Autonomous Development: Humanizing the Landscape

Citation

Mahmood, A. (2000), "Autonomous Development: Humanizing the Landscape", Journal of Economic Studies, Vol. 27 No. 6, pp. 600-605. https://doi.org/10.1108/jes.2000.27.6.600.1

It is now widely acknowledged that the prediction of the neo‐classical growth models[1] that over time the rates of growth industrialised and developing countries would converge has not come true[2]. It has also now been accepted widely that even today, after decades of “development”, “three billion people are still living under $2 a day, with growing inequity between rich and poor, with forests being degraded at the rate of an acre a second, with 130 million children not in school, with 1.5 billion people still not having access to clean water, and two billion not having access to sewerage, ... and [that] 80 to 90 million people are being added to our planet”[3]. At the same time the “moral, educational and cultural credentials” of the “twentieth‐century developmentalism” are no less suspect than those of earlier versions of colonialism[4].

It is against the background of this disappointing experience that Raff Carmen has written his book, Autonomous Development. While challenging the dominant view of development, Raff Carmen has made it quite clear that he is not advocating “alternative” development or “alternatives to development”; rather the task he has set for himself in this book is to “recapture” and “reclaim” both the reality and the term “development”. He has emphasised that “the word development should ... be reserved for what it was coined for in the first place: to indicate growth, yes, but also and above all to invoke creation, culture, education, ownership and control, the satisfaction of fundamental human needs and everything involving autonomous human agency.” Development is not something done to people, in the usual interventionist mode, by outside agencies and self‐proclaimed experts, but is and can only be the product of an ever inventive, creative, autonomous human agency.

Autonomous Development is essentially an eclectic book. First of all, it reflects the author’s personal experience as a Christian priest in Zambia, and after leaving priesthood, his more formal studies in community development and rural development communication, and finally his field work in Burkina Faso. But Raff Carmen has also brought together in this book a rich variety of ideas and practices of development activists and thinkers from all over the world, in particular of writers and practitioners from Africa, Latin America and Asia who are not very well known in the West. This inclusive approach has not only enabled him to integrate the intellectual and moral strivings of a wide range of people into a coherent set of theories and programs, but also helped him achieve one of the important objectives of his book: restoration of economics to its proper cultural matrix.

The book, Autonomous Development, consists of an introduction and three broad sections: Maldevelopment, Autonomy, and Humanizing the Landscape (An Ethical Imperative) which are further sub‐divided into chapters. The section on autonomy which in a sense constitutes the core of the book rests on what Raff Carmen has described as its four pillars: autonomy in the political sphere (ownership and control); autonomy in the cultural sphere (literacy and the media); autonomy in the organisational sphere (management literacy); and autonomy in the economic sphere (self‐reliance). The issues relating to women, environment and development are discussed in the last part (Part III) of the book. The part entitled “Humanizing the Landscape” also takes a deep look at the on‐going debate on development ethics, including the work of scholars like Amartya Sen, Rawls and Manfred Max‐Neef.

One of the critical themes that Carmen has explored in several different contexts with remarkable sensitivity and understanding is the complex relationship between culture and economy. For example, in his perspective, the so‐called “informal economy” is synonymous with the resistance of the traditional sector to the incursion of an alien, transplanted development model. The informal economy is “a forum where the whole sub‐history of everyday human life is played out, where productive practices are linked with closely collective survival strategies, cultural identity and popular memory”. Development is not and never can be neutral. It is a concept and an enterprise which is couched in human values.

In his chapter, Self‐reliance, or Economics Embedded in Culture, Raff Carmen has joined hands with Max‐Neef, the Director of Santiago‐de‐Chile CEPAUR research group to reinterpret human needs and to “differentiate clearly between needs, goods and satisfiers”. According to Max‐Neef and Carmen, needs not only encompass human deprivations (for example, poverty as deprivation of consumption goods) but also “individual and collective creative human potential”. Satisfiers, on the other hand, are individual forms of being, having, doing and interacting which “actualize” those needs in the present space and time. Economic goods, finally, are objects or artefacts which affect the efficiency of the satisfier. Consequently, needs are not simply either fulfilled or unfulfilled, satisfied or unsatisfied. “Because they exist in dialogical tension with satisfiers and goods, needs should be conceived of as forever in the process of being ‘realized’, experienced or actualized”.

In a powerful matrix designed by Max‐Neef to portray the relationship between needs and satisfiers, needs have been sub‐divided along a horizontal axis into four “existential categories” and along the vertical axis into nine “axiological[5] categories”. Being, having, doing and interaction are the existential categories while axiological categories include subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity and freedom. This matrix makes it abundantly clear that food and shelter, for example, are not needs as such, but “satisfiers of the fundamental need for subsistence”. These needs, which Max‐Neef describes as fundamental needs, differ profoundly from the notion of human needs as understood by neo‐classical economics. Economism, according to Carmen, assumes that human needs (wants) are infinite, that they change all the time, and the moment one need is satisfied, ten others jostle to take its place. The liberating aspect of thinking in terms of “fundamental” rather than “basic human needs” resides in the fact that fundamental needs are finite and few. This way of defining needs is unavoidable if the economics of the future are to be sound in ecological and ethical terms.

Finally, in the last chapter, Carmen traces the evolution of a new branch of development studies called development ethics. Carmen maintains that though this research programme, namely, development ethics, is still limited to a relatively small group of thinkers, it can already claim to have evolved over three generations of philosophers, sociologists, economists and practitioners. The first generation included “early questioners of the dominant development culture” such as people like the French economist Lebret, and Goulet[6]. The contribution of the “second generation” thinkers on ethics includes the work done by Amartya Sen in association with World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER). It is well worth observing here that Carmen regards the contributions of Amarya Sen and Rawls as somewhat problematic because of their deep association with Euro‐centric liberal individualism. The third generation development thinkers, according to Carmen, has dedicated itself is to the task of rediscovering and recapturing meaning in development because development has been emptied of its original, qualitative dimensions and appropriated exclusively by quantitative criteria.

It is perhaps too much to expect widespread agreement even among persons of good will on the economic and social analysis offered by Raff Carmen, but it is doubtful if any one will disagree with him that decision‐makers should promote the values for which oppressed and underdeveloped groups struggle: greater justice, a decent sufficiency of goods for all, and equitable access to collective human gains realised in the domains of technology, political organisation and economic order.

Notes

1. 1.

   1. These models have for long been the basis of much of the development policies of the international financial institutions and donor countries.

2. 2.

   2. “The postwar economic achievement”, World Economic Outlook, 1995.

3. 3.

   3. “A proposal for a comprehensive development framework (a discussion draft)”, from James D. Wolfensohn, World Bank, 21 January 1999.

4. 4.

   4. Raff Carmen: Autonomous Development.

5. 5.

   5. In this context axiology has been defined as the study of values in ethics and aesthetics, particularly the search for and nature of “good life”.

6. 6.

   6. The author of The Cruel Choice, 1971.