Development effectiveness: modernisation theory redux?

Emma Mawdsleyeem10@cam.ac.uk

Aid effectiveness/new millennial paradigm

• Emergence of the aid effectiveness agenda: recipient ownership, donor harmonization, good governance, focus on ‘soft-wiring’ of development

• Post-modern sensibilities, universalism tempered by cultural relativism, ambivalence about the benefits of industrial modernity

• Mainstreaming of participatory approaches, gender, sustainable development• Development norm centred on poverty reduction• Commitment to a series of international development targets, most notably

the Millennium Development Goals• Bilateral norms and institutions dominated by OECD-DAC, albeit in a

‘partnership’ framework• Relationship between development and ‘security’ rearticulated and

deepened; strong focus on failing/fragile/conflict states• Geopolitical context: war on terror, growth of the ‘rising powers’, rising global

inequality

‘Development effectiveness’• Rapid shift of discourse in the run-up to Busan• Aid effectiveness displaced by ‘development effectiveness’: economic

growth, focus on productivity and capacity, stronger role for the private sector, wider concept of development financing, a post-aid world– CSOs pushing the idea of DE as a rights-based agenda, but a minority voice

• Theories of development: Asian (generational, self-help, limited social, civil and political rights), South-South (non-interference, horizontal)

• End of western domination of global development governance; emerging regime uncertain, but more complex, voluntary

• Geopolitical context: the global financial crisis, submerging powers, rapidly shifting and fractured geographies of wealth and power

1950s/1960s modernisation theory

• Deeply rooted in US domestic politics and anxieties (Gilman 2007)• Intellectual lineages in the Enlightenment (e.g. Comte, Condorcet etc), 19C

economic-political theory (e.g. Hegel, Marx) and early 20C theories of societal change (e.g. Parsons, Durkheim)

• Holistic meta-narrative – the interplay of psychological, social, political and economic transformations

• Eurocentric, arrogant, culturally parochial and oblivious: from biological to cultural account of ‘backwardness’

• Optimistic, trust in (‘western’) science, technology and know-how• Narrative of national progress• Broadly, a period of global growth and declining inequality. • Geopolitical context: Cold War, decolonization, consolidation of a deeply uneven

post-1945 international order; ‘developmental states’: capitalist, socialist, democratic, authoritarian; import substitution industrialization, trades unions

Similarities

• The (eventual) promise of industrial modernity, material

growth, wealth• Optimistic accounts of the promise of (Southern-

led)science and technology– far less ambivalence about industrial modernity

• Limited concern environment or subaltern peoples or cultures

• Hubris? Assertions of national superiority?• Linear model of stages of (economic – but not cultural)

development?

Differences• Biological and then cultural explanations of ‘backwardness’ replaced by

geopolitical narrative: colonialism and neo-imperialism• Dominated by economic element: notions of psychological, social and political

transformation far less prominent• Developmental states (liberal, socialist, authoritarian) replaced by transnational

capitalist elites and a more prominent role for private sector, public-private partnerships

• Context of financial and trade deregulation; massive decline in trades union power; labour informality, SEZs

• Far wider set of actors, pluralizing international governance regimes, declining USA/western hard and soft power

• Legitimacy of Enlightenment-based universal human rights increasingly strongly resisted

• Different positioning of different sectors: resources/primary, manufacturing, services