Development and Human Rights - Perspectives from the developed and developing World...
What is Development for one is luxury for the other...
While a few are restricted even to locomotion,
Nano, the face of development in India,
Is but a minuscule car model vis-a-vis an Octavia...
What is Right for one is restriction for the other...
While many yearn for it, some easily earn it,
Like Water, basic right, denied to many,
Is also a litre of Evian worth 200 Indian rupees.
This essay attempts to de-envelope the concept of development – tracing the trajectory with the post-modernist lens of an insider – de-envelope the altruistic advocacies, the capitalist and socialist ideologies and write on the rights of individuals - on rights which proclaim the aspirations and establish the modernity constructs, together emphasizing and seeking the greater good of the entire humanity.
What actually is development? The answer is simple: it is to de-envelope that which is already hidden in the social system. The organic being as it were to be taken out of its cover. What are human rights? This answer is very simple: human rights are the basic rights and freedoms of all individuals without any distinctions or prejudices.
In the twentieth century, change engineered the processes, systems, spheres of the world. Nothing escaped the inevitable call for change. The predominant descriptions of the world swayed between the Developed world and the Developing world. The Developed world portrayed self-sufficiency, growth and advancement, contentment and literally, an excess of access to rights, opportunities, choices and freedoms. The Developing world depicted a picture of struggle and strife, the lack of opportunities, always weighing the needs and resources, adjusting, and often falling behind the set goals and objectives of achieving Development. These constructs of Developed and Developing world are still valid, popular and relevant and seem to be gaining more substance and statistical feeds as decades roll on.
As different paradigms and perspectives find mention under several heads in the following pages, an idea about what perspectives are is essential to comprehend the notions of development and human rights. Perspectives are shortcuts for philosophical and ideological understanding of how the world is functioning and of how it should be functioning. There is always a mainstream perspective – or simply a defining context as put forth by Victoria Lawson in her book, Making Development Geography. This perspective is deeply embedded in the socio-economic formation – which has perhaps lost its relevance in the academic discourse.
Interestingly, the contours of all habitats differ in different epochs and places constantly. Moreover, the mainstream perspective attempts to reinforce itself – either openly or in a concealed manner, or by the diverse ideological agencies operating in society and reinforcing the on-going system. Obviously, this explains the dominant concepts of what good the present development has brought, of what entitlements the rights have assured to the people and how more of the two will lead to better good for all.
The perspective reiterated all through this essay is of the people at the receiving end of the development and the human rights process – those who are the least significant for the mainstream advocates of development and human rights. Heading in a more fundamental critique of the path of development and human rights, we position at the extreme end of the debate, and attempt to focus on the urgent need for a closer reflection on the idea as a whole – from an insider’s viewpoint.
Understanding Development:
In a layperson’s understanding, development would simply mean a positive growth or a quantitative change over time. Nevertheless, this essay on development attempts to look at this idea as a discourse and a debate on – the roots and origins of development, the perspective of the designers or the proponents, the criteria for development, the understanding of this great idea by the beneficiaries – the people experiencing development and of people who are victims of the same icon of our age.
With the colonial era coming to a close at around 1950s the so-called developed western world began conducting their experiments of ‘Development’ on the guinea-pigs called the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) without sparing a moment to consider whether the LDCs actually wanted to develop the way the West has. The Developmental Programmes and the associated aid given by the International Institutions, especially the Bretton Woods Institutions (IMF and World Bank) to the Third World nations are nothing but propaganda to propel neo-colonialism and maintain their grip over political, social, cultural and economic aspects of those nations.
The credit for popularizing the idea goes to the American scholars who argued that social engineering properly planned and implemented could bring about radical socio-economic transformation. Socialist ideals have by then spread all over the Third World. One of the concealed agenda of development project was however to contain the growth of Communism in the Third World.
The idea is born:
The rises of epochs often go unnoticed, but the dawning of the development age occurred at a precise date and time in the history of the mankind. On January 20, 1949, President Harry S Truman, in his inaugural address to Congress, dubbed the home of more than half the world’s people underdeveloped areas. This was for the first time the word underdevelopment, which was later to become a key ordering global relations, was used by a prominent political figure. Truman, after drawing a sharp line between democracy and communism in the first part of his speech, he directed the attention of the hall to the Southern Hemisphere with the high-flying words of the Point Four Program, and the development age, the particular period in world history following the colonial era, was opened (to be superseded some forty years later by the globalization age). In this period, the relationship between Europe/America and the rest of the world was being shaped by the specific assumptions about time, geographical space, and the relevant social actors. These assumptions came to frame the development discourse; they stand in continuity and contrast with the assumptions of both the earlier colonial and the later globalization periods.
Progress – the Predecessor
Of course, the belief in progress predates the development age by almost two hundred years. The European Enlightenment was already able to interpret the multiplicity of cultures in space as a succession of stages in time, viewing history as a never-ending process of improvement. Taken from biology, the metaphor ‘development’ constructed history as a process of maturation; society is likened to, say, a flower which develops according to inner laws, in a continuous and irreversible fashion, towards a final stage of bloom.
However, since about 1800, development has only been used as an intransitive concept; authors such as Hegel, Marx and Schumpeter conceived it as a process of history’s own making, but not yet as a project, to be carried out under the direction of human will and reason. This changed with the advent of the development age. Development took on an active meaning – it turned into a project of planners and engineers who set out to systematically remodel societies to accelerate maturation, a project to be completed within several decades, if not years.
Growth – the Gear:
As it happened, this measure of excellence has been available only since 1909, when Colin Clark for the first time compiled national income figures for a series of countries, revealing the gulf in living standards between rich and poor. GNP per capita provided a ready-made indicator for assessing the position of countries moving along the road of development. Informed by an economic worldview and aided statistical toolkit, experts for decades to come defined development as growth in output and income per head. “A developing country is one with real per capita income that is low relative to that in advanced countries like the United States, Japan and those in Western Europe”.
Globalization – the Road:
In the light of the concept development, all people on the globe appear to move along one single road. The lead runners show the way; they are at the forefront of social evolution, indicating a common destination even for countries which had highly diverse trajectories in the past. Many different histories merge into one master history, many different time scales merge into one master time scale. The imagined time is linear, only allowing for progressing or regressing; and it is global, drawing all communities worldwide into its purview. In contrast to cultures which may embrace a cyclical view of time or which live out stories enshrined in myths, the linear view of time privileges the future over the present, and the present over the past. As the concept of linear global time spreads, indigenous peoples like the Rajasthani in India or the Aymara in Peru, for instance, are compelled to put aside their particular chronographs. They are inevitably pulled into the perspective of progress.
Material Welfare – An Illusion:
Gilbert Rist sees development as a postmodern illusion, the promise of material welfare that has lost its credibility. Development had never been more than a pretext for expanding the realm of the commodity. To maintain the illusion that development would lead to material welfare, however, a stream of promises and policies, declarations and initiatives have drawn to generate support for the illusion and to give it weight. The concept of development can thus be considered a falsehood diffused in an almost messianic fashion.
Critical, but Supple:
Feminist Geographers engaged in critical development studies work on neoliberal modernization debates, the feminization of poverty and postcolonial theory to explore the ways in which power dynamics structure the discourses and practices of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality. Victoria Lawson stressed on the Contexts of Development – analyzing the formation and experiences of diverse subjects of development, the ways in which particular intellectual streams privilege or erase different subjects and actors. Analyzing development as polyvalent and contextual in terms of its intellectual and material foundations, she suggests that a post-structural feminist political-economy approach constitutes an exciting future for development geography. Further, it is concluded that the spatiality of development – the ways in which discourses and practices of development link places, move through scales and operates in relation to boundaries – can also reveal and help explain the paradoxes and also work to democratize development.
Human Development and Social Justice:
Critical of the neo-liberal consensus is an influential group of development theorists view development as improving basic needs. Their interest in social justice and equality over space raised three issues: nature of goods and services provided by governments; matter of access of these public goods to different social classes; how burden of development can be shared among these classes.
Their target groups include small farmers, landless, urban under-employed and unemployed. Moreover, these theorists emphasize the centrality of human well-being in development theorizing and the crucial role that public policies and expenditures play in successful efforts to improve the well-being of the poor in developing societies. Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others argue for placing a nuanced theory of human development grounded in capabilities and functioning at the center of development policy. In addition, they argue for the crucial role that public policy has in creating the human welfare infrastructure that is essential for the successful alleviation of destitution: public health, nutrition, free education, and democratic freedoms.
A concrete achievement of this approach is the creation and maintenance of the Human Development Index by the United Nations Development Programme. This index is designed to provide a measure of economic development that goes beyond measuring growth of per-capita income, and instead focuses on measures that are correlated with quality of life: health, longevity, and educational attainment, for example. Another such measure is the “Physical Quality of Life Index”. This approach of human development is also criticized for its criteria of measuring the social and cultural aspects of the society and doubted on its accuracy and reliability by questioning, “whose convention is conventional?”
Our discussion so far, has dealt with the different perceptions of development and the debates on how development should be achieved. However, in the further part, we will see that there are some theorists also, who reject the very notion of ‘development’. They argued that the historical nature of “development” is shown to have led to a universalizing logic that suggests European and American trajectories are the standard to which others should be compared.
Homogenization of the developing world is also a common problem in developmental theory. It often goes unrecognized that societies in the developing world are highly diverse in terms of social and economic conditions, and this tends to lead to ineffective policy-making which does not take these differences into account.
Post-Development:
Influenced by postcolonial way of thinking, a number of theorists like Arthur Escobar, Gustava Estena challenged the very meaning of development. According to them, the way we understand development is rooted in colonial discourse depicting the north as advanced and progressive and the south as backward, degenerate and primitive. Post development theorists do not suggest that the concept of development was new. What was new was to define development in terms of escaping from underdevelopment. Since the latter referred to 2/3rd of the world, this meant that the most of the world had to define themselves as having fallen into undignified conditions called underdevelopment. Development, according to them was US hegemony. Its western European allies which would form the basis of development everywhere.
Leading members of post development school argue that development was always unjust, never worked, and has now clearly failed. Among the starting points and basic assumptions of post development is the idea that a middle class, “western style” of life and all that goes with it is not a realistic goal for the majority of the world’s population.
Development is also seen as a set of knowledges, interventions and worldviews, which are also power – to intervene, transform and rule. Post development is also above all a critique of the standard assumption about progress as to who possesses the key to it and how it may be implemented. Post development attempts to overcome the inequality by opening up spaces for the agency for the non-western peoples.
There are a number of objections to post development school too. The first is that it overstates its case. For to reject all development, is also seen as rejection of the possibility for material advances and transformation, or it is to ignore the tangible transformation, in life chances, health and material well-being that has been evident in parts of the third world. Moreover, development itself is so varied, and carries so many meanings that critics need to be specific about what they mean when they claim to be post development.
Critical Modern Development:
Thus, Post-developmental and Feminist critiques of development paved the path for the emergence of Critical Modern Development. It puts forth a staunch support for increasing the economic capacity of the poorest people. It advocated for a system that would best be called as democratic socialism – where production and reproduction neither is controlled by private players nor is it placed under state control.
However, the questions, which remain unanswered in the whole scenario, are: How then, can development practitioners recognize and support this development which is not ‘Development’? Indeed, can post-development ever be practiced? To conclude, what development is and how it should be achieved may vary widely tackling issues surrounding development and post-development is arguably one of the most significant debates in the field of north-south relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Yet, the dialogue goes on. In fact, the dominant debates on arriving at the ‘right’ notion of development or post-development reflect the re-conception and reconstruction of the world from the perspective of, and along with, those subaltern groups that continue to enact a cultural politics of difference as they struggle to defend their places, ecologies, and cultures.
Nevertheless, we should consider if what might actually be useful to practitioners. Beyond being people centred, it should be people-led. Other moves in this direction may include - firstly, the willingness to empty oneself of preconceived notions of what development should be; secondly, to recognize and acknowledge indigenous efforts to improve well-being, however unconventional and unofficial. That is, to widen the boundaries to recognize ‘what people are doing anyway’, and to acknowledge that as development, even though there is no intervention, no report, no terms of reference, no project. It is to recognize people as knowing, active and capable. Thirdly, to move to support those efforts in practice, that is, to be willing to trust and support ‘what people are doing anyway’.
Thus, if there is a revolutionary movement among development practitioners towards practicing imminent development, the practice of intentional development will move as well, until it finally coincides with innovative development.
ON HUMAN RIGHTS:
To define in short, Human rights are the rights possessed by all persons, by virtue of their common humanity, to live a life of freedom and dignity. They give all people moral claims on the behaviour of individuals and on the design of social arrangements—and are universal, inalienable and indivisible.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights urges member nations to promote a number of human, civil, economic and social rights, asserting these rights as part of the "foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world." The declaration was the first international legal effort to limit the behaviour of states and press upon them duties to their citizens following the model of the rights-duty duality. The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 reads: "...recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world". Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the Human Rights Commission, which framed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has rightly remarked that "it is not a treaty...[In the future, it] may well become the international Magna Carta."
The Background:
The idea of human rights is a post- World War II phenomenon. In the aftermath of the deadliest of the wars and the scars of the holocaust and the denigration of the face of humanity, about threescore years ago, the basic ideas underlining the Human Rights culminated in one place, in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. There existed no such idea or concept or construct called the Human Rights in the times old. The Greek societies and few other ancient societies had "elaborate systems of duties... conceptions of justice, political legitimacy, and human flourishing that sought to realize human dignity, flourishing, or well-being entirely independent of human rights".
The modern age has begotten rationality and a code of conduct for the entire humanity. Yet another modernist construct, Human Rights developed contemporaneously with the European secularization of Judeo-Christian ethics. The age of Renaissance and Enlightenment in the continent of Europe has dawned new thought and discourse in the minds of great men. This era witnessed the emergence of the ideas on Natural Rights when philosophers like John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui propounded and elaborated on the ideas of natural justice and the concepts of State. The political movements of the era - the American Revolution and the French Revolution established and ushered in prominence to the idea of Human Rights in the political circles as well.
With this beginning, the modern concept of Human Rights came into the forefront of the world socio-political discourse and became a strong point of reiteration for the dignity of the humankind in the twentieth century in both the developed and the developing worlds. From this foundation, the modern human rights movement emerged over the latter half of the twentieth century.
Presently, the idea of Human Rights is wedded to the cries of the social activism and political rhetoric in many nations, which translated it to be a vocal-point on the world stage. In September 2000, when 189 heads of state and government adopted the UN Millennium Declaration—with commitments for international cooperation on peace, security and disarmament; development and poverty eradication; environmental protection; and human rights, democracy and good governance, based on a set of fundamental values including freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature and shared responsibility - Human Rights was enunciated as one of the core ideals to achieve human excellence and assure the dignity of the mankind.
Perspectives: The underlying philosophy
The perspectives of human rights attempts to examine the underlying basis of the concept of human rights and critically looks at its content and justification and the direction of the focus of the proponents of the defense and declarations of human rights. In the twenty-first century, the concept of Human Rights has crept into the minds of the people - both the defenders and the recipients, as social expectations and genuine aspirations. Like umpteen theories on Development, several scholars have attempted to explain the underlying philosophies of Human Rights.
Early Western thinkers viewed human rights as evolutionary products of a natural law, with firm roots in the existing philosophical or theological grounds. Thinkers like Hume have further added the notion the moral behaviour of the individuals is s social product and human rights codify moral behaviour of men and women - which is a natural outcome of the processes of biological and social evolution (associated with Hume). The Weberian school of thought also exerts thrust upon the sociological underpinnings to explain the guarantee of Human rights as in the sociological theory of law and the work of Weber. John Rawls, another defender of the sociological theory ascribes to the notion that human rights are by nature - a form of social contract wherein he elaborates the philosophy that individuals in a society accept rules from legitimate authority in exchange for security and economic advantage.
Contemporary Human Rights theories are usually contemplated and classified under the Interest theory or the Will theory. Human Rights discussions of the present times are centered around and dominated by these two sets of theories in the present times inadvertently. The advocates of the Interest theory argue that the essential purpose of the human rights is to protect and promote certain basic human interests, while the proponents of the Will theory attempt to reiterate the nature of human rights and their validity propositions drawn from the unique human capacity for freedom. The strong claims made by human rights to universality have led to persistent criticism. Philosophers who have criticized the concept of human rights include Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx.
Relativists do not argue against human rights, but concede that human rights are social constructs and are shaped by cultural and environmental contexts. Again the idea of a defining CONTEXT, enunciated by Victoria Lawson comes to the forefront. Universalists argue that human rights have always existed, and apply to all people regardless of culture, race, sex, or religion. More specifically, proponents of cultural relativism argue for acceptance of different cultures, which may have practices conflicting with human rights. There is also a strong word of caution from the Relativists that universalism could be used as a form of cultural, economic or political imperialism.
Human development and Human Rights:
Human rights and human development have much in common. Since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, defending human rights has had a broad influence in protecting people’s lives. International conventions and protocols, and associated codifications in national laws, have given legal status to normative claims. Human rights are also politically appealing, and many civil society groups have mobilized to protect and advance them. Principles of human rights complement human development by providing absolute safeguards or prohibitions against violations, such as those affecting minority communities.
Human development focuses on individual and group empowerment; human rights, on structural safeguards. Over time national and global citizen action has broadened the parameters of human rights, as with the global movements that led to the UN Declaration for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the campaigns for conventions to regulate landmines. Human rights include economic, social and cultural rights, as well as civil and political liberties. Human development also encompasses this broad agenda. The realization of human rights evolves by setting baselines and progressive goals, devising implementation and monitoring strategies, and updating legislation.
Human development does explicitly, complements the realization of human rights through the processes of ongoing attention and monitoring of the interconnections among objectives, priorities and strategic trade-offs. This complementary strength of human development and human rights lies in responding to differing and evolving contexts, identifying barriers to human progress and opportunities for synergies, and stimulating local solutions. The fact that human rights are also designed to attain human development is enunciated in the World Bank's paradigm of good government, which lays out the protection of human rights as the top most priority on its agenda.
Inherent in the human development tradition is that the approach be dynamic, not calcified. It is proposed that a reaffirmation consistent with development practice on the ground and with the academic literature on human development and capabilities is quintessential for: Human development is the expansion of people’s freedoms to live long, healthy and creative lives; to advance other goals they have reason to value; and to engage actively in shaping development equitably and sustainably on a shared planet. People are both the beneficiaries and the drivers of human development, as individuals and in groups.
This reaffirmation underlines the core of human development - its themes of sustainability, equity and empowerment and its inherent flexibility. Because gains might be fragile and vulnerable to reversal and because future generations must be treated justly, special efforts are needed to ensure that human development endures - that it is sustainable. Human development is also about addressing structural disparities - it must be equitable. And it is about enabling people to exercise individual choice and to participate in, shape and benefit from processes at the household, community and national levels - to be empowered. Human development insists on deliberation and debate.
Empowering Women – A key to achieving development and securing rights:
Empowerment is a multi-dimensional process that helps people gain control over their own lives communities and in their society by acting on issues that they define as important. Empowerment occurs within sociological, psychological, economic spheres and at various levels such as individual, group and community and challenges our assumptions about the status quo, asymmetrical power relationships and social dynamics.
Empowerment of women involves many things – economic opportunity, property rights, political representation, social equality, personal rights and so on. The Indian society is a patriarchal system in which women’s’ position within the structures and duties towards the family precede their rights as individuals. Many who argue for empowerment of women do so either with or without a full understanding of the conflicts between the historical and contemporary status of women in the patriarchy and the goals of empowerment. Certainly, we may track great many changes that have occurred in the direction of change of the status in India but women have yet to achieve or realize many of the ideal stages of social, psychological, economic and political empowerment. Hence, it is more appropriate to define empowerment as a process rather than an end-point.
The question that needs to be answered is that in a society where men control the destiny of women how is it possible to empower women. The process of mainstreaming a gender perspective in the development process through a rights-based approach is a need of the hour undoubtedly.
The Way Ahead:
Even assuming a second-best approach, the challenge still remains of formulating inclusive and reasonable policies that accommodate the interests of all sides, and then mobilizing the political support and commitment to implement them. And allowing greater "policy space" to individual nations will in fact make it easier to uphold the social bargains that enable openness to achieve the goals of Developmentalists and Human Rights activists.
Many challenges lie ahead. Some are related to policy: development policies and claiming rights must be based on the local contexts and sound overarching principles; numerous problems go beyond the capacity of individual states and require democratically accountable global institutions. There are also implications for research: deeper analysis of the surprisingly weak relationship between economic growth and improvements in health and education and careful consideration of how the multidimensionality of development objectives affects development thinking are just two examples.
The postulations on human development and wellbeing will turn into success stories when they go far beyond the dimensions to encompass a much broader range of capabilities, including political freedoms, human rights and, echoing Adam Smith, enhance “the ability to go about without shame.”
It is commonplace to have development experts, social activists and multi-lateral institutions venturing diagnosis of what ails a developing country and ready-to-implement prescriptions for those problems. There is a growing despair that corruption and weak governance are holding back these economies from effectively implementing these magic solutions. Is development as simple as these experts would suggest? Is it merely an issue of our not being able to translate a simple policy prescription into tangible action at the field level?
Harvard Professor Dani Rodrik has emphasized about how our quest for the best solution can and often leads us astray and prevents us from finding the most optimal solutions to our problems. He has written a deeply insightful article in which he explores the world of second-best, third-best and other alternative approaches to solving the numerous challenges facing global nation states.
At this juncture, we need to start our journey of discovering solutions to complex socio-economic problems by acknowledging that these problems act in multiple dimensions with numerous implications, and each problem often has more than a single solution, especially when it concerns the causes of Development and Human Rights. In fact, all social issues involving interaction among individual economic agents provide fertile ground for numerous emergent situations, with differing permutations and varying probabilities. The development problems facing extremely diverse settings like that in developing societies require multi-pronged responses, which cannot be straitjacketed into any single consistent and overarching logic.
Most of our development schemes adopt the comprehensive and systemic approach to policy formulation and implementation. In an effort to encapsulate and capture the requirements and demands of all areas and different categories of people, we over-standardize a development scheme into a monolithic set of guidelines and thereby curtail the program's effectiveness. Given the diversity and resultant complexity of problems, it is futile to capture all the possible solutions into a single policy framework.
The development of varying perspectives on Development and Human Rights over time reflects the changes that the ideas have undergone from the time of their inception. The challenge is to formulate inclusive plans to bridge regional, social and economic disparities. The idea of being developed is so diverse that it can hold a different meaning at the level of individual human beings. Hence, to dictate theories on development and to prescribe what is developed and what is not only kills the diversity and plurality that the entire idea encompasses.
With the Arab spring and economic recession, the rights of individuals are up for a debate. It is time to move forward from mere lip service to actual entitlements of the human rights to all individuals across the globe. The ideas underlying human rights emanate from plural principles. And plural principles such as respect for human rights, equity and sustainability are the keys to human development in the longer run.
