Elusive Development by Marshall Wolfe . »JLL»/ United Nations United Nations Research Institute Economic Commission for for Social Development Latin America Printed by S'*! Hungary, 1981 Statistical Publishing House Contents Acknowledgments ........................................... P reface ............................................................... in CHAPTER ONE: Why Elusive Development? 1 CHAPTER TWO: The Quest for a Unified Approach 11 Background of the unified approach project of UNRISD and ECLA — Methodology and institutional constraints - Differing approaches that emerged and their underlying supposition — The changing international market for propositions on development during and since the unified approach project - The place of the unified approach project in the inter­ national rethinking of development - Lessons for the future and needs for international research. CHAPTER THREE: Development Images, Agents and Choices............................. 55 Images of development - Concepts, values and criteria for styles of develop­ ment — A digression on the practical - Choices aiming at an acceptable and viable style of development. CHAPTER FOUR: Approaches to Development: Who is Approaching what? 75 Development under question: The feasibility of national choice between alternative styles — The setting within which developmental choices present themselves — Policy approaches to the challenge of “unified”, “original”, or “human-oriented” styles of development. CHAPTER FIVE: Social and Political Structures and Development Policy .... 105 National situations: a classification of relevant factors (historical, geogra­ phical, demographic and economic settings; social classes, élites, and distribu­ tion of power; national integration and plural societies; unifying political concepts and ideologies; political regiïnes and the state; external influences and constraints) — National situations: some implications for the viability and scope of a unified approach to development policy. CHAPTER SIX: Problems of Communication and Participation .......................... 131 Local institutions, organizations and channels for communication (tradi­ tional groupings: family, neighbourhood, community, tribe, religious grouping; local institutions introduced or taken over by the state; voluntary organizations for the mobilization and aggregation o f interest groups; spatial mobility and mass communication channels) — Possible directions and consequences of change in local situations — Alternative tactics for the different societal actors that intermediate between the national centre and the social unit (tactics accessible to the state; tactics accessible to the social units). CHAPTER SEVEN: Utopias Devised by Committees............................................... 165 A new egalitarian world order for nation states or a new egalitarian world order for human beings? CHAPTER EIGHT: Seeds o f Change in Different Types of National Societies . 179 Hypotheses — The industrialized market-economy countries — The socialist camp — Regions of the Third World other than Latin America — Latin America: a future open to choice or hazard? CHAPTER NINE: Poverty as a Social Phenomenon and as a Central Issue for Development Policy ..................................................................................................209 CHAPTER TEN: Preconditions and Propositions for “Another Development” . 241 Where to? — Priority for the meeting of basic human needs — Meaningful human activity and employment — Participation — Self-reliance. Acknowledgements The colleagues and friends who have contributed to the shaping of this book, at different stages and in many different ways, by setting me tasks, stimulating my pursuit of certain themes, discussing ideas, criticizing texts, or furnishing informa­ tion, include the following: Raymond Apthorpe, Manuel Balboa, Solon Barraclough, Jacques Baudot, Carlos Borsotti, Alfredo Eric Calcagno, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Jean Casimir, Julio Cotier, Serge Domicelj, Francisco Whitaker Ferreira, Luiz Alberto Gómez de Souza, Jorge Graciarena, Adolfo Guerrieri, Joseph Hodara, Enrique V. Iglesias, Henry Kirsch, Joost Kuitenbrouwer, Donald V. McGranahan, José Medina Echavarria, Lawrence Moore, Andrew Pearse, Cesar Pelaez, Aníbal Pinto, Raúl Prebisch, Aníbal Quijano, Germán Rama, Luis Ratinoff, Witold Rodzinski, Aldo Solari, Osvaldo Sunkel, Rubén Darío Utria, Oscar Varsavski, José Villamil and René Zavaleta. Naturally, they are not responsible for the use I have made of their ideas and their help. Some of them would disagree fundamentally, from quite different the­ oretical positions, with my conclusions. I owe very special thanks to Virginia A. Wolfe for constant encouragement, for many valuable suggestions deriving from her own experience in social policy, and for her efforts 3 weed out pretentiousness and vagueness from the text. Marshall Wolfe Vermont July 1981 Preface As the years pass and one Development Decade succeeds another, one is tempted to conclude that the literature already produced has covered every conceivable aspect of the subject. Is it possible today to write a book about development that will grip the imagination, offer new insights and open up new perspectives? Elusive Development is not a book that teaches How to Develop, nor does it offer any grand theory of development. Its originality lies in its approach to the subject, in the relevance and pertinacity of the questions it poses rather than in the novelty of its answers. It looks at what has been said and what has been done in the name of development for almost four decades and seeks to identify those elements that, in various combinations, seem to offer the best hope of advancing human welfare and social justice, the most elusive dimensions of development efforts so far. The author, Marshall Wolfe, is a former Chief of the Social Development Divisi­ on of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (EC LA). EC LA, ever since its creation in 1948, has tried to keep in balance several quite different functions and objectives: the explaining of Latin American development in ways helping governments and public opinion to accelerate and guide it; the provision of advisory services in a wide range of policy areas as called for by governments; objective research and reporting on the major economic and social trends of the region; the exploration o f problems of development theory; the relating of Latin American trends and theories to the global context so as to combat exceptionalism and parochialism; and, lastly, the questioning of conventional wisdom on develop­ ment — the function of the Socratic gadfly. During 17 years of work in ECLA, following upon 15 years elsewhere in the United Nations Secretariat, Wolfe made a distinguished contribution to this effort, and ECLA particularly welcomed his performance of the last role. At the beginning of the 1970s he entered into a joint venture of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), ECLA and the Uni­ ted Nations Headquarters Social Development Division, a team project seeking a "unified approach to development analysis and planning”, becoming editor and principal drafter of the project’s Preliminary Report. This project was mandated to bring all the different aspects of development together in a set of viable objectives and policy approaches; an over-ambitious and poorly defined notion, it seems today, but nevertheless one that encouraged serious questioning of ideas about development, of means and ends, myth and reality, and criteria by which to assess what had conventionally passed for “development” Many of the propositions and hypotheses that animate the development debate today were shaped by those, within and ouside the United Nations system, who participated in the project at one time or another. This book is an outcome, assembled on the author’s retirement from the United Nations Secretariat, of his work on the unified approach project and of his longer experience of Latin American development problems and polemics. He has pursued up to the present many of the questions raised by the project, seeking through masses of often conflicting materials from several disciplines coherent, intellectually satisfying and practically useful answers, stressing the permanent tension between the state and society, between technocratic and participationist visions of develop­ ment, between the ideal of harmonious and rationalistic planning, and the reality of social forces in conflict, forces that use a bewildering variety of tactics to secure a bewildering variety of prizes. He sees parallels between social-justice-oriented dis­ cussions of development policy and the mice discussing how to bell the cat, or cats discussing how to promote the welfare of mice, but he does not stop there. Elusive Development surveys the whole scene: Development Images, Agents and Choices. Approaches to Development. Social and Political Structures and Development Policy... Problems of Communication and Participation... Utopias Devised by Committees.. Seeds of Change in Different Types of National Societies. Poverty as a Social Phenomenon and as a Central Issue for Development Policy... and Preconditions and Propositions for “Another De­ velopment”. In addition to an extensive knowledge of the subject matter, of the actors in the drama and of the intricacies of the development industry, what qualifies the author to write yet another book about development is a healthy scepticism of all the