Social change and development short essay
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Chapteronesocialdevelopment.docx1 Development: Theory and Reality
Development, today, is increasingly about how we survive the future, rather than how we improve on the past. While ideas of human progress and material improvement still guide theory and policy making, how we manage “energy descent” and adapt to serious ecological deficits, climatic disruption, and social justice effects will define our existence. How will this change our understanding and practice of development?
A central issue is how effectively policy makers (in states and development agencies) recognize the need for wholesale public coordination of planning to minimize and adapt to inevitable climatic changes. Plenty of new ideas, practices, and policies are surfacing, but more as a cacophony rather than a strategic endeavor to reverse our ecological footprint (see Glossary/Index for bolded definitions). For example, while the Chinese government is strategic in promoting green technology, China—the major offshore assembly zone for global commodities—leads in global greenhouse gas emissions (one-third).1 Climate summits tend to confirm ambivalence of governments held hostage to domestic growth policies—whether these governments are from the global North or the global South. Across this historic divide, there is now a shared global crisis of unemployment and debt, compounding the challenges of development futures with rising inequalities.
Not only are there increasingly evident biophysical limits to development as we know it, but development is now compromised by public austerity policies across the nation-state system, most recently evident in Greece. Such policies, introduced to the global South from the 1980s, now shape northern societies and their interrelations. All over, the development ideal of a social contract between governments and citizens is crumbling as hard-won social rights and public entitlements erode, generating despair, disillusionment, or disorder as citizens protest cutbacks. Arguably, “development” is not only in crisis but is also at a significant turning point in its short history as a master concept of (Western-oriented) social science and cultural life.
This book is a guide to the rise and transformation of “development” as a powerful instrument of global social change over the last two centuries. From one (long-term) angle, it appears increasingly cometlike: a brilliant lodestar for ordering the world, but perhaps destined to burn out as its energy-intensive foundations meet their limits. From another (immediate) angle, the energy and inequality dilemma forces renewed critical thinking about how humans might live sustainably and equitably on the planet. These perspectives are the subjects of chapters to come. Here, we are concerned with the source and maturation of development as a master concept—both its promises and its paradoxes.
Development: History and Politics
Development had its origins in the colonial era, as European domination came to be understood as superiority and leadership along a development axis. Global in its origins, the meaning of development nevertheless compared European accomplishments with societies increasingly disrupted by imperial ventures. While such accomplishments came with substantial environmental and social—and often violent—upheaval, they have been represented in theory as a set of idealized outcomes to be emulated by other countries. Accordingly, development’s ends justify its means, however socially and ecologically disruptive the process may be.
Here, Michael Cowan and Robert Shenton’s distinction between development as an unfolding universal social process and development as a political intervention is useful. In the nineteenth century, development was understood philosophically as improving humankind (in the form of knowledge building, technological change, and wealth accumulation). In relation to this, European political elites interpreted development practically, as a way to socially engineer emerging national societies. Elites formulated government policy to manage the social transformations attending the rise of capitalism and industrial technologies, so development was identified with both industrialization and the regulation of its disruptive social impacts. These impacts began with the displacement of rural populations by land enclosures for cash cropping, a process that generated “undesirables,” such as menacing paupers, restless proletarians, and unhealthy factory towns.2 Development, then, meant balancing technological change and the rise of new social classes, fashioning policies to manage wholesale social transformations. At the same time, such transformations became the catalyst of competing political visions—liberal, socialist, conservative—of the ideal society.
In Europe’s colonies, the inhabitants appeared undeveloped—by self-referential (evolutionary) European standards. This ideological understanding of development legitimized imperial intervention, whether to plunder or civilize. Either way, the social engineering impulse framed European imperialism. Not only did massive colonial resource extraction facilitate European industrialization, but European colonial administrators also managed subject populations experiencing their own wrenching social transformations. Thus, development assumed an additional, normative meaning, namely, the “white man’s burden”—the title of a poem by nineteenth-century English poet Rudyard Kipling—imparting honor to an apparently noble task. The implied racism remains a part of the normative understanding (and global consequence) of development.
Thus, development extended modern social engineering to colonies incorporated into the European orbit. Subject populations were exposed to a variety of new disciplines, including forced labor schemes, schooling, and segregation in native quarters. Forms of colonial subordination differed across time and space, but the overriding object was either to adapt or marginalize colonial subjects to the European presence. In this sense, development involved a relation of power. For example, British colonialism introduced the new English factory-model “Lancaster school” to the (ancient) city of Cairo in 1843 to educate Cairo’s emerging civil service. Egyptian students learned the new disciplines of a developing society that was busily displacing peasant culture with plantations of cotton for export to English textile mills and managing an army of migrant labor, which was building an infrastructure of roads, canals, railways, telegraphs, and ports.3 Through the colonial relation, industrialism transformed both English and Egyptian society, producing new forms of social discipline among working-and middle-class citizen-subjects. And while industrialism produced new class inequalities within each society, colonialism racialized international inequality. In this way, development introduced new class and racial hierarchies within and across societies.
While development informed modern narratives in the age of industrialism and empire, it only became formalized as a project in the mid-twentieth century. This period was the high tide of decolonization, as the Western (British, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Belgian) and Japanese empires succumbed to the moral force of anticolonial resistance and when a standardizing concept—development as an emancipatory promise—became the new global ontology (a way of seeing/ordering the world).
In 1945, the United Nations, with the intent of expanding membership as colonies gained independence as sovereign states, institutionalized the System of National Accounts. A universal quantifiable measure of development, the gross national product (GNP), was born. At this point, the colonial rule of subjects under the guise of civilizing inferior races morphed into the development project, based on the ideal of self-governing states composed of citizens united by the ideology of nationalism. And by the twenty-first century, the global development project focused on market governance of and by self-maximizing consumers. Given this trajectory, development is conventionally understood as economic growth and rising consumption.
Development Theory
Identifying development with rising consumption privileges the market as the vehicle of social change. The underlying philosophy—deriving from a popular (but limiting) interpretation of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations4 and formalized in neoclassical economic theory—is that markets maximize individual preferences and allocate resources efficiently. Whether this theory reflects reality or not, it is a deeply held belief now institutionalized in much development policy across the world. Why is this the case?
Naturalizing Development
There are two ways to answer this question. First, a belief in markets is a central tenet of liberal Western philosophy. Hungarian philosopher Karl Polanyi noted that modern liberalism rests on a belief in a natural human propensity for self-gain, which translates in economic theory as the market principle—realized as consumer preference.5 Self-gain, expressed through the market, drives the aspiration for improvement, aggregated as consumption. Second, as Polanyi noted, to naturalize market behavior as an innate propensity discounts other human traits or values—such as cooperation, redistribution, and reciprocity, which are different organizing principles by which human societies have endured for centuries. For Polanyi and other classical social theorists, pursuit of individualism via an economic calculus is quite novel in the history and makeup of human societies and quite specific to modernity, rather than being inherent in human social life.
While cooperative values are clearly evident today in human interactions, the aspiration for improvement, normalized now as a private motivation, informs development. That is, well-being and self-improvement center on access to goods and services through the marketplace. Dating from the mid-twentieth century, in an era of powerful anticolonial, labor, and citizenship movements, formulations of development paired private consumption with public provisions—infrastructure, education, health, water supply, commons, clean air, and so forth. The mid-twentieth century was the heyday of the welfare, or development, state. But from the last quarter of the twentieth century, provisioning has increasingly been subjected to privatization, as the market, rather than the state, becomes the medium through which society develops.
This outcome was prefigured in one of the most influential theories of development emerging in the post–World War II world. In 1960, economist Walt Rostow published The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,6 outlining a development theory that celebrates the Western model of free enterprise—in contrast to a state-planned economy. The “stages” traverse a linear sequence, beginning with “Traditional Society” (agrarian, limited productivity) and moving through “Preconditions for Take-Off” (state formation, education, science, banking, profit-systematization), “Take-Off” (normalization of growth, with investment rates promoting the expanded reproduction of industry), and “Maturity” (the second industrial revolution that moved from textiles and iron to machine-tools, chemicals, and electrical equipment)—and finally to the “Age of High Mass-Consumption,” characterized by the movement from basic to durable goods, urbanization, and a rising level of white-collar versus blue-collar work.
This evolutionary sequence, distilled from the US experience, represents the consumer society as the terminal stage of a complex historical process. Rostow viewed the US model as the goal to which other (i.e., developing) societies should aspire, which partly explains his book’s subtitle—expressing the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union at the time. The theorization of development as a series of evolutionary stages naturalizes the process, whether it occurs on a national (development era) or an international (globalization era) stage. Mass consumption was a final goal to be realized through membership of the “free world” at the time, and by implication, US assistance would be available to spur the Third World of postcolonial, developing nations into progress along the stages.
However, note that Rostow’s “development blueprint” depended on a political context. That is, markets required creating, securing, and protecting (by a development state). They could not be natural. And development was neither spontaneous nor inevitable; rather, it was shaped by social struggle, and it required an institutional complex on a world scale (a development project) to nurture it along, complete with trade, monetary, and investment rules, aid regimes, and a military umbrella—all of which were supplied through postwar, multilateral institutions and bilateral arrangements led by the United States. In this way, a theory of spontaneous markets diverges from reality. But reality was nonetheless shaped by this theory—informing public discourse and translated into policy implementation via an increasing market calculus. This is a central paradox explored in this book.
Global Context
Reality is more complicated than it first appears. For example, Rostow’s prescriptions artificially separated societies from one another. This may have expressed the idealism of mid-twentieth-century nationalism. But to assign stages of growth to societies without accounting for their unequal access to offshore resources discounted a fundamental historic relationship between world regions shaped by colonial and investment patterns. Not only did European powers once depend on their colonies for resources and markets, but these patterns continued in the postcolonial era. Because of continuing First World dependence on raw materials from the Third World, some societies were more equal than others in their capacity to traverse Rostow’s stages, in part because resource extraction was one way, as we shall see in Chapter 4.
It was this reality that stimulated dependency analysis and world-system analysis. The concept of “dependency” (referring to unequal economic relations between metropolitan societies and non-European peripheries) emerged in the mid-twentieth century from several quarters—an empirical observation by economist Hans Singer that “peripheral” countries were exporting more and more natural resources to pay for increasingly expensive manufactured imports; an argument by Singer’s collaborator, Argentinean economist Raúl Prebisch, that Latin American states should therefore industrialize behind protective tariffs on manufactured imports; and earlier Marxist theories of exploitative imperialist relations between the European and the non-European world.7 Dependency was, then, a relationship accounting for the development of Europe at the expense of the underdevelopment of the non-European world. Economist Andre Gunder Frank put it this way:
[H]istorical research demonstrates that contemporary underdevelopment is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other relations between the satellite underdeveloped and the now-developed metropolitan countrie…. When we examine this metropolis-satellite structure, we find that each of the satellites … serves as an instrument to suck capital or economic surplus out of its own satellites and to channel part of this surplus to the world metropolis of which all are satellites.8
World-system analysis, advanced by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, deepened the concept of dependency by elevating the scope of the modern social system to a global scale. States became political units competing for—or surrendering—resources within a world division of labor. Here, regional labor forces occupy a skill/technological hierarchy associated with state strength or weakness in the capitalist world economy.9 From this perspective, the “core” concentrates capital-intensive or intellectual production and the “periphery” is associated with lower-skilled, labor-intensive production, whether plantation labor, assembly of manufactured goods, or routine service work (e.g., call centers). As we shall see, this kind of geographical hierarchy is increasingly complicated by what journalist Thomas Friedman calls “flat world” processes, exemplified, for him, by India’s embrace of information technology.10
While dependency broadens the analysis of development processes to world-scale relationships, challenging the assumption that societies are aligned along a self-evident spectrum of growth stages, it implies a “development-centrism”—where (idealized Western) development is the term of reference. In this regard, Wallerstein has argued that given the power hierarchy of the world system, (idealized Western) development represents a “lodestar,” or master concept, of modern social theory.11 As such, the privileging of Western-style development denied many other collective/social strategies of sustainability or improvement practiced by non-Western cultures. Nevertheless, while measuring all societies against a conception of (industrial) development may have seemed the appropriate goal for modernization and dependency theory at mid-century, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century it is quite problematic. The growing recognition that the planet cannot sustain the current Western-emulating urban-industrial trends in China and India is one dramatic expression of this new reality.
Agrarian Questions
Urbanization is a defining outcome of development and the “stages of growth” metaphor, where “tradition” yields to “modernity” as industrialization deepens and nurtures it. Political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing about the process of modernization in Political Order and Changing Societies (1968), claimed, “Agriculture declines in importance compared to commercial, industrial, and other nonagricultural activities, and commercial agriculture replaces subsistence agriculture.”12 While this theoretical sequence is clearly in evidence and has informed policies discounting small-scale farming, there is a further question regarding whether and to what extent this is natural, or inevitable. And this in turn raises questions about the model of separate national development. In fact, the demise of millions of small producers has foreign, or international, origins—in the form of colonialism, foreign aid, and unequal market relations—expressing the global power relations identified by dependency and world-system analysts. How we perceive these changes is the ultimate question: We know, for instance, that agricultural productivity ratios across high- and low-input farming systems have risen from 10:1 before 1940 to 2,000:1 in the twenty-first century,13 putting small producers (primarily in the global South) at a competitive disadvantage in the global market. Even as social changes occur within nations, does that mean the change is “internally” driven? Thus, if subsistence agriculture declines or disappears, is this because it does not belong on a society’s “development ladder”?14 Or is it because of an exposure of smallholders to forces beyond their control, such as unequal world market competition by agribusiness?
Small farming cultures are represented as development “baselines”—in theory and in practice, given modern technology’s drive to replace labor and control production (with commercial inputs such as seed, fertilizer, and pesticides along with farm machinery). Unrecognized is the superior capacity or potential in surviving agrarian cultures for managing and sustaining their ecosystems compared to industrial agriculture, which attempts to override natural limits with chemicals and other technologies that deplete soil fertility, hydrological cycles, and biodiversity.15 The current “global land grab” depends on representing land in the global South as “underutilized” and better employed by conversion to commercial agricultural estates producing foods and biofuels largely for export.16 Such activities raise a fundamental question as to whether and to what extent development—as modeled—is inevitable or intentional, and national or international.
Ecological Questions
This example of conversion of farming into an industrial activity underscores a significant ecological blindspot in development theory. Where the passage from small farming to large-scale (commercial) agriculture is represented as improvement, or development, it is an insufficient measure if it does not take into account the “externals.” These are the significant social and environmental impacts, such as disruption of agrarian cultures and ecosystems, the deepening of dependency on fossil fuel, and modern agriculture’s responsibility for up to a third of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Such consequences challenge the wisdom of replacing a long-standing knowledge-intensive culture/ecology (farming) with an increasingly unsustainable industrialized economic sector (agriculture).
One key example of this ecological blindspot is its reproduction in the Human Development Index (HDI), constructed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990. The HDI overcame the singular emphasis on economic growth as development, but carried forward the absence of the ecological dimension:
The concept of human development focuses on the ends rather than the means of development and progress. The real objective of development should be to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. Though this may appear to be a simple truth, it is often overlooked as more immediate concerns are given precedence.17
While the HDI is known for its more robust measurement of (human) development, its data sources have lacked environmental content. This is particularly so, given that humanity has now overshot the earth’s biocapacity (see Figure 1.1). Focusing on the outcomes of development discounts how we live on the earth—that is, measuring what practices are sustainable or not. It was only in 2011 that the UNDP began to embrace an ecological sensibility. Thus, the Human Development Report (2011) is “about the adverse repercussions of environment degradation for people, how the poor and disadvantaged are worst affected, and how greater equity needs to be part of the solution.”18
Figure 1.1 Humanity’s Ecological Footprint
Figure 1.1 Humanity’s Ecological Footprint
Source: Global Footprint Network, 2010 National Footprint Accounts.
Given the UNDP’s reputation for questioning conventional wisdom, this new focus complements the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which noted that the last half century of human action has had the most intensive and extensive negative impact on world ecosystems ever, and yet this has been accompanied by continuing global gains in human well-being.19 Known as the “environmentalist’s paradox” (since we might expect ecosystem degradation to negatively affect human well-being), researchers have noted that average measures of well-being may reduce the validity of this claim, but perhaps more significantly, “technology has decoupled well-being from nature” and time lags will only tell.20 In other words, mastery of nature may be effective in the short-term in generating rising consumption patterns, but also in masking the long-term health implications of ecosystem stress. What such research suggests is that development needs a robust sustainability dimension—as suggested at the end of this book in the section on sustainable development approaches.
Development Paradoxes
The environmentalist’s paradox, when inverted, is, in fact, a “development paradox.” Former World Bank economist Herman Daly formulated this as an “impossibility theorem”—namely, that the universalization of US-style high mass-consumption economy would require several planet Earths. Either way, the ultimate paradox here is that the environment is not equipped to absorb its unrelenting exploitation by the current growth model of endless accumulation. In other words, development as we know it is undermining itself.
Three of the nine designated planetary operational boundaries have been crossed already—climate change, biodiversity, and the nitrogen cycle—while others such as fresh water use and oceanic acidification are at serious tipping points. Meanwhile, the costs of environmental degradation are borne disproportionately by the poor—the very same people targeted by the development industry. This is a key development paradox. Related to these formulations is the notion (advanced by the World Bank in 1992) that economic growth is a condition for sustainable development, which the UK Stern Review of 2006 termed a paradox since the cost of climate change adaptation would be far greater if we wait for higher future levels of wealth to address the problem.
Some subsidiary paradoxes include such questions as these: Are low-carbon cultures that live with rather than seek to master nature backward? Are non-Western cultures judged poor in what makes Western cultures rich? Is frugality poverty? Why is malnutrition common to Western and non-Western cultures (see Figure 1.2)? Are non-Western cultures rich in what Western cultures are now poor (nonmonetized items such as open space, leisure, solidarity, ecological knowledge)? Should we measure living standards only in monetary terms?
Figure 1.2 Percentage of Population That Is Malnourished and Overweight
Figure 1.2 Percentage of Population That Is Malnourished and Overweight
Source: Adapted from New Internationalist 353 (2003): 20.
Sources: Foster (2011); Stern (2006); Daly (1990).
Social Change
As we have seen, development theory provides a blueprint, and justification, for universalizing a European-centered process. European industrialization depended on displacing non-European industry and capturing non-European resources (labor, minerals, raw materials, and foodstuffs). Such colonial intervention was justified as a civilizing mission—asked what he thought of British civilization, the leader of India’s independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi, reputedly replied, “It would be a good idea.” Of course, colonial subjects resisted—for example, the successful late-eighteenth-century slave uprising in the French colony of Saint Domingue (forming the Haitian free state), but also the unsuccessful Amritsar rebellion, put down savagely by British forces in India in 1919. Such uprisings marked a long-term politics of decolonization, with colonial subjects gaining moral and material power as countermovements to European empires, which in turn became increasingly costly to maintain. Resistance to colonial relations—including substantial peasant mobilizations from China to Mexico to Kenya—was matched with labor uprisings and political organization during the late-colonial era. The British faced widespread labor strikes in their West Indian and African colonies in the 1930s, and this pattern continued over the next two decades in Africa as British and French colonial subjects protested conditions in cities, ports, mines, and on the railways.21
In other words, large-scale social changes accompanying industrial development involve definitive power struggles. Colonial rule generated a politics of decolonization, including class conflict, identity/cultural claims, and the desire for equality of treatment, including sovereignty. The colonial project was certainly anchored in class relations, as empires subordinated colonial labor forces and resources to service imperial needs. But this economic relation was accompanied by fundamental racial politics that both justified subjugation and fueled resistances in the name of human rights across the colonial world. These struggles ushered in a postcolonial era, which informed a mid-twentieth-century global development project, embedded in a system of sovereign nation-states forming the United Nations organization in 1945.
The divisive racial legacy of colonialism certainly did not disappear, but a very diverse world was bound together now by a universal principle: an international governmental structure enshrining the meaning and measurement of development as a national standard. This was institutionalized in the UN System of National Accounts, by which monetized economic activity was recorded as gross national product (GNP). Outside of the Communist bloc (also known as the Second World), as national economic growth and income levels became the measure of development, so First- and Third-World societies came to be governed by the market (and its metrics), with varying degrees of public regulation.
The “market society” was the product of modern capitalism and commodification of the material world, expressed in monetary exchanges. As Karl Marx pointed out, even human labor power came to be commodified, as villagers lost their means of livelihood and were forced to work for monetary wages.22 Karl Polanyi extended this observation to land and currency, noting that with the rise of nineteenth-century market society each of these substances came to be traded for a price. He argued that neither labor, land, nor money were produced for sale, and so were really “fictitious commodities.” When these substances are treated as commodities, workers, farmers, and businesses are exposed to exploitative or uncertain conditions. That is, their labor, farming, or entrepreneurship experience competitive relations beyond their control by a market with seemingly independent authority. Accordingly, social countermovements would inevitably arise and advocate for protection from unregulated markets (a “double movement”). The resulting effect would be to re-embed markets within social/public controls. In Polanyi’s account, this explains the origins of the twentieth-century welfare state, which became a model for the development state. It arose out of a European-wide social mobilization to protect the rights of workers, farmers, and businesses from the ill effects of unrestrained markets.23
The Projects as Historical Framework
Within the terms of this broad social-change theory, then, the postcolonial world order emerged from the combined force of decolonization politics and public initiatives to regulate capitalist markets (as distinct from the Communist model of a state-planned economy). Development as an ideal and as a policy carried forward the social welfare dimension, reinforced by the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights (1948), by which governments were enjoined to protect civil rights through a social contract between state and citizen. This idealistic contract defined the era of the development project (1940s–1980), rooted in public regulation of markets as servants of states. The following era of the globalization project (1980s through the present) saw markets regain ascendancy—with states as servants—and the incorporation of the “good market, bad state” mantra into public discourse. The tension between these poles continues in what may become a sustainability project as the world transitions to a new project governed by environmental stress and climate uncertainty.
Here, we frame the story of development around the three projects: colonial, development, and globalization. This framework stresses that the meaning and practice of development changes with changing political-economic (and environmental) conditions. The transition from the development to the globalization project stemmed from a political reversal “from above” by increasingly powerful business and financial interests and their allies to reduce or eliminate public regulation of corporations and their ability to operate across national borders. Deregulation of markets has been the ultimate goal, legitimized by neoliberal economic theory. And subsequent controversies over the impact of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have been generated by social mobilization “from below,” driven by economic destabilization and intensification of social inequalities as markets have been disembedded from social controls.24
These protests, dramatized in 2011 by the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement among others, draw attention to the development paradox, where poverty accompanies economic growth. This is evidenced in an Oxfam report that 2016 marked the threshold of the top 1 percent of the world’s population owning more than 50 percent of global wealth, 25 as well as continuing a food crisis that renders almost a billion people chronically hungry.26
Currently, the crisis of the globalization project (addressed in Chapter 8) is stimulating a wide range of sustainability initiatives at all scales, geared to containing or reducing environmental degradation and climate warming. How these may coalesce into some kind of world ordering is not yet clear. Whether we will see or make a more authoritarian world order built on energy and climate security claims or some decentralized, ecologically based social organization are some of the possibilities that are informing debate (see Chapter 9). In the meantime, we can situate our condition via some “development coordinates.”
The Development Experience
Development is not an activity that other societies do to catch up to the “developed societies.” That nomenclature is unfortunate, since it suggests a condition enjoyed by citizens of the global North that is the goal and envy of the rest of the world. Indeed, some argue that the West is busy “undeveloping,” as jobs relocate to growth areas such as China and India, as northern public infrastructure decays, as social services such as education and health care dwindle, and as ecosystems degrade. From this perspective, development does not look like a linear process, nor is there a model outcome since it is an uneven global dynamic.
From a global perspective, development redistributes jobs to lower-wage regions. While transnational firms thereby enhance profitability, northern consumers (at least those with incomes) enjoy access to low-cost products that are produced offshore. In this sense, development has been identified—for its beneficiaries—as consumption. This, of course, corresponds with Rostow’s final growth stage, but not as a national characteristic—rather as a global relationship. Much of what we consume today has global origins. Even when a product has a domestic “Made in …” label, its journey to market probably combines components and labor from production and assembly sites located around the world. Sneakers, or parts thereof, might be produced in China or Indonesia, blue jeans assembled in the Philippines, a cell phone or portable media player put together in Singapore, and a watch made in Hong Kong. The British savor organic vegetables from western China, the Chinese eat pork fed with South American soy, and North Americans consume fast foods that may include chicken diced in Mexico or hamburger beef from cattle raised in Costa Rica. And, depending on taste, our coffee is from Southeast Asia, the Americas, or Africa. We readers may not be global citizens yet, but we are certainly global consumers.
But global consumers are still a minority. While over three-quarters of the world’s population can access television images of the global consumer, only half of that audience has access to sufficient cash or credit to consume. Television commercials depict people everywhere consuming global commodities, but this is just an image. We know that much of the world’s population does not have Internet access (despite increasingly ubiquitous mobile phones), and we know that a relative minority of the world’s population consumes a vast majority of global goods and services.27 Distribution of, and access to, the world’s material wealth is extraordinarily uneven. Almost half of the ex-colonial world dwells now in slums. Over three billion people cannot, or do not, consume in the Western style. Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano makes this observation:
Advertising enjoins everyone to consume, while the economy prohibits the vast majority of humanity from doing so…. This world, which puts on a banquet for all, then slams the door in the noses of so many, is simultaneously equalizing and unequal: equalizing in the ideas and habits it imposes and unequal in the opportunities it offers.28
And yet it is important also to note that while readers may be accustomed to a commercial culture and view it as the development “standard,” other cultures and peoples are noncommercial, not comfortable with commercial definition, or are simply marginal (by choice or circumstance) to commercial life. Contrary to media images, global consumerism is neither accessible to—nor possible for—a majority of humans, nor is it necessarily a universal aspiration, whether by cultural choice for some peoples, or simply for others needing to make ends meet on a day-to-day basis.
Nevertheless, the global marketplace binds consumers, producers, and even those marginalized by resource consumption. Consumers everywhere are surrounded, and often identified by, world products. One of the most ubiquitous, and yet invisible, world products is coltan, a metallic ore used in consumer electronics, such as computers and cell phones, in addition to nuclear reactors. It comes predominantly from the Congo, where militarized conflict over this valuable resource has caused nearly four million deaths, and mining has negative environmental consequences for forests and wildlife. Such ethical issues, similar to those associated with “blood diamonds,” have driven some electronics corporations to mine coltan elsewhere in Africa.29
The global economy is a matrix of networks of commodity exchanges. In any one network, there is a sequence of production stages, located in a number of countries at sites that provide inputs of labor and materials contributing to the fabrication of a final product (see Figure 1.3). These networks are called commodity chains. The chain metaphor illuminates the interconnections among producing communities dispersed across the world. And it allows us to understand that, when we consume a product, we often participate in a global process that links us to a variety of places, people, and resources. While we may experience consumption individually, it is a fundamentally social—and environmental—act.
Figure 1.3 A Commodity Chain for Athletic Shoes
Figure 1.3 A Commodity Chain for Athletic Shoes
Source: Adapted from Bill Ryan and Alan During, “The Story of a Shoe,” World Watch, March/April 1998.
Commodity chains enable firms to switch production sites for flexible management of their operations (and costs). Any shopper at The Gap, for example, knows that this clothing retailer competes by changing its styles on a short-term cycle. Such flexibility requires access through subcontractors to labor forces, increasingly feminized, which can be intensified or let go as orders and fashion changes. Workers for these subcontractors often have little security—or rights—as they are one of the small links in this global commodity chain stretching across an often-unregulated global workplace.
The world was shocked in 2010 when 18 Chinese migrant workers between 17 and 25 years old attempted suicide at Foxconn factories in three Chinese provinces. Foxconn recorded profits that year in excess of some of its corporate customers, such as Microsoft, Dell, and Nokia. Foxconn—responsible for producing the iPhone4, the iPod, and the iPad2—captures 50 percent of the world electronics market share in manufacturing and service.30
Not everything we consume has such global origins, but the trend toward these worldwide supply networks is powerful. Our food, clothing, and shelter, in addition to other consumer comforts, have increasingly long supply chains. Take food, for example. Britain was the first nation to deliberately “outsource” a significant part of its food supply to its empire in the 1840s. In spite of the fact that the British climate is ideal for fruit production, 80 percent of pears and almost 70 percent of apples consumed by Britons now come from Chile, Australia, the United States, South Africa, and throughout the European Union.31 The Dutch concept of “ghost acres” refers to additional land offshore used to supply a national diet. Britons are estimated to use about 4.1 million hectares of ghost acres to grow mainly animal feed.32 Ghost acres include “food miles,” prompting the remark, “This form of global sourcing … is not only energy-inefficient, but it is also doubtful whether it improves global ‘equity,’ and helps local farmers to meet the goals of sustainable development.”33 In other words, much commercial agriculture today is dedicated to supplying the global consumer rather than improving production for domestic consumers. It is extroverted, rather than introverted as in the Rostow schema.
Half of all [Guatemala’s] children under five are malnourished—one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world. Yet the country has food in abundance. It is the fifth largest exporter of sugar, coffee, and bananas. Its rural areas are witnessing a palm oil rush as international traders seek to cash in on demand for biofuels created by US and EU mandates and subsidies. But despite being a leading agro-exporter, half of Guatemala’s 14 million people live in extreme poverty, on less than $2 a day.34
Globalization deepens the paradox of development by virtue of its sheer scale. Integrating the lives of consumers and producers across the world does not necessarily mean sharing the benefits of development globally. The distance between consumers and producers and their environments means it is virtually impossible for consumers to recognize the impact of their consumption on people and environments elsewhere. At the other end, producers experience the social distance in the difficulty in voicing concerns about working conditions or the health of their habitats. Bridging this distance has become the focus of initiatives such as fair trade, or brand boycotts organized by activist movements or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to enhance transparency with information to support more responsible consumption (paradoxically perpetuating dependency on tropical exports versus local food system development).
Case Study Waste and the Commodity Chain
The disconnect between development theory and the environment is dramatized by the problem of waste, concealed in plain sight. The fact that consumption simultaneously produces waste is neither something consumers want to acknowledge, nor does it feature in measures of economic growth. And yet waste in general, and electronic waste (e-waste) in particular, are huge and problematic by-products of our lifestyle. The household electronics sector is now the fastest growing segment of municipal waste streams, as computing and communication technologies rapidly evolve. The UN estimates the annual global generation of waste from electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) runs at a rate of between 20 million and 50 million tons. In 2009, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) reported that e-waste could increase by 500 percent over the next decade in rising middle-income countries. The toxicity of this waste is extraordinary: From 1994 to 2003, for example, disposal of personal computers released 718,000 tons of lead, 287 tons of mercury, and 1,363 tons of cadmium into landfills worldwide.
Cellular, or mobile, phones (1.2 billion sold globally in 2007) leach more than 17 times the US federal threshold for hazardous waste. And yet the noxious ingredients (including silver, copper, platinum, and gold) are valued on second-hand markets, just as discarded e-waste may be recycled for reuse in poorer markets—sometimes by businesses such as Collective Good, which donates a portion of the profits to the Red Cross or the Humane Society. Refurbishing phones occurs from Ghana to India, where labor costs are lower and environmental regulations are less. About 70 percent of the world’s discarded e-waste finds its way through informal networks to China, where it is scavenged for usable parts—often by children with no protection—and abandoned to pollute soil and groundwater with toxic metals. Africa is one of the largest markets for discarded phones, while China sells between 200 million and 300 million phones annually to dealers in India, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Thailand, from where they may pass on to buyers in Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Just as water seeks its own level, unregulated markets enable toxic waste to leach into the global South. While there are regulations regarding hazardous waste, the 170-nation agreement called the Basel Convention is ambiguous on the question of restricting the movement of e-waste from North to South.
Why is the current fixation on the virtual, or “dematerialized,” information economy unable to recognize the dependence on offshore manufacturing and disposal of waste—both of which pose social and environmental hazards?
Sources: Schwarzer et al. (2005); Widmer et al. (2005); Mooallem (2008); Leslie (2008); Salehabadi (2011).
Case Study Consuming the Amazon
In a report, Eating Up the Amazon, Greenpeace noted, “Europe buys half the soya exported from the Amazon state of Matto Grosso, where 90% of rainforest soya is grown. Meat reared on rainforest soya finds its way on to supermarket shelves and fast food counters across Europe.” As the Greenpeace website claimed, “Nuggets of Amazon forest were being served up on a platter at McDonald’s restaurants throughout Europe.” Following this dramatic report, McDonald’s slapped a moratorium on purchasing soya grown in newly deforested regions of the rainforest and entered into an alliance with Greenpeace, and other food retailers, to develop a zero deforestation plan, involving the government in monitoring the integrity of the forest and of its inhabitants, some of whom had been enslaved and subjected to violence. The global soy traders—Cargill, ADM, Bunge, Dreyfus, and Maggi—made a two-year commitment to the alliance.
What is all this about? Like many NGOs, Greenpeace made the unseen relations embodied in chicken nuggets explicit. Documenting the ways in which the Brazilian soy boom—with all its social and environmental consequences—is a product of the fast-food diet, Greenpeace brought to light what is routinely made invisible by the impersonal marketplace. By tracing the soy chain—with the aid of satellite images, aerial surveillance, classified government documents, and on-ground observation—Greenpeace reconstructed the geography of the soy trade, bringing the ethical dimensions of their diet to consumers’ notice. While traders can escape the notice of the consuming public, retailers have become “brand sensitive” in an era in which information technology has created a new public space, and consumers have the ability to choose not to consume products that come with baggage.
What is the value of fast food compared with the value of preserving one of the richest and most biologically diverse rainforests on the planet—especially given that the scientific journal Nature recently warned that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest will disappear by 2050 if current trends continue? And what is it about the market that conceals the consequences of our consumer choices?
Source: Greenpeace, Eating Up the Amazon, 2006. Available at www.greenpeace.org.
Summary
Development, conventionally associated with economic growth, is a recent phenomenon. With the rise of capitalism, European rulers pursued economic growth to finance their needs for military protection and political legitimacy. But “development,” as such, was not yet a universal strategy. It became so only in the mid-twentieth century, as newly independent governments embraced development as an antidote to colonialism, with varying success.
The mid-twentieth-century development project (1940s–1970s) was an internationally orchestrated program of nationally sited economic growth across the Cold War divide, involving financial, technological, and military assistance from the United States and the Soviet Union. In United Nations terms, development was a timely ideal, as formerly colonized subjects gained political independence, and all governments were enjoined to implement a human rights-based social contract with their citizens, even as this ideal was unevenly practiced. This book traces the implementation of this project, noting its partial successes and ultimate failure, in its own terms, to equalize conditions across the world, and the foreshadowing of its successor, the globalization project, in laying the foundations of a global market that progressively overshadowed the states charged with development in the initial post–World War II era.
The globalization project (1970s–2000s) superimposed open markets across national boundaries, liberalizing trade and investment rules and privatizing public goods and services. Corporate rights gained priority over the social contract and redefined development as a private undertaking. The neoliberal doctrine (“market freedoms”) underlying the globalization project has been met with growing contention, symbolized by the antineoliberal social revolt in Latin America over the last decade, recent Middle East and southern European rebellions against authoritarianism and austerity, and the growing weight and assertiveness of the more state-regulated economies of China (and India) in the world political economy. Polanyi’s double movement is alive and well.
Whether the global market will remain dominant is still to be determined. In the meantime, an incipient sustainability project, heavily influenced by the climate change emergency, may be forming, with China leading the green technology race and a myriad of environmental and justice movements across the world, pushing states, business leaders, and citizens toward a new formulation of development as “managing the future” sustainably (in contrast to “improving on the past,” as in modernization).
Finally, development, as we know it, is not the same across time, nor is it the same across space. It is uneven within and among societies. It has been, and will continue to be, contentious. This book seeks to make sense of this by emphasizing development paradoxes and providing students with a “birds-eye” (global) perspective on development controversies not easily seen from the ground.
