Hegel, negation asserts itself as opposition and criticism against everything

that endeavours to persist. The antagonisms between contradictory ele

ments (thesis and antithesis) are exacerbated to the point that they can no

longer co-exist, precipitating a crisis in which the contrary elements are re-

absorbed into a higher and qualitatively different unity (the synthesis). In

this way, the World Spirit progresses from notion to notion, each uniting

in itself a new stage of reality, spiritual and material. The dialectic is Hegel’s

way of showing how development follows a complex yet rationally

determined path (Cornu 1957; Hegel 1967).

Marx followed Hegel’s dialectical method but disagreed with Hegel’s

teleological and spiritual idealism. In opposition to idealism, Marx was a

dialectical materialist. As Marx and Engels put it at the time:

In direct contrast to German philosophy [Hegel] which descends

from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is

to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor

from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to

arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on

the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of

the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process … Life is not

determined by consciousness but consciousness by life.

(Marx and Engels 1981: 47)

Marx and Engels concurred with Hegel that the driving force in devel

opment was conflict and opposition. But Marx began his analysis of con

flict by examining not transcendental consciousness, but real economic

conditions. From the time of The German Ideology, Marx and Engels (1970)

saw struggle within social relations as the driving force of history. How

ever, Marx at first understood social relations as a ‘form of intercourse’

between people, with ‘intercourse’ including all kinds of relations, such as

trade and commerce, as well as the class relations that he eventually came to

focus on. By comparison, Marx’s conception of the development of the

material productive forces (human labour power and means of production)

was more advanced. These different levels of conceptual understanding

lent the tenor of technological determinism to Marx’s first overall state

ment about social development. As Marx (1969b: 503–4) put it:

KARL MARX

167

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations

that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of pro

duction which correspond to a definite stage of development of their

material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of pro

duction constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foun

dation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to

which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode

of production in material life conditions the social, political and

intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men

that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being

that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their devel

opment, the material forces of society come in conflict with the

existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression

for the same thing – with the property relations within which they

have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the pro-

ductive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an

epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foun-

dation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly

transformed …. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and mod-

ern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive

epochs in the economic formation of society.

In this statement, the development of the forces of production drives

change in the entire ‘mode of production of material life’ following a con-

ception influenced still by Hegelian idealism (the self-development of the

productive forces standing in for the unfolding rationality of the World

Spirit). By the time of Marx’s Capital (1976), however, the forces of pro

duction were subordinated to the relations of production, and these were

thought of more exactly as class relations within the labour process.

For Marx, the most essential aspect of social relations was control over

the productive forces available in any society. In class societies, the produc

tion of existence was controlled by a ruling elite. This created a fundamen

tal social cleavage, a class relation, between owners of the productive forces

and the labourers who performed the work necessary for life to continue.

The aspect of this most crucial for issues of economic development was the

extension of the working day beyond the labour time necessary for simply

reproducing the worker and his or her family. So, for Marx, societies were

‘exploitative’ when uncompensated surplus labour, or its products, were

taken from the direct producers, the exploitation process being an arena of

the conflict and opposition that Marx, as a dialectical thinker, focused on.

In class struggle, the dominant elite used a combination of economic,

political and ideological forces against the dominated, and the dominated

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KARL MARX

resisted through overt means like organisation (unions, political parties),

and hidden means, like reluctant compliance (putting a spanner in the

works). For Marxists, while workers produce the means of economic

growth, they do not control the development process. This makes capital

ism both highly productive and very unstable, a dangerous combination.

The other main social relation is within the capitalist class, among capi

talists competing on markets. Capital itself came from surplus made in ear

lier periods of history, from merchant’s capital (in which profits were made

by buying cheap and selling dear), from savings and hoarding, but mostly

from that fearsome source of ‘primitive accumulation’, the raiding of non-

capitalist societies for their accumulated wealth, their resources and their

people:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation,

enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous popula

tion of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of

India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commer-

cial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn

of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the

chief moments of primitive accumulation.

(Marx 1976: 915)

Capitalists were originally commercial farmers or small manufacturers

who put accumulated money into productive use as capital to make profit.

Under market conditions, they had to produce commodities at low prices.

Competition forced capitalists to extract the maximum surplus value from

workers. Competition forced capitalists to re-invest most surplus in

improving the forces of production, especially tools, machines and infra

structures in an attempt at making production more efficient. Competition

also forced the adoption of innovative types of organisation (corporations

as compared with family firms, multinationals as compared with national

corporations). Thus under capitalism, investment, productivity and devel

opment are not a matter of will, but result from compulsion forced by

competition – it is a case of develop or lose in the race to survive. Each

technological or organisational change forced by competition then has

multiple effects running through the entire economy, society and culture –

hence the theme of ‘progress’ in modern history. For Marx, development

occurred unevenly in social terms of class (the owning class becoming

richer) and geographical terms of space (some countries becoming richer

than others), hence the theme of uneven development in Marxism. Devel

opment was a contradictory process altogether (Marx 1976; Harvey 1982;

Becker 1977; Weeks 1981; Peet with Hartwick 1999).

KARL MARX

169

For Marx, social transformation essentially involved a shift from one

mode of production (for example, feudalism) to another (for example, cap

italism). Marx envisioned such transformations as violent episodes under

taken when all the productive possibilities of old social orders had been

exhausted. Crises in material development sharpened and intensified

ongoing social struggles, lending struggle the potential for broad social

change. The new social system, produced through class struggle, did not

materialise out of thin air, nor from utopian desire alone, but was formed

out of the embryonic relations already present in the dying body of the old

society. Marx saw capitalism as a necessary stage in history, developing

technology and destroying old beliefs in gods, ghosts and goblins. Follow

ing from this, Marx saw capitalism and imperialism as progressive aspects of

the development of non-capitalists societies, like India and China, making

possible a better society in the future, a viewpoint that made Marx vulnera

ble to criticisms of Eurocentrism. The main point is that Marx favoured

modern technology and social development because these made a better

life possible for the mass of ordinary people. He just wanted the develop-

ment process to be owned, controlled and directed democratically, by

working people. Only then could the full potential of modern develop-

ment be fully realised – as the satisfaction of needs, as education for all and

as sustainablity. For Marx, this would require a further transformation in

mode of production, from capitalism to socialism.

Marx is important in two main ways. First, his doctrines were suppos-

edly the political-economic basis on which the Communist countries (the

Soviet Union, the East European bloc, China, etc.) were established.

These countries used a development model founded on growth of the pro

ductive forces, understood narrowly as heavy industries like steel, chemi

cals and engineering, the idea being to increase productivity as quickly as

possible. Consumer goods industries were less developed within a political

culture stressing hard work for the state and sacrifice for the future. Second,

Marx’s writings form the intellectual basis for a range of subsequent theo

ries such as dependency and world systems theories, as well as constituting a

philosophy of development in and of themselves. This body of ideas con

tinues to influence radical social theory up to the present time.

Major works

Marx, K. (1969a) Wages, Price and Profit (1865 original), in Karl Marx and Frederick

Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2, Moscow: Progress Publishers, pp. 31–76.

—— (1969b) Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859

original), in Marx, K. and Engels, F., Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress

Publishers, pp. 502–6.

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KARL MARX

—— (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1887, 1907–9 original),

Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1847–8 original) Manifesto of the Communist Party,in

Marx, K. and Engels, F., Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers,

pp. 108–37.

—— (1970 and 1981) The German Ideology (1847 original), New York:

International Publishers.

Further reading

Becker, J. (1977) Marxian Political Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Cornu, A. (1957) The Origins of Marxian Thought, Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas.

Harvey, D. (1982) The Limits to Capital, Oxford: Blackwell.

Hegel, G.W.F (ed.) (1967) The Phenomenology of Mind, New York: Harper

Publishers.

Peet, R. with Hartwick, E. (1999) Theories of Development, New York: Guilford.

Weeks, J. (1981) Capital and Exploitation, London: Edward Arnold.

Richard Peet

MANFRED MAX-NEEF (1932–)

Manfred Max-Neef, the son of German immigrants, is a Chilean econo-

mist who has had a significant influence on grassroots movements and local

development projects worldwide. Since teaching at the University of Cali-

fornia, Berkeley, in the early 1960s, he has held several academic posts in

the USA and Latin America, including Rector of the Universidad

Bolivariana and subsequently of the Universidad Austral de Chile in

Valdivia (1994–2002). He has also worked for international organisations

like the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the International

Labour Organisation (ILO). He is the founder and Executive Director of

the Centre for Development Alternatives (CEPAUR) in Santiago, Chile,

which is dedicated to transdisciplinary research and action projects in order

to reorient development by stimulating local self-reliance, satisfying funda

mental human needs, and promoting human-scale development. He has

also been an executive council member of the Club of Rome. In 1983

Max-Neef was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in recognition of his

work on development alternatives. The prize is often described as the

Alternative Nobel Prize, and is awarded for outstanding vision and work

on behalf of our planet and its people. In 1993 he stood as an independent

candidate in the Chilean Presidential election and achieved a respectable

minority vote. His work and writing continue to influence and inspire

grassroots organisations and local movements in search for alternative,

sustainable development.

MANFRED MAX-NEEF

171

Max-Neef’s thinking originates to a large extent in his frustration with

classical, conventional economics. The discipline of economics, he argues,

has become obsessed with being a science, with providing technical solu

tions to human problems and with abstract measurements such as GNP,

growth rates, and balance of payments. As a result, economists have

become ‘dangerous people’ (1992: 19), whose theories and models cast a

powerful spell on policy-making, but have proved dismally incapable of

responding adequately to poverty and human misery. Instead, conven

tional economics makes the majority of poor people invisible, as it assigns no

value to work carried out at the subsistence and domestic level. This

reflects the discipline’s obsession with gigantism, efficiency, measurements

and abstractions. In the process, economics has, in the words of Max-Neef,

lost ‘a good deal of its human dimension’ as well as its connection to moral

philosophy (1992: 20). For these reasons, Max-Neef writes, ‘I severed my

ties with the trends imposed by the economic establishment, disengaged

myself from “objective abstractions”, and decided to “step into the mud” ’

(1992: 21). He became a self-described ‘barefoot economist’, someone

who has a profound distrust of grandiose solutions imposed from the top

down and whose main concern is instead with local action and small-scale,

bottom-up development.

Max-Neef’s ideas and experiences as a ‘barefoot economist’ are set out

in his most well-known book, From the Outside Looking In (1992). Since its

first publication in 1982 by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Sweden,

the book has been translated into five languages and has achieved the status

of a classic text on grassroots development projects. In the book, Max-Neef

details his personal experiences with participatory grassroots projects in

two Latin American settings, interspersing his empirical account with more

theoretical reflections on the nature of development. The result is a mov

ing and passionate book, where the voices of the poor speak with clarity

and force and where conventional theories and models are shown to be

lacking. His recollection of his involvement with an integrated develop

ment project among peasants in Ecuador is particularly interesting and

powerful, and demonstrates both the willingness and capacities of poor

people to organise and participate, given the right circumstances and

opportunities. The participants’ own accounts of their development prob

lems (reprinted verbatim in the book) provide a forceful antidote to the

widespread perception that poor people are ignorant of their situations,

and speak, as Max-Neef puts it, with a voice so vivid and so true ‘that no

expert with all his formal knowledge could have improved upon them’

(1992: 71). Sadly, the project also demonstrates the intrinsically political

character of participation and empowerment, in that all the project’s docu

ments and reports from the peasants’ meetings were confiscated by

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Ecuador’s military authorities. Shortly afterwards, the project was closed,

presumably because its success in organising and empowering the peasants

was seen as too dangerous by the political elite.

This experience leads Max-Neef to a profoundly political, as opposed to

technical, vision of development. To assume ‘goodwill on the part of gov

ernments to really improve the lot of the invisible sectors [the poor] is

naïve’, he argues, and in this sense development represents the interests of

the dominant class (1992: 114). In the national accounts, where growth

rates and import/export ratios reign supreme, the poor are expendable, or

at best, they can wait patiently until the effects of economic growth ‘trickle

down’. This scepticism of top-down, grandiose solutions leads Max-Neef

to put his trust in local action: ‘if national systems have learned to circum

vent the poor, it is the turn of the poor to learn how to circumvent the

national systems’ (1992: 117). His vision for a better future accordingly

arises from small-scale action, where the people concerned actively partici-

pate and where self-reliance and ecological harmony are guiding princi-

ples. It is only in such environments, he argues, that ‘human creativity and

meaningful identities can truly surface and flourish’ (1992: 117). Drawing

on traditions of thought stretching back to Aristotle, Max-Neef argues that

large cities lead to alienation, passivity and indifference, whereas small

environments allow for a dynamic equilibrium between nature, human

beings and technology, as in such settings people have the opportunity to

feel directly responsible for the consequences of their actions (1992: 132).

As a firm believer in the relationship between theory and praxis, Max-Neef

put his ideas to the test in Tiradentes, a small city in Brazil. The project was

an effort to revitalise the city, counter the trend of hyper-urbanisation and

improve the livelihoods of local people. Described in From the Outside

Looking In, the project succeeded with relatively few resources not only to

increase people’s incomes, but also their sense of well-being, community

and control, hence confirming Max-Neef’s belief that local action holds

the key to development.

Max-Neef’s conviction that ‘big problems require a great number of

small solutions’ (1992: 204) is given further elaboration in his second book,

Human Scale Development (1991). The book’s main postulate is that ‘devel

opment is about people, not about objects’, and proposes an ‘ethics of well-

being’ against the logic of economics which dominates modern life (1991:

16, 64). Human-scale development is based on:

the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on the generation of

growing levels of self-reliance, and on the construction of organic

articulations of people with nature and technology, of global

MANFRED MAX-NEEF

173

processes with local activity, of the personal with the social, of plan

ning with autonomy and of civil society with the state.

(1991: 8)

As an aid to achieving this form of development, the book proposes a radi

cally different conception of human needs and wants. Whereas conven

tional economics commonly assumes that human needs are infinite, and

that human beings are driven by an insatiable desire for material posses

sions, Max-Neef asserts that fundamental human needs are ‘finite, few and

classifiable’. What is more, these needs are ‘the same in all cultures and in all

historical periods’ (1992: 18). What changes over time and from culture to

culture is the manner in which people satisfy their needs. Apart from the

fundamental need of subsistence or survival, there is no hierarchy of needs,

as suggested for example by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, but instead

needs are constant and complementary. This in turn allows for a reclassifi-

cation of poverty, which can no longer be defined simply in terms of

income below a certain level, as all unfulfilled needs reveal a human pov-

erty, such as, for example, poverty of affection or of understanding.

Max-Neef identifies nine fundamental human needs; subsistence, pro-

tection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity,

and freedom, with the possibility that transcendence (a process that he

doesn’t define or elaborate on) may in time become a tenth universal need

(1992: 27). Needs are also defined according to the existential categories of

being, having, doing and interacting, and on the basis of these Max-Neef

develops a 36-cell matrix designed to help small communities enhance

their awareness of their deprivations and potentials. The matrix is filled

with examples of so-called satisfiers, that is, the means by which various

needs are fulfilled in a specific community. Satisfiers have different charac

teristics, and while some are relatively straightforward (food satisfying the

need for subsistence, formal education the need for understanding), others

are more complicated. Some satisfiers can be destroyers of the very need

they are said to fulfil, an example being excessive military expenditure

which is supposed to provide protection, but instead promotes insecurity

and inhibits subsistence, participation, affection and freedom (1991: 33).

Others are ‘synergic’ satisfiers, meeting more than one particular need

simultaneously. Through this redefinition of human needs and the devel

opment of the needs/satisfiers matrix, Max-Neef aims to assist communi

ties in realising their potential for local self-reliance and develop a strategy

for the actualisation of human needs.

Human Scale Development represents a departure from the prevailing

economic rationale and the equation of development with attaining the

material living standards of the most industrialised countries, and suggests

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MANFRED MAX-NEEF

instead that an abundance of goods and economic resources can exist side

by side with poverty of, for example, affection and creativity. In fact, the

valorisation of material possessions has, according to Max-Neef, led to

alienated societies, where life ‘is placed at the service of artifacts, rather than

artifacts at the service of life’ (1991: 25). While human-scale development

does not exclude conventional development goals such as economic

growth, it differs from such approaches in that the aims of development are

considered not only as points of arrival, but as part of the process itself. Fun

damental human needs must be realised throughout the entire process of

development, and in this way the realisation of needs becomes, instead of a

goal, the motor of development (1991: 53).

Max-Neef has made a noticeable contribution to development thinking

and practice through his pioneering critique of development economics,

his early advocacy of grassroots participation and empowerment, and his

redefinition of human needs. His arguments for development alternatives

and community participation remain relevant, perhaps even more so as

civil society, participation and poverty reduction have become the con-

temporary buzzwords of mainstream, top-down development models.

One prominent vehicle for disseminating his ideas has been Development

Dialogue, the journal of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, with which he

had a close association over many years. Overall, it is thus possible that his

emphasis on participation and grassroots involvement has had a belated

influence on international institutions like the World Bank, as seen, for

example, in its recent large-scale ‘Voices of the Poor’ project. For Max-

Neef, this would not necessarily signify the success of his ideas, but rather

the ability of the holders of power to conceal their vested interests and pour

old wine into new bottles (1992: 115; see also Wisner 1988). For him,

human-scale development can arise only from local settings, not from dis

tant development organisations and predefined development models.

Accordingly, his own writings do not so much propose an alternative

development model as provide flexible tools whereby communities can

arrive at their own solutions to their individual problems. Unlike so-called

post-development writers, however, who also focus on grassroots move

ments and local knowledge, Max-Neef remains within the language of

development, utilising the same terms and phrases as orthodox models.

Many post-development thinkers, by contrast, argue for alternatives to

development, as opposed to development alternatives, and this entails a

change of the discourse that produced the problem of development in the

first place (see Esteva 1987; Escobar 1992).

Like the economist E.F. Schumacher’s embrace of the dictum ‘small

is beautiful’, Max-Neef’s vision of human-scale development is open to the

charge of romanticism. Yet, for someone who describes his political

MANFRED MAX-NEEF

175

philosophy as ‘human eco-anarchism’ (1992: 55) and who wishes to revi

talise our capacity to dream (1991: 3), this is not necessarily a criticism. That

said, Max-Neef denies being a smallness fanatic, recognising that small can

also be ugly and evil, but maintains that smallness of scale allows for a

degree of responsibility and human interaction that is impossible in larger

environments (1992: 143, 160). The relationship of these local communi

ties to their national and global surroundings remains largely outside the

parameters of Max-Neef’s writings; the challenge is to ‘think small and act

small, but in as many places as possible’. The path, he argues, ‘must go from

the village to the global order’, an insight that remains a powerful inspira

tion for local action and grassroots movements (1992: 117).

Major works

(available in English; he has written more extensively in Spanish)

Ekins, P. and Max-Neef, M.A. (eds) (1992) Real-Life Economics: Understanding

Wealth Creation, London: Routledge.

Max-Neef, M.A. (1992) From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in ‘Barefoot

Economics’, London: Zed Books.

Max-Neef, M.A. with contributions from Antonio Elizalde and Martin

Hopenhayn

(1991) Human Scale Development: Conception, Application and

Further Reflections, New York and London: The Apex Press.

Further reading

Escobar, A. (1992) ‘Reflections on “Development”: Grassroots Approaches and

Alternative Politics in the Third World’, Futures 24(5): 411–36.

Esteva, G. (1987) ‘Regenerating People’s Space’, Alternatives 12(1): 125–52.

Wisner, B. (1988) Power and Need in Africa, London: Earthscan.

Rita Abrahamsen

TERENCE GARY McGEE (1936–)

Terence (‘Terry’) McGee is a development geographer who has made key

contributions to our understanding of urbanisation and development and

the structure of cities, particularly as regards the rapidly growing conurba

tions of Southeast Asia. He is best known for his explanation of the role in

development of Southeast Asian cities characterised by poor infrastructure,

rapid growth due to rural–urban migration, political instability and exten

sive poverty. He was a pioneer in the 1970s in emphasising the significant

position in the urban economy of the ‘informal sector’ (the extensive range

of unregulated enterprises and activities in the black market or under

ground economy that operate without any formal or official recognition by

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government). Up to this point there had been hardly any acknowledge

ment of its overwhelming contribution to economy and society in some of

the world’s largest cities, the way people are employed, how and where

they live and how so many of the economic and social relationships in the

Asian city can be explained.

McGee was born on 5 January 1936 in Cambridge, New Zealand, a

small agricultural town on the North Island situated in the heart of the

Waikato farming district where he gained early experience in milking cows

and mending fences, as well as the normal New Zealand aptitude for ball

skills at rugby and cricket. At the age of ten he moved with his family to

Auckland where he was at school on the city’s North Shore and where, in

1954, he enrolled at Auckland Teachers’ College while also attending BA

classes part-time in history and geography at the University of Auckland.

Graduating with a teaching diploma in 1954, he transferred to Victoria

University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he majored in geography

and gained his BA in 1957. In Auckland, McGee attributes his early appre-

ciation of history and its later importance in his writing to Willis Airey

(1897–1968), a leading New Zealand historian of Russia, and Keith

Sinclair (1922–93), poet and expert on New Zealand history. In

Wellington his mentors were Keith Buchanan (1920–98), brilliant lecturer

and utopian socialist who wrote widely on Asia; Harvey Franklin, an eco-

nomic geographer who introduced him to the work of the institutional

economist, Clarence Ayres (1891–1972), an American who wrote the

book, The Theory of Economic Progress, in 1944 and who propounded a

theory of ‘institutional lag’, whereby technological changes were always

several steps in front of change in socio-cultural institutions; and Ray

Watters, a human geographer who had adopted ethnographic and anthro-

pological approaches in his research on the Pacific.

He continued with his MA studies in 1958–61, where the courses

taught by Buchanan, Franklin and Watters were influential and where

Buchanan introduced him to the French regional geographers in Asia,

notably the work in Vietnam by Pierre Gourou (1900–99) and Charles

Robequain (1897–1936). Another important influence was members of

the Chicago ecological school of sociologists, including Louis Wirth

(1897–1952), whose approaches towards urbanism as a way of life he used

in his Master’s thesis on Indian migration to the City of Wellington, New

Zealand, which he attained with First Class Honours in 1961.

His academic career began alarmingly when he took up a position as

Temporary Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Victoria

University to teach a class on the geography of Europe, a region which he

had not at that time visited and which he only accomplished with the help

of lecture notes that Franklin had left behind when he went on leave. But

TERENCE GARY McGEE

177

1959 was also the year he gained his first continuing appointment as Lec

turer in geography at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He was to

remain there for six years and recognises this as a very formative period in

his life. McGee went to Asia expecting to teach but considers he learned far

more than he ever imparted (Presidential Address to Canadian Institute of

Geographers 1991). While in Malaysia he enrolled in a PhD at Victoria

University on Malay migration to Kuala Lumpur City, a subject that fol

lowed on from his Master’s thesis. The research involved an extensive

household questionnaire survey, staying as a guest of Malay families and

travelling widely throughout the country to track down migration source

areas. This period also presented him with an opportunity to explore

Southeast Asia extensively and it was on one such expedition that the idea

for a book on the Southeast Asian city was conceived.

He returned to New Zealand to become a Lecturer in geography at

Victoria University in 1965 and completed both the book and his PhD the

sis. The Southeast Asian City: A Social Geography of the Primate Cities of South-

east Asia was published in 1967 and his graduation followed in 1968.

McGee propounded the novel view that Asian cities were characterised by

a form of ‘pseudo urbanisation’, typified by conspicuous consumption,

extraction of surplus from the countryside and a drag on development.

This was a perspective that progressively diminished in importance as the

developing world became more closely integrated with the global eco-

nomy in the last decades of the century. The book was the first in a distin-

guished list of titles on Asian urbanisation. A forthcoming book will study

the extended metropolitan regions of Asia and be jointly authored with

some of his former PhD students. This was also a busy period in his life with

marriage, the birth of his son and building a house in Otaki (near

Wellington, New Zealand) taking centre stage.

One of McGee’s most influential papers on the economic structure of

cities was jointly written in 1968 (with Warwick Armstrong, a colleague in

Wellington) before returning to Asia, to a Senior Lectureship at the Uni

versity of Hong Kong. This paper, heavily influenced by members of the

Latin American dependency school of development thinkers (notably the

Argentine economist, Raúl Prebisch, and American, Andre Gunder

Frank, was titled ‘Revolutionary Change and the Third World City: A

Theory of Urban Involution’ (Civilisations 1968). It was the beginning of a

collaboration with Armstrong that was to be renewed in Canada in the

early 1980s and a precursor to their influential 1985 book, Theatres of Accu

mulation: Studies of Urbanization in Asia and Latin America. In Hong Kong

McGee was soon promoted to a personal Chair in 1970 and continued his

interest in the informal sector with the first of a series of major publications

on street vendors (Hawkers in Hong Kong: A Study of Policy and Planning in

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TERENCE GARY McGEE

the Third World City, 1974). He also began a productive relationship with

the Canadian International Development Research Centre which was to

result in further titles on the same topic during the 1970s.

In 1973 McGee took up a Senior Fellowship in Human Geography at

the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. His five

years at the ANU were marked by innovative new work on the political

economy of development and collaborative research in the Pacific with

academic colleagues (notably David Drakakis-Smith (1942–99), with

whom he had worked in Hong Kong, and Gerard Ward). Publications of

particular note at this time included ‘The Persistence of the Proto-

proletariat’ (McGee 1974), and ‘Conservation and Dissolution in the Third

World City (McGee 1979). It was also a time saddened by the death of his

first wife and the added responsibilities of being a single parent. In 1978 he

moved to Canada to take up the joint positions of Professor of Geography

and Director of the newly created Institute of Asian Research at the Uni

versity of British Columbia in Vancouver. In spite of a heavy administrative

workload, McGee continued to contribute effectively to Asian studies

through fieldwork in Malaysia investigating urban female workers in the

new semi-conductor factories and their rural links expressed through send-

ing part of their incomes back to home villages. This interest in urban–rural

dynamics was to lead, late in the 1980s, to some of McGee’s most impor-

tant work – the identification of new extended metropolitan regions in

Asia characterised by the outward expansion of urban activity into the

intensely crowded agricultural hinterlands of cities like Jakarta on the Indo-

nesian island of Java. McGee termed this novel metropolitan form desakota,

taken from the bahasa Indonesian names for village and town. He argued

that it was an Asian form of urbanisation distinctive from that of the devel-

oped countries (apart perhaps from Holland). This was an ecological view

point in the tradition of cultural geographers like Carl Sauer (1889–1975)

and led in 1991 to the publication of The Extended Metropolis: Settlement

Transition in Asia (ed. with N. Ginsberg and B. Koppell).

A number of objections have been raised to the idea of extended metro

politan regions (EMRs) being distinctive or peculiarly Asian. Briefly, these

critiques have argued that the book was over-generalised in its claims and

that it neglected the present evidence and inevitability of growth in market

systems in Asia that will replicate patterns found in the developed countries

(Tang and Chung 2000; Dick and Rimmer 1998). McGee has responded

by saying that the idea was never based on Asian as opposed to Western

traits but was one which stresses the influences on the urbanisation process

of the context in which it operates. Government policy, foreign invest

ment and various local factors, like the roles of municipalities and commu

nity organisations, explain much of the character and change found in

TERENCE GARY McGEE

179

EMRs such as Jabotabek (Indonesia), Bangkok (Thailand) and the Pearl

River Delta (China).

Besides contributing extensively to the academic debate on urbanisa

tion processes in Asia, McGee’s work has had a practical and applied focus.

During the 1990s he forged strong links with the National Centre for

Humanities and Social Sciences in Hanoi (Vietnam) as part of a long-term

project looking at Socialist Transition Economies and developing research

capacity in Vietnamese research institutions. Further investigations exam

ined the fiscal crisis in Southeast Asia at the end of the 1990s for the Cana

dian International Development Agency and identified a list of urban

indicators for the Asian Development Bank. He reached compulsory

retirement age in 2001, leaving his positions at the University of British

Columbia to become a Professor Emeritus and spend part of each year

teaching in Australia and researching a new book and further papers on

Asian urbanisation.

McGee has made fundamental contributions to the study and under-

standing of modern urbanisation processes. His work, with its emphasis on

human and institutional features of urban life and change in Southeast Asia,

has followed a consistent path, enduring through the 1970s when geogra-

phers all around him were caught up in what was then termed a ‘quantita-

tive revolution’ based on the primacy of numerical techniques, to emerge

in the new century with his ideas intact and equally relevant to the contem-

porary debate. A measure of the resilience of his ideas is also seen in the way

his formulation of theory contributed to new concepts in allied fields other

than his own. For example, views about the character of retailing in the

informal sector (hawking), an activity so typical of Asian cities, were

adapted by him to explain the persistence of shantytown features in these

same cities (Development and Change, 1979). Though this was the only

paper on housing he has ever written, it remains a key contribution in

understanding the nature of the squatting process and the determination of

urban management strategies to cope with its effects.

Major works

Armstrong, W. and McGee, T.G. (1985) Theatres of Accumulation: Studies of

Urbanization in Asia and Latin America, London and New York: Methuen.

Ginsberg, N., Koppell, B. and McGee, T.G. (eds) (1991) The Extended Metropolis:

Settlement Transition in Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

McGee, T.G. (1967) The Southeast Asian City: A Social Geography of the Primate

Cities of Southeast Asia, London: Bell.

—— (1971) The Urbanization Process in the Third World: Explorations in Search of a

Theory, London: Bell.

—— (1974) Hawkers in Hong Kong: A Study of Policy and Planning in the Third World

City, Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong.

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TERENCE GARY McGEE

McGee, T.G. and Robinson, I. (eds) (1995) The Mega-Urban Regions of Southeast

Asia: Policy Challenges and Response, Vancouver: University of British Columbia

Press.

Further reading

Dick, H.W. and Rimmer, R. (1998) ‘Beyond the Third World City: The New

Urban Geography of Southeast Asia’, Urban Studies 35(12): 2303–21.

McGee, T.G. (1974) The Persistence of the Proto-proletariat: Occupational Structures and

Planning for the Future of Third World Cities, Los Angeles, CA: School of

Architecture and Urban Planning, University of California (reprinted in Abu-

Lughod, J. and Hay, R. (eds) (1977) Third World Urbanization, Chicago, IL:

Maaroufa, pp. 257–70.

—— (1979) ‘Conservation and Dissolution in the Third World City: The

Shantytown as an Element of Conservation’, Development and Change 10(1): 1–

22.

—— (1991) ‘Presidential Address: Eurocentrism in Geography: The Case of Asian

Urbanisation’, The Canadian Geographer 35(4): 332–42.

—— (2002) ‘Reconstructing the Southeast Asian City in an era of Volatile

Globalisation’, Asian Journal of Social Science 30(1): 8–27.

McGee, T.G. and Armstrong, W. (1968) ‘Revolutionary Change and the Third

World City: A Theory of Urban Involution’, Civilisations XVIII(3): 353–78.

Tang, W.-S. and Chung, H. (2000) ‘Urban–Rural Transition in China: Beyond

the Desakota Model’, in Li, S.M. and Tang, W.-S. (eds), China’s Regions, Polity

and Economy: A Study of Spatial Transformation in the Post-Reform Era, Hong

Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, pp. 276–308.

John P. Lea

GUNNAR MYRDAL (1898–1987)

A prolific writer and active policy advisor, Gunnar K. Myrdal had a pro-

found effect on development thinking through the early development

decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Trained as an economist, Myrdal’s writings

engaged with sociology and gained a wide and influential audience of plan

ners, governments and academics through his long career. Moreover, the

issues he raised about the institutional and social milieu for favourable

development are still debated by contemporary researchers. Born in Stock

holm in December 1898, Gunnar Myrdal was associated with that city

throughout his life, despite his extensive work and travel around the globe,

particularly in the USA, Switzerland and India. Educated at Stockholm

University, he gained a law degree in 1923, followed by a PhD in econom

ics in 1927. His PhD focused on the role of expectations in price formation,

although he is best known for his later work on macro-economics and

social factors. Following a Rockefeller travelling fellowship in the USA in

1929–30, and an equally short period in Geneva as associate professor at the

GUNNAR MYRDAL

181

Institute of International Studies (1930–1), he returned to Stockholm

where he held posts at the University of Stockholm. As professor of Politi

cal Economy (1933–50) and then as professor of International Economics

(1960–7), his international work was associated particularly with the direc

torship of the Swedish Institute for International Economic Studies. His

public role was furthered by his appointment as executive secretary to the

UN Economic Commission for Europe (1947–57). In addition to acting as

advisor to the Swedish government on economic, social and fiscal policy,

Myrdal was a member of the Swedish Senate, becoming the Minister of

Commerce, and a member of the population, housing and agricultural

commission. He died in Stockholm in May 1987.

Myrdal was part of an iconoclastic generation of development econo

mists whose work extended Keynes’ economics and state interventionism.

Learning from wealthy Western and Eastern European countries, this

group adapted Keynesian demand management and drew on Schumpeter’s

work in viewing development as a structural transformation process.

Rejecting neo-classical economics, most of these so-called structuralists

saw the lack of industrialisation as the reason for countries’ poverty (see

Martinussen 1997: 50ff. for an overview). Alongside Myrdal, writers

including Richard Nurske, Thomas Balogh, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan,

Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer highlighted issues such as dual econo-

mies, labour surplus, unbalanced growth, the vicious circle of poverty,

unequal exchange and dependency. In their policy prescriptions, they

argued for rapid industrialisation and redistribution with growth. Com-

pared with this generation of structuralists, however, Myrdal’s work con-

sidered non-economic phenomena more systematically (Martinussen

1997: 73). Arguably, Myrdal’s direction of a major study of the situation of

the African-American population funded by the Carnegie Corporation

from 1938 to 1943 contributed to his understanding of the legal, social and

cultural factors involved in the creation and perpetuation of mass poverty.

His aim in this study was, he stated, to determine ‘the social, political, edu

cational, and economic status of the Negro in the US, as well as defining

opinions held by different groups of Negros and whites as to his “right” sta

tus’ (An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 1944:

x). This represents his first major work, the themes of which would recur in

later studies. Also, in comparison with many structuralists at the time,

Myrdal believed that the accumulation of capital could assist in economic

development, which drew him closer to the ‘modernisation’ thinkers in

this regard. Myrdal’s influence on development thinking can be seen in the

four key fields of regional development, dependency approaches, the state,

and non-economic factors.

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GUNNAR MYRDAL

With regard to regional planning, Myrdal contributed several key con

cepts that had a wide impact on development studies thinking and on plan

ning. He was one of the first writers to offer an explanation for the contrast

between a dynamic part of a developing country – usually the capital city –

and stagnation in the rest of the country. He attributed regional inequalities

to the ‘spiral of cumulative causation’ which results in positive spread effects

in the core area, and negative backwash effects in the periphery (Economic

Theory and Under-developed Regions, 1957). Myrdal’s 1957 book identified a

similar process to Albert Hirschman but his approach was more humane,

and had more influence (Brookfield 1975: 99). By means of the ‘process of

cumulative causation’ found in free market economies, economic activities

became concentrated in certain centres, to the detriment of other sectors of

the economy and country and are reinforced by movements of capital, goods

and people. The concepts of spread and backwash effects had an immediate

impact on debates in regional development and urbanisation as planners

struggled to account for the location and impacts of urban centres (Reitsma

and Kleinpenning 1985: 202). Although neither Hirschman nor Myrdal

theorised about the best initiators of positive spread effects, a commonly

agreed impetus was urban industrial development, which had been vital in

Europe. By the 1960s, however, Myrdal had concluded that industrialisation

could not absorb all underemployed people and argued for the need to

develop agriculture in order to create employment and increase productivity

and efficiency. Compared with Hirschman’s optimism that growth,

although initially unbalanced geographically, would equalise over time,

Myrdal believed that this would be unlikely unless strategic state interven-

tion took place. It was only after the work of Myrdal and Hirschman that

uneven development in the development process became firmly established,

demanding further examination and theorisation. For example, John

Friedmann’s work on core–periphery built on Myrdal and Hirschman,

although he was able to be more precise in the treatment of regional econo

mies (Brookfield 1975: 101).

Myrdal also engaged with a growing body of theory examining the

international context for inequalities in wealth between nations, particu

larly between core European and North American countries and former

colonies in South America, Africa and Asia. He noted that economic, social

and political dependency relations existed between regions at the interna

tional level (Reitsma and Kleinpenning 1985: 246). Influenced by the ear

lier writings of Latin American economists and planners such as Raúl

Prebisch and the influential United Nations ECLA (Economic Commis

sion on Latin America) school, Myrdal regarded underdevelopment as

intrinsically related to development elsewhere through the pervasive

effects of negative backwash effects. Differing from Walt Rostow’s stage

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183

model of development independent of international relations, Myrdal took

the structuralist argument that post-Second World War international trade

could not act as the growth engine for developing countries as it would

only cause the ‘trickle up’ of benefits to industrialised countries

(Martinussen 1997: 78–9). However, he crucially extended the struc

turalist account by his argument of circular and cumulative causation, in

which an outflow of surplus, the brain drain and the destruction of domes

tic crafts were all indicative of backwash effects. Underdevelopment was

also tied to the vagaries of the global economy, argued Myrdal, with back

wash effects stronger in a depression than a boom (Brookfield 1975: 100).

Developing a theme to be further explored by later neo-Marxists, Myrdal

drew attention to colonial legacies which, through their law and order pol

icies and tax collection, were oriented to the interests of colonial powers,

not poor countries (Martinussen 1997).

Economics in the 1950s and 1960s assumed that market failure was the

norm in developing countries, meaning that the state would have to mobi-

lise domestic and foreign savings for investment in directed industrial

development, with state plans (see Corbridge 1995). In line with main-

stream thinking, Myrdal viewed the state as ‘knowledgeable and compas-

sionate’ (Lal 1985), although he remained critical of certain state economic

policies such as those in India (Toye 1993: 100). The state envisaged by

Myrdal (1960) was a highly organised and centralised one with features

such as collective bargaining, democratic participation and a welfare state.

States were important institutions, to be created by policies and political

determination (Martinussen 1997: 227). However, according to Myrdal’s

research, a developmentally favourable state was not necessarily found in

poor countries. Myrdal assumed that most developing country states were

‘soft’, and would be exploited by powerful individuals and groups (Myrdal

1968: chap. 18; 1970). Myrdal first used the term ‘soft state’ to describe a

country the government of which is incapable of instituting radical reform

policies or which fails to follow through with policies (Reitsma and

Kleinpenning 1985: 332). His work on India and South Asia in Asian

Drama (a majestic combination of theory and policy) develops these aspects

for the first time, analysing the detrimental impact of inefficient political

development agencies. Another feature of soft states was the weak formula

tion of law, permitting both corruption and the continuation of exploit

ative systems such as sharecropping (Martinusssen 1997: chap. 16). As the

interests of the powerful control the state and its economic performance,

the goal is to envisage a strong state structure which, according to Myrdal,

can enforce social discipline or generate a tolerance of authoritarianism.

Rather than focus on political structure, Myrdal’s approach thus inter

preted soft states as ‘a problematic absence of the right cultural context for

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development planning’ (Toye 1993: 124). This interpretation was long

seen as highly ethnocentric, although it is in line with some recent conser

vative interpretations of culture and development (compare Berger and

Huntington 2002). In the 1958 Storr lectures at Yale, Myrdal outlined the

kind of state he envisaged for developing countries, where, although

responding to international crises, national planning acts as a positive

internal force, enhanced by democratisation, economic nationalism and

equalisation.

As much a sociologist as an economist of development, Myrdal worked

for many years to understand the impact of non-economic factors on

development and poverty. Through his critique of capital-centric theories,

he moved beyond economic theory to a more general theory of societal

stagnation and transformation (Martinussen 1997: 80). Criticising previous

planning models for their production and income orientation, he high

lighted the need to consider attitudes to work and life, and political and

cultural institutions (Myrdal 1968, Appendix 3, 4; also Martinussen 1997:

230). His multi-factor model included six categories that ranged from out-

put and incomes, and conditions of production, to attitudes towards work

and life, institutions and policies. He viewed these aspects of the develop-

ment process as interrelated, tending to shift in similar directions with the

result of either development or underdevelopment (Martinussen 1997:

80). His 1968 book, Asian Drama, described attitudes to life and work

including those obstructing economic growth (such as low levels of work

discipline, punctuality, orderliness) as well as superstitious beliefs and irra-

tionality, and readiness for change. Myrdal’s belief in the circular causation

of poverty, which rested partially on the poor’s attitudes, was not unique at

this time; the work of Oscar Lewis and others analysed the – now

discredited – idea of a ‘culture of poverty’ (Lewis 1959).

Although widely influential, Myrdal’s work was not without its critics.

While easily summarised, his work failed to acknowledge others’ work in

similar fields and at times stated the obvious (Brookfield 1975: 100). During

the 1980s ‘counter-revolution’ against Keynesian and state-centred

development, Myrdal’s work was strongly criticised for its dirigisme dogma

(Lal 1995 [1985]: 56). Neo-liberals particularly disagreed with Myrdal’s

assumption of an omniscient central state authority, and his implicit goal of

egalitarianism (Lal 1995 [1985]). Similarly, while recognising Myrdal’s

concern for human capital formation, Toye criticises his erroneous claim

that ‘productive consumption’ – that is, investment in education and

health – ‘proved that the standard macro-economic distinction between

consumption and investment was worthless in policy making’ (Toye 1993:

97–8). By emphasising the cultural predilection to comply with govern

ment planning rather than the political structures of states, Myrdal’s soft

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185

state theories were later perceived as ‘embarrassingly close to Peter Bauer’s

linking of development prospects to cultural characteristics of ethnic

groups’ (Toye 1993: 124). African-American critics focus on his evasion of

a class critique and his faith in the American way of life, although they

acknowledge the depth of statistical information presented in American

Dilemma (Reed 2001). Nevertheless, Myrdal’s analysis of structures and

power – albeit superficial – laid the ‘groundwork for a fruitful analysis of

interactions between the state and economic development’ (Martinussen

1997: 227).

Myrdal’s work continued to have a resonance in development thinking

and policy throughout his life. In 1974, he shared the Nobel Prize for Eco

nomics with Friedrich A. von Hayek ‘for their pioneering work in the the

ory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis

of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena’

(also Martinussen 1997: 227). In his collaborations with development

thinkers such as Ester Boserup and Michael Lipton, and his extensive

friendships with scholars and politicians, Myrdal’s influence was felt

through succeeding generations. His wife, Alva Myrdal (1902–86), was a

highly significant figure in her own right, working variously for

UNESCO, as a Swedish MP and Cabinet Minister, an Ambassador, and a

disarmament negotiator (for which she won the Nobel Peace Prize). In

their different fields, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal were prime examples of a

social democrat commitment to equality and public service allied with

concrete information. In his attention to detail and his sensitivity to the

multifaceted character of mass poverty, Gunnar Myrdal’s work contributes

to an understanding of the human cost of underdevelopment through his

descriptions of widespread un(der)employment, poor use of resources, and

income inequalities. In his view that inequality was morally unacceptable

and that the agenda of development was to guarantee social equity, Myrdal

came close to what later became termed a basic needs strategy (Martinussen

1997: 82).

Major works

Myrdal, G. (1944) An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,

New York and London: Harper and Brothers.

—— (1956) An International Economy, London: Routledge.

—— (1957) Economic Theory and Under-developed Regions, London: Duckworth.

—— (1960) Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning in the Welfare States and its

International Implications, London: Duckworth.

—— (1963) Challenge to Affluence, London: V. Gollancz.

—— (1968) Asian Drama, 3 vols, London: Penguin.

—— (1970) The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline,

London: Penguin.

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GUNNAR MYRDAL

Further reading

Berger, N. and Huntington, S.P. (eds) (2002) Many Globalizations: Cultural

Diversity in the Contemporary World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brookfield, H. (1975) Interdependent Development, London: Methuen.

Corbridge, S.E. (1995) Development Studies: A Reader, London: Arnold.

Dickenson, J. et al. (1996) Geography of the Third World, London: Routledge.

Lal, D. (1985) ‘The Misconceptions of Development Economics’, reprinted in

Corbridge (ed.), Development Studies: A Reader, London: Arnold.

Lewis, O. (1959) Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, New

York: Basic Books.

Martinussen, J. (1997) Society, State and Market, London: Zed Books.

Reed, Jnr, A. (2001) ‘Race and Class in the Work of Oliver Cromwell Cox –

American Writer’, Monthly Review 52(9) (February): 23–32.

Reitsma, H.A. and Kleinpenning, J.M.P. (1985) The Third World in Perspective,

Maastricht: Van Gorcum.

Toye, J. (1993) Dilemmas of Development, Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn.

Sarah Radcliffe

KWAME FRANCIS NKRUMAH (1909–72)

The Osagyefo (meaning the redeemer, as he was popularly known to sup-

porters), Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led Black Africa’s first inde-

pendent nation, Ghana, was born in Nkroful, in Ghana’s Western Region

close to the Ivorian border, in mid-September 1909, the son of the senior

wife of an Nzima goldsmith. Some of his detractors would later cast asper-

sions on his Ghanaianness because of this geographical accident of birth.

According to a contemporary, he was a shy child who was highly influ-

enced by his mother, emerging as a very determined, highly motivated and

disciplined individual (Davidson 1973). Nkrumah believed that Africans

must not only shed the yoke of colonial inferiority but must be prepared to

take up responsibilities, as a prerequisite for retrieving power from the

coloniser. One of the earliest challenges the young Nkrumah had to face

was that of education, in a colony where the vast majority of children

dreamed of attending school but never had the opportunity to do so. After

finishing his elementary education in 1926, he became a teacher in Half

Assini, a small coastal town near the Ivorian border, from where at the age

of seventeen he was recruited by the Reverend A.G. Fraser, the founder of

Achimota College, to become a student there. This he did for the next four

years. After Achimota, he taught in a number of schools before leaving for

the USA in 1935.

Nkrumah’s choice of the USA for further studies was influenced by the

rejection of the snobbery he saw ‘in the British way of life’ as well as the

influence of people like Nigerian nationalist leader, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and

KWAME FRANCIS NKRUMAH

187

the realisation that many Black pioneers were themselves luminaries of US

educational institutions (Davidson 1973). During his sojourn in the USA,

he attended Lincoln University, Pennsylvania and got to know many of the

Black emancipators in the US, men such as W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus

Garvey, who helped in the formulation of his Pan-Africanist ideals. Despite

this growing period of intellectual enlightenment, life in America was not

easy for the young Nkrumah, who had to toil to pay his way through uni

versity, endured racism and imperialism, factors which impelled him to

return to his native land to lead the anti-colonial struggle.

Armed with Western liberal philosophy, Nkrumah became convinced

about the need for Africa to both overturn the colonial system and struggle

for continental unity. These two projects would come to dominate the

thinking and life of Nkrumah, and he was convinced that the latter could

not be achieved without attaining the first objective. Thus his famous

maxim: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all things shall be added’,

which points to his ability to draw connections between the colonial sub-

jugation and the wretched plight of the mass of the African people (Mohan

1967). Once political independence had been won, Africa and its leaders

would then embark on the task of continental unity, and a clear anti-

Balkanisation strategy, which he saw as the way out of colonial bondage

and neo-colonialism. In his political treatise, Africa Must Unite (1968),

Nkrumah argued that Ghana’s independence would be meaningless with-

out the complete liberation of the African continent.

In May 1945, Nkrumah left New York homeward bound via London,

where he met George Padmore, the West Indian journalist, and the pub-

lisher T.R. Makonnen from British Guiana as well as attending the Fifth

Pan-Africanist Congress in Manchester in the same year. During the two

years he spent in London, Nkrumah made an immediate impact on Lon

don’s small Black community as vice-president of the West African Stu

dents’ Union, as well as endearing himself to the city’s intellectual

community through lecturing and studying for the Bar. He was also instru

mental in setting up a secret group, which emerged from the Manchester

Congress among activists of the West African National Secretariat, called

The Circle, with policies designed to foster unity and national independ

ence in West Africa.

During his stay in London he received an invitation from his old friend

from Lincoln University, Ako Adjei, and Dr J.B. Danquah to return home

to assume the role of secretary general of the newly formed party, the

United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), which was about to be

launched. After much soul-searching, he left for the Gold Coast in

November 1947, arriving to find a country heaving with social and consti

tutional changes, including a shoppers’ strike and restive young men, many

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KWAME FRANCIS NKRUMAH

of whom had remained unemployed since being demobilised in 1945.

Nkrumah soon fell out with the leaders of the UGCC after being accused

of being a communist, which led him to form the Convention People’s

Party (CPP) in 1949. The guiding principle of the CPP was Positive

Action, which involved mass action in order to achieve the specific goal of

political liberation, and Tactical Action, a strategy involving neo-colonial

accommodation with the colonial power in alliance with the petty bour

geoisie in order to defeat the chiefs and the middle class. Through the vehi

cle of the CPP, Nkrumah won independence for Ghana in 1957 and

became the leader of Black Africa’s first independent sovereign state. This

provided him with the opportunity to put some of his ideas into practice

for his country’s development. This has been referred to as Nkrumahism

(Mohan 1967).

Nkrumahism was not a systematic or coherent ideology; indeed,

Mohan described it as ‘a personalised choice of slogans and formulas’ with a

‘hopeless attempt to superimpose an apparent order over a mass of contra-

dictions’ (Mohan 1967: 211). Nonetheless, one can unravel several strands

to it: the philosophy of ‘Consciencism’; ‘socialism in one country’; Pan-

Africanism; Positive and Tactical Actions; political and economic strategies

for national liberation and continental unity. However, as Mohan has

argued, the doctrine was riddled with contradictions.

Consciencism was a ‘third way’ philosophical outlook designed by

Nkrumah to aid Africa’s social and political revolution. It is an eclectic

ensemble of the triple heritage of the African continent which will enable

African society to digest the Western, the Islamic and the Euro-Christian

elements in Africa, and develop them in such a way that they fit into the

African personality (Nkrumah 1964: 79). The African personality is

defined as a cluster of humanist principles underlying traditional African

society. In Nkrumah’s world the need for a new philosophical or ideologi

cal outlook for Africa was premised not just because of the syncretic nature

of post-colonial Africa, but because the essence and purposes of capitalism

are contrary to African society and the African Weltanschauung. For him

capitalism was the denial of the African personality and conscience of

Africa. Not only was capitalism unjust, but it was also unworkable and alien

to Africans (ibid.).

Thus in order to resituate Africa’s humanist and egalitarian principles,

which had been transgressed by colonialism, socialism was the answer.

With regard to domestic policies, in the early days the CPP was riddled

with anti-communist psychosis (Mohan 1967), designed to neutralise the

radical wing of the Party and depoliticise the trade unions in order to gain

colonial accommodation. Part of the CPP’s project of modernity was to

foster national unity (as a prelude to continental unity) and in order to

KWAME FRANCIS NKRUMAH

189

achieve this Nkrumahism directed its attack on the chiefs, perceived as the

symbols of the ancien régime and sources of ‘tribalism’ and regionalism.

However, after 1951 Nkrumah defended chieftaincy in the country

(Mohan 1967), provided that they delivered the vote in a new form of

post-colonial decentralised despotism. Paradoxically, the emergence of a

bourgeoisie, that genre of modernity sui generis, was to be discouraged at all

costs, as they were seen as a comprador class and as harbingers of neo-colo

nialism. In reality, Nkrumah was concerned about the emergence of a class

that might challenge the CPP for state hegemony. Mohan has argued that

the rejection of the middle class put paid to the rise of an incipient Ghana

ian capitalism and transformed the large farmer-chiefs into the political

opponents of the CPP’s dominance (Mohan 1967). National liberation, it

was argued, should be constructed with the petty bourgeoisie (the famous

Veranda Boys) as the vanguard and a depoliticised worker-peasant move

ment (Mohan 1967). The surplus that was so necessary for social and eco-

nomic reconstruction was to be squeezed from the peasantry operating

within a modernised agricultural sector managed by the apparatchiks, via the

state-controlled marketing boards.

If an indigenous bourgeoisie was to be denied, then the task of social

reconstruction and industrialisation was left to the state. Nkrumah invested

huge amounts in both human and physical capital: schools and universities,

state farms, harbours and roads, including the Accra Tema highway and

factories. The Nkrumahist state was a Bonapartist one: highly centralised,

autonomous of any class or group, but a developmental one with the gov-

ernment playing a major role in industrial transformation. To ensure

national unity and stability, the sine qua non for economic development, not

only must dirigisme remain supreme, but also the ruling party must have

total monopoly of power as all counter-hegemonic groups were pro

scribed. This alienated large sections of Ghanaian society, leading to several

assassination attempts.

The economic core of Nkrumahism was proto-Marxist, tinctured by

Leninism on a framework of African socialism, which denied the class

nature of African societies by celebrating its egalitarian past as if these were

monolithic (Ottaway and Ottaway 1981). Nkrumahism had a continental

dimension, which was meant to ‘bring home Pan-Africanism’ from its

diasporan origin to Mother Africa and transform it from a rather nebulous

movement, concerned vaguely with black nationalism, into an expression

of African nationalism. In 1963, Nkrumah called for Africa to unite

(Nkrumah 1963) as the main continental body, the Organisation of African

Unity, was inaugurated in Addis Abba, the Ethiopian capital. His message

appeared to have been ignored by African leaders. In 1965, he published his

Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism , pointing to the role that

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KWAME FRANCIS NKRUMAH

transnational corporations play in draining surplus from Africa, hence fos

tering the continent’s underdevelopment. Following the United Nations’

débâcle in its peace-keeping activities in the Congo, which led to the death

of that country’s leader, Patrice Lumumba, Nkrumah called for an African

High Command in order to prevent internal and external rogue elements

from destabilising budding African governments (Zack-Williams 1997a).

In order to eliminate all vestiges of colonialism in Africa, Nkrumah’s

Ghana became a haven for liberation fighters from several African

countries.

Nkrumahism demanded that Africa should remain neutral or non-

aligned: supporting neither the Western alliance nor the Warsaw Pact.

Thus to counterbalance Western influences, Ghana developed close eco

nomic and political relationships with the Eastern bloc nations in addition

to those already existing with the West. The country also played a major

role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), an assembly of radical Third

World nations established at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. In this way, not

only was Ghana able to play off one superpower against another, but also

Ghana was able to attract resources from the East (Zack-Williams 1997b)

on relatively more favourable terms than could be obtained from the

advanced capitalist nations. Nkrumah was removed from power on 22

February 1966 while en route to Vietnam in search of the peace that he felt

might bring an end to the brutal war taking place in that country. It was

then that senior military officers in cahoots with foreign cold warriors

removed him from power after depressing the price of cocoa, Ghana’s

main export.

He returned to Africa, having gained asylum in nearby Guinea Conakry

where he was declared joint President of Guinea with Ahmed Sekou

Touré. He remained in Guinea for the remainder of his life, apart from a

visit to Bulgaria for medical treatment and where he died in 1972. By the

time of his death, Kwame Nkrumah was not just the Osagyefo of Ghana

but, as The Legon Observer (Ghana, 18 May 1972) noted: ‘To the black man

in all parts of the world, Nkrumah gave a new pride.’ Hence his remains,

initially buried in his home town of Nkroful, were later reinterred with

ceremonial pomp in a grand mausoleum constructed adjacent to Accra’s

independence arch and stadium.

Major works

Nkrumah, K. (1957) Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, London,

Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson.

—— (1961) I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology, London, Melbourne,

Toronto: Heinemann.

—— (1963) Africa Must Unite, London: Panaf.

KWAME FRANCIS NKRUMAH

191

—— (1964) Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation and Development

with Particular Reference to the African Revolution, London: Heinemann.

—— (1965) Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialsim, London: Thomas Nelson

& Sons.

—— (1970) Class Struggle in Africa, London: Panaf.

—— (1990) The Conakry Years: His Life and Letters, London: Panaf.

Further reading

Birmingham, D. (1998) Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nationalism, Athens,

OH: Ohio University Press.

Boateng, C.A. (1995) Nkrumah’s Consciencism: An Ideology for Decolonisation and

Development, Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.

Bretton, H.L. (1966) The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah: A Study of Personal Rule

in Africa, London: Pall Mall Press.

Davidson, B. (1973) Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah,

London: Allen Lane.

Milne, J. (1990) Kwame Nkrumah: The Conakry Years, His Life and Letters, London:

Panaf, Zed Press.

Mohan, J. (1967) ‘Nkrumah and Nkrumahism’, in Miliband, R. and Saville, J.

(eds), Socialist Register 1967, London: Merlin Press.

Ottaway, D. and Ottaway, M. (1981) AfroCommunism, New York and London:

Africana Publishing.

Rathbone, R.J.A.R. (2000) Nkrumah and the Chiefs: The Politics of Chieftaincy in

Ghana, 1951–60, Oxford: James Currey.

Sherwood, M. (1996) Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad, 1935–47, Legon:

Freedom Publication.

Zack-Williams, A.B. (1997a) ‘Peacekeeping and an ‘African High Command’,

Review of African Political Economy 71(3): 131–7.

—— (1997b) ‘Labour, Structural Adjustment and Democracy in Sierra Leone and

Ghana’, in Siddiqui, R.A. (ed.), Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s: Challenges to

Democracy and Development, Westport, CT and London: Praeger, pp. 57–69.

Alfred Babatunde Zack-Williams

JULIUS KAMBARAGWE NYERERE (1922–99)

The attempt to apply the philosophy of Ujamaa characterises the thinking

and political work of Julius Kambaragwe Nyerere during his presidency of

Tanzania. Nevertheless, Nyerere’s thinking was not guided solely by the

ethos of African tradition in which the philosophy of Ujamaa was encapsu

lated, for he was a modernist and a practical politician who tried to synthe

sise the best of his people’s ideas with those of the Western world in

pursuance of transformation and the development of his country.

In so doing, he exhibited the highest level of moral commitment. Many

critics have called his Ujamaa strategy an economic failure. However, it is

more useful to interrogate his philosophy and practice holistically in order

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JULIUS KAMBARAGWE NYERERE

to distil that which was valid, at the time, from that which proved unwork

able but which could be revisited and modified in order to inspire future

generations. In the words of Ali Mazrui,

When he was president of the United Republic of Tanzania, Julius

K. Nyerere’s vision was bigger than his victories; his perception was

deeper than his performance. In global terms, he was one of the

giants of the twentieth century. And like all giants he had both great

insights and great blind spots. While his vision did indeed outpace his

victories, and his profundity outweigh his performance, he did

bestride this narrow world like an African colossus.

(Mazrui 2002: 1)

Mazrui, previously a great critic of Nyerere, adds that with Ujamaa,

which means ‘familyhood’, Nyerere attempted to ‘build a bridge between

indigenous African thought and modern political ideas’. By making it the

organising principle of Tanzania’s entire economic experiment from the

Arusha Declaration of 1967 to the mid-1980s, Nyerere turned it into a

foundation for African socialism (ibid.: 5). Thus an assessment of his politi-

cal and development thinking must be blended with the consideration of

wider issues with which he was involved throughout his political life.

Julius Nyerere was born on 13 April 1922 in Butiama village in the

Musoma District of Tanganyika’s Mara Region. In 1947 he obtained his

diploma in education from Makerere University in Kampala. Thereafter he

taught at St Mary’s Secondary School in Tabora for two years before study-

ing for his Master’s degree in history, geography and economics at the Uni-

versity of Edinburgh. On returning to Tanganyika in 1952, he taught at

Pugu Secondary School, Kisarawe in Dar es Salaam between 1953 and

1954.

His political life began when he resigned from teaching to help found

the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) on 7 July 1954, immedi

ately becoming its president. In 1960, he became prime minister of

Tanganyika under ‘self-government’ and continued to hold the position

when Tanzania became independent on 12 December 1961. Nyerere soon

resigned his position and handed over the government to his deputy,

Rashid Mugume Kawawa, so that he could return to consolidate the party

among the ordinary membership. When he felt that work to be done, he

took charge of the government once more in December 1962, after the

declaration of a republic, and became Tanganyika’s president until his

eventual resignation in November 1985.

The inspirations of an outstanding thinker and politician like Julius

Nyerere cannot be traced to a single influence or a particular phase (Green

JULIUS KAMBARAGWE NYERERE

193

1995: 81–2). However, several trends and directions are indicative of how

his thinking about rural development, with which his Ujamaa ideology was

most associated, evolved.

His approach was based on a strong attempt to find inspiration in tradi

tional African society. Beyond that, he tried to mould these ideas into a

new compact of economic and political theory. Some have seen the origin

of his ideas in Fabian socialist ideology and Catholic social teachings

(Ibhawoh and Dibua 2003: 62), while others regard his political ideas as

parallel to those of Rousseau (Stöger-Eising 2000: 34–5). However, Irene

and Roland Brown have argued that Rene Dumont’s book, False Start in

Africa, had a ‘particular significance’ for Tanzania, especially Dumont’s

explanations of rural poverty as forming the root cause of lack of industrial

isation (Brown and Brown 1995: 9–11).

Nyerere also read Marxism and scientific socialism and later came to

develop close relations with the People’s Republic of China, with which

he entered into several bilateral economic co-operation programmes.

However, he always tried to marry new ideas gleaned from his prodigious

reading to the conditions on the ground in which African traditional ideas

and norms played a significant role. Joseph Warioba, one-time prime min-

ister and confidant of Nyerere, believes that Nyerere’s ideas about self-reli-

ance were inspired very much by his conversations with ordinary people

and their lived experiences. He adds that Nyerere believed very much in

the idea of ‘man-centred’ development (interview, Arusha, 28 September

2004).

We have to delve deeper to understand how he integrated traditional

and intellectual ideas into a personal philosophy and political practice. For

this purpose, the main texts are the Arusha Declaration and its two sequels,

‘Socialism and Rural Development’ (1975a) and Education for Self-Reliance

(1967b). The declaration, adopted as official doctrine by the Tanganyika

African National Union (TANU) in February 1967, officially placed Tan

zania on a socialist path and an associated strategy of self-reliance (Nyerere

1975b). It argued that agriculture formed the basis of Tanzania’s economic

development, and that only through the hard work and intelligence of the

people could production levels be raised (Nyerere 1977).

Nyerere’s Ujamaa philosophy and its ideological base are set out in

Socialism and Rural Development (1975a). The ‘traditional African family’ is

identified as the unit through which the principle of Ujamaa was to be

examined. In his view, Ujamaa constituted the ‘Third Way’ to modern

development. According to Nyerere, the African traditional family ‘lived

and worked together because that is how they understood life’. The results

of their joint efforts were divided unequally among them, but this was done

according to well-defined customs and traditions (Nyerere 1975a: 1).

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Although Nyerere, the traditionalist, extolled the virtues of what he

regarded as traditional African values, Nyerere, the modernist, simulta

neously recognised their limitations. He pointed out that the result of these

practices ‘was not the kind of life we really wish to see existing throughout

Tanzania’. Quite apart from the failure of individuals to live up to the ideals

of the social system, he noted that two other factors prevented traditional

society from ‘flowering’. The first was gender inequality: ‘It is impossible to

deny that the women did, and still do, more than their fair share of the

work in the fields and in the homes.’ They were made to suffer from

inequalities, which had nothing to do with their contribution to the family

welfare. This, he concluded, ‘was inconsistent with the socialist conception

of the equality of all human beings and the right of all to live in security and

freedom’. He added: ‘If we want our country to make a full and quick

progress now, it is essential that our women live in terms of full equality

with their fellow citizens who are men’ (ibid.: 3).

The other limitation of traditional society, according to Nyerere, was

the prevalence of poverty. Here, Nyerere began to ‘graduate’ from the tra-

ditional world of the African family to modern neo-colonialism. He

accepted that the traditional system offered an attractive degree of equality,

albeit at a low level that could be raised. He blamed the prevalence of pov-

erty on two factors, namely ‘ignorance’ and the scale of operations of the

family unit. In his view, the principles of mutual respect, sharing and joint

production, and work by all were, and are, the foundation of human secu-

rity, of practical human equality and of peace between members of a soci-

ety. They can also form the basis of economic development ‘if modern

knowledge and modern techniques of production are used’ (ibid.: 3). Here,

Nyerere stood alongside all modernists.

This recognition of the need to move rural production forward in mod

ern conditions constituted the basis of Ujamaa Vijijini (Ujamaa Villages).

The implementation programme set out in the Arusha Declaration began

to confront the realities in rural areas and the way that peasants looked at

the same problem. To be sure, the strategy of rural development was not

entirely Nyerere’s idea. It was suggested by the World Bank in their first

Mission report, which formed the basis of the First Five Year Plan adopted at

Tanganyika’s independence in 1961 and which came into effect in 1964

(Nabudere 1981: 98).

This plan had adopted the ‘transformation approach’ to promote ‘Vil

lage Settlement Schemes’, which would depend on the injection of foreign

capital into rural development. The plan also had a ‘socialistic’ ring to it,

envisaging the creation of 60 ‘settlement villages’ with each ‘scheme’

involving 250 individual family farms. It was hoped that the schemes

would bring about ‘a relatively abrupt transition’ to modern techniques

JULIUS KAMBARAGWE NYERERE

195

with regard to land use, land tenure, patterns of agricultural production and

a change in economic attitudes. Such schemes could ‘also be relied upon …

to relieve incipient land hunger and population pressure in certain areas’

(Government of Tanganyika 1964 I: 21). In the event, very little foreign

capital was attracted; instead, there was capital flight, leading to the imposi

tion of exchange controls that showed signs of reversing this trend (Loxley

1972: 104). The programme proved too costly and unproductive, while

the individual traditional family unit survived, recording ‘impressively’

increased production, diversification and productivity (Ngotyana 1972:

125).

By 1965 panic arose in official circles regarding the lack of foreign capi

tal inflow to support the plan. From this perspective it appeared that Afri

can socialism of the Ujamaa type would be the answer. The Arusha

Declaration’s main innovations were an expansion of the Settlement

Schemes as new villages and a programme to nationalise enterprises aimed

at saving foreign exchange. However, when the Ujamaa Vijijini policy was

implemented, the peasants and pastoralists immediately resisted what they

saw as a derogation of their rights to ancestral lands. From a policy of per-

suasion, the government resorted to using force to implement its objectives

and this soon precipitated the collapse of the entire programme. Faced with

this failure and the pressure to adopt structural adjustment programmes by

the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Nyerere stood

down as president of Tanzania in 1985, creating room for reforms that the

new president, Ali Hassan Mwinyi (1985–95), was forced to adopt in line

with the demands of the Bretton Woods institutions in order to obtain new

loans to ‘revive’ the economy.

Nyerere’s decision to resign was very unusual in Africa, especially

within one-party states. However, his leadership had a long record of mod

esty. Although the son of a chief, he strove to live a simple life. He placed

little significance on owning money; his salary and those of his ministers

were very modest. He hated corruption and tried to banish it from his gov

ernment. The party and army insisted on building him a larger house in

Butiama ahead of his retirement. However, he slept in it for only two

weeks before falling sick. He went to London for treatment for leukaemia,

and died soon afterwards at St Thomas’s Hospital, aged 77. He was buried

at his new house in Butiama during a state funeral.

Nyerere dedicated the last years of his life to South–South co-opera

tion. Serving as chair of the South Commission proved a creative experi

ence, marking the beginning of his ‘international career’, which lasted

more than thirteen years and put Nyerere’s vision, unique capacities and

political acumen in the service of the Third World and its development.

The Commission’s landmark report, for which Nyerere chose the title, The

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Challenge to the South, comprised the first comprehensive ‘Southern’ analy

sis of global development challenges. It argued forcefully that intellectual

and technical preparedness was vitally important if developing countries

were to confront the complexities of the modern age and the challenges

posed by the North’s continuing global dominance. Thus, one of the

report’s principal priorities was the need to establish permanent and ade

quate institutional support for collective global action by the South. This

was not taken up directly but in September 1995, the South Centre

became an intergovernmental organisation – the first South–South institu

tion with a comprehensive global development mandate.

Nyerere served as chancellor of the University of East Africa (1963–70),

University of Dar es Salaam (1970–85) and Sokoine University of Agricul

ture (1984); was awarded numerous honorary degrees; and received presti

gious awards, including the Nehru Award for International Under-

standing, the Third World Prize, Nansen Medal for Outstanding Service to

Refugees and Lenin Peace Prize.

With typical modesty, Nyerere declined to write an autobiography and

did not encourage others to produce a biography. Two schools of thought

have emerged in the debate about his contribution (Ibhawoh and Didua

2003: 70). The first argues that Nyerere’s strategies were a complete failure,

wasting economic resources in the name of slavish adherence to ideology

(Nursey-Bray 1980; Von Freyhold 1979; Hyden 1980; Coulson 1985;

Green 1995). The second school, while conceding that the economic per-

formance of Ujamaa was modest, nevertheless points to achievements in

social welfare such as the provision of health and educational facilities; a

movement towards greater social equality in income distribution, the

maintenance of political stability and a strong sense of Tanzanian national

identity (Legum and Mmari 1995; Pratt 1999; Ishemo 2000; Mwakikagile

2002).

Nyerere’s legacy therefore goes beyond developmentalism. It includes

his contribution to the struggle for Pan-Africanism and the creation of an

East African federation, his role as Chairperson of the Liberation Commit

tee of the Organisation of African Unity and the Front Line States (the

forerunner to the Southern African Development Community). His Pan-

African contribution led to Nyerere being acknowledged as the fourth

‘greatest’ African of all time in New African magazine (2004), which

described him as ‘A great leader who refused to allow the trappings of

power to corrupt him. He was respected by his country, Africa and the rest

of the world.’

JULIUS KAMBARAGWE NYERERE

197

Major works

Nyerere, J.K. (1966) Freedom and Unity/Uhuru na Umoja: A Selection from Writings

and Speeches 1952–1965, London and Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press.

—— (1967a) The Arusha Declaration, Dar es Salaam: Government Printer.

—— (1967b) Education for Self-Reliance, Dar es Salaam: Government Printer.

—— (1968) Freedom and Socialism/Uhuru na Ujamaa: A Selection from Writings and

Speeches 1965–1967, London and Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press.

—— (1973) Freedom and Development/Uhuru na Maendeleo: A Selection from Writings

and Speeches 1968–1973, London and Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press.

—— (1975) Speeches in Parliament, Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 18 July.

—— (1975a) ‘Socialism and Rural Development’, in Cliffe, L., Lawrence, P.,

Luttrel, W., Migot-Adholla, S. and Saul, J.S. (eds), Rural Cooperation in

Tanzania, Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House.

—— (1975b) The Development of Ujamaa Villages, Presidential Circular No. 1 of

1969, Dar es Salaam: Government of Tanzania.

—— (1977) The Arusha Declaration Ten Years After, Dar es Salaam: Government

Printer.

Further reading

Brown, I. and Brown, R. (1995) ‘Approach to Rural Mass Poverty’, in Legum, C.

and Mmari, G. (eds), Mwalimu: The Influence of Nyerere, Trenton, NJ: Africa

World Press; London: James Currey; Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota.

Coulson, A. (1985) Tanzania: A Political Economy, Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Dumont, R. (1966) False Start in Africa, London: Deutsch.

Government of Tanganyika (1964) First Five Year Plan, Dar es Salaam: Government

Printer.

Green, R.H. (1995) ‘Vision of Human-Centred Development: A Study in Moral

Economy’, in Legum, C. and Mmari, G. (eds), Mwalimu: The Influence of

Nyerere, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press; London: James Currey; Dar es

Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota.

Hyden, G. (1980) Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured

Peasantry, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Ibhawoh, B. and Dibua, J.I. (2003) ‘Deconstructing Ujamaa: The Legacy of Julius

Nyerere in the Quest for Social and Economic Development in Africa’, African

Journal of Political Science 8(1).

Ishemo, S.I. (2000) ‘A symbol that cannot be substituted’: The Role of Mwalimu

J.K. Nyerere in the Liberation of Southern Africa, 1955–1990’, Review of

African Political Economy 27(83): 81–94. (Other tributes appeared in ROAPE

26(81) and 26(82), 1999.)

Legum, C. and Mmari, G. (eds) (1995) Mwalimu: The Influence of Nyerere, Trenton,

NJ: Africa World Press; London: James Currey; Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na

Nyota.

Loxley, J. (1972) ‘Structural Change in the Monetary System of Tanzania’, in Saul,

J. and Cliffe, L. (eds), Socialism in Tanzania, Vol. II, Nairobi: East Africa

Publishing House.

Mazrui, A.A. (2002) The Titan of Tanzania: Julius K. Nyerere’s Legacy, Binghamton,

NY: Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Global Publications, Binghamton

University, State University of New York.

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Mmari, G. (1995): ‘The Legacy of Nyerere’, in Legum, C. and Mmari, G. (eds),

Mwalimu: The Influence of Nyerere, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press; London:

James Currey; Dar es Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota.

Mwakikagile, G. (2002) Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era; The Biography of Julius

Kambarage Nyerere (1922–1999), President of Tanzania, USA: Protea Publishing.

Nabudere, D.W. (1981) Imperialism in East Africa, Volume 1: Imperialism and

Exploitation, London: Zed Press.

New African (2004) ‘100 Greatest Africans of All Time’, 432 (August/September):

12–32.

Ngotyana, R. (1972) ‘The Strategy of Rural Development’, in Saul, J. and Cliffe, L.

(eds), Socialism in Tanzania, Vol. II, Nairobi: East African Publishing House.

Nursey-Bray, P.F. (1980) ‘Tanzania: The Development Debate’, African Affairs

79(314): 55–78.

Pratt, C. (1976) The Critical Phase in Tanzania, 1945–67: Nyerere and the Emergence

of a Socialist Strategy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

—— (1999) ‘Julius Nyerere: Reflections on the Legacy of Socialism’, Canadian

Journal of African Studies 33(1): 137–52.

—— (2000) ‘Julius Nyerere: The Ethical Foundation of his Legacy’, The Round

Table 355: 355–64.

South Commission (1990) The Challenge to the South: The Report of the South

Commission, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stöger-Eising, V. (2000) ‘Ujamaa Revisited: Indigenous and European Influences

in Nyerere’s Social and Political Thought’, Africa 70(1): 118–43.

Von Freyhold, M. (1979) Ujamaa Villages in Tanzania: An Analysis of a Social

Experiment, New York: Monthly Review Press; London, Ibadan and Nairobi:

Heinemann Educational Books.

Dani W. Nabudere

RAÚL PREBISCH (1901–86)

Economist, teacher, central banker, civil servant and institution builder,

Raúl Prebisch was a pragmatic but persistent advocate of a more egalitarian

system of international trade between the more developed countries of the

North (which he referred to as the ‘centre’) and the less developed coun

tries of the South (the ‘periphery’). In economic circles and beyond, he is

best known for what has been labelled as the ‘Prebisch–Singer’ thesis con

cerning the terms of trade between the developed and developing coun

tries. He is certainly the most influential Latin American development

economist and probably its most eminent.

Prebisch was born on 17 April 1901 in Tucumán, Argentina and died

on 29 April 1986, shortly after his eighty-fifth birthday, in Santiago, Chile.

His father was of German origin and his mother came from a traditional

family of Tucumán, a provincial city in the interior of Argentina. He stud

ied economics at the University of Buenos Aires, the main national univer

sity, graduating in 1922. From 1925 to 1948 he lectured in political

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economy at the School of Economics in the same University. From 1930

to1935 he was initially Under-Secretary of Finance and Agriculture and

later the advisor to the Ministers of Finance and Agriculture. More impor

tantly, he was one of the principal founders of Argentina’s Central Bank,

becoming its first Director in 1935, a position he held until 1943 when

political changes forced him to resign. He was then invited to assist the

Mexican Central Bank and went on to advise other central banks in Latin

America. In 1949 he was hired as a consultant by the recently established

UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA),

located in Santi

ago de Chile, only to be catapulted the following year into the headship of

the organisation with the title of Executive Secretary, a position he kept

until 1962. From 1962 to 1964 he served as Director-General of the UN’s

Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES), also

based in Santiago, and which he was instrumental in establishing.

Before joining ECLA, Prebisch was already one of the most highly

regarded economists in Latin America. But his rapid rise to the top has

much to do with a document he wrote a few months after his arrival and

which he presented to the institution’s conference in 1949. This took place

in Havana in front of a select audience, including the various country rep-

resentatives of the organisation. This magisterial work, ‘The Economic

Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems’,

created quite a

stir among the delegates, who were most impressed not only by its ideas but

also by Prebisch’s forceful personality, persuasiveness and vision. Years

later, the prominent development economist, Albert Hirschman (1961:

13), was to refer to this document as ‘ECLA’s manifesto’. Indeed, given its

polemical character, it was a sort of manifesto and this explains why it was

circulated under his own name, something which was highly unusual since

UN rules dictate that documents should be anonymous and bear only the

imprint of the institution. It urged Latin American countries to industrialise

and launched an attack on the international division of labour in which the

central countries specialised in the production of manufactures while the

peripheral countries specialised in the production of raw materials such as

agricultural products and minerals. Thus the central countries largely

exported industrial products to the peripheral countries while the latter

exported primary products to the former. His proposal was highly unusual

at the time; even more so was his critique of the neo-classical international

trade theory which had hardly been questioned before.

Conventional international trade theory argued that the current eco

nomic specialisation of the developed countries in the production of indus

trial commodities and of the developing countries in primary commodities

worked to their mutual benefit as each enjoyed comparative advantages in

these respective areas. Furthermore, this theory argued that international

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trade would help to reduce the income gap between rich and poor coun

tries. Prebisch (1949), however, observed that incomes grew faster in the

centre than in the periphery. The main reason for this widening gap was, in

his view, the secular deterioration of the prices of primary goods in com

parison with industrial products in the world market. To support this argu

ment he relied on historical price data from a 1948 UN study, which did

not indicate authorship but had been written by Hans Singer, who was

then working at the UN in New York. This unexpected long-run ten

dency for prices of primary products to deteriorate relative to the prices of

manufactured goods meant that the periphery had to export an increasing

quantity of raw materials in order to continue importing the same amount

of industrial commodities. Thus, Prebisch argued, the prevailing interna

tional trade system, by confining the periphery to the production of pri

mary commodities, favours mainly the centre. He set out to explain the

reasons for this trend as it contradicted existing international trade theory.

His thesis regarding the deterioration of the periphery’s terms of trade

reveals Prebisch’s distinctive approach to the problems of development and

underdevelopment as compared with neo-classical theories. Prebisch’s

(1959, 1964) analysis of this process deals both with demand and supply

conditions of commodity markets. On the demand side, Prebisch argues

that the terms of trade deteriorated against the periphery because of the dif-

ferent income-elasticity of demand for imports by the centre and periphery

or, as he put it, due to the ‘dynamic disparity of demand’ between centre

and periphery. This means that the centre’s imports of primary products

from the periphery rise at a lower rate than its national income, while the

periphery’s imports of industrial commodities from the centre grow at a

faster rate than its income. As for the supply arguments, or the ‘cycle ver

sion’ of the periphery’s deterioration of the terms of trade, these are related

to the differential effect of the world economic cycle on centre and periph

ery. The capitalist economic system evolves in a cyclical fashion with the

centre being the initiator of these cycles, which provoke an adaptive cycli

cal response by the periphery. During an economic upswing, the terms of

trade generally turn in favour of primary producers but during a down

swing they turn against them to an even greater degree. This results in the

long-run deterioration of the periphery’s terms of trade, especially as the

downswings tend to last longer than the upswings.

This differential impact of the world economic cycle on centre and

periphery is explained by the differential behaviour of prices, profits and

wages in both the centre and periphery during the phases of the cycle. Dur

ing an economic upswing wages and prices grow substantially in the centre

while they hardly rise in the periphery because of the availability of surplus

labour. Meanwhile during a downswing the fall in wages and prices at the

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centre is limited due to the existence of trade union power and the

oligopolistic structure of industry. In the periphery, by contrast, the down

swing greatly reduces prices and wages as producers are able to compress

wages substantially on account of surplus labour and the non-existence

and/or weakness of trade unions.

Although Prebisch did not discover independently that the terms of

trade of primary products were in secular decline, as he relied on the previ

ous study of Singer, he was the first to provide an economic cycle analysis

of this phenomenon. In his seminal essay, Singer (1950) partly advances

arguments similar to those of Prebisch, although his analysis was done inde

pendently. Thus, the hypothesis on the deterioration in the terms of trade is

known in the economic literature as the ‘Prebisch–Singer hypothesis’. In

condemning the deterioration of the commodity terms of trade, Prebisch is

not arguing against international trade, nor has he ever suggested delinking

as did some dependencia advocates like Andre Gunder Frank and Samir

Amin. On the contrary, he sees international trade and foreign capital as

essential elements for raising productivity and growth in the periphery.

The Prebisch–Singer hypothesis created much controversy and was much

criticised, particularly by neo-classical economists. But the emerging con-

sensus is that it has stood the test of both time and new statistical techniques

remarkably well, although the reasons for it may have shifted. Thus even

today, barring a few exceptional cases, the gains from trade continue to be

distributed unequally between those countries exporting mainly primary

products and those exporting mainly manufactures.

Prebisch was the guiding light of ECLA which, under his inspirational

leadership, became one of the most notable UN regional organisations. It

had a major influence on development thinking and policy, especially in

Latin America, mainly during its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. The

‘ECLA manifesto’ became the cornerstone of what was to become known

as ‘structuralism’ or the Latin American structuralist school of develop

ment. Prebisch assembled at ECLA a first rate team of mostly young social

scientists, but mainly economists, from various Latin American countries

who all made, to a greater or lesser extent, a contribution to the develop

ment of structuralism and the core–periphery model. The structuralist

view of development stresses the crucial significance of the differences in

the economic, social and political structures between the core and periph

eral countries. This core–periphery model argues that the world economy

is divided into an industrial centre and an agrarian periphery. While the

core or developed countries have an internally homogeneous structure

with similar levels of productivity in different sectors, the periphery or

underdeveloped countries are characterised by heterogeneity as the various

sectors of the economy have major differences in productivity arising from

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different levels of technology. This duality is also replicated within each of

the economic sectors. Thus the periphery is characterised by ‘structural

heterogeneity’, or internal inequality, which is reinforced by international

trade. Furthermore, unequal exchange between the centre and the peri

phery also reinforces the external inequality between the core and the

periphery. Structuralism is thus one of the first attempts to construct a

theory of development and underdevelopment.

This structuralist analysis led Prebisch to propose a new development

strategy for the periphery, in particular Latin America, so as to counteract,

and possibly overcome, the negative impact of unequal exchange on the

periphery. It entailed a radical change in the export-led development model

based on primary products, or what he called the ‘outward-oriented’ devel

opment path, which most periphery countries had been following. In its

place he argued for a new ‘inward-oriented’ development strategy based on a

process of import-substitution-industrialisation (ISI). This required protec-

tionist measures such as a set of duties on manufacturing imports as well as a

tax on primary exports so as to induce a switch of resources from primary

production for exports to industrial activities which at first would be directed

at the domestic market but later would also be geared to exports. He also

proposed allowing union activity in the primary export sector to push up

wages, to defend primary commodity prices through concerted international

action, and to press for the reduction or elimination of protection for pri-

mary commodities in the centre (Prebisch 1959: 263). The main thrust of his

argument was aimed at changing the periphery’s structure of production and

developing an industrial sector which would lead to higher rates of produc-

tivity growth and to a greater ability to retain the ‘fruits of technological

progress’, leading thereby to higher rates of growth and incomes which

could reduce the gap between the core and periphery. While the ISI process

did not fulfil all of its promises, which Prebisch was one of the first to point

out, he insisted that industrialisation was a key route to development of the

periphery. He was also a firm believer in the importance of the State for

achieving development.

It was only natural for Prebisch to move from ECLA to the wider stage.

His mission for a fairer international economic system led him to propose

the creation of a new UN agency. On the strength of his report to the UN

Secretary-General (Prebisch 1964), as well as his lobbying skills, the UN

Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was established in

1964. He was appointed its first Secretary-General, a post he held until

1969. In his report he advocated a fairer international trading system which

would tackle the problem of primary commodity prices and assist develop

ing countries to shift to industrial exports by tariff preferences in the devel

oped countries, among other measures. Prebisch’s ideas had a major

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influence in shaping the demands of many developing countries who were

proposing a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s.

Upon his ‘retirement’ he remained closely associated with ECLA in

Santiago. It was only in the last years of his prolific life that Prebisch set out

to develop systematically his ideas on what he termed ‘peripheral capital

ism’ in a series of articles originally published in CEPAL Review, the journal

of ECLA, which he helped to create in 1976. He became its first Director, a

position he held for several years (e.g. Toye and Toye 2004). These articles

form the basis of what was to become his major last work (Prebisch 1981).

Although schooled in the neo-classical tradition, his acute mind and prag

matic sense soon led him to question it. His ideas shaped structuralism and

had a major influence on dependency and world systems theory. The last

years of his life coincided with the rise of neoliberalism of which he became

a major critic. As an institution builder and activist, he was able to trans

form some of his ideas into action but his vision for a fairer international

economic system remains to be fulfilled.

Notes

1 Now the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean

(ECLAC).

2 The document was published in English a year later, see Prebisch (1950).

3 Economic Survey of Latin America 1949, New York: United Nations, 1951.

Although the authorship is assigned to the Secretariat of the Economic

Commission for Latin America (ECLA), it is known that Prebisch wrote the

whole of Part One, entitled ‘Growth, Disequilibrium and Disparities:

Interpretation of the Process of Economic Development’ comprising five

chapters, pp. 3–87. This text is Prebisch’s most elaborate attempt to present his

principal theses.

Major works

Prebisch, R. (1950) The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal

Problems, Lake Success, NY: United Nations. (Trans. of El Desarrollo Económico

de la América Latina y Algunos de sus Principales Problemas, Santiago: Comisión

Económica para América Latina (CEPAL), 1949.)

—— (1959) ‘Commercial Policy in the Underdeveloped Countries’, American

Economic Review 49(2): 251–73.

—— (1963) Towards a Dynamic Development Policy for Latin America, New York:

United Nations.

—— (1964) Towards a New Trade Policy for Development: Report by the Secretary-

General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, New York:

United Nations.

—— (1976) ‘A Critique of Peripheral Capitalism’, CEPAL Review 1: 9–76.

—— (1981) Capitalismo Periférico: Crisis y Transformación, Mexico City: Fondo de

Cultura Económica.

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—— (1984) ‘Five Stages in My Thinking on Development’, in Meier, G.M and

Seers, D. (eds), Pioneers in Development, New York and Oxford: Oxford

University Press, pp. 175–90.

Further reading

Furtado, C. (1988) La Fantasía Organizada, Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de

Buenos Aires. This biographical essay written by an ECLA insider, and one of

Latin America’s most original development thinker after Prebisch, provides a

fascinating insight into the origins and developments of Prebisch’s ideas at

ECLA.

Gurrieri, A. (ed.) (1982) La Obra de Prebisch en la CEPAL, 2 vols, Mexico City:

Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Hirschman, A. (1961) ‘Ideologies of Economic Development in Latin America’, in

Hirschman, A. (ed.), Latin American Issues: Essays and Comments, New York:

Twentieth Century Fund.

Love, J.L. (1980) ‘Raúl Prebisch and the Origins of the Doctrine of Unequal

Exchange’, Latin American Research Review 15(3): 45–72.

Mallorquín, C. (1998) Ideas e Historia en Torno al Pensamiento Económico

Latinoamericano, Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés Editores.

Rodrí guez, O. (1980) La Teoría del Subdesarrollo de la CEPAL, Mexico City: Siglo

Veintiuno Editores.

Singer, H.W. (1950) ‘The Distribution of Gains Between Investing and Borrowing

Countries’, American Economic Review 40(2): 473–85.

Toye, J. and Toye, R. (2004) The UN and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance

and Development, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Various authors (2001) ‘Tribute to Raúl Prebisch’, CEPAL Review 75: 1–108.

Cristóbal Kay

WALTER RODNEY (1942–80)

Walter Rodney was one of the most influential writers on history, devel

opment and underdevelopment to have emerged from the Caribbean. His

intellectual and political work has had worldwide impact. A quarter of a

century after his untimely death (Rodney was assassinated in his native

Guyana at the age of thirty-eight), Rodney is still widely read. In particular,

his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (first published in 1972) remains

influential.

Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana in March 1942. At this time,

one key aspect of the colonial economy was booming, with the allies con

suming all that could be produced of British Guyana’s main export, bauxite

(the ore for aluminium). Two-thirds of allied aircraft would be made from

Guyanese ores. Yet wartime shortages of consumer goods and disruption

to Atlantic shipping meant that many in Guyana had to struggle to make

ends meet or found themselves out of work. Just months before Rodney

WALTER RODNEY

205

was born, the Americans commenced the construction of an airbase close

to Georgetown. This was one of eight sites in the western hemisphere

where the British permitted the USA to establish military facilities follow

ing a September 1940 agreement between British Premier Churchill and

US President Roosevelt. In exchange Britain received fifty surplus Ameri

can destroyers.

In other words, Rodney was born at the cusp of a shift from Britain and

Europe to the USA in terms of where the centre of Western economic and

political power was seen to reside. The relative eclipse of British Empire

and the rise of American superpower soon became evident. Coming too

were the struggles for national liberation in Africa and Asia, the birth of the

Third World amidst enhanced global polarisation and contest between

capitalism and communism and the rise of programmes and strategies for

‘development’. These momentous geopolitical shifts and contests consti

tuted the backdrop to his intellectual and political formation.

Whilst Rodney grew up in Guyana and entered high school in 1953, he

travelled to Jamaica in 1960 to study at the University of the West Indies

(then still the University College of the West Indies). Rodney majored in

history then moved to London in 1963 for graduate studies at the history

department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). In 1966

he earned a doctorate for a thesis on ‘The History of the Upper Guinea

Coast, 1545–1800’. While at SOAS, Rodney participated in reading and

study groups on Marxism. Rodney was far from an orthodox Marxist,

however, and he subscribed to no formal party-line. At the same time as

Rodney made his way through the school and university system, other

Caribbean intellectuals were formulating radical conceptions of the

region’s dependence, fragmentation and marginality. This work certainly

influenced Rodney, although his key contribution was concerned with the

related problem of African underdevelopment.

Rodney was an Afro-Guyanese from a working-class family, and Afri

can and Black liberation, along with class struggle, were the other inputs

into his political, intellectual and personal development. According to

Lewis’s (1998: xvii) survey of Rodney’s intellectual and political thought,

we should:

situate his intellectual and political evolution in the transatlantic

diasporic locations of Guyana, Jamaica, London and Tanzania. These

geographically dispersed locations were, of course, linked by the his

tory of the British Empire and capitalism. What emerges from

Rodney’s work is not only a critique of empire and capitalism in

general but a dissection of the domestic political elite that assumed

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political authority from the colonisers in Africa and the Caribbean as

well as an analysis of the process of recolonisation.

On completion of his doctorate, Rodney took up a position in the his

tory department of the University College of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,

then chaired by Terence Ranger (who later became a distinguished histo

rian of Southern Africa). Tanzania was then embarking on a path of ‘Afri

can socialism’ under Julius Nyerere. It proved a fertile environment for

Rodney and other radical scholars engaged in debates on the making of

Africa’s underdevelopment. However, Rodney sought to return to the

Caribbean with the ambition to develop African studies back in Jamaica.

He was prevented from doing so by the Jamaican government who banned

him in 1968, after he returned there briefly at a time of considerable politi

cal turmoil. As part of a combined crackdown on radical intellectuals (and

the banning of texts, such as the writings of Malcolm X) and on the grass

roots Rastafari movement, Rodney was declared persona non grata. A col-

lection of his reflections and exchanges in Jamaica was published in London

in 1969 under the title The Groundings with my Brothers. In these Rodney

(1969: 59) asserted that:

The Government of Jamaica, which is Garvey’s [Marcus Garvey,

born 1887 in Jamaica, died 1940 in the UK, was a founding figure of

Black Liberation/Nationalism] homeland, has seen it fit to ban me, a

Guyanese, a black man, and an African. But this is not very surprising

because though the composition of that Government – of its Prime

Minister, the Head of State and several leading personalities –

though that composition happens to be predominantly black, as the

Brothers at home say, they are all white-hearted.

Fortunately, Rodney was able to continue working in Dar es Salaam,

where he stayed until 1974. The pull of the Caribbean remained, however,

and in 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana. Although denied a university

position there (on account of his growing differences with and critiques of

Burnham’s authoritarian government), he continued to produce academic

writings and relied on guest lecture tours in North America and Europe

and external research grants to survive financially. By this time his interna

tional reputation had grown, in large part owing to the broad readership

that his How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was gaining. This was, however,

little protection against the agents of Burnham’s regime who assassinated

Rodney on 13 June 1980, largely in response to his political activity

directed against the incumbent regime.

WALTER RODNEY

207

Rodney’s most influential book is a statement of what became known as

dependency theory. It is thus marked by many of the controversies (and

limits) of that perspective. To Latin American conceptions of dependency

with their emphasis on class relations and imperialism, Rodney injected

and insisted on the roles of racial categories and identities. On Rodney’s

return to Jamaica:

News travelled fast about the young, radical and dynamic university

teacher who could spellbind his audience, and ‘knew all about

Africa’. The dependency theorists at the university had just started an

intensive public campaign and Rodney became the most sought-

after lecturer at black, middle-class gatherings as well as at Rasta

meetings in the slums of Kingston. He was dangerous [to the estab

lished order], primarily because he described the dependence

problematique in racial terms – a subject which had never been

brought up in the Latin American debate …

(Blomström and Hettne 1984: 108)

Blomström and Hettne (1984: 147) go on to note how, in comparison

to the bulk of dependency theory writings: ‘Rodney ends up far to the left

on all axes.’ More significantly, in writing on Africa from a dependency

perspective, Rodney was a significant agent in the dissemination of

dependency beyond its Latin American roots (Kay 1989). Blomström and

Hettne (1984: 108–9) point out that:

Emancipation was to Rodney not so much a matter of economic

rights as it was a right to cultural identity: in this context his thoughts

are more reminiscent of African ideas, of African personality and

Négritude, than of Latin American dependency theory. Conse

quently, his contacts with the Rastafari movement were well devel

oped, which in turn, the [Jamaican] government considered to be a

greater danger than communist agitators.

In particular, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa highlighted the roles of

the slave trade and subsequent predatory colonial capitalism in producing

the simultaneous flow of wealth to Europe and impoverishment of Africa.

Rodney pictured African social and commercial relations being frag

mented and distorted as they became increasingly orientated to Western

markets. For Rodney (1972: 37) therefore:

The question as to who and what is responsible for African under

development can be answered at two levels. Firstly, the answer is that

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WALTER RODNEY

the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for

African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by

making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the

continent. Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulate the

system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of

the said system.

The latter point relates to the agency of African (and other postcolonial)

elites as intermediaries, a theme that crops up in Rodney’s other writings

on African and Caribbean histories, development and underdevelopment

(e.g. Rodney 1967, 1970, 1981). Yet during his time in Tanzania, Rodney

celebrated some of the claims and putative achievements of the Arusha

Declaration (proclaiming a strategy of socialism and self-reliance) in chart

ing an alternative to the usual neo-colonial pattern in Africa. Here Rodney

was undoubtedly caught up in, and his judgements shaped by, the revolu

tionary optimism of the times and the sense of an alternative to the neo-

colonialism that he felt characterised most of Africa and the Caribbean.

However, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa transcends that moment. By

insisting that African underdevelopment was not a natural condition and

that African cultures and histories were rich and not themselves the source

of the continent’s contemporary relative underdevelopment, Rodney’s

book would prove inspirational among a broad readership. In particular,

for many black folk in the diaspora (hence in Europe, the Caribbean and

the Americas), Rodney’s book was part of a wave of expression,

mobilisation and radicalisation in the 1970s.

Robert Shenton (then Professor of History at the University of

Toronto) ended his review of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (subse-

quently expanded and reprinted as an introduction to later editions of

Rodney’s book) with the following words inviting further questions on

Africa’s trajectories:

Dr Rodney’s book is important because rather than just presenting

history he seeks to make it. It is doubly important because Rodney,

through the use of a popular, polemical style seeks to reach those

who in his eyes are truly capable of making history. My own reserva

tion is that the use of this style sometimes cloaks the need for analysis

with popular polemic and creates the impression that all the impor

tant questions regarding Africa’s past and present development have

been asked and answered. And this clearly is not the case.

(Shenton 1975: 150)

WALTER RODNEY

209

Rodney’s book is clear about the genesis of African underdevelopment.

As Rodney intended, it was perhaps most effective as a polemic and an

invitation to think historically and comparatively about African under

development. In his original preface to the text, Rodney (1972) explains

that: ‘the purpose has been to try and reach Africans who wish to explore

further the nature of their exploitation, rather than to satisfy the “stan

dards” set by their oppressors and their spokesmen in the academic world’

(1983 edn: 8). Rodney was not much interested in convention, theoretical

abstraction or academic honours. His commitment to activism underlay his

return to Guyana and ultimately led to his early death.

Lewis (1998: 256) ends his book-length study of Rodney’s thought and

impact by returning to his place in a radical Caribbean tradition:

Rodney’s intellectual legacy, as a historian and as an activist, forms an

important part of the unfolding Caribbean intellectual tradition. …

The central feature underlying Rodney’s contribution to this tradi-

tion was his positive awareness of himself as a person of African

descent in the Caribbean, the link he forged with Africa and the

intellectual agenda that emerged in relation to the major challenges

of decolonisation.

It is interesting to reflect on how Rodney’s thought would have

evolved had he not been killed. What would Rodney have said about

‘globalisation’, neo-liberalism and new configurations of Empire? How

would his politics and writings have dealt with the eclipse of state socialism,

the relative decline of Third Worldism and the rise of Asian (and other so-

called ‘newly industrialised’) economies? Many things have changed since

Rodney’s days. Yet, more than three decades after its publication, How

Europe Underdeveloped Africa has not lost its polemical capacity to incite

reactions and to radicalise some of its readers. A major conference in

Guyana in June 2005 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death and

celebrated his emancipatory vision (www.rodney25.org//index.htm).

Meanwhile, issues of Africa’s past and present (under)development remain

open-ended questions and contests.

Major works

Rodney, W. (1967) West Africa and the Atlantic Slave-Trade, Nairobi: East Africa

Publishing House.

—— (1969) The Groundings with my Brothers, London: Bogle-L’Ouverture

Publications.

—— (1970) A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545–1800, London and New

York: Monthly Review Press.

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WALTER RODNEY

—— (1972) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Bogle-L’Ouverture

Publications (republished 1983).

—— (1981) A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905, Kingston and

London: Heinemann Educational Books.

Further reading

Blomström, M. and Hettne, B. (1984) Development Theory in Transition. The

Dependency Debate and Beyond: Third World Responses, London: Zed.

Kay, C. (1989) Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment,

London and New York: Routledge.

Lewis, R.C. (1998) Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought, Kingston: The

Press, University of the West Indies.

Shenton, R. (1975) ‘Review of Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped

Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 9(1): 146–50.

James Sidaway

WALT WHITMAN ROSTOW (1916–2003)

Rostow’s most famous book, The Stages of Economic Growth, is subtitled A

Non-Communist Manifesto – an appropriate motto for both his academic

and political works. Among the ‘pioneers in development’ of the 1950s

with his theory of economic ‘take-off’, Rostow was by far the most influ-

ential because he saw his academic work as a political mission and under

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson he held high government posts. That

gave him direct influence on US policy towards the Third World and also

led him to become one of the most controversial political figures of the

1960s.

Rostow was born in New York on 7 October 1916 to a Russian immi

grant father. He graduated from high school in New Haven, Connecticut

in 1932, aged fifteen, and was awarded a scholarship to study economics

and history at Yale. In 1936 the highly gifted Rostow won a Rhodes

Scholarship and experienced his first stay in Europe at Oxford from 1936 to

1938. Following his return, he wrote his PhD thesis on ‘British Trade Fluc

tuations, 1868–1896’, graduating from Yale in l940. Having worked

briefly as an economics instructor at Columbia University, Rostow was

called up for military service when the USA entered the Second World

War, serving from 1941 to 1945 in the Office of Strategic Services (the

forerunner of the CIA) in London, analysing aerial photographs for the

planning of strategic bombing. In 1945/6, he became the Harmsworth

Professor of American History at Oxford, but decided to return to political

work in 1947. He became Assistant to Gunnar Myrdal, head of the UN

Economic Commission for Europe, based in Geneva. Yet not even the

highly prestigious UN job could hold him for long. He resigned in 1949

WALT WHITMAN ROSTOW

211

and became Visiting Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge

(England). It was not until 1950, aged only thirty-three, when he was

appointed to the chair of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT), a position which he held until 1961, that he more or

less settled down.

For Rostow, these were the decisive academic years, marked by the

founding of the Center of International Studies (CENIS) at MIT in 1951.

Its head was Max Millikan, whom he knew from his Yale days. With the

Korean War raging, CENIS was to develop strategies against the spread of

Communism. The circle of colleagues in Cambridge and Boston, where

the MIT and Harvard University are separated only by the Charles River,

included such highly acclaimed people as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow,

Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Everett Hagen, Charles Kindleberger,

Benjamin Higgins, Wilfred Malenbaum, Lucian Pye, Robert Baldwin,

Richard Eckaus and Daniel Lerner. They constituted an illustrious collec

tion of the pioneers in development – economists, sociologists and political

scientists, all of whom would deserve inclusion in a Who’s Who of devel-

opment theory. At CENIS, he collaborated in two projects on the Soviet

Union and China, which he summed up in 1955 in the essay, ‘Marx Was a

City Boy, or Why Communism May Fail’. Even more important was A

Proposal (Rostow and Millikan 1957), which presented the perception that

development policy can be a political instrument in the East–West con-

flict. From 1956 to 1958, Rostow did the groundwork for The Stages of

Economic Growth (1960), which is based on a series of lectures he gave in

Cambridge in late 1958.

The third stage of Rostow’s life began in 1960 with his appointment to

John F. Kennedy’s election campaign team. He took leave of absence from

MIT, and after Kennedy’s election was named as Deputy Special Assistant

to the President for National Security Affairs in January 1961. The follow

ing autumn he became Chairman of the Policy Planning Council at the

State Department. Together with Paul Schlesinger, John K. Galbraith and

his brother Eugene, Rostow formed the Charles River clique, Kennedy’s

liberal brains trust. During this time, Rostow wrote many memoranda in

which development policy was conceived as a new field of US foreign pol

icy. After Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Rostow continued

to work for Lyndon B. Johnson. In May 1964 he became the US member

of the Inter-American Committee on the Alliance for Progress with the

rank of ambassador. At the beginning of 1966, Rostow returned to the

White House as National Security Adviser, and held this office until Janu

ary 1969, i.e. at the height of the Vietnam War. Nixon’s election as Presi

dent ended Rostow’s political career, which had brought him increasing

criticism from the liberal public because he was seen as one of the

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Administration officials mainly responsible for the escalation of the war.

Rostow’s old faculty at MIT refused to let him return to his chair, and an

attempt to win an appointment at Harvard also failed. But in February

1969, he was appointed to the specially created chair of Jr. Professor Emer

itus for Political Economy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public

Affairs at the University of Texas, in Austin, where he ended the fourth and

now purely academic stage of his life. He dropped out of the public eye and

wrote many academic books. He died in Austin on 13 February 2003, aged

eighty-six.

Rostow was a convinced liberal with a missionary-like zeal which was

expressed equally in his commitment to development and his anti-com

munism. Economic growth and the modernisation of society, according to

the CENIS theory, were to prevent the spread of communism. From his

studies of China and the Soviet Union, Rostow was convinced that,

because Marxist theory neglected agriculture, it could not master the prob-

lem of development. Therefore he argued that force of arms should be used

to assert what he believed to be sensible: the stages of economic growth

that he had outlined. Thus his work revealed many parallels with that of

Marx, against whom he fought so bitterly. These related not only to his

claim to have formulated a universally historic counter-concept to the

Communist Manifesto, but also to his derivation from it of his demand for

political action.

However, Rostow is distinguished from Marx by one thing: whereas

Marx never possessed personal political power, only supplying the con-

cepts for his successors, Rostow did have power through direct access to

two US Presidents. That applied both to the period of the ‘Pioneers in

Development’ and to the Kennedy years. Rostow succumbed to the hubris

of power; he believed he could not only define the world but also change

it. What influenced him? Initially, it was surely the liberal minds of his par

ents and the anti-communism of his Russian immigrant family. In addi

tion, there was the academic influence of Oxford and Cambridge,

Keynesianism, the influence of the German Historical School, and finally

the context of MIT and Harvard with their unique group of luminaries.

His ‘Stages’ theory was so influential because of its simplicity. Like

Marx, he distinguished five stages through which all countries have to pass.

These are: (l) the traditional society; (2) the preconditions for take-off; (3)

the take-off; (4) the drive to maturity (self-sustained growth); and (5) the

age of high mass consumption. The most important are stages 2–4, because

they mark the transition from traditional to modern society (Rostow

1960). Rostow claimed that, in emphasising that economic change was the

result of human will, he was not formulating merely a theory of growth but

one of societal development in general.

WALT WHITMAN ROSTOW

213

The building blocks in Rostow’s theory are the modernisation-

promoting use of science and technology, the sharp increase in the savings

and investment rates in order to achieve continual growth, the role of the

innovative entrepreneur and the concept of key sectors. This is a crude syn

opsis of elements which can be found among prominent contemporaries:

big push (Rosenstein-Rodan), spurt (Gerschenkron), linkage concept

and key sectors (Hirschman), the role of the entrepreneur (Schumpeter),

and stages theory (Fourastie).

Whether it constitutes a theory at all rather than merely a taxonomy of

economic stages is one of the fundamental criticisms levelled at Rostow. It

is also said that, notwithstanding his own claim, he took too little account

of social and political factors. However, this objection is wrong if one looks

at other works in which he emphasises the decisive role of new societal

forces, whereby nationalist sentiment vis-à-vis more advanced countries is

recognised as a motivating force for modernisation. Rostow is also criti

cised for his fixation on the Anglo-Saxon path, which ignores the top-

down modernisation implemented in countries such as Germany, Japan

and the Soviet Union. In empirical terms, much does not tally; for instance,

no take-off can be verified in France or Austria-Hungary. Even Rostow’s

description of the USA as a model case is only partly right because, despite

its mass consumption, it is not a welfare state. The relative decline of coun-

tries such as Britain can certainly not be explained at all, and countries such

as Turkey, Argentina and India have never emerged from their alleged

take-off stage. In that respect, Rostow suffers the fate of many global theo-

rists because there are always many objections in respect of empirical

details. Like other representatives of the Historical School, neo-classical

authors deny that his work has the character of theory because the theoreti-

cal stringency of deductively obtained models can never be achieved in an

inductive way.

The highpoint of criticism was reached at the Constance Conference of

the International Economic Association in 1960, which Rostow edited in

1963 under the title The Economics of Take-off into Sustained Growth. The

main critics were Kuznets and Solow. The former found fault with the lack

of an empirical basis and the latter questioned whether Rostow’s work had

the character of theory at all. It was not until 1978, in The World Economy,

that he provided the empirical proof for his stages theory. He originally

intended his How It All Began (1975) to be the introduction to that. Basi

cally, his enormous final research programme was nothing other than an

attempt to put straight his earlier critics.

The controversy over take-off marked the core of the problem. Only if

the existence of take-off could be proved, did it make sense to research the

preconditions, and only then was the theory correct that the automatism of

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WALT WHITMAN ROSTOW

self-sustaining growth followed take-off. Also, only then did the normative

conclusion make sense that one could orchestrate this connection and pro

mote it externally. Less noticed but much more important were the politi

cal consequences of Rostow’s stage theory in reformulating American

foreign policy which, against the background of the Korean War, was fix

ated on the military dimension of the East–West conflict. Rostow believed

that the USA should assume the leadership in a new international partner

ship programme for world economic growth. He aimed to broaden the

understanding of Containment and make clear that the East–West conflict

also had to be conducted in the countries of Asia, the Middle East, Africa

and Latin America because they were in the second stage of the Rostowian

model, where the preconditions for take-off are laid. If the preconditions

were not in place, the economy would come to crisis. The communists

then would have the chance to take over power, as had already happened

in China and was in the offing in Vietnam and elsewhere. Therefore the

process had to be supported from outside – by means of development assis-

tance. Rostow calculated how much capital would be required to bring the

investment rates of the countries involved up to the critical level.

The partners in the assistance programmes would be the new elites in

the countries mentioned, whose nationalistic strivings are expressed in the

wish for economic and social modernisation. At least in the initial phase, a

strong state component would be essential; if necessary, the military could

certainly become a suitable partner. This is very much how things were

actually handled from the 1960s onwards, with support given to every

autocratic regime provided that it was robustly anti-communist and prom-

ised development. The Alliance for Progress was to contribute to ‘political

maturity’.

Previously, Rostow had believed it necessary to convince the US for

eign policy elite that development policy was definitely in their national

security interest. The Republicans criticised Rostow vehemently for his

programme: in fact he had to justify himself to Congress against charges

that he was seeking to water down American security policy and placing

too much emphasis on a planned economy. Conservative economists such

as Peter Bauer and Milton Friedman even said that they suspected him of

socialism because of his budgetary approach. However, Rostow and his

fellow combatants were able to assert their views and convince Kennedy.

To be sure, they were helped by Khrushchev’s political offensive from the

Sputnik shock in 1957 to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which signalled a

substantial growth in Soviet power.

The establishment of development policy at the beginning of the 1960s,

the announcement of the first development decade, the founding of the

USAID, the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps and the OECD’s

WALT WHITMAN ROSTOW

215

Development Assistance Committee, and the reorientation of the World

Bank from post-war reconstruction aid to financing development – all of

which meant putting the new foreign policy strategy on an operational

basis – reflect Rostow’s influence. But a small flaw was overlooked amid

the hubris of power: despite all efforts, reality could not be shaped in the

manner proposed in the Rostowian stages theory. That again links him

with Marx. Vietnam, the chosen model, became a trauma. Because the

Vietcong prevented the creation of the preconditions for take-off in South

Vietnam, the war was driven ahead ever more, due not least to Rostow’s

advisory position under Johnson. It was not until the change to the Nixon

administration that the conservative realist, Henry Kissinger, was able to

stop the bustling activity of Rostow, the liberal missionary, by accepting

the American defeat in Vietnam.

What is left of Rostow today? In the 1970s, he became a classic figure of

controversy – not only because of his role in the Vietnam War, but also

because he had dared to provide a counter-concept to Marx. He never

mentioned the subjects of dependency, the world market, terms of trade or

colonialism. He liked assistance from outside, the World Bank, direct for-

eign investment, multinationals and military advisors. But for Vietnam, he

could have taken his place among the honoured school of the development

pioneers, could have returned to the MIT without his reputation having

the taint of warmonger and fanatical anti-communist. What have remained

are his concepts: take-off, preconditions of growth, self-sustained growth,

the age of mass consumption. From today’s viewpoint, against the back-

ground of the major disaster of failed and rogue states, we must recognise

that his demand for the political preconditions for take-off is more topical

than ever. He was one of the decisive theorists able not only to dream up

development policy and justify its necessity, but also use his position at the

levers of power to ensure its practical introduction. Whether US security

policy interests and combating communism were the crucial motive, or

whether he knew how to package his developmental engagement cleverly

in political terms, as realistic critics ascribe to him, is an open question.

Either way, the countless Vietnamese and the counted American victims of

the Vietnam War are also part of his appraisal. The title of his last autobio

graphical book, published posthumously, is Concept and Controversy: Sixty

Years of Taking Ideas to Market.

Major works

Rostow, W.W. (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn 1971.

—— (1971) Politics and the Stages of Growth, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

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WALT WHITMAN ROSTOW

—— (1975) How It All Began: Origins of the Modern Economy, London: Methuen.

—— (1978) The World Economy: History & Prospect, London: Macmillan.

—— (1980) Why the Poor Get Richer and the Rich Slow Down: Essays in the

Marshallian Long Period, London: Macmillan.

—— (1985) Eisenhower, Kennedy and Foreign Aid, Austin, TX: University of Texas

Press.

—— (1990) Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present: With a

Perspective to the Next Century, New York: Oxford University Press.

—— (2003) Concept and Controversy: Sixty Years of Taking Ideas to Market, Austin,

TX: University of Texas Press.

Rostow, W.W. and Millikan, M.F. (1957) A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign

Policy, New York: Harper; repr. 1976, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Further reading

Baran, P.A. and Hobsbawm, E.J. (1961) ‘The Stages of Economic Growth’, Kyklos

14(2): 234–42.

Cornwell, R. (2003) ‘Walt Rostow: Vietnam War Super-hawk Advising

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson’, The Independent, 17 February, London

(www.independent.co.uk).

Economist, The (2003) ‘Walt Rostow: An Adviser in the Vietnam War, Died on

February 13th, Aged 86’, Vol. 366(8312), 22 February: 101 (www.economist.

co.uk).

Fishlow, A. (1965) ‘Empty Economic Stages?’, Economic Journal 75(297): 112–25.

Foster-Carter, A. (1976) ‘From Rostow to Gunder Frank: Conflicting Paradigms

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Hodgson, G. (2003) ‘Walt Rostow: Cold War Liberal Adviser to President

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Guardian 17 February, London (www.guardian.co.uk).

Kindleberger, C.P. and Di Tella, G. (eds) (1982) Economics in the Long View: Essays

in Honour of Walt Whitman Rostow. Vol. 1: Models and Methodology. Vol. 2:

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Meier, G.M. (ed.) (1987) Pioneers in Development, Second Series, New York:

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Meier, G.M. and Seers, D. (eds) (1984) Pioneers in Development, New York: Oxford

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Pearce, K.C. (2001) Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid, East Lansing:

Michigan State University Press.

Rosowsky, H. (1965) ‘The Take-off into Sustained Controversy’, Journal of

Economic History 25(2): 271–5.

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Ulrich Menzel

WALT WHITMAN ROSTOW

217

E.F. (FRITZ) SCHUMACHER (1911–77)

Fritz Schumacher’s (1973) book Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if

People Mattered was undoubtedly a landmark in encouraging a redefinition

of the complex relationships between people, environment, technology

and development. Schumacher challenged orthodoxies and raised issues

that are just as relevant today, with present concerns about such matters as

climate change, pollution and sustainability.

It had a truly global impact, with over 700,000 copies sold in numerous

languages. As Peter Lewis (1974) commented in the cover notes of the

paperback edition,

A book of heart and hope and downright commonsense about the

future … The basic message in this tremendously thought-provok

ing book is that man is pulling the earth and himself out of equilib-

rium by applying only one test to everything he does: money, profits

and therefore giant operations. We have got to ask instead, what

about the cost in human terms, in happiness, health, beauty and con-

serving the planet?

Over a quarter of a century after his premature death in 1977,

Schumacher is still universally associated with this book and the concept of

‘intermediate technology’ which he popularised. Yet, both this book and

his lesser-known, more theoretical second volume (Schumacher 1977),

represented the culmination of a lifetime of deep thought and indefatigable

commitment, that were stimulated by Schumacher’s journeys and personal

encounters, his wide reading and his impressive knowledge and

understanding.

Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher was born on 16 August 1911 in

Bonn, Germany, the son of a charismatic and well-connected professor of

economics. He followed in his father’s footsteps by studying law and eco

nomics, initially at Bonn University. Then, in October 1930, he was

awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. But even before he took

up his place, at the age of eighteen and on his first visit to England, he was

introduced to John Maynard Keynes, who invited the young Fritz to

attend his prestigious seminars in Cambridge. England of the 1930s was not

an easy place for a young German to live, and in any case he didn’t like

Oxford, so that he requested an additional year of his scholarship to be

based at Columbia University in New York. At Columbia, he was much

more settled and developed a good rapport with the outspoken professor of

banking, Parker Willis, who, recognising the twenty-two year old’s ability

218

E.F. (FRITZ) SCHUMACHER

and potential, invited Fritz to give a course of lectures and seminars in

1933.

A year later he returned to Germany, but the deteriorating situation

there prompted Fritz and his young wife, Muschi Petersen, to leave for

London in 1937. Through his many contacts, Fritz was offered a small

labourer’s cottage on Lord Brand’s estate at Eydon, Northamptonshire,

where he lived during the wartime period, working first as a farm labourer,

and then, from 1942, at the Oxford Institute of Statistics. A period spent

during 1940 in an internment camp at Prees Heath, Shropshire, experienc

ing harsh physical and emotional conditions, had a particular impact on

Schumacher’s personal development. Four months after entering the

camp, he was elected camp leader by his fellow inmates, and it was there

that he began to appreciate the relevance of Marx’s ideas and the impor

tance of understanding the political and social dimensions of economic

issues. As his daughter, Barbara Wood, writes in her biography of her

father,

When he was released from Prees Heath, he came out not as a man

emerging from the hard conditions that go with the deprivation of lib-

erty, but as though he was returning from a stimulating seminar, on

fire with new ideas and visions. He left Prees Heath invigorated …

(Wood 1984: 113)

Schumacher became a British citizen in April 1946, and in November

1949 was offered the post of Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board

(NCB), which was to be his workplace until early retirement in 1971. In the

meantime, and following visits to Burma (1955) and India (1961 and 1962),

in 1965 he teamed up with his NCB colleague George McRobie, to estab

lish the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG).

With his background in economics, Fritz Schumacher was well aware

of the literature and understood the arguments sufficiently well to feel con

fident in challenging orthodox viewpoints. His early work focused on the

question of unemployment and the interface between labour and tech

nology. In pre-war Germany he was concerned about the six million

unemployed, and he talked about what he called ‘Fritz’s World Improve

ment Plan’, an incentive scheme for manufacturers to employ labour rather

than machinery. In 1943, he wrote a pamphlet for the left-wing Fabian

Society on Export Policy and Full Employment, and he later worked closely

with Sir William Beveridge (the architect of the British welfare state), in

producing the report on Full Employment in a Free Society (1944). These

experiences, coupled with his reading of Marx and Lenin, engendered a

deep concern in Schumacher for morality, and the nature of work that

E.F. (FRITZ) SCHUMACHER

219

people did and how they felt about it. In the early 1940s, he said that he

regarded Lenin as ‘more exciting and illuminating than anything I know’

(Wood 1984: 137). At that time, Schumacher was intolerant of religion,

believing that intelligence and Christianity were incompatible.

However, his views on religion gradually changed. Undoubtedly a key

landmark in his personal development was the three months he spent in

Burma in 1955 as a UN-funded Economic Adviser on secondment from

the NCB. He became fascinated with the Buddhist approach to econom

ics, which makes a distinction between ‘renewable’ and ‘non-renewable’

resources. Here too there was a link with his longstanding interest in

employment. In a chapter on ‘Buddhist Economics’ in Small is Beautiful,he

comments:

The very start of Buddhist economic planning would be a planning

for full employment … While the materialist is mainly interested in

goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation … The key-

note of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-vio-

lence … From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the

Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern – amazingly

small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

(Schumacher 1974: 47)

Schumacher was also fascinated with the views of Gandhi, who

believed that ‘the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production,

only by production by the masses’ (ibid.: 128).

The visits to Burma and India also fired his interest in technology. In the

context of the latter, Schumacher believed that ‘the biggest single collec

tive decision that any country in the position of India has to take is the

choice of technology’ (ibid.: 175). Rather than unquestioningly transfer

ring technology from rich to poor countries, he argued that what was par

ticularly needed was intermediate technology, that was both superior to

outdated and primitive technology and also simpler, cheaper and freer than

the technology of the rich. He was sceptical of sophisticated technology,

and, in particular, its dubious role in alleviating poverty: ‘Can we develop a

technology which really helps us to solve our problems – a technology

with a human face?’ (ibid.: 123).

At a conference of eminent economists in Cambridge in September

1964, he presented a well-argued paper on the economic motivation for

intermediate technology, which caused uproar and proved to be the talk

ing point of the entire conference.

Fritz Schumacher was also deeply concerned with the quality of human

life, and the need to improve the lot of the unemployed, the poor and other

220

E.F. (FRITZ) SCHUMACHER

marginalised elements of economies and societies. Just as technology needs

to have ‘a human face’, so, he argued must economics demonstrate a greater

awareness of the human dimension, as if people mattered. Schumacher sug

gested that,

Economics and the standard of living can just as well be looked after

by a capitalist system, moderated by a bit of planning and

redistributive taxation. But culture and, generally, the quality of life,

can now only be debased by such a system.

(ibid.: 217)

He also questioned the role of economics in clarifying the meaning and

nature of development in the context of both rich and poor countries,

observing that, ‘Economic development is something much wider and

deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the

economic sphere, in education, organisation, discipline and, beyond that,

in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance’

(ibid.: 171).

Schumacher criticised the focus of much economic writing; ‘We do not

approach economics primarily from the point of view of people; we

approach it from the point of view of the production of goods, and the

people as a kind of afterthought’ (McRobie 1981: 6). He frequently

extolled the virtues of what he termed ‘non-violent economics’, and in

1960 wrote a much-quoted article for the Sunday newspaper, the Observer,

in which he said,

A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of earth to sus-

tain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding

generation can only be called violent. It is not a way of life that one

would like to see exported to countries not yet committed to it.

(Observer, 21 August 1960)

Schumacher was also fascinated with the nature of the workplace and the

work experience, and in Small is Beautiful he writes about ‘New patterns of

ownership’, in which large companies might be broken down into smaller

worker-friendly subsidiaries, where all workers can feel a sense of ownership

and receive rewards that are commensurate with their efforts, as reflected in

production and profitability. He believed that, ‘people [should] have a

chance to enjoy themselves while they are working, instead of working

solely for their pay packet and hoping, usually forlornly, for enjoyment solely

during their leisure time’ (Schumacher 1974: 16–17).

E.F. (FRITZ) SCHUMACHER

221

Environmental issues were a lifelong passion with Schumacher. Soon

after establishing the family home at Caterham, Surrey in 1950, he became

a keen gardener and an active member of the Soil Association, experiment

ing with organic methods in his own back garden. On a broader scale, he

argued that, ‘In agriculture and horticulture, we can interest ourselves in

the perfection of production methods which are biologically sound, build

up soil fertility, and produce health, beauty and permanence. Productivity

will then look after itself’ (ibid.: 16–17). He was a keen supporter of the Soil

Association and referred to its objectives regularly in his writing and lec

tures. In 1970 he became the Association’s President.

He was also concerned about the disproportionate use of non-renew

able resources by the richer countries, referring to the case of the USA, ‘the

5.6% of the world population which live in the USA require something of

the order of 40% of the world’s primary resources to keep going’ (ibid.: 98).

Large powerful countries and organisations are also responsible for damag-

ing the environment.

Fritz Schumacher was a brilliant orator and was regularly invited to

speak on many occasions around the world, his frequent absences from the

NCB being generously condoned by his boss, Lord Robens. Schumacher

visited the President of Peru, then Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, whose

Arusha Declaration on ‘African Socialism’ greatly impressed him. Other

high-level visits were made to Zambia and South Africa, and in 1977, he

gave a six-week coast-to-coast lecture tour in the USA and was invited to

meet President Jimmy Carter at the White House.

Schumacher’s final lecture, delivered in Caux, Switzerland on 3 Sep-

tember 1977, the day before he collapsed and died, was typical. Repro

duced in McRobie (1981), the lecture, ‘Technology for a Democratic

Society’, had the key message that both highly industrialised and develop

ing countries of the world must begin to develop technologies that are

more in harmony with people and the environment, and are less depend

ent on non-renewable resources (McRobie 1981: 1). His University of

London lectures on ‘Crucial Problems of Modern Living’ were highly

popular with students and initiated much debate. In these, he called for the

raising of consciousness, or an ‘inner development’, so that the necessities

for the world’s survival could be worked out carefully and put into prac

tice. As he later wrote, ‘Everywhere people ask: “What can I actually do?”

The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to

put our own house in order’ (Schumacher 1974: 249–50).

Schumacher’s message has been carried forward in so many ways. The

ITDG and Soil Association have gone from strength to strength, together

with Schumacher UK (‘promoting human scale sustainable development’)

based in Bristol, the E.F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington,

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E.F. (FRITZ) SCHUMACHER

Massachusetts (USA), Schumacher College in Devon (UK), and the New

Economics Foundation in London (UK), to name but a few. The fact that

these organisations exist today, over a quarter of a century after Schu

macher’s death, are themselves a testament to the power and relevance of

his ideas. Global warming, pollution, the depletion of non-renewable

resources, the alleviation of poverty, sustainable development, the nature

and effects of different technologies, organic farming and, not least, the

quality of life, all remain high on international and national agendas in the

twenty-first century. This is surely indicative both of the significance of

Schumacher’s inspirational message, and also that he was definitely well

ahead of his time.

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to Andrew Scott, Policy and Programmes Director

of the Intermediate Technology Development Group, for his valuable

advice in researching this chapter.

Major works

Schumacher, E.F. (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered,

London: Blond and Briggs (paperback, London: Abacus, 1974).

—— (1977) A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Jonathan Cape.

—— (1979) Good Work, London: Harper and Row.

Further reading

ITDG (2003) Small is Working: Technology for Poverty Reduction, Paris: UNESCO/

ITDG/TVE.

Kirk, G. (ed.) (1982) Schumacher on Energy, London: Jonathan Cape.

Kumar, S. (ed.) (1980) The Schumacher Lectures, London: Blond and Briggs.

McRobie, G. (1981) Small is Possible, London: Jonathan Cape.

Schumacher, E.F. (1943) Export Policy and Full Employment, London: Fabian

Society, Research Series No. 77.

Scott, A. (1996) ‘Appropriate Technology: is it Ready for – and Relevant to – the

Millennium?’, Appropriate Technology 23(3): 1–4.

Smillie, I. (2000) Mastering the Machine Revisited: Poverty, Aid and Technology,

London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

Wood, B. (1984) Alias Papa: A Life of Fritz Schumacher, London: Jonathan Cape.

Tony Binns

E.F. (FRITZ) SCHUMACHER

223

DUDLEY SEERS (1920–83)

‘The world is inconveniently large to cover in one lifetime’, wrote Dudley

Seers in the Preface to his most important work, completed shortly before

his death, The Political Economy of Nationalism (1983). Not a gesture of self-

importance, his listing of over thirty-five countries in which he had

worked was meant to underscore several unique features of his develop

ment work: the belief in a steady engagement with real situations as a basis

for reliable knowledge and policy formulation; the notion that knowledge

is largely influenced by one’s experiences and historical context; and an

acute inclination to question established truths, including his own. The fact

that those countries in which he worked happened to be small or medium-

sized (e.g. Colombia, Sri Lanka, with some in the early years of radical

transformation including Cuba, Chile, and Portugal) made him aware of

issues that were to recur throughout his life, including dependency and

inequality. He was above all an independent thinker working within a

structuralist framework that conformed neither to neo-classical nor to neo-

Marxist paradigms.

Seers’s interest in empirical data went back to his early days as a statisti-

cian at Oxford in the 1940s. His contributions in this area were substantial,

including on topics such as social development indicators (1972, 1977); the

articulation between political-economic problems, planning models, and

national accounting systems (see his contribution to a volume in honour of

one of his collaborators, Hans W. Singer (Seers 1976a)); and the insis-

tence on reliable statistics on key aspects of a country’s socio-economic and

cultural life that could realistically inform planning ‘targets for key

resources and styles of consumption’ (1976b: 12). Seers’s interest in statis

tics, however, was characteristically self-reflexive; he asserted outright that

numbers are artifacts and acknowledged that underlying any accounting

system there lies a view of the world. As Richard Jolly (1992: 494) put it,

it was in the areas of national planning and statistics that Seers was ‘deeply

radical, perhaps more constructively radical than in any other area of his

work’. Today we would call Seers a ‘constructivist’, believing that statistics

are not value neutral, since they narrate power-laden stories about the

world. He urged planners to develop statistics that could serve the cause of

the poor effectively.

Seers is best known for two crucial interventions in development

debates: the inadequacy of neo-classical economics to non-industrialised

countries, and his critique of growth as a standard of development. Begin

ning in the early 1960s, he published a handful of wonderfully titled papers

on these topics which became among the most celebrated of the time.

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DUDLEY SEERS

These interests were influenced by his formative years at the Economic

Commission for Latin America (ECLA, or CEPAL in Spanish, 1957–61).

These were the years when CEPAL’s founder Raúl Prebisch’s core–

periphery model of underdevelopment was being developed to result, in

the 1960s, in the famous dependency perspective. Prebisch’s challenges to

neo-classicism and emphasis on structural factors did not go unnoticed by

Seers.

‘The Limitations of the Special Case’ (1963) made the argument that the

economic doctrines and preoccupations developed for industrial econo

mies were largely inapplicable to developing countries because the frame of

reference was fundamentally different – indeed, these doctrines applied to

a ‘highly special’ case (1963: 4–5); what was needed was a framework that

did not render invisible the defining features of less-developed economies

(e.g. entrenched land tenure systems, economic and political dependency).

Less noticed in Seers’s work has been his pioneering epistemological analy-

sis. At a time when appeal to paradigms and research programmes was

barely thinkable or still to come, Seers’s analysis constituted a lucid state-

ment on how economic doctrines sought hegemony and replaced one

another, underscoring some of the central practices through which scien-

tific discourses are deployed, including the use of textbooks and graduate

training. He found his fellow economists conveniently unaware of this fact,

save for exceptions such as his mentor, Professor Joan Robinson. Marxist

economics was vulnerable to the same critique. In ‘The Birth, Life, and

Death of Development Economics’ he added ‘professional convenience

and career interests’ (1979: 709) among the factors conditioning the

hegemony of particular economic theories.

That Seers found more in common with the Latin Americans who

emphasised structural factors than with those who applied allegedly univer

sal economic models (1981) was at the root of his critique of economic

growth as goal and yardstick of development. Instead, he proposed a view

aptly encapsulated in an oft-quoted passage from ‘What Are We Trying to

Measure?’:

The questions to ask about a country’s development are therefore:

What has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to

unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If all three

of these have become less severe, then beyond doubt this has been a

period of development for the country concerned.

Otherwise, rapid rates of growth notwithstanding, ‘it would be strange to

call the result “development” ’ (1972: 24). With time, his proposal would

influence such important transformations in development thinking as the

DUDLEY SEERS

225

‘redistribution with growth’ approaches of the 1970s and landmark policy

developments in the 1980s and 1990s such as the basic needs approach,

adjustment with a human face, and human development indicators (pio

neered by Hans Singer, Richard Jolly, Hollis Chenery, Paul

Streeten, Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen). Seers also often referred

to the social, cultural and political requirements that could make develop

ment meaningful. His death cut short the development of this framework,

a task that remains pertinent to this date.

During the last decade of his life, Seers’s work took a significant turn in

two respects: the application of his development framework to Europe,

emphasising nationalism, and a radicalisation of his views on the Third

World. The result was an integrated framework which (a) encompassed the

entire world and focused on worldwide problems, respecting specificities;

and (b) subsumed development economics into an interdisciplinary field

incorporating all important dimensions of development (1977, 1979,

1983). He even suggested that dependency theory could be more pertinent

to many European situations than neo-classical theories; this was the case

when thinking about Europe’s own peripheries (e.g. southern Europe) or

underdeveloped regions within core countries, e. g. southern Italy or the

Scottish highlands (Seers, Schaffer and Kiljunen 1979; De Brandt, Mándi

and Seers 1980). His disappointment with internationalism – the increased

interdependence of nations which he saw as equivalent to super-power

domination – was accompanied by the observation that the Cold War

international system had become untenable.

These were the years of the Club of Rome reports on the planet’s limits

to growth (e.g. Meadows et al. 1972), to which, Seers felt, both capitalism

and socialism failed to provide answers. Adding to this the persistence of

nationalism, in his last book he postulated a third path to development,

based on a judicious form of nationalism and partially self-sufficient

regional blocs. Self-sufficiency in basic food staples, technology and culture

were the basis of any nationalist and regional development strategy.

Changing the structures of demand (particularly patterns of consumption)

was essential in this regard, which called for a curb on the influence of

transnational corporations in these three areas. Seers’s framework resem

bled positions advocated by radical Third World intellectuals, particularly

Julius Nyerere’s concept of self-reliance and Samir Amin’s strategy of

de-linking. Today we could restate Seers’s thesis in terms of selective de-

linking and selective re-engagement, quite different from what came to

prevail in the Thatcher–Reagan–Bush neoliberal era.

Seers’s anticipatory mind was also in evidence in his discussion, often in

passing, of topics rarely addressed during his time, such as race, religion and

culture in development. He led five interdisciplinary country missions

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DUDLEY SEERS

(particularly for the International Labour Organisation’s World Employ

ment Programme), each lasting between four and six weeks and each

resulting in a major conceptual and policy report. He occupied many

prominent positions with academic organisations, the United Nations, and

non-governmental organisations such as the Society for International

Development (the most influential development NGO at the time). Insti

tutionally, he will remain most well known as the first director of the Insti

tute of Development Studies at Sussex (1967–72). From its inception, the

Institute became the most exciting place in the developed world for young

students eager to pursue enlightened careers in the development field; he

also helped provide safe haven at the Institute for scholars fleeing military

dictatorships from South America and Eastern Europe, who added to the

vibrant ambiance of the place.

Dudley Seers had been born on 11 April 1920, ‘a white, English, Chris

tian male’, as he was prone to say at the beginning of his courses to warn

students about the biases in his works.

To have been brought up in the family of an executive of General

Motors, educated at a preparatory school and Rugby, then at Cam-

bridge, and to have served as an officer of the Royal Navy [1941–

1945] and in the civil service at home and abroad, is to be a lifetime

captive of these institutions, even (perhaps especially) when one is

reacting against the attitudes they attempt to instil.

(Seers 1983: 11)

His profound awareness of the historicity of all knowledge – which today

goes under the rubric of ‘positionality’ – was exemplary for his moment.

Lest this sound as though he was a postmodernist avant la lettre, it should be

remembered that his acute self-reflexivity went side by side with a deep

commitment to some of the grand narratives of modernity, certainly egali

tarianism and a humanism infused with the best traditions of critical

thought. He did not shy away from proposing practicable solutions to what

he saw as the pressing problems of the day; his pragmatism was informed by

a realistic diagnosis of power and a distrust of grandiose development

objectives common in the literature of the time (witness his ironic and

uncompromising critique of the Brandt Report (1980) on North–South

relations, which emerged out of Seers’s analysis as a paradigmatic instance

of a discourse run amok).

Seers’s prescient mind could be found wanting on a number of issues; he

was, after all, a child of his age. Even if he was always willing to reinvent it,

he believed in development perhaps because, as Professor Singer (1983)

put it, he was ‘a practical visionary’ who had ‘a knack for getting his ideas

DUDLEY SEERS

227

and visions translated into practice’. He was not an iconoclast in the sense

of, say, Ivan Illich among his more radical contemporaries; he was critical

of many aspects of the Enlightenment tradition but did not call for a sys

tematic overhaul. However, he fulfilled a tremendously important role as

one of the few real enfants terribles – or, more precisely, critical consciences

– of the development age, and he was respected by Marxist and neo-classical

theorists alike, despite the fact that both were equally the target of his acer

bic pen.

By the time he died on 21 March 1983, he had become an inevitable

reference in the development field. He was, and remains, one of the finest

minds and kindred spirits to work for the wellbeing of what was called, in

what he characterised as ‘the odiously euphemistic language of the UN’,

the Third World. Many of his works are as relevant today as they were

when they appeared, with a few pertinent adaptations. The critical exami

nation of orthodox economics (‘deconstruction’, in today’s jargon) is as

pressing today as at the time of ‘The Limitations of the Special Case’, given

the greater hypertrophy of econometrics and the hegemony of neo-liberal

approaches. Nationalisms and regional blocs capable of countering the

present imperial power have, if anything, become more salient issues today;

even some contemporary attempts at harnessing multiculturalism would

not be inconsistent with his vision for the European case. There is much he

would decry in what is happening today – the self-serving internationalism

of market forces, the pernicious effect of global media on the world’s cul-

tures, and the seeming capitulation of international lending institutions to

the dictates of a world run by, and for the benefit of, large transnational cor-

porations. His development framework has by no means become part of

the mainstream. This does not mean that his work has ceased to be relevant,

perhaps it is now even more so; or perhaps one could say with greater perti

nence that he remains, even today, a pioneer of development thought.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Sir Richard Jolly for his clarifying and detailed com

ments, and Wendy Harcourt for her constructive suggestions on an earlier

draft.

Major works

De Bandt, J., Mándi, P. and Seers, D. (eds) (1980) New Trends in European

Development Studies, New York: St Martin’s Press.

Seers, D. (1964) ‘The Limitations of the Special Case’, In Martin, K. and Knapp, J.

(eds), The Teaching of Development Economics, Chicago: Aldine Publishing

Company, pp. 1–27 (originally published in Oxford University Institute of

Economics and Statistics Bulletin 25, 1963).

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DUDLEY SEERS

—— (1969) ‘The Meaning of Development’, International Development Review

11(4): 1–6.

—— (1972) ‘What Are We Trying to Measure?’, Journal of Development Studies 8(3):

21–36.

—— (1976a) ‘The Political Economy of National Accounting’, in Cairncross, A.

and Puri, M., Employment, Income Distribution and Development Strategy: Problems

of the Developing Countries. Essays in Honour of H.W. Singer, New York: Holmes

and Meier Publishers, pp. 193–209.

—— (1976b) ‘A New Look at the Three World Classification’, IDS Bulletin 7: 8–

13.

—— (1977) ‘The New Meaning of Development’, International Development

Review 19(3): 2–7.

—— (1979) ‘The Birth, Life and Death of Development Economics’, Development

and Change 10: 707–19.

—— (1980) ‘North–South: Muddling Morality and Mutuality’, Third World

Quarterly 2(4): 681-93.

—— (ed.) (1981) Dependency Theory: A Critical Reassessment, London: Frances

Pinter.

—— (1983) The Political Economy of Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Seers, D. and Joy, L. (eds) (1971) Development in a Divided World, Harmondsworth:

Penguin.

Seers, D., Schaffer, B. and Kiljunen, M.-L. (eds) (1979) Underdeveloped Europe:

Studies in Core–Periphery Relations, Sussex: Harvester Press.

Seers, D. and Vasitos, C. (eds) (1980) Integration and Unequal Development: The

Experience of the EEC, New York: St Martin’s Press.

Further reading

Brandt Commission (1980) North–South: A Programme For Survival, London: Pan.

Jolly, R. (1992) ‘Dudley Seers (1920–1983)’, in Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer

(eds), A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, Aldershot: Elgar, pp.

491–9.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W. (1972) The Limits to

Growth, London: Pan.

Singer, H. (1983) ‘Tribute to Dudley Seers’, in The New Internationalist: The People,

The Ideas, The Action in the Fight for World Development, 125 (July), Oxford: New

Internationalist Publications (no page number).

Times, The (1983) ‘Professor Dudley Seers: Leading Overseas Development

Economist’, The Times (London), 23 March: 12.

United Nations History Project, www.unhistory.org.

Ward, M. (2004) Quantifying the World: UN Contributions to Statistics, New York:

United Nations. (Analysis of the pressures and biases underlying the UN’s role

in development statistics.)

Country reports and major missions

International Labour Office (1970) Towards Full Employment: A Programme for

Colombia, Geneva: ILO (mission led by Seers).

—— (1971) Matching Employment Opportunities and Expectations: A Programme of

Action for Ceylon, Geneva: ILO (mission led by Seers, 2 vols).

DUDLEY SEERS

229

—— (1981) First Things First: Meeting the Basic Needs of the People of Nigeria, Geneva:

ILO.

Seers, D. (1990) in Trosky, S.M. (ed.), Contemporary Authors, Vol. 129: 395–6,

Detroit, MI: Gale Research Inc.

Seers, D., Bianchi, A., Jolly, R. and Nolff, M. (1964) Cuba: The Economic and Social

Revolution, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Arturo Escobar

AMARTYA KUMAR SEN (1933–)

Amartya Kumar Sen is a leading public intellectual of our time. Born in

1933 and brought up in Dhaka (now in Bangladesh), Sen’s childhood was

marked by encounters with key members of the Bengali intelligentsia, and

by the horrors of the Great Bengal Famine and the Partition of India. Sen

continues to acknowledge the presence of these events in his life and work,

large parts of which have been concerned to understand how a lack of sub-

stantial freedoms leads to a lack of ‘functionings’, or the ability to live a dif-

ferent or a better life.

Sen is best known in development studies for his work on poverty and

famines, and on the measurement of ‘human development’, but the cita-

tion for his 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science also salutes

his work on social choice theory. In addition, he is known to readers of the

New York and London Reviews of Books for well-crafted essays on environ-

mental sustainability, religious nationalism and violence in India, and the

poetic and political careers of Rabindranath Tagore. In key respects, Sen is

a descendant of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ which began in the early nine-

teenth century. His rapid rise to prominence, and the breadth and quality

of his published work, call to mind forebears like Rammohun Roy and

Tagore (an early teacher), along with contemporaries like Partha

Chatterjee and Partha Dasgupta. Sen was a Professor at Jadavpur University

by the age of twenty-three, and later taught at the Delhi and London

Schools of Economics before moving in turn to Oxford, Harvard and the

Mastership of his old Cambridge College, Trinity. In addition to the Nobel

Prize, which he received while at Cambridge, Sen has been awarded

India’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna. In 2004 he returned to teaching

and research at Harvard.

Few can have contributed more to development studies than Amartya

Sen. A version of his 1957 Prize Fellowship dissertation at Trinity College

was published as his first book (Sen 1960). Thereafter, Sen published

widely on savings and capital in developing countries, on surplus labour in

peasant economies, on the relationship between farm size holdings and

productivity in Indian agriculture, and on the isolation paradox and

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collective action problems. In the 1970s he began to produce the work for

which he is now better known – on the measurement and meanings of

human development, on the causes and prevention of famines, on gender

issues and inequality, and on development as freedom. In addition, while it

is a matter of pride for Sen that he has never advised governments, it is clear

that his work has been shaped by involvements with the United Nations

Industrial Development Organization (where his work with Partha

Dasgupta and Stephen Marglin (1972) formed the basis of UNIDO’s

guidelines for project analysis), the International Labour Office (two of his

key books (Sen 1975, 1981) grew out of work for the World Employment

Programme of the International Labour Organization), and the United

Nations Development Programme (which incorporated aspects of Sen’s

work on the evaluation of development into its Human Development

Index and Human Development Reports).

Notwithstanding the diversity of Sen’s work, which informs an extraor

dinary body of research now carried out by former students and colleagues,

there is consistency in many of his leading propositions. The first of these

has to do with the proper focus of economic and moral evaluations. Sen

rejects the idea that individuals act according to a narrow specification of

what might count as self-interest. Most of us are not rational fools, and

issues like class position, gender, family influence and a sense of fairness

affect the way we behave (Sen 1977). Sen also rejects the idea that different

policies can usefully be evaluated in terms of the classic concerns of welfare

economics or utilitarianism. ‘[M]aximizing the sum of individual utilities

[pleasure, happiness, welfare] is supremely unconcerned with the interper-

sonal distribution of that sum. This should make it particularly unsuitable

for measuring or judging inequality’ (Sen 1973: 16). This is especially the

case when it is combined with an insistence on Pareto optimality, or the

idea that the utility (or welfare) of anyone should not be raised if it leads to a

reduction in the utility (or welfare) of someone else. Such an insistence

could lead to a situation where government action in favour of the poor, or

those without substantive freedoms, is disabled to the extent that better-off

social actors define their utilities in opposition to those of the poor.

Sen is staunchly opposed to this conclusion. In his view we are strongly

marked by the accidents of history and geography: by the fact that some of

us are born to wealthy families in Beverly Hills while others are born to

landless labourers in Bangladesh. He thus agrees with John Rawls (1971)

that a theory of justice as fairness would wish to ensure that all humans are

endowed with a minimum set of primary goods (including education and

an income) subject only to a prior rule that would guarantee equal personal

liberties. For Sen, however, the Rawlsian Difference Principle is good, but

not good enough. He argues that a strict equation cannot be drawn

AMARTYA KUMAR SEN

231

between primary goods and well-being because the former cannot always

be converted into the latter. ‘For example, a pregnant woman may have to

overcome disadvantages in living comfortably and well that a man need not

have, even when both have exactly the same income and other primary

goods’ (Sen 1995: 27).

It follows that Sen’s own preference is for a model of economic evalua

tion which suggests that, ‘Development consists of the removal of various

types of unfreedoms that leave people with little opportunity of exercising

their reasoned agency’ (Sen 2000: xii). For Sen, real freedom is defined pre

cisely in terms of certain human and civil rights that must be guaranteed for

all. To live a good life we need to be fit and healthy, educated and exposed

to different sources of information. But we must also be free to choose our

own accounts of the good life and to participate in market exchange. The

choices which free agents make will necessarily be influenced by the differ

ences which constitute us as individual human beings, or which shape our

personal circumstances. The conversion of personal incomes and resources

into capabilities, achievements, well-being or real freedoms will be affected

by personal heterogeneities, environmental diversities, variations in social

climate, and differences within the family (after Sen 2000: 70–1).

Notions of similarity and difference in turn feed through to the empiri-

cal and practical insights that can be claimed for Sen’s account of develop-

ment as freedom. These begin with the language of ‘functionings’ and

‘capabilities’ that Sen uses to fashion his accounts of famine or gender dis-

crimination, among other issues. ‘Functionings’ refer to the things that a

person may value doing or being, and thus denote a freedom to achieve a

certain lifestyle. ‘Capabilities’ refer to the sets of resources (physical, mental

and social) that a person might command and which give rise to various

‘functionings’.

Sen has used this approach to understand the dynamics of famines in

conditions both of ‘boom’ (Bengal in 1943–44) and ‘bust’ (Wollo, Ethio

pia in 1972–74). Sen maintains that famine deaths result from a precipitate

decline in the entitlements of various persons and social groups to parts of

the regional food supply. In the case of the Great Bengal Famine, then, the

victims were to be found mainly among agricultural labourers, fishermen,

transport workers, paddy huskers and others who faced a slackening

demand for their services at a time when the demand for labour in urban

Bengal was helping to push up the price of the main staple crop, rice. These

groups suffered because their exchange entitlements to food were all of a

sudden inconsistent with their basic needs or capability to survive. More

recently, Sen has argued that ‘no famine has ever taken place in the history

of the world in a functioning democracy’ (ibid.: 16). This claim is at one

with the ‘instrumental’ defence that Sen offers for the virtues of freedom. If

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freedom consists in part, but by definition, in democratic pluralism, then

that same system of governance ensures that the most basic economic free

doms are guaranteed by its major institutions, including contending politi

cal parties and a free press. As ever, the free flow of information is vital to

this process, and to the process of economic evaluation that is thereby

entailed.

Similar arguments are at work in Sen’s accounts of gender discrimina

tion and the evils of child labour. Sen has written movingly about the one

hundred million women who are missing from the world today as a conse

quence of sex-selective abortion and the comparative neglect of female

health and nutrition in childhood. While the precise figure might range

from 60 million to perhaps 110 million missing women, the scale of this

holocaust is horrible in the extreme. Sen accounts for it in terms of the

capability deprivation of women, most of whom do not enjoy the same

substantive freedoms as men. This manifests itself not just in unfair patterns

of food sharing and health care within a household but also in terms of the

lack of voice from which many females suffer.

Sen insists that such findings bear out the importance of an approach to

social comparisons that is focused on capabilities not incomes. It also

restates the importance of getting inside the ‘household’. Sen follows many

feminist scholars in insisting on the asymmetrical distribution of power and

resources within the household (almost always to the disadvantage of

women), and he buttresses this insistence with his continuing commitment

to the freedoms of the individual human subject. This commitment is fur-

ther apparent in his treatment of the child labour issue. Sen is aware that

campaigning groups have drawn attention to the income gap that drives

some parents to seek employment for their children. He insists, even so,

that child labour is very often linked to slavery or bondage, and that it

removes from a child the freedom to attend school. It is thus wrong in and

of itself, as indeed are coercive population policies in a country like China.

This is where the foundational nature of Sen’s commitment to freedom

reasserts itself.

Sen’s work is widely admired for its crisp prose, common sense, and evi

dent concern for social justice. It has also helped to change the way we

think about famines (less emphasis on food availability decline), and devel

opment itself (less emphasis on aggregate economic performance, more on

empowerment and basic needs). But it is not without its critics. Peter

Nolan (1993) was an early and ungracious critic of Sen’s account of the

causation and prevention of famines, and David Keen (1994) has shown

how freedom to choose often disappears amid war, famines or complex

emergencies – a point that Sen largely misses. Other critics have charged

that Sen has a poorly developed sense of power and politics (Corbridge

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233

2002; Gasper 2004). Sen’s liberalism inclines him to place great emphasis

upon the power of ideas and reasoned debate in the promotion of public

policy. While he is not unaware of the embedded nature of social and eco

nomic inequalities – far from it – Sen is sometimes inattentive to the politi

cal struggles that must be waged to change entrenched structures of power

and to secure a greater freedom of choice for a wider range of people. This

relates to his additive conception of ‘freedom’. Sen’s most recent account

of development as freedom is committed to the view that an extension of

freedom in one direction is or can always be linked to an extension of free

dom in all other directions. He thus has no truck with the view that rela

tively benign authoritarian states in East Asia might have secured high and

sustained rates of economic growth and development precisely because

they suspended democratic freedoms in the first decades of structural trans

formation. This is not the commonly accepted wisdom, however, and it

can reasonably be argued that Sen underestimates the power of such

regimes to solve collective action problems (Wade 1990).

Two further criticisms should be noted. First, there is a growing techni-

cal literature on Sen’s accounts of functionings, capabilities and

entitlements (Qizilbash 1997; Giri 2000; Devereux 2001; Alkire 2002).

This is partly concerned with the ways in which Sen defines an agent or

personhood. If his rational actors are not fools, to what extent and how are

they embedded in particular collectivities, cultures or systems of belief?

Second, concern has been voiced about the determinacy of some of the

policy suggestions that seem to flow from Sen’s work. How is greater edu-

cational and health investment to be achieved? What institutions does Sen

have in mind, and how would he mobilise support for social investment

against defenders of the status quo?

In Paul Seabright’s view, ‘Development as freedom is curiously silent

about the difficulty of devising mandates that work’ (Seabright 2001: 43).

Sen, however, has often pointed out that this job falls mainly to others. In

any case, Sen’s work has aided the development of famine early-warning

systems, just as it has encouraged others to build more rounded indices of

Human Development. More recently, too, Sen has used his Nobel Prize

money to fund two Trusts in India and Bangladesh which do have to get to

grips with institutional and political realities. The Pratichi India Trust is

mainly concerned with tackling illiteracy in West Bengal, while the

Pratichi Bangladesh Trust is concerned with gender inequalities and the

empowerment of women. Sen continues to lead by example and by

responding vigorously, but always carefully, to the criticisms that have

been levelled against his work. He remains a towering and much-loved

figure not just in development studies, but across the social sciences.

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Major works

Drèze, J. and Sen, A.K. (1989) Hunger and Public Action, Oxford: Oxford University

Press/WIDER.

—— (2002) India: Development and Participation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sen, A.K. (1960) Choice of Techniques, Oxford: Blackwell.

—— (1973) On Economic Inequality, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

—— (1975) Employment, Technology and Development, Oxford: Oxford University

Press/ILO

—— (1981) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford:

Clarendon Press.

—— (1982) Choice, Welfare and Measurement, Oxford: Blackwell.

—— (1984) Resources, Values and Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

—— (1989) ‘Food and Freedom’, World Development 17: 769–81.

—— (1995) Inequality Reexamined, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—— (2000) Development as Freedom, New York: Anchor Books.

—— (2004) Rationality and Freedom, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press.

Further reading

Alkire, S. (2002) Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction,

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Atkinson, A. (1999) ‘The Contributions of Amartya Sen to Welfare Economics’,

Scandinavian Journal of Economics 101: 173–90.

Corbridge, S. (2002) ‘Development as Freedom: The Spaces of Amartya Sen’,

Progress in Development Studies 2: 183–217.

Dasgupta, P., Marglin, S. and Sen, A.K. (1972) Guidelines for Project Evaluation

(UNIDO), New York: United Nations.

Devereux, S. (2001) ‘Sen’s Entitlement Approach: Critiques and Counter-

critiques’, Oxford Development Studies 29: 244–63.

Drèze, J. and Sen, A.K. (1995) India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity,

Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Drèze, J., Sen, A.K. and Hussain, A. (eds) (1995) The Political Economy of Hunger,

Oxford: Oxford University Press/WIDER.

Gasper, D. (2004) The Ethics of Development, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press.

Giri, A.K. (2000) ‘Rethinking Human Well-being: A Dialogue with Amartya

Sen’, Journal of International Development 12: 1003–18.

Keen, D. (1994) The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in

Southwestern Sudan, 1983–1989, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Nolan, P. (1993) ‘The Causation and Prevention of Famines: A Critique of A.K.

Sen’, Journal of Peasant Studies 21: 1–28

Nussbaum, M. and Sen, A.K. (eds) (1993) The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon

Press.

Qizilbash, M. (1997) ‘A Weakness of the Capability Approach with Reference to

Gender Justice’, Journal of International Development 9: 251–62

Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Seabright, P. (2001) ‘The Road Upward: Review of Development as Freedom’,

The New York Review of Books XLVIII(5): 41–3.

AMARTYA KUMAR SEN

235

Sen, A.K. (1970) ‘The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal’, Journal of Political

Economy 78 (1): 152–7.

—— (1977) ‘Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of

Economic Theory’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6: 317–44.

—— (1990) ‘More Than One Hundred Million Women are Missing’, New York

Review of Books, 20 December: 61–6.

—— (1993) ‘The Causation and Prevention of Famines: A Reply’, Journal of

Peasant Studies 21: 29–40.

—— (1996) ‘Secularism and its Discontents’. in K. Basu and S. Subrahmanyam

(eds), Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India’s Secular Identity, New

Delhi: Penguin, pp. 11–43.

Sen, A.K. and Williams, B. (eds) (1982) Utilitarianism and Beyond, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Vanhuysee, P. (2000) ‘On Sen’s Liberal Paradox and its Reception within Political

Theory and Welfare Economics’, Politics 20: 25–31.

Wade, R. (1990) Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in

East Asian Industrialization, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stuart Corbridge

VANDANA SHIVA (1952–)

Vandana Shiva was born on 5 November 1952 in the valley of Dehradun

(India), nestled in the Himalayan mountain ranges. Her father was the

Conservator of Forests and her mother a former Education Ministry official

who had been displaced from her home when part of India became Paki-

stan in 1947. She trained as a physicist (her doctoral thesis was on ‘Hidden

Variables and Non-locality in Quantum Theory’ from the University of

Western Ontario) before shifting her focus to interdisciplinary research on

science, technology and environmental policy. This shift was in part

inspired by her involvement during the 1970s in the Chipko movement, a

grassroots ecological movement in the Himalayan forest comprising thou

sands of supporters, mainly village women, coming out to protest against

commercial logging abuses, often by interposing their bodies between the

contractors’ axes and the trees.

As a feminist-ecologist working in and out of India, Shiva draws on

detailed historical knowledge of specific natural resource conflicts in her

pioneering research on biodiversity and the environment. In the main, she

argues that ecological and technological issues are intimately connected to

social equity and human freedoms. She criticises the market-oriented,

hyper-extractive approach to development – often legitimised by modern

western scientific knowledge and biotechnology – for the over-exploita

tion of natural resources and the devaluation of indigenous knowledge on

the environment. In turn, she proposes working towards a resource-

prudent, sustainable, ‘survival’ (i.e. subsistence-oriented) economy based

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on technological choices informed by indigenous knowledge of ecological

relations. Her best-known books include The Violence of the Green Revolu

tion: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (1991), a critique of the

agricultural ‘revolution’ beginning in the 1960s, sponsored by the United

Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), to increase world

food production by introducing high-yield cereal varieties; Ecofeminism

(1993; with feminist sociologist Maria Mies), which combines feminism

with environmentalism in its critique of the twin domination of women

and nature in both the North and the South; Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature

and Knowledge (1997) about the way intellectual property rights on life

forms represent a theft of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge; Stolen

Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000) on the decrease in

food security as a result of agricultural trade liberalisation; and Water Wars:

Privatization, Pollution and Profit (2002) about the environmental conflict

arising from the destruction of water systems as a result of development

projects such as dam-building.

For Shiva, there can be no separation between intellectual work and

activism. Inasmuch as her books are primarily works of advocacy, she is also

an outspoken environmental activist, playing a leading role in international

movements against corporate globalisation, which she sees as eroding peo-

ple’s basic economic rights to determining their own living conditions, and

advocating instead the preservation and extension of indigenous agricul-

tural and environmental knowledge. From Mohandas Gandhi, she draws

on and applies the idea of Satyagraha, or non-violent non-co-operation to

defend the people’s freedoms to have access to water, seed, food and medi-

cine. She is founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology

and Ecology, an independent institute in India dedicated to research on

ecological and social issues, as well as Navdanya, a grassroots conservation

movement aimed at protecting biodiversity, particularly native seeds. Her

work on conservation, ecology and the environment has reaped her many

awards, including the Right Livelihood Award (known also as the Alterna

tive Nobel Prize) in 1993, for ‘pioneering insights into the social and envi

ronmental costs of the dominant development process, and her ability to

work with and for local people and communities in the articulation and

implementation of alternatives’. In the late 1990s, she initiated the interna

tional movement, Diverse Women for Diversity, which acknowledges the

role of women from less-developed countries as seed conservators and

experts in the use of medicinal plants.

An important concern in Shiva’s work lies with ensuring food security,

sustainable agriculture and the conservation of resources such as forests and

water. Her forceful critique of the Green Revolution (mainly in the con

text of the Punjab, India) is well known: while the Revolution has created

VANDANA SHIVA

237

an infrastructure of agricultural research and development and impressive

yields of grain on limited land, the new strains of plants require large quan

tities of fertilisers, pesticides and water (justifying massive dam-building

programmes with destructive ecological consequences). The adverse

effects include the evolution of pesticide-resistant pests, the creation of

crop dependency and arable monoculture vulnerable to disease, the

destruction of fish stocks by pesticides, a decline in food production due to

soil destruction, and the encouragement of agricultural costs beyond the

means of many small, independent farmers. By encouraging self-reliance

and individualism, the Green Revolution has also diminished the sense of

community responsibility over common resources, and instead aggravated

conflict and violence – including religious strife in the case of the Punjab –

throughout society.

More generally, Shiva argues that market-driven development in agri

culture or forestry, spurred on by trade and investment liberalisation, is a

project of exclusion that siphons resources and knowledge of the poor in

the South into the global marketplace. In the context of India, for example,

she argues that modernising agriculture (still the primary livelihood for

three-quarters of humanity) through biotechnological fixes and global-

isation strategies has encouraged a shift in production from food to export

crops and thereby reduced food security; flooded the local market with

imports that have wiped out local business and diversity; and paved the way

for global corporations to take over the control of food processing.

Globalised food production of this nature is tantamount to what Shiva calls

‘food totalitarianism’, something that can be challenged only by the build-

ing of an alternative ‘food democracy’. By ‘food democracy’, Shiva refers

to a way of producing and trading food that preserves diverse seed and food

varieties, allows for crop species to fulfil multiple functions, incorporates

cultural needs and local autonomy, and encourages human labour to

engage in diverse, complex and meaningful tasks. This requires resisting

the top-down approach of western development models as well as promot

ing local activism (such as that organised by Navdanya) in, for example,

placing native seeds out of the reach of commercial plant breeders and bio

technology corporations. In a similar vein, Shiva argues too that mining

and damming activities, aquafarming and industrial agriculture have

depleted water resources and stripped indigenous people of communal

water rights. Accordingly, she appeals for a framework for just and sustain

able water use through returning democratic control of water resources to

the people.

A second related arena of Shiva’s work is built around her contention

that not only does biodiversity have intrinsic value, but control over eco

systems should be vested in the local communities in the South who have

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used and protected them, and should not be hijacked by large transnational

corporations driven primarily by commercial motivations. Shiva uses the

term ‘biopiracy’ to describe what she sees as the theft of biodiversity and

indigenous knowledge by the extending global reach of US-style patent

laws – often spurred on by giant US companies – which encourages life

patenting (i.e. granting patents on life forms). She considers patents, and

more generally intellectual property rights on life forms (as propelled by the

Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) under the

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), precursor to the World

Trade Organisation (WTO)) as a tool for imperialistic control, leading to

the privatisation of knowledge (i.e. knowledge cannot be transmitted

without permission and licence fee collection). Based on a highly restricted

concept of innovation and exclusive Eurocentric notions of property,

TRIPs favour transnational corporations which appropriate ownership of

genetically engineered substances through private property patents, to the

detriment of the citizens, peasants, and indigenous people of the less devel-

oped world who find themselves being treated as a ‘market’ for ‘products’

developed from the very seeds which were taken away from them. Fur-

thermore, seed-saving among farmers has become defined as intellectual

property theft, while exchanging seeds among neighbours – what was pre-

viously called brown-bagging, a social act of exchange for non-profit activ-

ity – has become an infringement because ‘distribution’ is now covered by

a patent regime. As medicine can now be patented, drugs made by Indian

companies as ‘generic drugs’ (many times cheaper than the same retrovirals

made in the US as a result of patenting) are labelled by the US pharmaceuti-

cal industry as ‘piracy drugs’. In short, Shiva argues that intellectual prop-

erty rights on life forms imposed by the US are leading to the ‘enclosure of

biodiversity, of life itself’ (e.g. seeds, genes, medicines) and this has become

the means by which South–North wealth transfer is taking place. In cam

paigning against these ‘rights’, Shiva insists on the freedom to ‘recognize

that things like seeds should be accessible to farmers, things like medicine

should be accessible to those who are dying of AIDS, and no regime in the

world can put profit above people’s lives’. Shiva goes further to argue that

as biodiversity is being converted from a local common resource into an

enclosed private property, transnational companies gain a monopoly on

the medical and agricultural uses of biodiversity while local knowledge

systems about the environment are systematically devalued and erased, and

local rights to the use of environmental resources displaced.

A third major thread which runs through Shiva’s work is her abiding

concern that women bear the brunt of globalised capitalist expansion,

including the environmental degradation that results from such expansion.

Women’s productive and reproductive lives are violated by development

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239

projects that erase biological and cultural diversity in favour of export-

oriented monoculture, by deforestation and toxic waste disposal that

destroy the environment, and by population control strategies that target

their bodies for surveillance and regulation. Together with Maria Mies in

Ecofeminism, Shiva identifies the confluence of global capitalism, western

narratives of development and patriarchy (what they call ‘the capitalist

patriarchal world system’) as the source of oppression. They argue instead

for an ecofeminist perspective which rejects capitalist development based

on high technology, mass consumerism and unrestrained economic

growth in favour of cultivating locally rooted, culturally diverse, self-reli

ant and life-affirming communities that give priority to subsistence. Shiva

takes the view that women are inherently closer to nature (what she calls

‘the feminine principle’) than men and has written in a range of places on

women’s approach to forest use, food production and water conservation

as providing a non-violent, inclusive alternative to more exploitative,

‘male’ models of development dependent on technological fixes.

In her critique of the fundamental flaws in capitalist development pro-

jects and technological fixes leading to the degradation of the environment

and livelihoods, in championing local subsistence and indigenous knowl-

edge, and in challenging ‘business as usual’ in both international and local

organisations, Shiva is often acknowledged as a powerful, morally compel-

ling voice for the people of the South. But her critics, including Bina

Agarwal and Meera Nanda, have pointed out that her vision is compro-

mised by a tendency to provide very simple answers to complex problems.

They argue that the world’s environmental crisis cannot be solely attrib-

uted to the rapacious North and its elite allies in the South, and that strate

gies based on local autonomy and indigenous systems of resource use alone

may not meet the needs of demographic expansion or necessarily ensure

the preservation of biodiversity. It is also not clear that subsistence activities

are inherently as emancipatory as she claims. Her environmental philoso

phy has also been perceived as ‘Arcadian’ while her views on women’s rela

tionship with nature are over-romanticised. Others have questioned the

political feasibility of her project as it is flawed by the assumption implicit in

her work that ‘women’, or the ‘poor’, can be treated as a unitary entity with

sufficient shared experience so as to be able to crystallise grassroots resis

tance as a collectivity. The tendency in Shiva’s work is to ascribe to the sub

ject a singular and ahistorical consciousness and to ignore the social

heterogeneity and political tensions embedded in local societies. In

eschewing questions of meaning and representation, Shiva runs the danger

of constructing an ‘authentic’ or ‘heroic’ subaltern, and proposing a

development project which may be inadequate to the complex tasks of

transformation called for.

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Major works

Mies, M. and Shiva, V. (1993) Ecofeminism, New Delhi: Kali for Women.

Shiva, V. (1988) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India, New Delhi:

Kali for Women.

—— (1991) Ecology and the Politics of Survival: Conflicts over Natural Resources in India,

New Delhi: Sage Publications.

—— (1991) The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and

Politics, Penang: Third World Network.

—— (1993) Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology,

Penang: Third World Network.

—— (1997) Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Cambridge, MA: South

End Press.

—— (2000) Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Cambridge,

MA: South End Press.

—— (2001) Protect or Plunder?: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights, London,

New York: Zed Books.

—— (2002) Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit, Cambridge, MA: South

End Press.

Further reading

Agarwal, B. (1994) A Field of One’s Own, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

BBC Reith Lectures (2000) ‘Poverty and Globalisation’, Interview with Vandana

Shiva, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/lecture5.stm.

DeGregori, T.R., ‘Shiva the Destroyer?’, http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/

articleprint.php?num=17 (based on DeGregori, T.R. (2003) Origins of the

Organic Agriculture Debate, Oxford: Blackwell).

In Motion Magazine (2004), interview with Vandana Shiva, ‘The Role of Patents in

the Rise of Globalization’, 28 March, http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/

global/vshiva4_int.html.

Jewitt, S. (2002) Environment, Knowledge and Gender: Local Development in India’s

Jharkand, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Malhotra, P. (2001) ‘Vandana Shiva: The Paradigm Warrior in Pursuit of

Environmental Justice’, The Financial Express (Bombay, India), 4 June, http://

www/commondreams.org/view01/0606-04.htm.

Nanda, M. (1991) ‘Is Modern Science a Western Patriarchal Myth? A Critique of

the Populist Orthodoxy’, South Asian Bulletin 11(1&2): 32–61.

—— (1997) ‘History is What Hurts: A Materialist Feminist Perspective on the

Green Revolution and its Ecofeminist Critics’, in Rosemary Hennessy and

Chrys Ingraham (eds), Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and

Women’s Lives, London: Routledge, pp. 364–94.

Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (n.d.) Short

Curriculum Vitae of Dr. Vandana Shiva, http://www.vshiva.net/vs_cv.htm.

Van Gelder, S.R. (2003) ‘Earth Democracy – An Interview with Vandana Shiva’,

Yes Magazine, Winter, http://www.futurenet.org/article.asp?id=570.

Brenda S.A. Yeoh

VANDANA SHIVA

241

HANS WOLFGANG SINGER (1910–)

Hans (now Sir Hans) Singer is one of the best-known and most respected

development economists. His work has been recognised in awards, honor

ary doctorates, and a knighthood in 1994 ‘for services to economic issues’.

He was included as one of the ten ‘pioneers in development’ in a World

Bank book published in 1984 (Meier and Seers 1984). Six Festschriften have

been published in his honour (Cairncross and Puri 1976; Clay and Shaw

1987; Chen and Sapsford 1997; Sapsford and Chen 1998; Sapsford and

Chen 1999; Hatti and Tandon 2004). They show the depth and breadth of

Singer’s influence in development economics, and the esteem and affection

in which he is held. Singer has produced 450 publications since his first

paper appeared in 1935 (A complete list appears in Shaw 2002 and 2004).

He has addressed more issues than any other development economist. The

downside is that he has dispersed his efforts so widely that he has not pro-

duced the one definitive work that he carries in him.

Singer was born on 29 November 1910 in Elberfeld, now part of

Wuppertal, in the German Rhineland into a strongly assimilated, largely

secular, middle-class Jewish family. Two personalities in particular helped

to shape his outlook on life; his father, a hard-working doctor with a large

practice, who often treated the poor without charge, and the local rabbi, a

highly respected member of society who gave him instructions in ethics,

moral values and civic responsibility.

Entering Bonn University in 1929 with the intention of studying medi-

cine, Singer switched to economics after attending a lecture by Joseph

Schumpeter and came under his spell, and that of his economic master-

piece, The Theory of Economic Development. Singer was forced to leave Nazi

Germany in 1933. Fortunately, on the recommendation of Schumpeter,

he received a two-year scholarship (1934–6) at Cambridge University to

complete his PhD work. At Cambridge, he came under another spell, that

of John Maynard Keynes, precisely at the time that Keynes was producing

his economic masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and

Money. Singer’s PhD dissertation was entitled ‘Materials for the Study of

Urban Ground Rent’, which covered the period 1845 to 1913. This

showed his aptitude for analysing long-term data series. He was among the

first group of students to receive doctorates in economics from Cambridge

University.

Singer’s first employment after university was on a major two-year

(1936–8) study of long-term unemployment in the depressed areas of the

United Kingdom organised by the Pilgrim Trust under the chairmanship

of Archbishop William Temple, with Sir William (later Lord) Beveridge as

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its main adviser (The Pilgrim Trust 1938). These two personalities and the

study made a strong impression on him. There followed lectureships at

Manchester (1938–44) and Glasgow (1946–7) universities. During brief

employment at the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in London

(1945–46), Singer was involved in the calculation of compensation for

owners as part of the Labour Party’s intended programme for the nationali

sation of development rights in urban land, drawing on his PhD work at

Cambridge.

In 1947, there occurred an event that was to dramatically change the

course of Singer’s career. David Owen, who had worked with Singer on

the unemployment study, was appointed the first head of the department of

economic affairs at the newly created United Nations. Owen sought

Singer’s services to strengthen his new department. Singer accepted a two-

year secondment, which was to last for twenty-two years (1947–69). He

was assigned to work in a small section that dealt with the problems of

developing countries. Simultaneously, he was appointed a professor in the

graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. He

welcomed the opportunity of maintaining his links with the academic

world. It also gave him the opportunity to think about the theoretical

framework of economic development within which his work at the UN

could be placed. And he was able to publish papers in his own name, a prac-

tice not allowed at the UN, which were widely acknowledged and quoted.

Analysis of the long-run terms of trade between industrialised and

developing countries is perhaps Singer’s best-known contribution to

development economics (Singer 1949 and 1950; UN 1949). He showed

that the net barter terms of trade between primary products and manufac-

tures were subjected to a long-term downward trend. This contradicted

the belief widely held at the time that the long-term trend favoured pri

mary products. Singer argued that economic history had been unkind to

developing countries. Most of the secondary and cumulative effects of

investment had been removed from the developing country to the invest

ing, industrial, country. Developing countries had also been diverted into

types of activities that offered less scope for technical progress, withholding

a central factor of ‘dynamic radiation’ that had revolutionised society in the

industrial world.

Singer emphasised that his work on the terms of trade was meant to be

more a policy guide than a long-term projection. He advised developing

countries to diversify out of primary exports through developing domestic

markets and industrialisation. Subsequently, he put more emphasis on rela

tions between types of countries than between types of commodities, and

on the distribution of ‘technological power’ in more contemporary terms

in answer to some of the criticisms of his original work (Rostow 1990).

HANS WOLFGANG SINGER

243

Singer also emphasised the objective of ‘distributive’ justice, pointing to in-

built, long-term inequalities between industrialised and developing coun

tries. He has constantly argued that unless there are fundamental changes in

the world economic order, divergence rather than convergence will con

tinue between them, threatening global economic and social advance

ment, stability and peace. Singer found strong allies, especially Raúl

Prebisch, who used Singer’s original work (Prebisch 1950; Toye and

Toye 2003). The Prebisch–Singer thesis, as it came to be known, has cre

ated a growth industry in the development economics literature. Increas

ingly sophisticated statistical and econometric analyses have vindicated the

thesis, making it one of the very few hypotheses in economics that have

stood the test of time (Sapsford and Chen 1998: 27–34).

What are some of the special attributes that have set Singer apart from

other pioneering development economists? Singer came under the direct

influence of both Schumpeter and Keynes, the two great beacons in his

intellectual development. The combination of these forces has had a deci-

sive influence on Singer’s ideas: Schumpeter with his views on the impor-

tance of technology and innovation and the role of the entrepreneur; and

Keynes’ thesis that economics is not a universal truth applicable to all coun-

tries and conditions. They provided Singer with an enabling framework for

much of his work.

Work on the terms of trade has been the fulcrum for many of the other

issues Singer has taken up in order to achieve ‘distributive justice’ for the

developing countries including: industrialisation, science and technology,

human investment, planning, trade and aid, technical assistance and pre-

investment activities, regional co-operation, and a new international eco

nomic order with multilateral global governance.

Long service in the United Nations during its formative years was also to

benefit Singer’s work. He carried out a wide range of assignments that enabled

him to see at first hand conditions in the developing world, discuss with leaders

and planners their development problems and aspirations, and set his own the

oretical and conceptual framework against the background of concrete reality.

Out of this milieu emerged Singer’s ‘perspectives’ on development including:

the mechanics of development, the role of the public sector in economic

growth, a balanced view of balanced growth, the concept of pre-investment

financing, the notion of human investment, the interaction of population

growth and education with economic growth, his concept of ‘redistribution

from growth’ to tackle poverty, and his view that development is ‘growth plus

change’, culturally, socially and economically.

Singer was also one of the founders of the structural analysis of develop

ment. He has maintained that there can be no ‘blueprint’ for development

(Schiavo-Campo and Singer 1970). However, a number of themes have

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HANS WOLFGANG SINGER

permeated his work. He considers that the starting point should be people,

not money and wealth, which gave a whole new perspective on the devel

opment process. Sustained and equitable development depended not on

the creation of wealth but on the capacity of people to create wealth.

Hence, Singer’s insistence on the importance of the human factor in eco

nomic development, and on health, education and training, the well-being

of children, and food security, science and appropriate technology,

employment, income distribution and the conquest of poverty, and plan

ning and sound institutions, all viewed in an international context in which

trade and aid are conducted with distributive justice and efficiency so that

all countries, developing and developed, might flourish and converge, not

diverge. Many of these perspectives have since become conventional

wisdoms of progressive development work.

Not being content only to formulate the theoretical underpinnings of

the problems of developing countries, Singer became involved in many

pioneering ventures to overcome them. A number of the organisations he

helped to set up or strengthen in order to tackle Third World problems are

still operating today including: the United Nations Development

Programme, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the UN World Food

Programme, the UN Research Institute for Social Development, the UN

Industrial Development Organization, and the African Development

Bank. He was also indirectly involved in the creation of the International

Development Association (IDA), the soft-loan arm of the World Bank.

The IDA was established in part as a foil to prevent attempts to set up a Spe-

cial UN Fund for Economic Development, which Singer and others tried

to establish in the United Nations (Meier and Seers 1984: 296–303).

Since 1969, Singer has been a professorial fellow of the Institute of

Development Studies (IDS), and professor (now emeritus), at the Univer

sity of Sussex, UK. During this period his output has been prolific. He has

made a significant contribution to the activities of IDS, which is now

recognised as one of the world’s leading institutes of development studies.

He is remembered with respect and affection as a source of unlimited help

and inspiration by the cohorts of students. And he has been in constant

demand by governments, multilateral and bilateral aid agencies and non-

governmental organisations. Singer’s commitment to the case for a more

just and equitable world economic order remains undiminished. His life

and work serve as an inspiration for the next generation of development

economists.

HANS WOLFGANG SINGER

245

Major works

The following is a representative selection of Singer’s many publications:

Ansari, J.A., Ballance, R.H. and Singer, H.W. (1982) The International Economy and

Industrial Development: Trade and Investment in the Third World, Brighton:

Harvester Press.

Ansari, J.A. and Singer, H.W. (1977) Rich and Poor Countries: Consequences of

International Economic Disorder, London and Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman.

Jolly, R. and Singer, H.W. (1972) Employment, Incomes and Equality: A Strategy for

Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya, Geneva: International Labour Office.

Raffer, K. and Singer, H.W. (1996) The Foreign Aid Business: Economic Assistance and

Development Co-operation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

—— (2001) The Economic North–South Divide. Six Decades of Unequal Development,

Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Roy, S. and Singer, H.W. (1993) Economic Progress and Prospects in the Third World:

Lessons of Development Experience Since 1945, Aldershot and Brookfield, VT:

Edward Elgar.

Schiavo-Campo, S. and Singer, H.W. (1970) Perspectives in Economic Development,

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Singer, H.W. (1964) International Development, Growth and Change, New York:

McGraw-Hill.

—— (1975) The Strategy of International Development: Essays in the Economics of

Backwardness by H.W. Singer, in Cairncross, A. and Puri, M. (eds), Basingstoke

and London: Macmillan.

—— (1998) Growth, Development and Trade: Selected Essays of Hans Singer,

Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

—— (2001) International Development Co-operation. Selected Essays by H.W. Singer on

Aid and the United Nations System, in D.J. Shaw (ed), Basingstoke and New

York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Singer, H.W., Wood, J. and Jennings, T. (1987) Food Aid. The Challenge and the

Opportunity, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Further reading

Cairncross, A. and Puri, M. (eds) (1976) Employment, Income Distribution and

Development Strategy: Problems of Developing Countries. Essays in Honour of H.W.

Singer, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.

Chen, J. and Sapsford, D. (eds) (1997) ‘Economic Development and Policy:

Professor Sir Hans Singer’s Contribution to Development Economics’, World

Development, 25(11): 1853–956.

Clay, E. and Shaw, D.J. (eds) (1987) Poverty, Development and Food: Essays in Honour

of H.W. Singer on his 75th Birthday, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.

Hatti, N. and Tandon, R. (eds) (2004) Trade and Technology in a Globalizing World:

Essays in Honour of H.W. Singer, New Delhi: BPRC (India) Ltd.

Meier, G.M. and Seers, D. (eds) (1984) Pioneers in Development, New York:

Published for the World Bank by Oxford University Press, pp. 273–311.

Prebisch, R. (1950) The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal

Problems, Santiago, Chile: United Nations Commission for Latin America.

Rostow, W.W. (1990) Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present

with a Perspective on the Next Century, New York: Oxford University Press.

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HANS WOLFGANG SINGER

Sapsford, D. and Chen, J. (eds) (1998) Development Economics and Policy: The

Conference Volume to Celebrate the 85th Birthday of Professor Sir Hans Singer,

Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.

—— (1999) ‘The Prebisch–Singer Thesis: A Thesis for the New Millennium’,

Journal of International Development 11(6): 863–916.

Shaw, D.J. (2002 and 2004) Sir Hans Singer: The Life and Work of a Development

Economist, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan (hardback); New

Delhi: BRPC (India) Ltd (paperback).

Singer, H.W. (1949) ‘Economic Progress in Under-developed Countries’, Social

Research 16(1): 236–66.

—— (1950) ‘The Distribution of Gains between Investing and Borrowing

Countries’, American Economic Review 40(2): 473–85.

The Pilgrim Trust (1938) Men Without Work: A Report Made to the Pilgrim Trust,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted (1968) New York:

Greenwood Press.

Toye, J. and Toye, R. (2003) ‘The Origin and Interpretation of the Prebisch–

Singer Thesis’, History of Political Economy 35(3): 437–67.

UN (1949) Relative Prices of Exports and Imports for Under-Developed Countries: A

Study of Post-War Terms of Trade between Under-Developed and Industrialized

Countries, 1949/II.B.3, New York: United Nations.

John Shaw

JOSEPH STIGLITZ (1943–)

Born in Gary, Indiana on 9 February 1943, Joseph Stiglitz is reputed to

have been dubbed by Paul Samuelson the best economist to have origi-

nated from the declining steel town. This is, however, the home town of

the first Nobel Laureate for the discipline. Stiglitz’s career has been aston-

ishing. As a graduate student he edited Samuelson’s Collected Papers. At

twenty-seven, he became full professor at Yale, subsequently taking

appointments at Stanford, Oxford, Princeton and Columbia. He received

the J.B. Clark award for outstanding economist under the age of forty. He

joined Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, serving as Chair and a

member of Cabinet. In 1997, he became the World Bank’s Chief Econo

mist, promoting the Comprehensive Development Framework with

President James Wolfensohn. In the putative turn away from the discred

ited neo-liberal Washington Consensus, he launched the post-Washington

Consensus. This helped to restore legitimacy to the Bretton Woods Insti

tutions as more state-, people- and development-friendly. In 2001, he was

awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in part for his role in founding the

New Development Economics, an element in his more general informa

tion-theoretic approach. In the volume of 2003 honouring his sixtieth

birthday, his list of publications runs to almost fifty pages, including

JOSEPH STIGLITZ

247

multiple editions of textbooks in economics, micro-economics, macro-

economics and the economics of the public sector.

Despite these astonishing achievements, Stiglitz would have remained a

significant but minor figure within development studies and economics

but for an event that catapulted him to prominence. He was forced to

resign from the World Bank at the instigation of Larry Summers, one of his

predecessors and, at the time, US Treasury Secretary of State. He insisted

that Stiglitz must go if Wolfensohn were to remain in office. The reason is

that, from the outset of his appointment at the World Bank, Stiglitz had

used his position to criticise the IMF. This became unacceptable once it

threatened policy rather than offering rhetoric, and Stiglitz had become

particularly outspoken over his opposition to privatisation in the former

Soviet Union and the austere macro-economic policies and financial

liberalisation imposed upon South Korea following the Asian crisis.

Close examination of Stiglitz’s economics reveals paradoxes. First, he is

not particularly radical in policy and theory nor are his conclusions particu-

larly original. Close attention to market imperfections leads him to seek

balance between market and state, safety nets, proper sequencing and regu-

lation of financial liberalisation in particular and other policies in general as

opposed to neo-liberal shock therapy. But from the 1980s onwards, litera-

ture critical of the Washington Consensus, especially that concerned with

the developmental state and adjustment with a human face, drew similar

conclusions. His emphasis on market and institutional imperfections as

especially characteristic of developing countries represents a partial redis-

covery of the old and classic development economics of what might be

termed the pre-Washington consensus of the McNamara period. Thus,

Stiglitz’s novelty lies less in the conclusions that he draws than in the infor-

mation-theoretic approach that he uses to obtain them, and the positions

from which he has been able to promote them with considerable and rare

intellectual integrity given the personal consequences.

Second, in his career, he seems to have become more radical, especially

after his break with the World Bank. He has set up an Initiative for Policy

Dialogue to promote alternatives to what he now terms neoclassical

economics, having redefined it as the idea that markets work perfectly in

order to distance himself from it. His critique of the Bretton Woods Insti

tutions, especially the IMF, has intensified. His book, Globalization and Its

Discontents, published in 2002, mainly concerned with a critique of the

IMF and his own experiences in promoting debate over his disagreements

with it, is a best-seller. He has been hailed as the champion of the poor for

his stances. But there is no increasing radicalisation in Stiglitz’s economics

apart from the loss of a naïve innocence about the power of his own ideas.

This is someone who has remained over his entire career committed to

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JOSEPH STIGLITZ

Keynesianism at the macro level and the correction of market imperfec

tions by capable government at the micro level. It is the intellectual envi

ronment that has changed rather than his position within it, opportunity

for prominence aside.

Third, then, within mainstream (development) economics, Stiglitz has

been at the forefront of the turn against neo-liberalism since the 1990s.

Marx argued of Ricardo that, for his analytics, it was sufficient to read the

first two chapters of his Principles. The first deals with the labour theory of

value as average labour time of production in industry, and the second,

inconsistent with the first by defining value at the margin of cultivation,

constructs a theory of rent. All the rest is application with no further theo

retical advance. While in part a put-down, Marx also viewed Ricardo as

the bourgeois political economist par excellence. This is because he applied

his principles and his own version of the labour theory of value ruthlessly to

whatever economic phenomena he cared to address.

What has this to do with Stiglitz? There are some striking parallels, and

contrasts, to be drawn between him and (Marx’s view of) Ricardo. First,

Stiglitz can also be understood as relying upon two principles, to the first of

which he is obsessively committed. With the second, as will be seen, it is

inconsistent although it is mainly implicit and unconscious. Stiglitz under-

stands the capitalist economy in terms of what he himself dubs a new para-

digm based on imperfect information. It deploys the idea that exchanges

take place between agents who are imperfectly and asymmetrically

informed. For this reason, markets are imperfect, and three potentially

inefficient sorts of outcome result. Markets may clear (supply equals

demand) but be inefficient (some trades beneficial to both parties do not

occur). This is so if potential buyers (sellers) of lower (higher) quality goods

do not wish to trade at a price reflecting a higher (lower) average quality.

Second, markets may not clear but prices not adjust in favour of the

short side (price increases if excess demand and decreases for excess supply).

An example is efficiency-wages where, despite surplus labour, wages fall

because employers anticipate a more than compensating loss in produc

tivity, loyalty and work intensity. Third, markets can be absent, as in health

insurance for the aged or sick. Any level of premium would attract an aver

age level of health risk that is too high as the healthier choose to risk self-

provision rather than pay premiums that reflect the sicklier.

For Stiglitz, these are general principles that apply to all markets,

their significance depending upon the nature of the imperfections, the

goods, the agents, and so forth specific to each market. His voluminous

writings reflect one application after another. But a difference from

Ricardo is that Stiglitz’s horizons extend beyond capitalism to deal with

development and the transitional economies. Further, Stiglitz also

JOSEPH STIGLITZ

249

addresses the non-economic or non-market responses to market imperfec

tions. Thus, institutions are perceived to be a, not necessarily efficient,

response to market imperfections. His theory of share-cropping summarily

dismisses both customary behaviour and exploitation as explanations in

favour of monitoring and incentive problems in case tenants know more

than landlords over production possibilities and work effort. Share-crop

ping is also used to argue that informational imperfections in one market,

land, can have knock-on effects on others, such as availability of credit,

choice of technique and capital intensity.

But other social sciences and political economy are notable for their

absence from Stiglitz’s work. His point of departure is the neoclassical eco

nomics of perfectly working markets, which he carefully picks to pieces

from his own perspective. His own paradigm, however, displays consider

able continuities with the neoclassical approach. Like Ricardo, his method

is deductive, even more explicitly drawing conclusions from axioms in the

form of models. These are embedded in the optimising behaviour of indi-

viduals from which micro-foundations underpin macro-outcomes in the

form of equilibrium. As with Ricardo, the logic of his deductive system is

used to confront chosen topics with scant regard to methodology

(deductivism wedded to naïve empiricism and falsifiability) or history of

economic thought (with occasional token misinterpretations of Adam

Smith as anticipating general equilibrium theory and Hayek the informa-

tion-theoretic approach, for example).

Stiglitz’s second analytical principle is to abandon his first and appeal to

social, structural or other factors than optimising individuals. The need to

do so arises in three ways. First, the deductive method always depends

upon the exogenous as parameters. How are these to be explained other

than to push out the boundaries further only to recreate them anew? Sec

ond, the real world has a nasty habit of revealing exploitation and power,

and inventiveness and culture, not reducible to a calculus of imperfectly

informed optimising agents engaged in individual acts of exchange with

one another. As Marx said of Ricardo’s theory of rent, his assumption of

free exchange and flow of capital onto the land would have been incom

prehensible to his contemporaries anywhere else in the world. By the same

token, can share-cropping be understood as free of exploitation and cul

tural factors, and development or lack of it the consequence of imperfec

tions, and independent of power and associated conflicts?

Third, Stiglitz’s own experience outside the academic world of neoclas

sical economics leads him to recognise the failure of his logic to prevail,

most notably in the acknowledged rise to power of a financial system with

its own compelling interests or the irrational dogma of his opponents. Sig

nificantly, these analytically residual categories leap to prominence in his

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more reflective and recent contributions. Globalization and Its Discontents

has no theory, scarcely a concept, of globalisation (other than reduction in

transport and communication costs) and, by contrast, the term is effectively

absent from all of his earlier work. This, and the account of his period as

advisor to Clinton, is entirely free of the information-theoretic approach.

But, if he is ultimately drawn to recognise social power and interests, these

should surely serve as analytical starting point rather than conclusion of

informationally constrained optimisation.

In short, in the intellectual assault upon neo-liberalism, Stiglitz has

played the leading role from within mainstream economics. He has not

promoted alternatives other than his own. His command of these, method

ology, history of economic thought, and the other social sciences is limited.

For some, this puts him in the vanguard, for others he holds back a more

radical and wide-ranging critique of neo-liberalism. Ultimately, his lasting

contribution will depend upon the extent to which others build upon, and

break with, his partial and distorted restoration of the classic understandings

of development.

Major works

For his own ‘Memoir’, see http://www-1.gsb.columbia.edu/f.PDF.

Chang, H.-J. (ed.) (2001) Joseph Stiglitz and the World Bank: The Rebel Within,

London: Anthem Press. (A collection of his essays promoting the post-

Washington Consensus.)

Stiglitz, J. (1986) ‘The New Development Economics’, World Development 14(2):

257–65. (A concise and early account of his approach to economics and

development.)

—— (1994) Whither Socialism?, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (For a fuller account

with application to transitional economies.)

—— (2001) ‘Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics’, available

at http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/2001/stiglitz-lecture.pdf. (His

own overview of his work, provided in his Nobel Prize Lecture.)

—— (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents, New York: W.W. Norton and Co.

(His critique of the IMF.)

—— (2003) The Roaring Nineties: Seeds of Destruction, New York: W.W. Norton

and Co. (For a narrative of his time on the Council of Economic Advisers.)

Further reading

For an appreciative assessment, see ‘Markets with Asymmetric Information’,

available on the Nobel website, http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/

2001/press.html, ‘Advanced Information’.

Arnott, R. et al. (eds) (2003) Economics for an Imperfect World: Essays in Honor of Joseph

E. Stiglitz, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Essays in honour of his sixtieth

birthday, including a full bibliography of his work.)

JOSEPH STIGLITZ

251

Fine, B. (2002) ‘Economics Imperialism and the New Development Economics as

Kuhnian Paradigm Shift’, World Development 30(12): 2057–70. (For critical

assessments of the information-theoretic approach as paradigm.)

Fine, B. et al. (eds) (2001) Development Policy in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond the

Post-Washington Consensus, London: Routledge. (For a critique of the post-

Washington Consensus.)

Fine, B. and Jomo, K. (eds) (2005) The New Development Economics: A Critical

Introduction, Delhi, Tulikar and London: Zed Books.

Wade, R. (2001) ‘Showdown at the World Bank’, New Left Review 7: 124–37. (For

his ‘resignation’ from the World Bank.)

Ben Fine

PAUL PATRICK STREETEN (1917–)

It would be a mistake to confine Paul Streeten to a small box labelled ‘de

velopment economics’ and to seek to assess him within the limits of a sub-

discipline when, like Keynes, Marx or Adam Smith himself, he is not only

a total economist but a person of many disciplines who has focused all his

intelligence on the great economic issues of his day. He is one of that small

band, which includes his two mentors and colleagues, Gunnar Myrdal

and Thomas Balogh, who are not only widely regarded in Europe and

North America as highly sophisticated economists, albeit dissenters, but

who have also thought long and hard about poorer parts of the world.

It has been observed that Streeten’s style ‘did not develop, it appeared

like Minerva from the head of Zeus, fully grown and armed’ (Stretton

1986: 1). He burst on the scene in 1949 with articles on the theories of

profit and pricing. These ‘dense, laconic, lucid papers’ (ibid.: 2) were fol

lowed during the next four years by seven more (one written in German,

one translated into French) on the inadequacy of the price mechanism;

exchange rates and national income; the inappropriateness of simple elas

ticity concepts in the theory of international trade (with Balogh); reserve

capacity and the kinked demand curve; the modern theory of welfare eco

nomics; the effect of taxation on risk taking; plus a translation from German

(with a thoughtful appendix) of Myrdal’s (1953) Political Element in the

Development of Economic Theory. And all the while he was tutoring across the

full range of economics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he had arrived as

a wounded soldier-student near the end of World War II.

For the next fifty years a steady stream of articles, books and policy

reports was to emerge from the head of Zeus all beautifully written, clear,

erudite, witty, modest and fully armed. For Paul Streeten has an unrivalled

mastery of economics. His next essay was on ‘Keynes and the Classics’

(1954). Then he edited Myrdal’s essays and gave expression to his concern

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with methodology and with values in the social sciences: ‘Values are not

something to be discarded, nor even something to be made explicit in

order to be separated from empirical matter, but are ever-present and per

meate empirical analysis through and through’ (Streeten 1958: xiii). And

he saw the importance of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, concerning

the mutual impact of the observer and the observed, with all its implica

tions (ibid.: xv). It is an essay, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics

(1954), which he regards as his most genuinely innovative contribution but

which made no impact on the profession. It remains required reading.

While he continued to generate new insights as his experience widened,

Streeten was to remain remarkably consistent down the years in his

analytical style and focus.

‘My interest in social justice’, he wrote in his mid-seventies, ‘dates back

to my childhood’ (Streeten 1994: preface). It was a childhood far removed

from the quiet Balliol of his early writing and teaching. For Paul Hornig, as

he was born in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, grew up in

the hectic society of Vienna between the wars. His father died before he

was two but his mother and his aunt moved in intellectual circles, where

the young Paul met and was influenced by a wide range of thinkers, includ-

ing Max Adler, Karl Popper, several psychologists and the leading Utopian

socialist, Otto Bauer. As a teenager he was active in the socialist youth

movement, the Roten Falken (Red Falcons), battling fiercely with the radi-

cal right. But all this ended abruptly in March 1938, when the Nazis

marched into Vienna:

I was on several lists and the combination of being a Jew and politi-

cally active on the left would have been enough. But though enqui-

ries were made at our old flat, I was not given away. I believe there

was an SS officer who was a friend of mine (vintage Streeten!) and

who had deleted my name from the list of those to be arrested. I wit

nessed the hysterical city on the day of the Anschluss. I walked

through the streets, and saw the armoured Nazi cars cheered by the

crowds. The Viennese, reputed for their Gemütlichkeit, revealed faces

distorted by hate as they shouted hysterically ‘Heil Hitler’, ‘Ein Volk,

ein Reich, ein Führer’. It was a deplorable and frightening sight.

(Streeten 1985: 47)

If Austria in the 1930s had been turbulent, the next five years were to

take the young man on a dizzying roller-coaster. ‘Attempts to leave were

entirely haphazard’ but with the help of English friends he managed to

cross the Channel, where he was looked after by a group of Christians

including a family in Cambridge and two sisters in Sussex, Marjorie and

PAUL PATRICK STREETEN

253

Dorothy Streeten. Arriving just before May Week, ‘The transition from

the turbulence, hysteria, fear and ghastliness of Vienna to the peace, tran

quillity, and sunshine of the Master’s lodgings in a Cambridge College …

was an extraordinary experience’ (ibid.: 48). But more was to follow. He

went to Aberdeen University, where he studied Political Economy for

nearly two years until he was interned for being an enemy alien, even

though he had volunteered for the Royal Air Force. For the next year he

was shunted from pillar to Canada where he and his companions, some of

whom later became very distinguished, were held behind layers of barbed

wire, towers, armed sentries and searchlights. Like the prisoners of Robben

Island twenty-five years later, they started a University at which Paul over

came his deficiency in mathematics at the feet of Hermann Bondi, cos

mologist and subsequently co-creator of the steady-state theory of the

universe. He learned enough to be able to view with a beady eye the subse

quent work of the mathematical model builders in economics. Forty years

on he was to remark with his special combination of self-deprecation and

rapier wit that,

Of course, without a thorough training in mathematics, one feels

nowadays like a handloom weaver in the days after the invention of

the power loom. But the thought is made bearable by the fact that

the power loom seems to be weaving the Emperor’s clothes.

(ibid.: 56)

After five months behind the Canadian barbed wire, this motley crew

was returned to England for another few months of cold, hungry, over

crowded internment. But eventually, as a long-distance runner, he man

aged to attract the attention of the authorities who were looking for men

able to handle the arduous hush-hush work of the Inter-Allied Com

mando. Here, during training, they were told to pick English names in case

they were taken prisoner behind enemy lines and shot as traitors. And thus,

‘in a few seconds’ the young man changed from Hornig to Streeten and

assumed the cover story of his adopted family. The maiden sisters were very

pleased. Subsequently he was trained for the invasion of Sicily where, in

the summer of 1943, he was badly wounded. It was a watershed day. ‘[N]o

more punting, rock climbing, skiing, running’ (ibid.: 54). Indeed he was

not expected to survive but, after hospitalisation in Cairo, he arrived in

Balliol late the following year to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

The roller-coaster ride was over.

Twenty years later he was still in Oxford, teaching and writing hard.

During the 1960s two things happened to determine his future direction.

The critique of ‘balanced growth’ by Rosenstein-Rodan, Nurkse and

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PAUL PATRICK STREETEN

others became a focus of debate in the profession and Streeten found that

his own thinking about Europe (Streeten 1961) was relevant. Second,

Gunnar Myrdal asked him to collaborate in the research and writing of

Asian Drama. ‘And underlying these two tributaries, there was my … inter

est in the world community and my objections to the nation state and

nationalism as a form of heresy’ (ibid.). And so the die was cast.

In 1968 Asian Drama was published and Streeten co-edited The Crisis of

Indian Planning (Streeten and Lipton 1968). Three years later he co-edited

Commonwealth Policy in a Global Context (Streeten and Corbet 1971). This

was followed by a small gem, Aid to Africa (Streeten 1972a). A generation

later it is still worth reading. This was accompanied by The Frontiers of

Development Studies ‘on the problems of development in which rich and

poor countries co-exist and where the presence and policies of the rich

crucially affect the development efforts and prospects of the poor’ (Streeten

1972b). In Oxford in 1973 (at the invitation of the later-notorious pub

lisher, Robert Maxwell), he became founding editor of the journal, World

Development, which was to become influential as a monthly forum for

debate. ‘Our goal’, he wrote in what might almost be his testament, ‘is to

learn from one another, regardless of nation or culture, income, academic

discipline, profession or ideology. We hope to set a modest example of

enduring global co-operation through maintaining an international dia-

logue and dismantling barriers to communication.’

For the next twenty-

five years a steady stream of articles, reviews and ‘essays in biography’

sprang from the editorial pen. It was not until 2003, in his mid-eighties,

that he stepped down as chairman of the editorial board.

In June 1976 the International Labour Organisation held a seminal

world employment conference in Geneva, where a strategy to ‘satisfy the

most basic needs of all people in the shortest possible time’ was endorsed

(ILO 1977). Shortly after this, Streeten was asked by Mahbub ul Haq,

then director of policy planning at the World Bank, to lead the Bank’s stra

tegic thinking about ‘Basic Needs’. He did a brilliant job and, in his dual

role of missionary and interpreter, converted everybody within the Bank

so effectively that the strategy of Basic Needs is widely perceived to be that

institution’s major contribution to thinking about development (Streeten

1981). But even then his questioning mind could see the unanswered ques

tions, the ambiguities. In a paper delivered in apartheid South Africa in

1984, he observed that ‘It is not at all clear whether the basic needs

approach mobilizes the power of the poor to improve radically their situa

tion or whether it reinforces the oppressive existing order’ (Streeten 1984).

But he stated pointedly that, ‘the freedom to define one’s needs is itself a

basic need’ (ibid.: 3).

PAUL PATRICK STREETEN

255

During the 1980s, Paul Streeten (then based at Boston University) was

at his most effective as scholar-statesman. After his success at the World

Bank, he was asked by the ILO to be joint leader of a Mission to Tanzania

to help devise a basic needs oriented development strategy for that country

(ILO 1982). Coming at a moment of great crisis when President Julius

Nyerere’s idealistic economic and social policies, with their consistent

goal of slaying the postcolonial dragons of Umaskini, Ujinga na Maradhi,

seemed to have come unstuck, the report was a masterly document. And

Streeten’s fingerprints were all over it. While expressing deep empathy for

the vision of one of Africa’s great leaders, the report examined, unflinch

ingly, what had gone wrong and what could be done to put it right. From

what happened subsequently in Tanzania, it would seem that the report

was heard. A few years later the IMF and the Indian Council for Research

on International Economic Relations convened a seminar in Mumbai

(Streeten 1988) to tackle the hot topic of structural adjustment in Asia.

Once again Streeten was to play a crucial role as enabler and mediator.

Observing that his criterion for a good seminar, which it had been, was to

meet again one old friend and to make one new one, he went on to edit the

book and write the summary of the discussion with its characteristic

conclusion:

Perhaps the most important general lesson that emerged was that

there are no general lessons, and that each case has to be treated sepa-

rately and on its merits. This pragmatic approach made it possible to

discuss policies without getting bogged down in ideological or dog-

matic positions.

(ibid.: 17)

Streeten was now in his seventies, an age when most people are begin

ning to slow down, but his greatest book was still to come. Five long lec

tures (plus appendices), delivered in Italy, form the core of Thinking about

Development (Streeten 1995). It is a potent distillation, with even now new

insights, of a life-time focused on the great global questions of the past sixty

years. It is full of what Michael Lipton calls ‘Streetenesque subtlety’

(Lipton 1977: 214). As Peter Timmer of Harvard has said, he is truly ‘one of

our wisest scholars’.

While the lectures in Italy were focused on ‘the eradi

cation of poverty in the world’, a small book (Streeten 1994) published in

Denmark at much the same time focused more particularly on unemploy

ment. But he was not yet finished. In 2001, in his mid-eighties, Streeten

published Globalisation: Threat or Opportunity?, where he was able to clarify

the two contradictory aspects and to consider the implications of a phe

nomenon with which he had been wrestling all his life.

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PAUL PATRICK STREETEN

Paul Streeten is truly a world economist, not limited by the blinkers of

the hidden assumptions of those confined to any one nation state or region;

someone who is able to see problems both from the inside, at the grassroots,

and also from an overall perspective. Drawing on his mastery of economics,

his wide reading in many other subjects, and on his own vast experience,

Paul Streeten has increased the understanding and enhanced the capacity of

scholars and policy-makers around the globe.

Notes

1 World Development: Notes for contributors.

2 Poverty, Ignorance and Disease in kiSwahili, Personal observation, Dar es

Salaam, July 1963.

3 Cover comment on Paul Streeten, What Price Food? Agricultural Price Policies in

Developing Countries, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1987.

Major works

Streeten, P. (1949) ‘The Theory of Profit’, Manchester School, vol xvii, no.3. For a

detailed bibliography of his work (up to 1991) see Streeten 1995: 357–80.

—— (1954) ‘Keynes and the Classics’, in K. Kurihara (ed.), Post-Keynesian

Economics, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

—— (1954) ‘Programmes and Prognoses, Unbalanced Growth and the Ideal Plan’,

Quarterly Journal of Economics, lxviii(3) (August): 355–76; reprinted as

Introduction to Gunnar Myrdal (1958) Value in Social Theory, London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul.

—— (1955) ‘Reformed Capitalism in Britain’, in Robert L. Heilbroner, The Great

Economists: Their Lives and their Conceptions of the World, British edn, London:

Eyre & Spottiswood.

—— (1958) ‘Introduction’, in Gunnar Myrdal (ed.), Value in Social Theory,

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. xiii.

—— (1961) Economic Integration: Aspects and Problems, Leiden: A.W. Sythoff,

chap. 5.

—— (1964) Economic Integration: Aspects and Problems, Leiden: A.W. Sythoff, 2nd

enlarged edn, chap. 5.

—— (ed.) (1970) Unfashionable Economics: Essays in Honour of Lord Balogh, London:

Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

—— (1972a) Aid to Africa: A Policy Outline for the 1970s, New York: Praeger.

—— (1972b) The Frontiers of Development Studies, London: Macmillan.

—— (1984) ‘Basic Needs: Some Unsettled Questions’, Carnegie Conference

Paper no. 8, University of Cape Town.

—— (1985) An Autobiographical Fragment, Balliol College Annual Record, Oxford:

Balliol College, Oxford.

—— (1987) What Price Food? Agricultural Price Policies in Developing Countries, Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press.

—— (ed.) (1988) Beyond Adjustment: The Asian Experience, Washington, DC: IMF.

—— (1994) Strategies for Human Development: Global Poverty and Unemployment,

Copenhagen: Handelshojskolens Forlag, preface.

PAUL PATRICK STREETEN

257

—— (1995) Thinking About Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—— (2001) Globalisation: Threat or Opportunity?, Copenhagen: Handelshojskolens

Forlag.

Streeten, P. and Corbet, H. (eds) (1971) Commonwealth Policy in a Global Context,

London: Frank Cass.

Streeten, P. and Lipton, M. (eds) (1968) The Crisis of Indian Planning: Economic Policy

in the 1960s, London: Oxford University Press.

Streeten, P., with others (1981) First Things First: Meeting Basic Human Needs in the

Developing Countries, New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank.

Further reading

Balogh, T. (1963) Unequal Partners, 2 vols, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

International Labour Office (1977) Employment, Growth and Basic Needs: A One-

World Problem, New York: Praeger.

—— (1982) Basic Needs in Danger: A Basic Needs Oriented Development Strategy for

Tanzania, Addis Ababa: ILO.

Lipton, M. (1977) Why Poor People Stay Poor: A Study of Urban Bias in World

Development, London: Temple Smith.

Myrdal, G. (1953) The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory,

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

—— (1958) Value in Social Theory: A Selection of Essays on Methodology, ed. Paul

Streeten, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

—— (1968) Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, New York:

Random House.

Stretton, H. (1986) ‘Paul Streeten: An Appreciation’, in Sanjaya Lall and Frances

Stewart, F., Theory and Reality in Development, London: Macmillan.

Francis Wilson

JAMES TOBIN (1918–2002)

James Tobin is one of the few economists working primarily in the main

stream of that discipline who has gained wide respect among development

scholars, politicians and activists. Paradoxically, perhaps, he is best known

for the proposal in 1972 to tax speculative electronic financial transactions

and that, thanks to the recent international campaign, now bears his name.

By contrast, his simultaneous contribution to measuring human welfare in

broader terms than by per capita GNP alone is now less well remembered.

James Tobin, Nobel Laureate and widely regarded as the USA’s fore

most Keynesian economist of the twentieth century, was born in Cham

paign, Illinois, on 5 March 1918, where he grew up with his younger

brother, attending neighbourhood schools and then the University High

School in Urbana, Champaign’s twin city. There, according to the autobi

ography that he delivered on the occasion of his Nobel Prize award in

1981, he obtained a ‘marvellous’ education from the university’s student

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JAMES TOBIN

teachers and their trainers and was able to play in the university basketball

team, ‘fulfilling ambitions that had seemed beyond reach in my childhood’

(Tobin 1981: 1). His father, Louis, a journalist and publicity director for

University of Illinois athletics, had a profound influence on his develop

ment: ‘My father also happened to be an intellectual, as learned, literate,

informed, and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casu

ally, he was my wise and gentle teacher’ (Tobin 1981: 1).

Tobin also attributes to his father the decision to apply to Harvard rather

than the local University of Urbana-Champaign (where he had expected

to land up studying law). Success in the entrance exams saw him head for

Cambridge, Massachusetts, in late 1935, leaving the Midwest for the first

time. There he spent six years, four of them as an undergraduate, in a

period which he described as Harvard’s ‘golden age’ in Economics before

and during World War II. Among his most influential teachers he counts

Joseph Schumpeter, Alvin Hansen, Seymour Harris, Edward Mason,

Gottfried Haberler and Wassily Leontief, while young faculty and fellow

graduates included Paul Samuelson, Lloyd Metzler, Paul Sweezy, John

Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Musgrave and Richard Gilbert, all of whom

later became prominent economists.

Following US naval service after Pearl Harbour, Tobin returned to

complete his PhD at Harvard in 1946–7 on one of his abiding interests, the

theory and statistics of the consumption function, by then persuaded that

he would follow an academic career. Shortly after returning, he met, and in

September 1946 married, Elizabeth (Betty) Fay Ringo, a former student of

Samuelson. A postdoctoral fellowship enabled Tobin to remain at Harvard

– with a stint at the Deptartment of Applied Economics in Cambridge

(UK) – until 1950. Thereafter, he moved to an associate professorship in

economics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, gaining a full

professorship in 1955 and assuming the named Sterling Professorship of

Economics two years later. There he directed the Cowles Foundation for

Research in Economics from 1955 to 1961, chaired the Economics

Department from 1974 to 1978 and remained a distinguished figure until

retirement in 1988 and subsequently as emeritus professor until his death

on 11 March 2002, just six days after his eighty-fourth birthday.

Tobin’s career was punctuated by a series of visiting appointments at

other universities. However, the absence from Yale of which he was most

proud was to serve on President John F. Kennedy’s Council of Economic

Advisors in Washington, DC from 1961 to 1962 alongside fellow luminar

ies like Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow. Although he soon returned to

academia, he continued as a consultant to the Council for several more

years and the experience influenced much of his subsequent work (Tobin

1966, 1974, 1987; Tobin and Wallis, 1968; Tobin and Weidenbaum 1988;

JAMES TOBIN

259

Perry and Tobin 2000). Tobin’s enduring interest in financial markets and

investment decision-making is reflected in another string of books (Hester

and Tobin, 1967a, 1967b, 1967c; Tobin 1970, 1982; Tobin and Golub

1998) and journal articles. His proposal for a tax on speculative foreign

exchange transactions originated from this strand of work (Tobin 1974).

Altogether, Tobin published some 400 journal articles, the most impor

tant of which were subsequently republished in a four-volume set of Essays

in Economics (1972, 1975, 1982 and 1996a), reflecting the principal the

matic phases of his output. A fifth set, embracing his later work on global

markets and finance, was published posthumously (Tobin 2003). Unlike

most academic economists, Tobin was as comfortable – and forthright –

penning topical potboilers for newspapers as in preparing scholarly

treatises.

His reputation in the development world rests principally on three con

tributions, none of which was directed specifically at developing countries

at the time. Indeed, he was very much a liberal American international

economist in the Keynesian tradition. The first pertinent contribution

reflects this directly, namely his sustained critique of the monetarist dogma

popularised by Milton Friedman in Chicago and later adopted in part by

President Reagan. Among those impressed by Friedman’s monetarism

were a group of young Chilean economics students who subsequently

undertook its ‘purest’ implementation under Augusto Pinochet’s military

dictatorship after 1973. Combined with the political repression, this caused

much hardship to the poor but heralded what was widely known interna-

tionally as Chile’s ‘economic miracle’, one of the inspirations for the inter-

national financial institutions in formulating their neoliberal policies to

tackle the 1980s debt crisis.

Tobin’s other two most notable development-oriented interventions

date from the early 1970s. ‘Is Economic Growth Obsolete?’ (Nordhaus and

Tobin 1972) initiated what became a sustained critique of using GNP (per

capita) as the principal measure of human welfare when, in fact, it is an

indicator of marketed production. This idea, and the several deductions

and additions required to approximate a more useful indicator, the Mea

sure of Economic Welfare (MEW), quickly entered economic textbooks

and informed a generation of economics undergraduates. To those, myself

included, learning their craft amid the daily realities of the global South,

where most people engaged at least partially in non-marketed production

and trade, this made eminent sense and represented an all-too-rare attempt

to relate conventional economic theory to familiar conditions. This line of

critique spawned experiments with compound indicators to avoid the

limitations of reliance on a single variable. Ultimately the Human Devel

opment Index (HDI) was introduced by the United Nations Development

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JAMES TOBIN

Programme (UNDP) in 1990 and has become the most widely used index

for international comparisons of development as well-being.

Tobin’s most widely known contribution to development thinking is

the ‘Tobin Tax’ proposal for what he called ‘sand in the wheels’ of interna

tional financial markets to reduce volatility and the profits from short-term

speculative transactions relative to longer-term productive flows. Many

years later, Tobin (1996b: x) observed that his early effort on the subject

(Tobin 1974, 1978) ‘did not make much of a ripple. In fact, one might say

that it sank like a rock. The community of professional economists simply

ignored it.’ That fate he attributed to the inherent objection of most eco

nomists and bankers to any market interference, accompanied by claims

that it would drive financial markets to offshore tax havens while not

reducing exchange rate fluctuations and speculative attacks. However,

Most disappointing and surprising, critics seemed to miss what I

regarded as the essential property of the transactions tax – the beauty

part – that this simple, one-parameter tax would automatically

penalize short-horizon round trips, while negligibly affecting the

incentives for commodity trade and long-term capital investments.

A 0.2% tax on a round trip to another currency costs 48% if trans-

acted every business day, 10% if every week, 2.4% if every month.

But it is a trivial charge on commodity trade or long-term foreign

investments.

(Tobin 1996b: xi)

Tobin viewed the tax as the principal objective, with use of the funds

thereby raised for multilateral purposes ‘as a by-product’. However, the

resurgence of interest that commenced at the World Social Summit in

Copenhagen in 1994 and which is attributable to the extreme currency

speculation of the mid-1990s, regards this revenue as no less important.

Even a tax rate of only 0.1 per cent (half of Tobin’s original proposal),

could raise between US$50 and 300 billion annually, thereby matching

existing levels of official development assistance (War on Want n.d.). By

1996, the IMF’s chief economist was also quite positive; the campaign has

gathered momentum since, led in part by the development NGOs, War on

Want and Oxfam, while several countries, notably Canada, France and

Belgium, support the plan and/or have introduced enabling legislation. It is

important to note, though, that supporters’ motives vary: some, like

Tobin, focus principally on the need for reduced financial market volatility

and the efficiency of the proposed tax; many development lobbyists see sta

bility and the funds accruing as being equally important; while anti-

globalisation protesters hope that it will retard financial globalisation.

JAMES TOBIN

261

Whether tactically or genuinely, Tobin (1996b; Patomäki 2001: 124–5)

has expressed uneasiness at the political agendas of some of the new protag

onists of the tax. Today, concerns over some practical implementation

problems and the loss of governmental sovereignty thereby implied and a

lack of political will remain the major obstacles to its implementation.

However, Tobin (1996b, 1996c) rejected most of these claims, pointing

out, for instance, that the tax would restore to governments some eco

nomic sovereignty already lost to international financial markets. More

over, Patomäki (2001) argues that universal agreement is no longer a

prerequisite. His important contribution also takes a broader view of finan

cial markets as co-responsible for the widening of global disparities and the

current global financial institutional arrangements as inadequate and ineffi

cient. Hence Patomäki advocates the tax on the additional grounds of

global-scale distributive justice, the shared ideal of democracy, and human

emancipation.

James Tobin’s robust commentaries on contemporary economics also

embraced the international arena, as illustrated by the conclusion to a 1993

paper on the challenges facing nation states in our increasingly interdepen-

dent world:

Our economies are increasingly interdependent. Our opportunities

are increasingly worldwide. Our maladies are contagious and inter-

twined. The leaders of the G7 countries have yet to show apprecia-

tion of the seriousness of the problems they jointly face, let alone

enough imagination and initiative to seek joint remedies. In com-

parison with their predecessors who confronted the tasks of world

economic recovery after World War II and responded with the Mar

shall Plan, the Bretton Woods institutions and the GATT, our pres-

ent leaders are pygmies.

(Tobin 1996d: 189)

Tobin’s reputation spawned invitations to deliver a bewildering array of

named lectures worldwide. Between 1967 and 1996, he also received no

fewer than twenty-one honorary doctorates (mainly LL Ds and Doctorates

of Humane Letters), from some of the USA’s leading universities and col

leges (including Syracuse, Illinois, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, New York,

Colgate, Harvard and Wisconsin-Madison) and three in Europe. He

became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1972 and in

1981 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in recognition of

his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions,

employment, production and prices.

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JAMES TOBIN

These honours, his prolific published output and their influence will

ensure that his reputation endures. However, outside the USA at least, he

will probably best be remembered for a modest proposal in 1972, long dep

recated but ultimately resurrected in the form of a global campaign for the

Tobin Tax about which he claimed to feel uneasy. As for the man himself,

fellow economist, Paul Krugman (2002), paid him this tribute:

He was a great economist and a remarkably good man; his passing

seems to me to symbolize the passing of an era, one in which eco

nomic debate was both nicer and a lot more honest than it is today …

and I mourn not just his passing, but the passing of an era when econ

omists of such fundamental decency could flourish, and even influ

ence policy.

Major works

Hester, D.D. and Tobin, J. (eds) (1967a) Studies of Portfolio Behavior, New York:

Wiley.

—— (eds) (1967b) Risk Aversion and Portfolio Choice, New York: Wiley.

—— (1967c) Financial Markets and Economic Activity, New York: Wiley.

Nordhaus, W. and Tobin, J. (1972) ‘Is Economic Growth Obsolete?’, National

Bureau of Economic Research, Fifth Anniversary Colloquium V, New York: NBER

(an earlier version appeared as Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 319 in 1971).

Perry, G.L. and Tobin, J. (2000) Economic Events, Ideas and Policies: the 1960s and

After, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Tobin, J. (1966) National Economic Policy, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

—— (1970) Asset Accumulation and Economic Activity: Reflections on Contemporary

Macroeconomic Theory, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (reprinted by

University of Chicago Press, 1982).

—— (1972) Essays in Economics Vol. 1: Macroeconomics, Chicago, IL: Markham

(reprinted by MIT Press, 1987).

—— (1974) The New Economics a Decade Older, Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.

—— (1975) Essays in Economics Vol. 2: Consumption and Econometrics, Amsterdam:

North-Holland (reprinted by MIT Press, 1987).

—— (1978) ‘A Proposal for International Monetary Reform’, Eastern Economic

Journal 4: 153–9.

—— (1982) Essays in Economics, Vol. 3: Theory and Policy, Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.

—— (1987) Policies for Prosperity; Essays in a Keynesian Mode, Brighton: Wheatsheaf

Books.

—— (1996a) Essays in Economics, Vol. 4: National and International, Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press.

—— (1996b) ‘Prologue’, in Ul Haq, M., Kaul, I. and Grunberg, I. (eds), The Tobin

Tax: Coping with Financial Volatility, New York and London: Oxford University

Press.

JAMES TOBIN

263

—— (1996c) ‘A Currency Transactions Tax: Why and How’, Open Economies

Review 7: 493–9.

—— (1996d) Full Employment and Growth: Further Keynesian Essays on Policy,

Cheltenham and Lyme, NH: Edward Elgar.

—— (2003) World Finance and Economic Stability: Selected Essays of James Tobin,

Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

Tobin, J. and Golub, S.S. (1998) Money, Credit and Capital, Boston, MA: Irwin/

McGraw-Hill

Tobin, J. and Wallis, W.A. (1968) Welfare Programs: An Economic Appraisal,

Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute.

Tobin, J. and Weidenbaum, M. (eds) (1988) Two Revolutions in Economic Policy: the

First Economic Reports of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.

Further reading

Krugman, P. (2002) ‘Missing James Tobin’, New York Times, 3 December (also at

www.pkarchive.org/column/031202.html, accessed on 9 February 2005).

Patomäki, H. (2001) Democratising Globalisation: the Leverage of the Tobin Tax,

London: Zed Books.

Tobin, J. (1981) Autobiography (www.nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/

1981/tobin-autobio.html, accessed 9 February 2005).

War on Want (n.d.) The Tobin Tax: Win–Win for the World’s Poor (Briefing),

London: War on Want (available at http://www.tobintax.org.uk).

David Simon

MAHBUB UL HAQ (1934–98)

[The] UNDP and the United Nations system as a whole owe

Mahbub a big debt of gratitude. Perhaps more than any other indi

vidual, he changed forever the way we think about development.

(Dijibril Diallo 1998: 2)

When he passed away on 16 July 1998, the Pakistani economist, Mahbub

Ul Haq (‘Loved by God’ as the name means in Arabic), had achieved inter

national acclaim as a scholar-administrator who had pioneered new visions

of human development and initiated the UNDP’s Human Development

Report series. Ul Haq served as Chief Economist in the Pakistan Planning

Commission (1957–70) and as Director of the World Bank’s Policy Plan

ning Department (1970–82). Mahbub’s influence on global development

policy debates was also tangible; he was the Chairman of the North–South

Roundtable (1979–84), an eminent adviser to the Brandt Commission

(1980–2) and a Governor of the IMF (1985) and also the World Bank

(1988). Mahbub served on the governing boards of numerous international

institutions and think-tanks, including the Earth Council, the World

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Commission on Culture and Development and the Institute of Interna

tional Economics (Speth 1998). UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan,

described Ul Haq’s untimely death from pneumonia as ‘a loss to the world’

(cited in HDC 1998: 1).

Having studied Economics at Government College in Lahore, Ul Haq

moved to Cambridge University where he studied for a Masters degree and

began a longstanding friendship with Amartya Sen. In the memorial lec

ture for Ul Haq on 15 October 1998, Sen recalled the discussions they had

after arriving at Cambridge about conventional economics and its potential

contribution in India and Pakistan. Sen explained that they both needed to

learn Economics to be heard ‘but not use it much … who really wants to

know what determines the price of toothpaste?’ (Sen cited in Rosenfield

1998: 1). At twenty-one, Ul Haq left Cambridge and continued his educa

tion studying for a PhD at Yale, from where he returned to Pakistan to

work for the Federal Government as Chief Economist of the National

Planning Commission until 1970. Working on the formulation and imple-

mentation of Pakistan’s five-year development plans, Mahbub later

declared, represented ‘happy days. My sights were set, my horizon was

clear, and there was no hesitancy in my views about economic develop-

ment’ (Ul Haq 1976: 3).

Ul Haq set to work in 1960, while at Harvard, on The Strategy of Eco-

nomic Planning: A Case Study of Pakistan (Ul Haq 1963). The book

attempted to express themes of poverty and economic development in

Pakistan and was concerned with the potential barriers to progress: the

deeply unequal pattern of landholding, the pervasive illiteracy and the

‘warped development’ that favoured a privileged minority (Ul Haq 1973:

1). In April 1968, Mahbub made a speech in Karachi about the twenty-two

‘industrial family groups’ that had come to warp, skew and dominate

national economic and political affairs. Not surprisingly, the speech created

major shockwaves in Pakistan and beyond. Although Julius Nyerere

wrote to Ul Haq with a letter of appreciation and Indira Gandhi used sec

tions of Mahbub’s speeches in her own policy presentations, Dr Haq later

recalled that ‘[t]he academic community in the Western world reacted in

shocked disbelief: one of its own products had suddenly gone berserk’ (Ul

Haq 1976: 8). Keen to avoid doctrinaire economics and planning philoso

phies, Amartya Sen has noted that this book was ‘informed by a general

recognition that while a poor economy may take a very long time to

become a rich country through GNP growth, the conditions of human liv

ing can be changed much more rapidly through intelligent policy making’

(Sen cited in Rosenfield 1998: 1). Calling for properly targeted social inter

vention, the book began a longstanding commitment to interrogate GNP

as a measure of progress, focusing on non-economic methods of securing

MAHBUB UL HAQ

265

positive change and improving the quality and targeting of development

policy. In reference to this work, Ul Haq later reflected that ‘[t]hough I

have written much else since then my detractors have seldom allowed me

to forget my original writings, perhaps believing that the evolution of ideas

is an unforgivable sin’ (cited in HDC 1998: 2).

Ul Haq’s writings and speeches about inequality and economic growth

brought him to the attention of World Bank President, Robert

McNamara. During his tenure at the World Bank (1970–82), Ul Haq was

credited with making a major contribution to the Bank’s philosophy of

development economics. Upon his death in 1998, the President of the

World Bank, James Wolfensohn, wrote in a letter to Mahbub’s wife

Khadija that ‘probably more than anyone else [Ul Haq] provided the intel

lectual impetus for the Bank’s commitment to poverty reduction in the

early 1970s’ (cited in HDC 1998: 1). As Director of the Bank’s Policy Plan

ning Department, Ul Haq set out to steer more attention towards poverty

alleviation programmes, nutrition, water supply, education, social welfare

and increased allocations for small farm production. According to one trib-

ute, through this work Mahbub was able to ‘help sensitise a cold commer-

cial lending institution to the concerns of the poor in the Third World’

(Jabbar 1998: 2). Drawing upon his involvement with the Bank, Ul Haq

wrote The Poverty Curtain: Choices for the Third World (1976), which high-

lighted the neglect of human resources in development planning and was a

seminal study that provided an important precursor for the Bank’s later

development of the basic needs and human development approaches of the

1980s (Ul Haq and Burki 1980; HDC 1998). In the book, the ‘seven sins’

committed by the ‘priesthood of development planners’ are highlighted.

These included playing ‘numbers games’, constructing excessive economic

controls, being constantly preoccupied with ‘investment illusions’, the

addiction to ‘development fashions’, the divorcing of planning and imple

mentation and the growing ‘mesmerization’ of planners with high growth

rates in GNP.

During the early 1970s, Mahbub shifted his attention towards the intel

lectual self-reliance of the ‘Third World’ and became more concerned at

the simplicity of some intellectual dialogues about development at the

international level (Ul Haq 1976). This feeling was sharpened by his expe

rience of the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm

in 1972 and a growing awareness of North–South differences of environ

mental perspective: ‘what were we really doing sitting through endless

seminars and conferences where our own voice was neither solicited nor

heard?’ (Ul Haq 1976: 84). Along with Samir Amin and others who had

shared these concerns and had also been present at Stockholm, Ul Haq

founded the Third World Forum, an action group of around 100 leading

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intellectuals from the South, which first met in Santiago (Chile) and forma

lised its own constitution in Karachi in 1975.

In the early 1980s, Mahbub left the World Bank to return to Pakistan to

work as Minister of Finance, Planning and Commerce (1982–88). Under

General Zia Ul Haq’s regime (no relation), Mahbub is credited with a

major acceleration in social spending and with instigating significant tax

reforms, new initiatives for poverty reduction, economic deregulation and

an increased emphasis on human development (HDC 1998). Nonetheless,

in reflecting some years later on his time in cabinet, Ul Haq spoke of his

lack of independence and the fact that he was ‘not able to do very much’

(cited in Brazier 1994: 4). As he put it in an interview in 1994: ‘I did

accomplish some things but I was part of a very élitist system dominated by

landlords in the Assembly, by élitist groups in the government, and by the

Army, which would not let any trade-off take place between military and

social expenditure’ (cited in Brazier 1994: 4). It could be argued that

Mahbub’s experience of these restrictions and ‘trade-offs’ between the

economic and social realms of development were to have a big impact on

his ideas in the years ahead and particularly when his attention turned to the

measurement and conceptualisation of ‘human development’.

In 1989 Ul Haq and his wife and intellectual partner, Khadija, moved to

New York where he became Special Adviser to the UNDP administrator

(1989–95). In doing so, he was reunited with Amartya Sen and also came

together with Frances Stewart, Richard Jolly and Meghnad Desai to pre-

pare the annual Human Development Reports (HDRs). According to Sen,

Mahbub explained that ‘[w]e need a measure of the same level of vulgarity

as the GNP – just one number – but a measure that is not as blind to social

aspects of human lives as the GNP is’ (cited in Rosenfield 1998: 2). The

Human Development Index (HDI) is now a central and recognised tool for

the UNDP and although Sen admits to initially finding the HDI a bit

‘coarse’, it helped bring about a ‘major change in the understanding and

statistical accounting of the process of development’ (Sen, cited in HDC

1998: 2). Critics of the HDI would come back to this issue of the coarse and

oversimplified nature of the Index and have continued to highlight the

costliness and numerous errors of HDRs as well as the poor quality of the

underlying data. The initiation of the HDRs has been seen by some as a

way for Ul Haq (who was their chief architect) to atone for his failure with

human development issues in Pakistan (Brazier 1998: 4). According to

Amartya Sen, however, the special achievement of the HDRs is that they

bring ‘an inescapably pluralist conception of progress to the exercise of

development evaluation’ (Sen 2000: 18).

Following his retirement from the UNDP, Mahbub initiated a new

series of HDRs in South Asia published by the Human Development

MAHBUB UL HAQ

267

Centre (HDC) he established in Islamabad. In his final years, Ul Haq began

to deepen and further his interest in human security issues and in the

regional crisis of governance in Asia. Through the HDC in Islamabad,

Mahbub was able to champion ‘an earnest debate on restoring a better bal

ance between arms and the people in South Asia’ (Ponzio 1998: 10). Tak

ing its lead from the UNDP’s 1995 HDR on Gender and Human

Development, the South Asia Human Development Report of 2000 (HDC

2000) opens with Ul Haq’s often-cited injunction that ‘Human Develop

ment, if not engendered, is fatally endangered’ (HDC 2000: 1). At one of

the last meetings of the HDC attended by Mahbub, he quoted Bernard

Shaw in telling colleagues ‘[y]ou see things that are, and ask why? I dream

of things that never were and ask why not?’. Over several decades, Ul Haq

regularly raised the question of cuts in global military spending and consis

tently connected this to the possibility of improved social provision,

human development and welfare. This was somewhat ironic given that he

once served under a military dictatorship in Pakistan in the 1950s and

1960s. The goal of his diplomatic efforts in the 1990s was a desire for a

more aggressive stance on disarmament, suggesting that the UN system

needed new rules of intervention for the superpowers in order to avoid

multilateral imperialism: ‘[o]therwise we’re back to the whole philosophy

of colonialism which was “the natives can’t handle it, let’s go in and teach

them” ’ (cited in Brazier 1994: 2).

In the foreword to Ul Haq’s Reflections on Human Development (Ul Haq

1995), Paul Streeten recalls how he met Mahbub while working for the

British Overseas Development Administration (ODA), arguing that deal-

ing with ‘hardened British civil servants’ gave Ul Haq a resilience, a healthy

scepticism and also an awareness that development did not always involve

the mobilisation of additional resources but that it could also be achieved

through a reallocation of existing resources. Interestingly, the book notes

the unholy alliance of ‘shock therapists’ and Bretton Woods institutions

which impedes the provision and redistribution of basic needs.

Nonetheless, Mahbub agreed with many of the Bank’s core tenets of eco

nomic liberalism, placing an emphasis on privatisation and a belief in mar

ket competition. This comes through clearly in a speech he gave about

Africa’s future shortly before he died (Ul Haq 1998: 2). Having been dealt a

‘cruel hand’ by history, African countries, he argues, should develop new

technical skills and follow the Indian example, becoming ‘a major supplier

of computer software and electronic goods to Europe’ (Ul Haq 1998: 3).

Amartya Sen has recalled Mahbub’s general ‘impatience with theory’

(Sen 2000: 22) but also notes the intense pragmatism that he brought to the

UNDP’s formulation of ‘human development’ and his ‘open minded

approach, his scepticism and his perpetual willingness to listen to new

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suggestions’ (Sen 2000: 23). Ul Haq regularly advocated an integrated UN

system with a strong human development message and in some of his final

writings, speeches and interviews he talked of how the World Bank had

‘seriously misled policy makers’ in focusing attention ‘on the symptoms,

not the causes’, noting that ‘to ignore the poor upstream and to count them

endlessly downstream is merely an intellectual luxury’ (Ul Haq 1997: 1).

This was one indulgent sin committed by the ‘priesthood of development

planners’ that Mahbub considered unforgivable.

Major works

Ul Haq, M. (1963) The Strategy of Economic Planning: A Case Study of Pakistan,

Karachi: Oxford University Press.

—— (1976) The Poverty Curtain: Choices for the Third World, New York: Columbia

University Press.

—— (1995) Reflections on Human Development, New York and Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

—— (1999) ‘Human Rights, Security and Governance’, in Worlds Apart: Human

Security and Global Governance, London: IB Tauris.

Ul Haq, M. and Burki, S.J. (1980) Meeting Basic Needs: An Overview, Washington,

DC: World Bank.

Further reading

Brazier, C. (1994) ‘The New Deal: Interview with Mahbub ul Haq’, New

Internationalist, 262(12): 1–4, http://www.newint.org/issue262/, accessed 4

July 2004.

Desal, N. (1998) ‘Heartbeat: Tribute to Development Economist Mahbub Ul Haq

– Obituary’, UN Chronicle, 22 September: 1. Copy available at http://

www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1309/is_3_35/ai_54259329.

Diallo, D. (1998) ‘From the Editor in Chief’, Choices: The Human Development

Magazine, 7(4): 2.

Human Development Centre (HDC) (1998) ‘A Tribute to Dr Haq’, http://

www.un.org.pk/hdc/Tribute/, accessed 7 July 2004.

—— (2000) Human Development in South Asia 2000: The Gender Question, Mahbub

ul Haq Human Development Centre, Delhi, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jabbar, J. (1998) ‘Two South Asian Stalwarts: Tribute [Nikhil Chakravarty and

Mahbub ul Haq]’, Himal, 11(8), copy available at http://www.himalmag.com/

Aug98/stalwart.htm/, accessed 4 July 2004.

Minna, M. (1999) ‘Tribute to Mahbub ul Haq’, speech given at the Mahbub ul Haq

commemorative conference ‘People and Poverty: Human Development into

the Next Millennium’, Ottawa, Canada, 13 October, http://www.acdi-

cida.gc.ca/cida_ind.nsf/, accessed 4 July 2004.

Ponzio, R. (1998) ‘Disarmament and Human Development: The Legacy of Dr

Mahbub ul Haq’, Bonn International Centre for Conversion: Bulletin, 1 October, 9:

1–2.

Rosenfield, S.S. (1998) ‘The not so Dismal Economist’, Washington Post,23October,

http://www.wright.edu/~tdung/mahbub.html, accessed 8 July 2004.

MAHBUB UL HAQ

269

Sen, A. (2000) ‘A Decade of Human Development’, Journal of International

Development 1(1): 17–23.

Speth, J.G. (1998) ‘UNDP Mourns Loss of Mahbub Ul Haq, Economist and

Development Visionary: Administrator James Gustave Speth Praises Haq’s

Unwavering Commitment to Social Justice’, UNDP Press Release, http://

www.undp.org/dpa/pressrelease/releases/P980717e.html/, accessed 4 July

2004.

Ul Haq, M. (1973) ‘System is to Blame for the 22 Wealthy Families’, The London

Times, 22 March, copy available at http://www.un.org.pk/speeches, accessed 4

July 2004.

—— (1997) ‘Poverty is Cancer, Not Flu’, introductory remarks at the Special

Event on Poverty Eradication arranged by UNDP, 20 May 1997, http://

www.un.org.pk/hdc/speeches/ accessed 3 July 2004.

—— (1998) ‘Does Africa have a Future?’, Opinion, Earth Times News Service, http:/

/www.meltingpot.fortunecity.com/lebanon/254/ulhaq.htm, accessed 9 July

2004.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (1990) Human Development

Report 1990: Concept and Measurement of Human Development, New York:

UNDP.

Marcus Power

ERIC R. WOLF (1923–99)

As an anthropologist, Eric Wolf’s unique contribution to the theory of

development stems from his critical approach, insisting on the inseparable

linkages between the local and the global. This helps to overcome vital

impasses and difficulties in development thinking.

Born in Vienna in 1923, Wolf was the son of a ‘multicultural’ couple.

His father, a secular Jew from Austria, had been in Siberia as a prisoner of

war during World War I. There he met his wife, from a Jewish family that

had been exiled for their participation in the 1905 revolution. His mother’s

tales of Siberia, as well as his father’s accounts of travels in Latin America,

enhanced the cosmopolitan bent of the family and may well have fostered

Wolf’s later interest in cultural anthropology and particularly in Latin

America. In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power in Germany, Wolf

moved to the Sudetenland (then Czechoslovakia) with his family. In 1938,

with Nazi expansion into Austria and Czechoslovakia, Eric Wolf was sent

to school in England. Ironically confined to an internment camp for enemy

aliens in early 1940, he met the sociologist, Norbert Elias, who raised his

interest in social science. After arriving in New York City, Wolf ‘discov

ered’ cultural anthropology after stints in biology, political science, eco

nomics and sociology. After serving in the US Army, he gained his BA

from Queens College in 1946 and became a PhD student at Columbia.

There he belonged to a group of students sharing a similar background as

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ERIC R. WOLF

veterans and Marxists who later went on to become quite eminent cultural

anthropologists. Studying under Julian Steward, the ‘founding father’ of

‘cultural ecology’ or ‘cultural materialism’ from 1947, Wolf commenced

field research in Puerto Rico among poor coffee growers and gained first-

hand knowledge of their risky and hard everyday life. After completing his

PhD in 1951, Wolf held various teaching positions and conducted research

in Mexico and South Tyrol. A professor at the University of Michigan

from 1961, he became increasingly committed to political issues: in 1965,

together with fellow-anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, he originated the

idea of and participated in the first teach-in against the Vietnam War on the

University of Michigan campus. Under the impact of this war, Wolf wrote

his famous Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. In this period, together

with Joseph C. Jorgensen, he also led an investigation of the American

Anthropological Association’s Ethics Committee on the misuse of

ethnographical research for counter-insurgency in Southeast Asia (cf.

Jorgensen and Wolf 1971). A Distinguished Professor at the City Univer-

sity of New York (CUNY) from 1971, Wolf, encouraged by his second

wife and fellow-anthropologist Sydel Silverman, shifted his research

towards world systems theory and the development of capitalism. This

resulted in Europe and the People Without History (1982). Besides teaching at

CUNY, he continued research into the worldwide spread of capitalism

and its consequences for the rise of new forms of power and domination.

These were also the themes of his last book (Wolf 1999). Eric Wolf died in

the same year.

During the early years of Eric Wolf’s academic career, development

thinking was virtually possessed by various modernisation theories. For all

their differences, these theories shared ‘dualistic’ concepts: ‘tradition’, seen

as an obstacle to development, had to be modernised away to achieve ‘ra

tional, progressive modernity’. Arguably the ‘corporate community’ was

considered the most formidable of these traditional obstacles. Populated by

a ‘backwards-oriented peasantry’, such communities were pictured as reg

ulated by immutable tradition that did not allow for individual develop

ment and success (see Walt Rostow).

One of Wolf’s early contributions (1957) showed that this ‘ancient tra

ditional’ corporate community was a red herring. Referring to

Mesoamerica and Central Java, Wolf unveiled such communities as, in fact,

products of European expansion, thus anticipating critical debate by ten to

twenty years. In Peasants (1966), he argued that the peasantry is not an

amorphous mass beholden by tradition, but has its own structured forms of

social, economic and political organisation, set between ‘tradition’ and

‘modernity’, and quite capable both of change as well as of stubborn persis

tence. Responding to US involvement in Vietnam, Wolf (1969) examined

ERIC R. WOLF

271

the reasons why peasants emerged as the most revolutionary force of the

twentieth century. He had a substantial impact on the debate on the role of

the peasantry in history as well as the modern, especially the underdevel

oped world (see Shanin 1971).

As an anthropologist, Wolf grappled with a problem of cultural-relativist

scientific fiction that is still current today: the idea of bounded, more or less

self-contained community. In contradistinction to this fiction, Wolf

insisted on the intimate and ‘dialectical’ interrelation between local com

munities or ‘small populations’ and complex, or ‘total societies’ (Cole and

Wolf 1999: 3). The task was to unveil the close interconnections between

processes evolving on a regional, national or even global level. It was from

this vantage point that Wolf contributed decisively to social science devel

opment theory. Rather than attributing pristine, ‘traditional’ conditions to

the local, while ‘modern’ would be the big world somewhere outside, for

Wolf, peasant communities, as well as individual persons and households,

constitute interfaces between local environments and overarching social

connections, reaching from regions right up to the global nexus of the capi-

talist world market.

In Europe and the People Without History, his vital contribution to devel-

opment theory, Wolf posits that ‘the world of humankind constitutes a

manifold, a totality of interconnected processes’ (1982: 3). He stresses that

we all live in one huge and complex ecosystem, but also insists that

throughout history, there have been ‘connections everywhere’ (ibid.: 3).

Therefore, the constructions of modernisation theories are, in fact, mere

mythology, based on the false assumption of discrete, solitary cultures or

communities. US history, the penultimate model and goal of modernisa

tion theory, also was ‘a complex orchestration of antagonistic forces’ rather

than ‘the unfolding of timeless essence’ (ibid.: 5). Therefore, history did not

follow an inexorable trajectory. Rather, there had been alternatives. Any

idea, then, of human history or social development as a triumphant march

to progress was deeply misconceived. Yet as Wolf noted, such conceptions

underlie the splintered-up array of disciplines that since the mid-nine

teenth century deal with ‘inquiry into the nature and varieties of human

kind’ (ibid.: 7).

Against widespread reification, Wolf reconstructed what happened

with the People Without History in the course of European expansion since

the fifteenth century. Above all he was concerned with the role that non-

Europeans had played in the making of today’s world and thus in shaping

our ideas about development. In reconstructing historical process both at

the global and at the micro levels, he also hoped to overcome the blind

spots of historical and developmental vision that he saw inherent in the

relations of domination established on a world scale during the last 500

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ERIC R. WOLF

years. In this conception, ‘both the people who claim history as their own

and the people to whom history has been denied emerge as participants in

the same historical trajectory’ (ibid.: 23). Accordingly, the idea of differen

tial stages of development among societies is mistaken. Modernisation the

ory was fundamentally wrong precisely in its fundamental tenets that

necessarily discriminate between different peoples and regions in the

world: the fundamental changes of modernity:

affected not only people singled out as the carriers of ‘real’ history but

also the populations anthropologists have called ‘primitives’ … The

global processes set in motion by European expansion constitute their

history as well. There are thus no ‘contemporary ancestors,’ no peo

ple without history.

(ibid.: 385)

The book title, Europe and the People Without History, is therefore deeply

ironic. Wolf first sketches the situation of the world around 1400 CE as one

of manifold interconnectedness, by trade, by relations between pastoralists

and agriculturalists, and by war. Western Europe developed from a mar-

ginal peninsula of the Eurasian land mass into a ‘hub of wealth and power’

(ibid.: 123) by processes that set in around 800 CE, and from the sixteenth

century onwards, England and the Netherlands were able to harness com-

merce and war to a grand strategy of expansion that was to transform the

world. Wolf explores four exemplary cases: the implantation of Iberian

colonies in the Americas, the North American fur trade, the transatlantic

slave trade, and the establishment and expansion of European control in

South and East Asia.

By giving centre stage to the intricate relationships of agency, Wolf

manages to overcome the interrelated views of the colonised as basically

backward and as mere victims and objects of colonial power. Rather, social

structures pertaining in ‘Indian’ communities in Spanish America or at the

Guinea coast in West Africa during the age of the slave trade were shaped

deeply by contemporary relationships of domination, exchange and

exploitation in the context of an expanding world market. Moreover, Afri

cans or American Indians were actively involved in shaping these condi

tions, even though the trading system was centred around Western Europe

and precious metals flowed from America towards the Iberian Peninsula

and East Asia. While peasant communities in the Spanish colonies resulted

from complex relationships and conflict between colonial administrators

and peasants, the famous League of the Iroquois underwent fundamental

changes in reorienting towards the fur trade and warfare in an age of intense

British–French rivalry around the Great Lakes; further, the lifestyles of

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273

Prairie Indians resembled today’s standard image of ‘Indian’ life only in the

wake of deep-going transformations through the spread of trade, horses

and firearms. The transatlantic slave trade that transported millions from

West and Central Africa to the plantations of the ‘New World’ (itself a very

Eurocentric construct – Ed.) also built on previously existing institutions in

African societies which were then fundamentally transformed by its conse

quences. In particular, centralised military and commercial powers were

enormously enhanced in the Guinea Coast kingdoms that thrived on the

slave trade.

To date, the historical process that has been common to all societies

reviewed here has culminated in the advent and universal expansion of

capitalism. In contradistinction to authors such as Wallerstein or A.G.

Frank, Wolf refers the capitalist mode of production strictly to the domi

nation of capital at the point of production, not just to the spread of market

relations around the world. Wolf’s detailed account of the specific constel

lation that conditioned the industrial revolution and the advent of capital-

ism in England reveals an ‘unusual development’ (ibid.: 268) with

immediate global repercussions. Overseas regions were at various times

converted into raw material bases for the burgeoning British cotton indus-

try. Again, Wolf stresses the ambivalent dimension of agency: besides suf-

fering oppression, the slave population in the Cotton South also developed

‘its own store of experience and modes of coping’ which it ‘would pass …

on across the generations’ (ibid.: 281). During the twentieth century, novel

social relationships were spawned by capitalism’s ‘tendency … to expand in

search of new raw materials … and … of cheap labor to process them’ (ibid.:

302). For example, the commercialisation of rubber caused vastly diver-

gent transformations, from one stage of a successive chain of fundamental

changes touched off by capitalist expansion in the Amazon rainforest, to

the recruitment of Indian labourers to Malaya to work the rubber planta

tions. The worldwide recruitment of labour for widely varying concerns

caused outcomes including migration, proletarianisation, and ethnic seg

mentation. For Wolf, ‘working classes are not “made” in the place of work

alone’ (ibid.: 360), underscoring the need for multidisciplinary approaches,

integrating cultural factors. Here as in his other works, Wolf combines rich

and diverse empirical data with a conceptual rigour to forge a vitally cre

ative theoretical contribution.

Major works

Cole, J.W. and Wolf, E.R. (1999) The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an

Alpine Valley, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press

(originally, New York and London: Academic Press 1974).

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Jorgensen, J. and Wolf, E. (1971) ‘Anthropology on the Warpath: An Exchange’,

New York Review of Books 8 April and 22 July 1971.

Wolf, E.R. (1957) ‘Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and

Central Java’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13 (Spring): 1–18.

—— (1966) Peasants, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

—— (1969) Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, New York: Harper and Row.

—— (1982) Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley, Los Angeles and

London: University of California Press.

—— (1999) Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis, Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press.

Wolf, E.R. with Silverman, S. (2001) Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of

the Modern World, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Further reading

Schneider, J. (2002) ‘Eric R. Wolf ’, American National Bibliography online: http://

www.anb.org/articles/14/14-01125.html.

Schneider, J. and Rapp, R. (eds) (1995) Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the

Influence of Eric R. Wolf, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

Press.

Shanin, T. (ed.) (1971) Peasants and Peasant Societies, Harmondsworth: Pelican.

Reinhart Kößler and Tilman Schiel

PETER WORSLEY (1924–)

Peter Worsley, the British social anthropologist, was born in Birkenhead

(Cheshire) in 1924. He began to read English at Cambridge University but

then joined the British Army during the Second World War, serving as an

officer in Africa and India. Returning to Cambridge after the war, he

switched his studies to the field of anthropology. After a short spell in East

Africa he returned to Britain, taking a Master’s degree at Manchester Uni

versity where he focused on a critique of Meyer Fortes’s work. He subse

quently worked as a researcher with S.F. Nadel at the Australian National

University, completing a dissertation on the Aborigines in 1954. Back in

Britain he returned to Manchester, joining Max Gluckman there and start

ing his famous work on cargo cults. His career, however, was to switch

from social anthropology to sociology when he took up an early post in

that discipline at Hull University. He then became the first Professor of

Sociology at Manchester University, a post he held from 1964 to 1982.

Worsley’s intellectual career, however, cannot be understood in purely

academic terms. At around the time of the Battle of Stalingrad he joined the

British Communist Party, along with other intellectuals of his generation.

Also in common with them, he left the CPGB in 1956 after the Soviet

invasion of Hungary. This ‘political’ side of Worsley’s intellectual career is

PETER WORSLEY

275

rarely made explicit but it helps to explain, for example, why the Preface to

his book, The Third World, contains an acknowledgement to labour histori

ans E.P. Thompson and John Saville. Their humanist, democratic, and

‘English’ vision of Marxism was to inform all his subsequent work. It never

became sectarian, pedantic or merely scholarly. The negative side of Wors

ley’s political commitment was a succession of Cold War establishment

vetoes on his work as an anthropologist, especially refusals of posts and

access to fieldwork sites. This partly explains his conversion to sociology,

although, as we shall see, Worsley never stopped being a social anthropolo

gist at heart.

The Trumpet Shall Sound (Worsley 1957) was Worsley’s first and still

best- known work, virtually creating the area of ‘cargo cult’ studies in social

anthropology. He set these millenarian social movement cults in Melanesia

in a broad historical and comparative context for the first time. Against the

prevailing ‘nativist’ interpretation that saw these movements as traditional

and frankly irrational flights of fancy, Worsley stressed their proto-nation-

alist character and the protest they articulated against racial and colonial

oppression. In a methodological appendix to the riveting story of the cargo

cults, Worsley argues that:

The concept of ‘nativism’ … fails to account for many cult elements

… Where old beliefs and practices are retained or revived, they have

a new content … And there is little that is reversionary or

perpetuative in the concept of expelling the Europeans … The

movements are thus forward-looking, not regressive, the order of

the future being the reversion of the present

(Worsley 1957: 275–6)

Worsley not only writes an extremely effective (and affecting) account of

the Melanesian cargo cults but also sets them within their anti-colonial

context against the prevailing traditional anthropological focus of the day.

Many generations of students were ‘converted’ by reading The Trumpet

Shall Sound to a passionate commitment to development and anti-

colonialism.

In 1964 Worsley published The Third World (Worsley 1964) that cer

tainly popularised if not started the circulation of a term that had originated

in French development thinking. It dealt with the colonial relationship of

the majority world with the West, the rise of nationalism, the importance

of populism, the structure of the new emerging post-colonial states, and

the ‘positive neutralism’ of the Third World in the Cold War, then at its

height. Peter Worsley, against the dominant modernisation perspective in

social and political theory, did not see ‘democracy’ versus ‘totalitarianism’

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PETER WORSLEY

as the main global divide but, rather, one ‘between those movements and

organisations oriented to radical social change and those resisting it’ (Wors

ley 1964: 355), primarily located in the USA. In terms of the politics

emerging in the post-colonial world he argued, against the orthodox

Marxists of the day, for the importance of populism, a cross-class move

ment that ‘has been infinitely greater than has been recognised and the

potential under-estimated’ (Worsley 1964: 170). Despite his own recent

communist past, Worsley argued that the Third World challenges both

‘late capitalism’ and ‘late communism’ (Worsley 1964: 271) and offers even

to transcend itself. Against the dominant materialism of both ‘bourgeois’

and ‘radical’ development thinkers alike, Worsley declared that: ‘People

who consider ideas and ideals unimportant … are ignorant of the real

world’ (Worsley 1964: 271).

Sometimes it is an author’s lesser-known work that is more revealing in

a way. Not having the cult status of The Trumpet Shall Sound or The Third

World, these works have not received the attention they deserve but they

are perhaps even more relevant to Peter Worsley as development thinker.

The first to be considered is Two Blades of Grass (Worsley 1971), an edited

collection on the role of rural co-operatives in agricultural modernisation.

Worsley sets the theme of co-operation in the broad context of the struggle

against inequality and the possessive individualism of contemporary capi-

talism. He also develops a theme that is central in his later writings, namely

the ‘populist’ dimension of democracy in the Third World, an aspect ‘that

so much structural political sociology ignores, concentrating as it does on

the formal elements in democracy’ (Worsley 1971: 10). He also rightly sees

the state being more active than in the advanced industrialised countries

‘because capital accumulation will be inadequate if left to the free play of

the market’ (Worsley 1971: 15–16). Yet the state most often intervenes to

assist those who already have power and it is ‘traditional ties of kinship – be

it those of neighbourhood, ethnicity or caste – that most often work

against the requirements of strict economic rationality’ (Worsley 1971: 23).

The mid-1970s were a period in which many Western intellectuals

made pilgrimages to communist China and enthused on the Cultural Rev

olution and agrarian reform in that country. Not many people know

Worsley’s Inside China (Worsley 1975) but it provides great insight into his

own politics. As an ethnographic study, the book works well and is more

balanced than some others appearing at the time. Worsley is sympathetic to

the socialist transformation experiment going on in China at the time but

bemoans ‘the virtual absence of “development theory” and of social sci

ence as we know it’ (Worsley 1975: 98) in China and even acknowledges

that ‘bourgeois scholars have often been right about very many things,

big and small, and have contributed enormously in areas where the

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277

contribution of Marxism has been virtually invisible’ (Worsley 1975: 199).

While acknowledging the ‘pragmatic’ Chinese role in world politics,

Worsley still concludes that ‘there is no reason to assume that China has

abandoned her commitment to world socialist revolution’ (Worsley 1975:

247). Perhaps more jarring is Worsley’s somewhat naive statement that: ‘I

have no idea how common the death penalty is but I should think it very

rare. Nor do I believe that there are many concentration camps’ (Worsley

1975: 215).

In the mid-1980s, Worsley came back into development theory with

the magnificent monograph, The Three Worlds (Worsley 1984), focused on

culture and world development. While in one way it was simply The Third

World twenty years on, its focus was quite different. Reflecting his much

earlier engagement with British labour historians like Edward Thompson

and John Saville, Worsley had two of his three core chapters dealing with

the ‘undoing of the peasantry’ and the ‘making of the working class’

respectively. Ethnicity and nationalism, traditional concerns of his, formed

the third leg of this great piece of work. The rise of agribusiness and the

development of a strong urban working class described in The Three Worlds

reflected work he was then beginning on international labour studies.

Worsley also, if belatedly, moved beyond his previous British Africa/Asia

focus to engage with the rapidly transforming Latin America with its strong

indigenous intellectual and analytical traditions. But, the main point of this

work was that Worsley identified ‘culture’ as the main missing ingredient

in the traditional sociology of development (and Marxist sociology too if

he had wanted to develop the theme). Taking his cue from the British cul-

tural theorist, Raymond Williams, as much as from anthropology, Worsley

reintroduced culture into the analysis of world development.

Worsley’s latest book, Knowledges (Worsley 1997), returns to his early

interest in language, thought and culture more generally. His basic argu

ment is that knowledge takes many forms and is by nature plural.

Extremely diverse in its topics – from Oceanic navigation techniques to

Disneyland, and from aboriginal Australian botanical classification to the

secularisation of Christmas – this is an ambitious and challenging book.

Conventional Western distinctions between science and culture are, in the

course of their discrete narratives, deconstructed and undermined. In the

era of resurgent US imperialism, Worsley effectively shatters the premise of

Western cultural superiority. Worsley is seemingly returning to his voca

tion as cultural anthropologist and revisiting the fieldwork carried out

among the aboriginal people of ‘Groote England’ in Australia in the early

1950s. In a worthy reprise of The Trumpet Shall Sound, Worsley engages

with contemporary debates on the science/culture and knowledge/belief

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PETER WORSLEY

distinctions with an original and radical intervention. As with all Worsley’s

work, it is supremely accessible.

Peter Worsley is a theorist of development but in Britain he is probably

best known for his edited sociology textbooks that served to educate a

whole generation of students in the 1970s and 1980s (Worsley 1970).

There was a breadth and accessibility to these texts that completely sur

passed the competition for a whole generation. Then there was his popular

text on Marx and Marxism (Worsley 2002) that systematised the open

Marxist method underpinning his own particular brand of social anthro

pology. For Worsley, Marxism was anything but an abstract philosophy

and his engagement with the influential contemporaneous ‘French school’

of anthropology (Claude Meillassoux, Maurice Godelier and Emmanuel

Terray) was tangential at best. Rather, and quite characteristically, Worsley

portrayed Marxism as a political philosophy that had been put to use in var

ious parts of the world with varying degrees of success. That open, flexible

and pragmatic approach to social and political theory was reflected in his

continuous commitment to interdisciplinarity, really a post-disciplinarity

where terms like anthropology, sociology and social anthropology never

took on a life of their own and whose disputes were never allowed to dom-

inate the problems of development.

With any thinker there are, finally, invariably certain silences or lacunae.

The strengths of an ‘understated’ Marxism mean that Worsley did not

engage in the important (if perhaps ‘theological’) Marxist debates in the

1970s and 1980s on issues of development and underdevelopment. Like-

wise, Worsley shows no interest whatsoever in the ‘post’ debates – post-

colonialism, post-structuralism and post-modernism – that were well

underway in the mid-1980s when The Three Worlds appeared. Also one of

his strengths – a groundedness in the British communist labour historian

tradition – was his distinctly Anglocentric perspective in terms of sources

and debates, however global his own view was. Thus while Andre

Gunder Frank’s dependency approach is flagged up already in the 1960s

work, The Three Worlds of 1984 fails even to mention the classic Dependency

and Development in Latin America by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (and

Enzo Faletto) that had already appeared in English in 1979. Notwithstand

ing these ethnocentric tendencies (even stronger in the earlier works)

Worsley does ‘see’ globalisation coming over the horizon in the early 1980s

when he refers to ‘a new “transcendental” global level’ (Worsley 1984:

317) and articulates the globalisation and culture debates before they even

happen.

PETER WORSLEY

279

Note

1 This section draws on Keith Hart’s note on Peter Worsley for the Biographical

Dictionary of Anthropology, Routledge, forthcoming.

Major works

Worsley, P. (1957) The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of ‘Cargo’ Cults in Melanesia,

London: McGibbon and Kee, 2nd edn 1968.

—— (1964) The Third World, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2nd edn 1967.

—— (ed.) (1971) Two Blades of Grass: Rural Co-operatives in Agricultural

Modernisation, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

—— (1975) Inside China, London: Allen Lane.

—— (1984) The Three Worlds: Cultural and World Development, London:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

—— (1997) Knowledges: Culture, Counter-culture, Subculture, New York: New

Press.

Other works

Worsley, P. (ed.) (1970) Introducing Sociology, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

—— (1987) The New Introducing Sociology, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

—— (2002) Marx and Marxism, London: Routledge.

Ronaldo Munck

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PETER WORSLEY

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Rita Abrahamsen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Politics,

University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where she teaches African and Postcolonial

Politics. She is the author of Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good

Governance in Africa (Zed Books, 2000).

V.N. Balasubramanyam (Baloo) holds the Chair in Development Economics,

University of Lancaster. His publications include Multinational Enterprises and the

Third Word, The Economy of India, International Transfer of Technology to India, Meeting

the Third World Challenge (with A.I. MacBean), and Conversations with Indian

Economists. He has edited several books on international trade and investment and

published articles on trade, international investment and development issues.

Jo Beall is Director of the Development Studies Institute (DESTIN) at the London

School of Economics (LSE). A political sociologist, she has expertise in

development policy and management and social development and her specialist

research interests include the intersection of formal and informal institutions in

local governance and urban development. She is author of Funding Local

Governance, Small Grants for Democracy and Development (IT Publications, 2004) and

co-author of Uniting a Divided City: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg

(Earthscan, 2002).

Anthony Bebbington is Professor and Director of Research in the School of

Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. Previously he

was at the University of Colorado at Boulder and has also worked at Cambridge

University, the World Bank, the Overseas Development Institute and the

International Institute for Environment and Development. His research in Latin

America has addressed NGOs and rural social movements; poverty and rural

livelihoods; agricultural development; and the links between development

interventions and political economy.

Tony Binns has been Ron Lister Professor of Geography in the University of

Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand since October 2004. Prior to this, he was based at

the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Tony has worked in the field of

281

Development Studies for over thirty years, with particular experience in Africa,

where he has had a longstanding interest in food production systems, rural change

and community-based development.

John Brohman is Associate Professor of Geography and a member of the Latin

American Studies Program at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, Canada.

His general research interests concern theories, strategies and practices of develop

ment, and the principal geographic area of his recent research has been Latin Amer

ica. This research focuses on regional development and planning, rural

development and agrarian reform, community participation and popular move

ments, and neoliberalism and alternative globalisations.

Sylvia Chant is Professor of Development Geography at the London School of

Economics, specialising in issues of gender and development. Her most recent

books are Mainstreaming Men into Gender and Development: Debates, Reflections and

Experiences (with Matthew Gutmann) (Oxfam, 2000), and Gender in Latin America

(in association with Nikki Craske) (Latin America Bureau/Rutgers University

Press, 2003). She is currently undertaking comparative research on the ‘femin-

isation of poverty’ in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Reginald Cline-Cole, a geographer by training, is with the Centre of West Afri-

can Studies, University of Birmingham, UK. His recent publications include West

African Worlds: Paths through Socio-Economic Change, Livelihoods and Development

(Pearson, 2005, co-edited with Elsbeth Robson) and Contesting West African For-

estry (Ashgate, 2000, co-edited with Clare Madge).

John Connell is Professor of Geography at the University of Sydney. He has

written numerous books and articles about development in the Pacific region, most

recently Urbanisation in the Island Pacific (with John Lea) (Routledge, 2002).

Stuart Corbridge teaches at the London School of Economics and the University

of Miami. He is the author, with John Harriss, of Reinventing India (2000), with

Sarah Jewitt and Sanjay Kumar of Jharkhand: Environment, Development and Ethnicity

(2004), and with Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron of Seeing the

State: Governance and Governmentality in Rural India (2005).

Christopher Cramer is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at the School of

Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research and

teaching interests include the economics of Africa, rural labour markets, primary

commodity processing, and the political economy of violent conflict. His book,

Why War? Making Sense of Violence, War and Development, will be published in 2005.

Vandana Desai is Senior Lecturer in Geography at Royal Holloway, University

of London. Her research interests are in the area of community participation, low-

income housing, the role of non-governmental organisations, gender and social

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

transformation in the context of globalisation. Her recent books include The

Companion to Development Studies (2002) and Doing Development Research (2006)

both co-edited with Robert Potter; and The Introduction to Displacement (2001) co-

authored with Jenny Robinson.

Arturo Escobar was born in Colombia, where he studied chemical engineering in

the hope of helping his country to ‘develop’. After working for a number of years

in the areas of food and nutrition – including a master’s degree and a year with

Colombia’s Department of National Planning – he moved on to study the political

economy of development in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and from there to the

cultural analysis of development in the 1980s and 1990s. Over the years, he has

worked with a number of NGOs and social movements on alternative

development and taught and lectured in this area chiefly in the United States but

also in Latin America, Europe and Africa. He is currently Kenan Distinguished

Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies

at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Research Associate at the

Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, ICANH in Bogotá.

Ben Fine is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London. Recent books include (with A. Saad-Filho) Marx’s Capital

(4th edn, Pluto, 2003), The World of Consumption: The Material and Cultural Revisited

(Routledge, 2002), Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social

Science at the Turn of the Millennium (Routledge, 2001); Development Policy in the

Twenty-First Century: Beyond the Post-Washington Consensus, with C. Lapavitsas and

J. Pincus (eds) (Routledge, 2001). In preparation is a two-volume book on the

shifting relationship between economic history and economic theory (with D.

Milonakis) as part of broader research on ‘economics imperialism’.

Tim Forsyth is senior lecturer in Environment and Development at the London

School of Economics. He specialises on aspects of environmental governance

under conditions of rapid industrialisation, with special reference to contested

environmental science and expertise, civil society, and public–private partnerships

in Asia. He is the author of Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental

Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), and International Investment and

Climate Change (London: Earthscan, 1999), and is the editor of the Encyclopedia of

International Development (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

Gary Gaile is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder and

Executive Director of the Developing Areas Research and Teaching (DART)

Programme. He is also Co-Chair of the Association of American Geographer’s

Developing Areas Specialty Group. He earned his PhD in Geography in 1976 from

UCLA. His research interests focus on Africa and include food security, rural–

urban linkages, and micro-enterprise credit.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

W.T.S. (Bill) Gould is Professor of Geography at the University of Liverpool,

and currently Director of its Masters Programme in Population Studies and its

Undergraduate Programme in International Development Studies. His research

and teaching interests are broadly in population/development relationships,

especially in Africa, and more specifically in the demographic and development

impacts of HIV/AIDS.

Robert Gwynne is Reader in Latin American Development at the School of

Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham. In

recent years, he has also been Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Chile.

His research interests focus on industrialisation in the developing world and on the

impacts of neoliberalism and globalisation on regional development in Latin

America. He is the author of Industrialisation and Urbanisation in Latin America

(Routledge, 1985); New Horizons? Third World Industrialization in an International

Framework (Longman, 1990); co-author of Alternative Capitalisms: Geographies of

Emerging Regions (Arnold, 2003); and co-editor of Latin America Transformed:

Globalization and Modernity (Arnold, 2004).

John Harriss is Professor of Development Studies at the London School of

Economics. He was previously the founding Director of the Development Studies

Institute in the School, and earlier the Dean of the School of Development Studies

at the University of East Anglia. His current research interests are in

democratisation, civil society and governance. He is the author of Reinventing India

(with Stuart Corbridge, Polity Press, 2000); Depoliticising Development: The World

Bank and Social Capital (Anthem Press, 2002); and (with Kristian Stokke and Olle

Tornquist) editor of Politicising Democracy (Palgrave, 2004). He is a Managing Editor

of the Journal of Development Studies.

Cristóbal Kay is Associate Professor in Development Studies and Rural

Development at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands. His

main research interests are in the fields of rural development and theories of

development and underdevelopment, mainly within the Latin American context.

His most recent books include Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia

and Latin America (co-editor) and Latin America Transformed: Globalization and

Modernity, second edition (co-editor, 2004).

Reinhart Kößler is Professor of Sociology at the University of Münster. Besides

sociology of development, he has researched and published widely on social theory,

culture of work and industrialisation, the post-colonial state, nationalism and

ethnicity and more recently, culture and politics of public memory. His main

regional interest has for some time been southern Africa.

John P. Lea, who was born in South India during the last years of the ‘Raj’, was

educated in England and has spent most of his academic career at the University of

Sydney, Australia. His work on urbanisation and development in southern Africa,

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Australasia and the Pacific has focused on housing, urban planning and governance

issues at the resource frontier.

Cathy McIlwaine is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Queen

Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on issues of poverty, survival

strategies, gender and urban violence, mainly in Latin America. Her most recent

publications include Encounters with Violence in Latin America, with Caroline Moser

(Routledge, 2004) and Challenges and Change in Middle America, with Katie Willis

(Prentice Hall, 2002). She is currently researching the livelihood strategies of

Colombians living in London.

Henning Melber holds a PhD in Political Science and a venia legendi in

Development Studies at Bremen University. He has been a Senior Lecturer in

International Politics at Kassel University (1982–92), Director of The Namibian

Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek (1992–2000) and is

currently Research Director at The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden.

He has published widely on a range of African Studies related subjects, mainly

Namibia, but also Southern Africa, racism and of late NEPAD (New Programme

for Africa’s Development). He is currently a Vice-President of the European

Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).

Ulrich Menzel, born 1947 in Düsseldorf, Germany, teaches International

Relations and Comparative Politics at the Technical University of Braunschweig

and is Managing Director of its Institute of Social Sciences. He has published

twenty-six books and many articles on the subjects of International Relations,

International Political Economy and Development Theory. Further information

about the author can be obtained at www.tu-bs.de/~umenzel/.

Ronaldo Munck is Strategic Director for Internationalisation and Social

Development at Dublin City University, having previously held chairs in sociology

at the University of Liverpool and of Durban-Westville. He has written widely on

Latin America and on development issues more generally, including Contemporary

Latin America (Palgrave, 2002) and Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a

New Paradigm (co-editor) (Zed Books, 1999). His most recent publication is

Globalisation and Social Exclusion: A Transformationalist Perspective (Kumarian Press,

2004).

Dani W. Nabudere is a senior researcher and executive director of the Afrika

Study Centre, Mbale, Uganda. He studied at Lincoln’s Inn, where he was called to

the Bar in 1963. Later, he spent six years as Associate Professor of Law at the

University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where he was able to observe at close

quarters the effects of the Ujamaa strategy between 1973 and 1979. Subsequently,

he was a minister of Culture and Community Development in the post-Amin

interim government in Uganda. He is currently promoting the establishment of the

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Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute dedicated to research and mainstreaming of

African indigenous knowledge and wisdom.

Anders Närman was, until his sudden death on 15 November 2004, Associate

Professor of Human and Economic Geography, Göteborg University. His research

interests included various aspects of Development Geography. Educational matters

were a central part of his research in Kenya and Tanzania. Until his death, he was

involved in research on conflict in Uganda, the Greater Horn of Africa, and on

regional development in Sri Lanka. These were collaborative projects, with the

universities of Dar es Salaam, Makerere and Kelaniya respectively.

Michael Parnwell is Reader in South East Asian Geography in the Department of

East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. He has specialised on the

development process in South East Asia since the late 1970s. His PhD was on

return-migration in North East Thailand, and he continued to take an interest in

Thailand during the 1980s and early 1990s, focusing on processes of regional

development, rural industrialisation and extended metropolitanisation. More

recently he has worked on the human impact of deforestation in Sarawak, Malaysia,

small-scale industries and urban sustainability in Sulawesi, Indonesia, sustainable

development in South East Asia, and on coping mechanisms and sustainable

livelihoods in Thailand, Vietnam and the Lao PDR.

Richard Peet is Professor of Geography at Clark University in Worcester,

Massachusetts. He has been editor of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and

Economic Geography. His recent publications include Modern Geographical Thought

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), Theories of Development (with Elaine Hartwick, New

York: Guilford, 1999, 2002) and Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO

(London: Zed Books, 2003). He is interested in issues of globalisation and

development, global governance and economic policy, culture, consciousness and

ideology, and the possibility of post-neoliberal societies.

Marcus Power is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the University of Durham.

His research interests are focused on Southern Africa and the Lusophone world and

are concerned with geopolitics, post-colonialism and development. His recent

publications include Rethinking Development Geographies (London: Routledge,

2003).

Sarah Radcliffe teaches at the Department of Geography, University of

Cambridge. Her research focuses on the development trajectories and state–

society relations in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and examines the gendered and

ethnic outcomes of social change. Her forthcoming book is Multiethnic

Transnationalism: Indigenous Development in the Andes (Duke University Press).

Jonathan Rigg is a geographer based at the University of Durham. He has worked

on rural and environmental change in Southeast Asia since the early 1980s. He is the

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author of Southeast Asia: The Human Landscape of Modernization and Development

(London: Routledge, 2003) and has recently completed a manuscript on

livelihoods and marketisation in Laos. He is currently working on aquatic food

production in peri-urban areas of Bangkok, Hanoi, Phnom Penh and Ho Chi

Minh City and on wider processes of de-agrarianisation and de-peasantisation.

Barbara Rugendyke is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of New

England, in Armidale, NSW, Australia. Barbara teaches about development issues

and her current research interests include the sustainability of ecotourism in

Southeast Asia and she is currently writing a book about the impacts of the

advocacy activities of development NGOs.

M.A. Mohamed Salih (PhD Economics and Social Studies, University of

Manchester, UK) is Professor of Politics of Development at both the Institute of

Social Studies, The Hague and the Department of Political Science, University of

Leiden in the Netherlands. His latest books include, African Democracies and African

Politics (Pluto Press, 2001), African Political Parties: Evolution, Institutionalisation and

Governance (co-edited) (Pluto Press, 2003) and Africa Networking: Information

Development, ICTs and Governance (co-edited) (International Books, 2004).

Roberto A. Sánchez-Rodríguez completed his BA in Architecture from the

National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and his PhD in Urban and

Regional Planning from the University of Dortmund, Germany. He is currently a

Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and

Director of The University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States

(UCMEXUS). His research interests are in development studies, sustainable

development, trade and the environment, and the interactions between

urbanisation and global environment change.

Tilman Schiel (born 1943) studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of

Heidelberg (MA) and Sociology at the University of Bielefeld (Dr.rer.soc. and

‘Habilitation’). Until his retirement in 2004 he worked as an itinerant scientist at

several universities and research institutions. He still is member of the board of the

Starnberg Institute for the Study of Global Structures, Developments and Crises.

John Shaw was associated with the UN World Food Programme for over thirty

years, latterly as economic adviser and chief of its Policy Affairs Service before his

retirement. He has also served as consultant to the Commonwealth Secretariat,

FAO and the World Bank. He is currently on the International Editorial Board of

the journal Food Policy and continues to write on development and food security

issues.

James Sidaway is Reader in Globalisation at Loughborough University. He

previously taught at the National University of Singapore, the Universities of

Birmingham and Reading in the UK and has been Visiting Professor at the

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Universities of Seville and Groningen. His research interests include geographies of

development, geopolitics and the history and sociology of geography.

David Simon is Professor of Development Geography in the Centre for

Developing Areas Research, Royal Holloway, University of London. His

particular research interests include development theory and policy; the

development–environment interface; urbanisation and urban–rural interaction;

transport and geopolitics. He has extensive research experience in sub-Saharan

Africa and tropical Asia. He is currently development/social science editor of the

Journal of Southern African Studies, and co-editor of The Peri-Urban Interface:

Approaches to Sustainable Natural and Human Resource Use (Earthscan, 2005) and of

Aquatic Ecosystems and Development: Comparative Asian Perspectives (Kluwer, 2006).

Rana P.B. Singh is Professor of Cultural Geography at Banaras Hindu University,

Varanasi, India. He has been involved in mass awakening programmes and heritage

planning in Varanasi region for the last twenty years as promoter, collaborator and

organiser. On these topics he lectured at various centres in America, Europe, East

Asia and Australia. His publications include over 140 papers and 30 books on these

subjects.

Morris Szeftel is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Leeds. He has also

worked and taught at universities in the United States, South Africa and Zambia.

He has published on African politics, problems of democratisation, development

and debt, and on corruption in Africa. Until recently he was Editor of the Review of

African Political Economy.

Jan Toporowski is Research Associate in London University’s School of Oriental

and African Studies; Official Visitor in the Faculty of Economics and Politics,

University of Cambridge; and Research Associate in the Research Centre on the

History and Methodology of Economics, University of Amsterdam. After studying

economics at Birkbeck College and Birmingham University, he worked in fund

management and international banking, and has published widely on money,

finance and economic development.

Juha I. Uitto has worked for over two decades on development and environment

issues both in international organisations and academia. He holds an MSc in

Geography from the University of Helsinki in his native Finland and a PhD in

Social and Economic Geography from the University of Lund in Sweden. He is

currently Senior Evaluation Advisor at the Global Environment Facility unit of the

United Nations Development Programme in New York, USA.

Ton van Naerssen is a Senior Lecturer in development geography and co-

ordinator of the Master’s programme for Globalisation and Development at the

Nijmegen School of Management (NSM), Radboud University of Nijmegen, the

Netherlands. His current fields of interest include development theories, the

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

involvement of civil society in urban development and international migration. He

has carried out research mainly in Southeast Asia. His most recent books are (both as

co-editor) Healthy Cities in Devloping Countries: Lessons to be Learned and Asian

Migrants at the European Labour Market (Routledge, forthcoming).

Michael Watts is Class of 1963 Professor of Geography at the University of

California, Berkeley where he has taught development studies for over twenty-five

years. He has just finished a book on American Empire (Afflicted Powers, Verso,

2005) and is working on another on petro-politics in Nigeria. He is currently at the

Center for the Study of the Advanced Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Katie Willis is Senior Lecturer in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of

London. Her main research areas are gender, development and migration, with a

particular focus on Mexico, China and Singapore. She is co-editor of International

Development Planning Review and the author of Theories and Practices of Development

(Routledge, 2005).

Francis Wilson was trained in Physics (at the University of Cape Town) and

Economics (Cambridge). He has been teaching in the School of Economics at

UCT for the past thirty-eight years. In 1975 he founded SALDRU, the Southern

Africa Labour and Development Research Unit which he directed until 2000

when he started Data First, a university resource unit For Information Research &

Scientific Training. His main work has been in labour (gold mines; migrant; farms),

South African history, data collection and in poverty about which, to find out

more, he directed the second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in

Southern Africa during the 1980s.

Ben Wisner flew around the Caribbean in a small plane with Jim Blaut and learned

about peasants and tropical soils from him, and misses him sorely. Wisner is now

research fellow at DESTIN, LSE and also at the Benfield Hazard Research Centre,

University College London, as well as teaching as Visiting Professor of

Environmental Studies at Oberlin College at the northern end of the underground

railway, in Ohio, USA.

Lakshman Yapa hails from Sri Lanka, where he took his first degree at Peradeniya

University (then the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya). He holds a PhD in

Geography from Syracuse University in New York. He is currently Professor of

Geography at Pennsylvania State University and Director of the service learning

project entitled, Rethinking Urban Poverty: Philadelphia Field Project. His recent

publications have addressed critical perspectives on scarcity, poverty and poverty

discourses in Sri Lanka and the USA.

Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Associate Professor, Department of Geography, National

University of Singapore and Principal Investigator of the Asian MetaCentre at the

University’s Asia Research Institute. Her research foci include the politics of space

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

in colonial and post-colonial cities; and gender, migration and transnational

communities. Her most recent books include Toponymics: A Study of Singapore

Street Names (2003, with Victor R. Savage), Theorising the Southeast Asian City as

Text (2003, with Robbie Goh), The Politics of Landscape in Singapore: Construction of

‘Nation’ (2003, with Lily Kong), and State/Nation/Transnation: Perspectives on

Transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific (2004, with Katie Willis).

Alfred Babatunde Zack-Williams is Professor of Sociology at the University of

Central Lancashire, Preston, UK. He was formerly Senior Lecturer in Sociology at

the University of Jos, Nigeria. Among his recent publications are: Africa in Crisis:

Challenges and New Possibilities, (ed. Pluto Press, 2002); Africa Beyond the Post-colonial

(ed. with Ola Uduku, Ashgate, 2004); The Politics of Transition: State, Democracy &

Economic Development in Africa (ed. with G. Mohan and James Currey, 2004). He is

an editor for the Review of African Political Economy.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

aborigines 275

Abu-Lughod, Janet 94, 103

academics vs practitioners vii

Achimota College 187

Adedeji, Adebayo 3–9

adjustment 124, 226

Adjustment with a Human Face 134, 226

African Alternative Framework to

Structural Adjustment Programs

for Socio-Economic Recovery and

Transformation (AAF-SAP) 6–7

African Centre for Development and

Strategic Studies (ACDESS) 3, 7

African philosophy/tradition 192–3,

194, 196

Agarwal, Anil 9–14

agrarian change 35, 38

agribusiness 113

agriculture 38, 45–9, 68, 122, 149–

55, 158, 183, 190, 196, 222, 230,

232, 237–8; sustainable 238

ahimsa (non-violence) 106, 108, 110

aid 121, 123, 125, 215, 244, 245

AIDS 35, 38, 114, 239

Alliance for Progress 215

Althusser, Louis 93

Altvater, Elmar 14–20

Amin, Samir 20–5, 40, 90, 92, 93, 94,

103, 202, 226, 266

anthropology/anthropologist(s) 41,

57, 58, 67, 68, 69, 270, 272, 273,

278; social 275

anti-imperialism 42

Arendt, Hannah 101

Argentina 199

Ariyaratne, A.T. 25–31

Arrighi, Giovanni 92

Arrow, Kenneth 259

Arusha Declaration 193, 194, 195,

209, 222

Asian Development Bank 180

Asian Drama xi, 51, 150, 184, 185,

255

Association to Tax Financial

Transactions to Aid Citizens

(ATTAC) 112, 115

Australia 56, 57, 278

Australian National University 179,

275

Austria 101, 116, 121, 253, 270, 271

autarchy 5

Azikiwe, Nnamdi 187

backwash effects 183, 184

Balogh, Lord Thomas 182

Bangkok 180

Bangladesh 15, 230, 231, 232, 234

banks 142–3; large-scale ‘universal’

118–19

Baran, Paul 20

barefoot economist 172

Barnett, Tony 38

basic (human) needs 29, 82, 133, 134,

135, 171, 174, 175, 233, 255, 266

Bauer, Peter 186, 215

Berg Report 6

Bhagwati, Jagdish 31–4, 147

Bhagwati tax 33

biodiversity 236, 237, 238–9

biopiracy 237, 239

biotechnology 153, 236, 238

black liberation 206

Blaikie, Piers 35–9

Blaut, James M. ‘ Jim’ ix, 40–5, 94

291

Bondi, Hermann 254

Borlaug, Norman ix, 45–50

Boserup, Ester xi, 50–5, 158, 186

bottom-up 59, 77, 109, 165, 172

brain drain (including skilled

emigration) 31, 33, 184

Brandt Commission 227, 264

Braudel, Fernand 90, 94

Brazil viii, 11, 15, 61–7, 93, 96–7,

100, 118, 173

Bretton Woods institutions 247, 248,

262, 268

Brookfield, Harold 36, 56–61

Brown, Lester 157

Brown, Mark Malloch 135

Brown, Paula 57

Brundtland, Gro Harlem ix

Buber, Martin 102

Buchanan, Keith 177

Buddhism/Buddhist 25–30, 220;

principles/teaching 27, 28

Budlender, Debbie 85

Cagatay, Nilufer 85

Cambridge University 31, 32, 73, 133,

155, 212, 213, 218, 220, 230, 242–

3, 254, 259, 265, 275

Canada 122, 254, 261

Canadian International Development

Agency (CIDA) 180

capabilities 232, 235

capital 140, 166, 169, 182, 196, 230;

accumulation 91, 139; flight 196;

foreign 196; imports 143; inflows

32, 33, 142

capitalism/capitalists 16, 20, 23–4, 25,

62, 112, 114, 120, 131, 169, 170,

189, 201, 250, 271, 274, 277; global

239; peripheral 204

Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 29,

61–7, 93, 179

cargo cults 276

Castells, Manuel 103

Catholic/Catholicism 28, 96, 194

Centre for Science and Environment

(CSE) 9, 10, 12, 13

Centro Internacional de

Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo

(CIMMYT) 47

CEPAL, see United Nations

Economic Commission for Latin

America (and the Caribbean)

(ECLA(C))

Cernea, Michael 67–73

Chambers, Robert 73–8

Chenery, Hollis B. 78–83, 133, 226

child labour 233

Chile 91, 93, 100, 102–3, 171, 199,

224, 260

China 11, 23, 47, 91, 94, 99, 105,

118, 161–5, 170, 180, 194, 212,

213, 215, 277–8

Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

162; Soviet Republic 162

Chipko movement 9, 236

Christian/Christianity 189, 220, 227

circular causation 185

cities 12, 101, 102, 180; capital 183;

sustainable 104; third world 178–9;

world 101

civil society 65, 67, 101

class 168, 208, 231, 275

Clausen, Alden Winship (Tom) 82

climate change (global warming) 11

Club of Rome 81, 157–8, 171

Cold War 90, 191, 226, 276

Colombia 127, 128, 224

colonialism 5, 184, 268, 273

Columbia University 127, 138, 211,

218, 247, 270

Commodities 200–3

communes 164, 161–5, 166, 212–6,

276, 277

communism, anti- 213

community, bounded 272

comparative advantage 79, 200

competition 166, 169

Comprehensive Development

Framework 247

Consciencism 189

conservation 10

Convention on Biological Diversity

Convention People’s Party (CPP)

189, 190

core/centre 199, 200, 201, 202, 203,

226

core-periphery model 103, 202

292

INDEX

Council for Mutual Economic

Assistance (COMECON) 92

critique of modelling and

monoeconomics 129

Cuba 99, 215, 224

Cultural Revolution 164, 277

cultural theory 278

culture(s) 54, 57, 67, 70, 174, 185,

209, 238, 278, 280; cultural

diversity 240; of poverty 185; of

silence 96, 98

cumulative causation 183

Dag Hammarskjøld Foundation 172, 175

dams 237, 238

Dasgupta, Partha 230, 231

debt/crisis 15, 112, 114, 115, 125,

135, 142, 148, 260

decentralisation 165

decolonisation 5, 20

deforestation 11–12, 110, 240

delinking 21, 22, 23, 129

democracy 108, 115, 262, 276, 277

Democratisation 86

demography 157

Denmark 50–1, 55

dependencia/dependency 33, 37, 62, 148,

182, 202, 204, 208, 224, 225, 226,

279; and development 61, 62;

theory 208

dependentista(s) 4, 99

Desai, Meghnad 267

desakota 179

development: administration 3;

agencies 184; agropolitan 101, 104;

alternative 104, 171; another 75;

anti- viii, 71; assistance 215;

capitalist 21, 23, 63, 166; dependent

23, 62; economic 20, 123, 124, 127,

129, 133, 140, 143, 145, 147, 195,

221, 265; egalitarian 127; equitable

245; export-led 203; feminist

critiques of 84–8; as freedom 231,

234; human 104; human-scale 171,

173, 175; indicators 224, 226;

indigenous strategies 3; induced 69;

inner 222; interdependent 56, 57,

59; material 170; meanings of viii;

modern 129, 170; participatory 69;

planning/planners 128, 185, 266,

269; polarised 103; policy 5, 79, 82,

121, 128, 150, 152, 186, 202, 216,

266; post- viii; practice/praxis/

practitioners vii, viii, 3, 65, 66, 78,

82, 173; proposals 18; regional 101,

105, 182; rural 69, 102, 104, 194;

self-sustaining 6; social 14, 69, 71,

145, size 54; state-centred 185;

strategies 15, 203; studies vii, viii, x,

xi, 20, 42, 43, 127, 130, 131, 151,

157, 230, 248, 255; sustainable 7,

59, 111, 171, 223; technological

117; theory/discourse viii, ix, 20–1,

24, 26, 38, 82, 173, 212, 270, 278,

279; thinking/thought 10, 38, 61,

111, 186, 193, 202, 228; 270–1,

277; of underdevelopment 21, 148;

under- 20–1, 24, 37, 93, 183, 185,

186, 206–10, 225, 279; unequal 2;

uneven 169

developmental/developmentalism

197; state 248

dharma 108

dialectics 167, 168

diffusion(ism) 38, 40, 41, 42

directly unproductive profit seeking

(DUP) 32

disarmament 132, 133, 134

disarticulation 21

disasters 36–7

distributive justice 244, 245, 262

division of labour: international 200

Down to Earth (publication of CSE)

10, 11, 12

Drakakis-Smith, David 179

dualism (dualistic) 271

Du Bois, W.E.B. 188

Earth Summit see UNCED

ECLA(C) see United Nations

Economic Commission for Latin

America (and the Caribbean)

ecofeminism 240

ecology 17, 18, 237; cultural 58, 59;

human 59

economic backwardness 116–20;

development 225, 226, 242, 243;

growth 133, 135, 225, 234, 244;

history 116, 122; inequalities 234;

policies 31, 184; theory 122, 194

293

INDEX

economics/economists ix, 15, 20, 29,

31–4, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 68, 69,

79, 84, 101, 102, 103, 122, 126,

127, 131, 133, 144, 150, 151, 172,

219, 222, 242, 248, 251, 255, 257,

258, 259, 260, 262, 264, 265, 266;

development 50, 78, 80, 138, 145,

150, 175, 185, 199, 248, 252; free

market 183; household 151;

international 182; neoclassical 251;

non-violent 221; welfare 231

economy: subsistence 146

ecosystem 272

Ecuador 172–3

education 96–100, 132, 134, 135,

136, 137, 164, 174, 185, 187, 194,

232, 245, 266; dialogue method of

96, 98

Ehrlich, Paul 81, 157

Elson, Diane 84–90

empowerment 52, 77, 101, 104,

172–3, 175

energy 16–18, 28, 46, 81; transition

Engels, Friedrich 166–7

England 56, 90, 99, 122, 156, 166,

254, 271, 273

entitlements 232, 234

entropy/syntropy 14, 17

environment/environmental 7, 9–10,

13, 32, 35, 37, 46, 54, 57, 59, 67,

236; change 35; degradation 11,

239–40; discourses 159; movements

48; policy 236; politics 9; science

10; sustainability 114, 230

Environmental Liaison Centre

International (ELCI) 10

environmentalism 9, 10, 159; red–

green 10

equity 186

Escobar, Arturo 75

Ethiopia 190

ethnographic method 60

Eurocentrism 40, 41, 42, 94, 170

exploitation 168

export promotion (EP) 32

extended metropolitan region 179–80

faith 106

Faletto, Enzo 62

family: planning 35, 157–8; size 54;

structure 54

famine 47, 231, 232

Fanon, Franz 40

Farmer First 73, 76

farming 74–5, 149–55, 238, 239, 223,

266

Fiji 58

financial markets 260–2

food 237; aid 113; production 156–8;

security 237; supply 48, 49

Food and Agriculture Organisation

(FAO) 9, 171, 237

Ford Foundation 48, 102

Fordism 14, 15, 16, 17

foreign direct investment (FDI) 32,

140, 164, 179

Framework Convention on Climate

Change 12

France 112, 214, 261

Frank, Andre Gunder 4, 20, 29, 90–6,

178, 202, 274, 279

freedom 232–3

Freire, Paolo 96–100

Friedman, Milton 90, 102, 215,

260

Friedmann, John 101–6, 183

functionings 232, 235

Galbraith, John K. 212, 259

Gandhi, Indira 265

Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma) viii, xi,

25, 28, 29, 106–11, 220, 237

Gandhian principles 27

Garvey, Marcus 188, 207

gender 231, 268; blindness 84; budget

initiatives (GBIs) 84, 88; and

development (GAD) 84–6, 88;

discrimination 232; division of

labour 52; (in)equality 84, 88, 195;

studies 52

General Agreement on Tariffs and

Trade (GATT) 262

general equilibrium theory 250

genetically modified (GM) crops 49

Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas 15–16

geography 41 56, 57, 58, 59, 101, 119,

231; cultural 57, 179; development

119, 176; economic 176; human

36, 38, 119, 176; regional 176

294

INDEX

geopolitics 71, 166, 206

George, Susan 111–16

Germany 116, 166, 214, 218, 219

Gerschenkron, Alexander 80, 116–21,

140, 142, 214

Ghana xi, 147, 148, 187–92

Global Environment Facility (GEF)

13, 59

global justice movement 112

global–local connections 270, 271–2

globalisation 13, 17, 22, 33, 40, 88,

159, 237, 248–9, 251, 256, 261,

279; anti- 20; neoliberal 112, 115

Gottmann, Jean 103

Gourou, Pierre 177

governance, good 66

Gramsci, Antonio 92

grassroots 175, 176; resistance 240

Great Bengal Famine 230, 232

Great Leap Forward 163–4

Green Revolution ix, 45–50, 113,

154, 156, 157, 237–8,

Grenada 43

Gross National Product (GNP) 265,

267; per capita 258, 260

gross nature product 10

Grown, Caren 85

growth, balanced 146; centres 103;

self-sustaining 214–15, 216

guerrilla 161

Guevara, Che 90, 99

Guinea 191

Guyana 205–7, 210

Harijans 109

Harvard University 15, 78, 79, 82, 97,

116, 118, 127, 213, 230, 259, 262, 265

Harvey, David 40, 103

Hayek, Friedrich A. von 186, 250

Hegel, G.W.F. 166–7

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

253

Helleiner, Gerald K. 121–6

Heyzer, Noeleen 85

Highly Indebted Poor Country

(HIPC) Initiative 125

Hinduism 29, 106, 109

Hirschman, Albert O. 116, 119,

126–32, 146, 147, 200, 214

historical materialism 166

history 177, 209, 231, 272–3

Hitler 90, 139

Hong Kong 178–9

Hornig, Paul see Streeten, Paul

Hoselitz, Bert 91, 116

household 105, 178, 233

human: development 133, 135, 137,

230, 231, 234, 266, 267, 268, 269;

resources 266; rights 42; security

268

Human Development Centre (HDC)

268

Human Development Index (HDI)

231, 260–1, 267–8

Human Development Reports

(HDRs) 135, 136, 264, 267–8

humanism 227

hunger 112; see also famine

hyperurbanisation 102

Illich, Ivan 74, 97, 98, 228

illiteracy 234

imperialism 21, 23, 40, 42, 188, 208,

209, 228, 268; anti- 42

import substitution industrialisation

32, 117–8, 141, 152, 203

indebtedness 81

independence 3, 188, 189, 193

India xi, 9–14, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 38,

47, 49, 50–1, 74, 106, 108, 150,

151, 152, 157, 169, 170, 181, 184,

219, 230, 231, 234, 236, 237, 238,

255, 265, 268

indigenous/local knowledge 67, 75,

77, 236–7, 239, 240

indigenous technical knowledge 41

industrialisation 58, 79, 80, 110,

116–20, 139, 140, 143, 146, 157,

163, 183, 210, 222, 243–4; export-

oriented 86; late 116–8, 120; rural

164

inequality 156, 159, 224; global 115;

regional 183

infant industry argument/policy 31

informal sector 178–9, 180

information-theoretic approach 248,

250, 251

injustice 112

Institute of Development Studies

(IDS) 73–7, 133, 151, 227

295

INDEX

integration: regional 3, 5

intellectual property rights 237

interconnectedness 108

interdisciplinarity vii, 58, 101, 128,

226, 280; studies 151

Intermediate Technology

Development Group (ITDG) 219,

222

International Development Research

Center (IDRC) 123

international financial: institutions

112, 125; markets 262

internationalism 226, 228

International Labour Organisation

(ILO) 52, 82, 91, 151, 171, 227,

231, 255, 256

International Monetary Fund (IMF)

92, 113, 123, 124, 125, 142, 196,

248, 256, 264

International Rice Research Institute

(IRRI) 47

internment 219

investment 260–1

‘inward-oriented’ development strategy

203

Islam 189

Jakarta/Jabotabek 179, 180

Jamaica 41, 206, 207, 208

Japan 140, 143, 214

Jolly, Richard 132–8, 224, 226, 267

Jomtien Conference on Education

135

Jubilee 2000 135

Judaism x, 68, 102, 150, 242, 253, 270

karma 108

Kennedy, John F. 259

Kenya 73, 158

Keynes, John Maynard/

Keynesian(ism) 122–3, 125, 140,

182, 185, 242, 244, 249, 252, 258,

260

Kindleberger, Charles Poor viii,

138–44, 212

King, Martin Luther 106, 111

Krueger, Anne 82

Krugman, Paul 263

Kuala Lumpur 178

Kuznetz, Paul 214

labour markets 153

lagging regions 129

Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) 5–7

land degradation 36, 38, 58, 156

land reform 151, 152, 163

latecomer models 116–7, 120

Lenin, V.I. 92, 219; Leninism 190

Leontief, Wassily 259

Lewis, Sir William Arthur xi, 4,

144–9

liberalisation 142, 143, 248

liberalism 234

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

(LTTE) 26, 27, 30

linear stage model/theory 80

Lipton, Michael xi, 149–55, 186, 256

livelihoods 56, 173

local communities 239, 241

locality; and scale 57

London 188, 196

London School of Economics see

University of London

longitudinal research 37

Luxemburg, Rosa 92

machines 108, 117

Maghreb 20

Maharashtra 150

Mahnkopf, Birgit 17

Malaysia 59

maldevelopment 22, 24

Malthus, Reverend Thomas Robert

viii, x, 47, 155–61

Malthusian(ism) 155–9

Mao Zedong 161–5

Maoism 21, 165

mapping 42; children’s 42

market(s): free 261; imperfections 248,

249, 250

Marshall Plan xi, 79, 128, 138, 143,

262

Marx, Karl viii, x, 15, 18, 50, 92, 96,

116, 157, 158, 162, 166–71, 212,

216, 219, 249, 250, 252, 279

Marxism/Marxist 20, 21, 22, 24, 63,

99, 169, 213, 276, 279; Marxism–

Leninism 21, 164, 165; proto- 190;

structural 93; theories 228

296

INDEX

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(MIT) 31, 91, 102, 138, 212, 213,

215

Max-Neef, Manfred 75, 171–6

Mazrui, Ali 193

McGee, Terence Gary 56, 176–81

McNamara, Robert 79–81, 248, 266

McRobie, George 219

Measure of Economic Welfare

(MEW) 260

Meier, Richard 102

Mendes, Chico viii

Mexico 46, 47, 48, 49, 57, 91, 93, 103

migration 274; African 52; labour 52;

rural–rural 51; rural–urban 51, 176,

178, 179

Mill, John Stuart 143

Millennium Development Goals

(MDGs) 85, 87, 136, 138

Miller, John 103

modernisation 182, 213, 214, 277;

theories 40, 271, 272, 273

modernisation-as-development 40;

spatial 41

modernism/modernist 166, 192, 195

modernity 190, 227, 272

monetarism 260

morality 108

Morawetz, David 80

Mumford, Lewis 101

Muslim 109

Mwinyi, Ali Hassan 196

Myers, Norman 157

Myrdal, Gunnar xi, 50, 51, 150,

181–7, 211, 252, 253, 255

Narain, Sunita 11

Narmada Dam 12, 70

National Coal Board 219, 220, 222

nationalisation 243

nationalism 224, 230, 276

Nazi regime: impact on development

thinking x–xi

Nazis 101, 121, 242, 253, 270

neoclassical economics 250;

economists 202, 214; paradigm/

theories 128, 145, 147, 201, 224,

225, 226, 228; tradition 204

neo-colonial(ism) 5, 20, 24, 189, 190,

195, 209

neo-Keynesianism 23

neoliberal(ism) 40, 64, 82, 129, 148,

185, 204, 226, 228, 249, 251, 260;

restructuring 86

neo-Malthusian(ism) 47, 51, 155, 157

neo-Marxism 23, 37, 99, 148, 184

Nepal 37–8

New Development Economics 247

New Economic Partnership for

Africa’s Development (NEPAD) 7

New Economics Foundation 223

new professionalism 75

New School for Social Research,

New York 243

New Zealand 177–8

Niebuhr, Reinhold 101

Nigeria 3, 122, 158

Nkrumah, Kwame Francis 147,

187–92

Nkrumahism 189, 190, 191

Nobel Prize 16, 47, 49, 145, 147, 150,

151, 186, 230, 234, 247, 248, 258,

262

Non-Aligned Movement 191

non-governmental organisation(s)

(NGO(s)) 10, 25, 27, 41, 227, 245–

non-violence 25, 27, 29, 30, 106, 108,

110

North–South relations 112

Nurske, Richard 182, 254

Nyerere, Julius Kambaragwe 7, 12,

100, 123, 124, 192–9, 207, 222,

226, 256, 265

Organisation of African Unity (OAU)

190, 197

obsolescent capitalism 22–3, 24

oil 122, 124, 158

Organisation for Economic

Co-operation and Development

(OECD) 133, 215

orientalism 41

Overseas Development

Administration (ODA) 268

Overseas Development Institute

(ODI) 136

Owen, David 243

297

INDEX

Oxford University 31, 84, 150, 211,

213, 218, 219, 230, 247, 252,

254

Padmore, George 188

Pakistan 47, 236, 264, 265, 267, 268

Pan-Africanism 188, 189, 190, 197

Papua New Guinea (PNG) 57, 59

participation 23, 24, 59, 136, 172,

173, 174, 175, 184

participatory 77; development 73–8;

research 41

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)

peace movement 27

Pearson, Ruth 85

peasant knowledge 42

peasant(ry) 151, 153, 162, 163, 165,

173, 190, 239, 271, 272, 273, 278

pedagogy 97–8, 100

Pedagogy of the Oppressed 97

People, Land Management and

Environmental Change (PLEC) 59

periphery 23, 62, 120, 183, 200, 201,

202, 203, 226

Perloff, Harvey 102

Philippines 47

place learning 42

planning 101, 104

policy: regional 183

political ecology 9, 36, 38

political economy 15, 35, 39, 90, 126,

155, 182, 213, 224, 249, 250, 254;

critical 14

politics 131, 150, 234, 255

polycentricity 22

Popper, Karl 253

population 47, 49, 155–9; control

156; fertility 53; growth 53, 155–9;

policy 233; size 53; urban 102

positionality 227

Positive and Tactical Actions 189

possibilism 130–1

postcolonial(ism) 256, 276–7, 279

post-development 175

post-modern(ism) 57, 227, 279

post-structuralism 29, 279

post-Washington consensus 247

poverty/poor 9, 10, 12, 13, 25, 29,

30, 38, 65, 67, 70, 73–7, 80, 96,

104, 111, 114, 124, 133, 134, 136,

146, 151, 152, 156, 157, 159, 172,

174, 175, 182, 184, 185, 220, 223,

231, 240, 244, 248, 249, 255, 266,

269, 271; alleviation 81, 82;

eradication 145; micro-level 150;

reduction 80; rural 74

power 224, 227, 234, 277

practitioner 77

Prebisch, Raúl 4, 93, 141, 178, 182,

183, 199–205, 225, 244,

Prebisch–Singer thesis 199, 202, 244

President Truman’s ‘Point Four’

speech viii

Prigogine, Ilya 16

Princeton University 147, 247

privatisation 63, 65, 237, 248

prizes 26, 197

production: forces of 168; mode of

168, 170; subsistence 52

productivity 146

progress 106

project cycle 69

proletarianisation 274

Puerto Rico 43

Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) 76

Rastafari 207

rational-choice models 127, 131

Rawlsian Difference Principle 231

Reagan, Ronald 82, 226

redistribution with growth 226

relations: social 167

reproductive economy 87

research methodologies 57

resettlement 70–2

resource(s): natural 236; non-

renewable 222; renewable 222; use

237–40

‘reversals’ 74–5

revolution 163, 165

Ricardo, David 249, 250

right livelihood 27, 29; Award 171,

237

risk 36–7, 46, 67, 70, 71, 117, 152

Robequain, Charles 177

Rockefeller Foundation 46, 48

Rodney, Walter xi, 205–11

Romania 68

Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul 182, 212,

214, 254

298

INDEX

Rostow, Walt viii, 41, 80, 91, 117,

119, 183, 211–17, 271

‘rural development tourism’ 74

Russia 16, 23, 116, 118, 177

Sachs, Wolfgang 41, 75

Sahlins, Marshall 271

Said, Edward 40, 41

Samuelson, Paul 31, 212, 247, 259

sanitation 132, 136

Sarvodaya 108, 109–110

Sarvodaya Shramadana 25–31

Satyagraha xi, 106, 109–110, 237

Sauer, Carl 57

savings 230

School of Oriental and African Studies

see University of London

Schultz, Theodore 102, 147, 148, 151

Schumacher, E.F. (Fritz) viii, 74, 75,

175, 218–23

Schumpeter, Joseph 15, 182, 214, 242,

244, 259

scientific modelling 128

Seers, Dudley 133, 224–30

self-help 28, 87

self-reflexivity 227

self-reliance 5, 6, 23, 29, 110, 165,

171, 173, 174, 194, 226, 238, 266

self-sufficiency 109, 110, 226

Sen, Amartya Kumar 49, 104, 226,

230–6, 265, 266, 267, 269

settlement: schemes 195; villages 195

share-cropping 250–1

Shiva, Vandana viii, 236–42

Simon, Julian 158

Singapore 41, 43

Singer, Hans 141, 182, 201, 202, 224,

226, 227, 242–7

Sinhalese 26–30

slave(ry) 233; trade (transatlantic) 273,

274

Small is Beautiful 175, 218, 220, 221

Smith, Adam 250, 252

social: democracy 64; equity 64;

justice 48, 233; movements 276;

relations 167; revolution 168; sins

107; transformation 92, 170, 278;

welfare 133

socialism/socialist 24, 25, 43, 68, 88,

162, 170, 189, 190, 194, 195;

African 190, 193, 196, 222; state

210

sociology/sociologist 15, 67, 68, 69,

119, 271, 276; of development 185,

278; sociological knowledge 69;

political 277

Soil Association 222, 223

soil erosion 35–6, 38, 46, 48

Solow, Robert 212, 214, 259

South Africa 56, 106, 109, 123, 153,

222, 255

South Commission 196

South Korea 248

Southeast Asian city 176, 178

Southern African Development

Community (SADC) 197

South–South co-operation 196

Soviet Union 91, 92, 104, 163, 170,

212, 213, 214, 215, 248

speculation 259–62

spirituality 107

spread effect 129, 183

Sri Lanka 25–31, 74, 151, 153, 224

Srinivasan, T.N. 82

stages theory 213, 215, 216

Stalinist approach 163

Stanford University 68–9, 79, 247

state: role of 117, 118; ‘soft’ 184;

welfare 184

Stewart, Frances 267

Stiglitz, Joseph 150, 247–52

Streeten, Marjorie and Dorothy 253–

Streeten, Paul Patrick xi, 150, 226,

252–8, 268

structural adjustment 6, 84, 114, 134,

196

structuralism 202, 203, 204

structuralist(s) 182

subsidies 31

substitutes 119

Summers, Lawrence 248

survival algorithm 152

sustainability 6, 42, 218 sustainable

livelihoods (approach) 76, 77

Svachetana 108

Swadeshi 109

Swedish International Development

Co-operation Agency (SIDA) 85

Switzerland 91

299

INDEX

take-off 211, 213, 214, 215

Tamils 26–30

Tanganyika 193, 195

Tanganyika African National Union

(TANU) 193

Tanzania xi, 100, 121, 123, 192–9,

206, 207, 222, 226, 256

targeting 133

tariffs 31, 32

tax 258, 260, 261–2

technology 119, 152, 153, 156, 158,

159, 203, 214, 218, 219, 220, 221,

222, 236, 237, 244; technological

change 54; intermediate 220;

studies 9; sustainable 54

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

102

There Is No Alternative (TINA) 6

thermo-balance 16

thermodynamics 16, 17

Thatcher, Margaret 82, 226

The Third World 276–8

‘Theory of the Optimising Peasant’

150, 152

Third Worldism 210

Thompson, E.P. 276, 278

Timmer, Peter 257

Tobin, James viii, 115, 258–64

Tobin Tax 115, 260, 261–2, 263

Todaro, Michael 4

top-down 41, 173, 175

trade 243; free 31, 33, 34, 141;

international 184, 199, 200–1, 203,

252; terms of 124, 201, 202, 243

tradition 272

transformation 225

transitional economies 249

transnational corporations 114, 122,

228, 238, 239

Transnational Institute 112, 114

trickle-down 80, 173

tropical agriculture 43

tropical soils 43

Trotsky, Leon 92

Uganda 38, 123, 124

Ujamaa 192, 193, 194, 196, 197

Ujamaa Vijijiini 195, 196

Ul Haq, Mahbub 226, 255,

264–70

unbalanced growth: theory of 126

underdevelopment see development

unemployment 256

unequal exchange 21, 146

unevenness of productivity 21

unfreedoms 232

United Gold Coast Convention

(UGCC) 188–9

United Kingdom (UK) x, 84, 119,

143, 206, 214, 219, 223

United Nations Children’s Fund

(UNICEF) 134, 135, 245

United Nations Conference on

Environment and Development

(UNCED) 11, 59

United Nations Conference on Trade

and Development (UNCTAD) 93,

203

United Nations Department of

Economic Affairs 243

United Nations Development Fund

for Women (UNIFEM) 85, 87

United Nations Development

Programme (UNDP) 85, 135, 231,

245, 260–1, 264, 265, 267–8

United Nations Economic

Commission for Africa (UNECA)

3, 6–7

United Nations Economic

Commission for Europe 182, 211

United Nations Economic

Commission for Latin America (and

the Caribbean) (ECLA(C)) 4, 93,

183, 200, 202, 203, 204, 225

United Nations Educational, Scientific

and Cultural Organization

(UNESCO) 97

United Nations Environment

Programme (UNEP) 11

United Nations Industrial

Development Organization

(UNIDO) 231, 245

United Nations Intellectual History

Project 135

United Nations Research Institute for

Social Development (UNRISD)

245

United Nations University (UNU)

123

300

INDEX

United Nations World Food

Programme (WFP) 245

United States Agency for International

Development (USAID) 79, 215,

216

United States of America (USA) vii, x,

15, 16, 34, 41, 43–4, 46, 49, 69, 78,

82, 90–1, 97, 100, 106, 112, 119,

143, 171, 181, 186, 187–8, 206,

211, 215, 222, 223, 259, 263, 272,

277, 279

University of British Columbia 179,

180

University of California at Los

Angeles (UCLA) 103

University of Chicago 101, 102

University of London xi, 3, 56, 127,

144, 147, 206, 222

University of Manchester 145, 147

University of the West Indies 144–5,

147

urban bias 149, 151, 152, 165

urbanisation 58, 103, 176, 178, 179,

180

utilitarianism 231

Venezuela 102

Vietnam 180, 191, 215, 216, 271

village studies 151

‘Voices of the Poor’ 76

vulnerability 36–7, 70, 71, 74, 75, 134

Wallerstein, Immanuel ix, 20, 40, 90,

92, 93, 94, 103, 274

Washington Consensus 148, 247, 248

water supply 132, 266

Watts, Michael 119

Wirth, Louis 177

Wisner, Ben 36

Wolf, Eric R. 90, 270–5

women(’s) 237, 239–40; in

Development (WID) 86; rights 162;

roles 10, 52; status 52

Wood, Barbara 219

World Bank ix, 48, 67–72, 76, 78–82,

112, 113, 114, 123, 125, 136, 142,

157, 175, 195, 196, 216, 242, 247,

248, 255, 256, 264, 266, 269

World Commission on Environment

and Development (WCED) ix

World Development 255

world: development 278; economy

93, 145; market 15–16, 18, 274

World Institute of Development

Economics Research (WIDER)

123

World Population Conference 52

World Resources Institute (WRI) 11

World Social Summit 261

World Spirit 167

world system 90, 93, 94, 113 theory

204, 274

World Trade Organisation (WTO)

World War II xi, 78, 252, 275; post-

viii, 4, 79, 117, 121, 128, 138, 184

Worsley, Peter 275–80

Yale University 122, 127, 133, 211,

247, 259, 265

301

INDEX

ECONOMICS: THE BASICS

Tony Cleaver

With case studies ranging from the coffee plantations of El Salvador to the

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Steve Pressman

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