One of the biggest issues that 50 ActionAid Country Directors and our International Secretariat have been grappling with at the ActionAid Country Directors Forum in Copenhagen has been the need to develop a new human development paradigm.
The dominant economic model has collapsed - what will replace it?
We’ve been forced by the sheer weight of the forces against us to become used to criticizing the predominant economic orthodoxy that preached deregulation, privatisation and a withdrawal of the State from economics to enable the free market to work its magic.
Recent developments such as the nationalization of banks in the United States and Europe, the collapse of car manufacturers, and over a trillion dollars of financial stimulus packages confirm that there is a need for a new model of human development as the neo liberal model has comprehensively failed.
When the global economic crisis is layered with climate change and the global food crisis, which will only increase given that oil prices are on the rise again, the main danger to human development is that life on earth is looking increasingly fragile. It is possible to find a new alternative, but it will rely on visionary leadership, concrete changes over time and an active citizenship who continue to maintain the pressure on governments for change.
Such a vision needs to focus on a rational and renewable use of natural resources and a new approach to economics that goes beyond producing private wealth to assuring the basis for human dignity and freedom.
Before the ideologues jump out of their boxes I want to make it clear that I’m not advocating any sort of return to socialism that was responsible for a lack of freedoms throughout much of the world for much of the last century. Instead we should be reviewing all global economic systems such as socialism and capitalism to see what we can learn to save the earth from destruction and end the global human development crisis which has left over 1.4 billion people living in absolute poverty.
A new model of development needs to build on the work of Nobel Prize winning economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen and must address questions of dignity, identity, health, education and human security. Any new model of human development must address the women’s rights crisis as many women have no human rights and are therefore treated as sub-human.
ActionAid is working on a possible model now and I’ll provide some more thoughts in future blogs. Ultimately ActionAid is demanding a shift in the human development paradigm to ensure equality, justice and a sustainable future for planet earth. We look forward to the challenge!
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Looking forward to reading about ActionAid’s possible model – challenging times ahead!
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Archie, I can’t help but feel there’s still a certain amount of old-fashioned top-down thinking in the phrase “developing a new model” — that a model for How Things Work is something that’s constructed in a committee and/or by experts and then gifted to the grateful recipients of “development”.
OK, I wasn’t in Copenhagen, and I realise a rights-based approach does, or at least should, focus on the individual and work up from there. But, now that you’ve experienced this most recent meeting, and I’m sure lived through many others in the past, do you feel that the reality is living up to the ideal?
I was particularly interested to read the article Optimizing Rural E-service Engagement: Comparing development-driven and entrepreneurial models. It compared India’s DakNet (bus- and motorcycle-based store-and-forward internet services, which were also described on ABC Radio’s Future Tense) with the UNESCO-funded Community Multimedia Centres. It would appear that DakNet, built from the ground up by local entrepreneurs, provided services that local communities actually wanted faster and cheaper than the somewhat more top-down approach of UNESCO.
I’m also influenced somewhat by Mark Pesce’s recent presentation, The Dangerous Power of Sharing (Power) which makes the point (amongst others) that hierarchical organisations actually get in the way of emerging new models or participation. The text is on his blog.
I wonder, therefore, that instead of “trying to develop a model” the world should really moving directly to providing people with the tools — tools that they then develop into new ways of doing things themselves. Not in imitation of something handed to them from the generous donors, but something unique and directly appropriate for their circumstances. Something that may be nothing like what the donors imagined, just like DakNet is nothing like how Western geeks would envisage the Internet in 2009.
It would be more chaotic, sure. It may be trickier to put forward development proposals which specify the results in advance. But maybe out of that chaos a new model will emerge of its own accord. Evolution.
How does that quick-thought-over-a-coffee fit with the Copenhagen discussions?
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Stilgherrian,
There’s no top down thinking when we talk about pushing for a new approach to economics that focuses on equality and social justice, although we probably should avoid the use of the word “model” in future!
So what are we doing….Each government has a national development strategy and we want to influence these strategies through our network of local organisations, social movements and communities themselves. We firmly believe that the model which the IMF and World Bank has pushed for the last 20-30 years (and yes that is a model!) which focuses on economic growth as the main driver for global human development crisis has failed. We believe that these national development strategies need to promote equitable growth through social justice and this will involve a redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor countries and from rich people to poor people in poor countries. This approach has to focus on poor people, women’s rights, enhancing food security through social justice.
How people want to achieve equality and social justice is up to them and will be by definition organic, unplanned and responsive to their circumstances. this will certainly not be decided by ActionAid !! All of our work is based on identifying effective local solutions and helping our partners work with poor communities to grow these solutions and then link the many great ideas at the local, national and international level. This can’t be planned and templated as this templated approach is largely why many countries in Africa are experiencing the catrastrophe which is the human development crisis. Something like a Daknet approach may be one such innovative idea and I’m currently engaging with ActionAid Colleagues in India to seek their views on such approaches.
Eddie,
ActionAid and the New Economics Foundation work closely together and this is contributing to our thinking. As far as the Sach’s approach is concerned it essentially revolves around the concept that poor communities lack resources and if they are provided with resources (and this includes some terrific ideas like the free provision of malaria nets) they will be able to escape poverty. What this approach neglects is the fact that people are largely poor because of unjust power relationships that exploit the resources of countries to ensure that those in power share in the wealth of a society and everyone else misses out. From my perspective, Duncan Green’s excellent “From Poverty to Power” is a more nuanced contribution to the deabte on how to help people escape poverty through a human rights based approach to poverty erradication and development.
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An economic paradigm that values is more human-centric, that values both money and meaning.
The first few things that come to my mind are:
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/ – New Economics Foundation
http://www.fourthsector.net/ – 4th Sector, For-Benefit organisations, could be off track perhaps. Michealdoneman introduced me to the concept.
What about that model that Sachs refers to in ‘The End of Poverty’? Clinical Economics. http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4602
Is that the paradigm you are referring you?Maybe a off track, but those were the first things that came into my head.
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Archie, you’ll get no argument from me about the World Bank’s approach being wrong!
I’ve never understood why countries end up with massive hydro-electric dams and the need for massive distribution grids and all the concomitant potential for big-time corruption, when it might be simpler to install 100,000 local solar power systems. Well, except for the obvious reasons.
I’m very glad to hear you say that the approach can’t be templated.
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