Could the Development Experts Be Wrong?

I have been wondering if the conventional wisdom is wrong about development.

Is building the Middle Class central to development?

The international development community has focused on poverty alleviation for decades. I wonder whether it might have been better to focus more on building the middle class. Two of the key development traps are war and poor governance (including corruption). Would a middle class have been effective in demanding more information from the media and more participation in society, and if so, would it be effective in opposing war and demanding better governance?

Certainly, the middle class where it exists plays a key role in running the economy and key services such as health, education and justice. These all have obvious benefits in terms of social and economic development.

The focus on countries

Donor agencies seem to work primarily in the framework the "nation state". That may make some sense in terms of political systems, but there are clearly large countries in which regions of the country are quite different one from another, and in which regional autonomy is important. On the other hand, as the European Union demonstrates, in some cases multinational governing bodies are quite important. Moreover, African countries demonstrate that political unrest affects neighboring countries as well as the country in which it starts.

In economics, it is perhaps even more clear that globalization encourages consideration of multinational economic systems. Regional markets and international trade agreements similarly suggest an economic focus that goes beyond the individual nation state to consider the larger market institutions. In contrast, large countries may have regional economies that are so little linked as to suggest that each region be taken as a frame of economic analysis.

I think of the emphasis on the nation state being created in Europe when there was a movement to draw all the speakers of a common language into a single nation. Even in Europe there are ethnic groups, such as the Basques that live in areas bridging borders of countries. In other areas, it would seem that the geographic areas best considered for programming and analysis of cultural issues might be other than nation states -- either smaller, as in the case of Africa in which some countries contain many ethnic groups, cross-national (e.g. Kurds), or larger (e.g. Arabs).

In terms of physical systems, water resources, diseases, wildlife, etc. do not respect national boundaries. The best frame of analysis and operation will again often be smaller or larger than the individual nation state, and will often involve geographic areas which cross borders.

Perhaps the emphasis on the nation state would better be replaced by complex networks of problem focused institutions that deal with problems at the scale and in the regions that make most sense. Should we not deal with river basins as wholes, rather than in the various pieces that correspond to the different nations through which the river runs?

Why don't they like us?

American foreign policy seems to be built on the assumption that if people only understood us better, they would like us more. Could it be that the government of the United States is increasingly disliked around the world because it is implementing policies that are disliked for good cause, and the citizens of this country are increasingly disliked because they boast that these bad policies are the result of good democratic processes>

My observation is that U.S. foreign policy has two major concerns -- security and economics. It seeks to protect the security of U.S. territory and citizens, and to serve the interests of the U.S. Economy. The United States is the worlds leading spender on the military, and the lest generous of OECD countries in terms of foreign aid. The United States government has been unwilling to sacrifice the country's short term economic interests to better secure long term global environmental sustainability. It has supported foreign governments that were odious where it seemed to advance U.S. economic or security interests to do so. And, of course, we continue to make military threats and start wars from time to time. Is it surprising that many foreigners see the United States, as personified by the actions of its government, as greedy and a bully?

Perhaps to make foreigners love us more, we should change policies, and act as a nation in ways that are more congenial and caring for the welfare of others.

What are the major foreign policy issues of the 21st century?

Perhaps the major ethical issue in international affairs is the increasing disparity between the have's and the have not's. The rich continue to get richer. Too many of the poor are trapped in their poverty. The distribution of income and wealth are getting less equitable in many countries, including the United States. This is true also of the distribution among nations, and only a few countries are successfully making the transition from poverty to relative affluence. Fortunately, those few seem to include the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) with large populations. Still, it seems unconscionable that large numbers of people are dying of hunger and preventable diseases in a world as rich as ours, and that so many people live lives blighted by poverty.

Still, I suppose that foreign policy will continue to be dominated by security and economic issues.

In terms of the economic, new players will be entering the competition for resources. Oil is obviously of concern, as existing reserves seem unlikely to be adequate for the demands to be placed on them in the rest of the century. With the growth of the BRIC economies, which represent nearly half of the world's population, the pressure on many resources should increase. Importantly, among these are arable land and water resources. Most of these are already in use, and as more people place greater per capita demands on these resources, we are likely to see prices rise and in the case of real shortages, conflicts arise.

Environmental degradation is increasingly a global problem. Most attention has been payed to climate change, and that would seem to be appropriate -- it is already apparent, and is likely to get much worse, especially if the world continues to procrastinate about the control of greenhouse gas emissions. But there are lots of other environmental problems that are also likely to worsen, including desertification, degradation of coastal zones, depletion of groundwater and snow pack water resources, loss of topsoil, etc. Not only will the global environmental problems exacerbate the competition for some resources and make life less livable, it will also potentially lead to conflict. When one country is polluting the environment in ways that cause real hardship in another, conflict seems likely. So too, the migration that will be increasing likely as people seek a better place to live is likely to cause conflict.

I fear that our diplomatic corps, as they seek to preserve and enhance our security and advance our economy will have to be far more concerned with the physical environment that they appeared to be in the 20th century.

And the competition for resources combined with increasing environmental degradation on a global scale, adding the social disruption that those forces will create, do not bode well for the poor.