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Development: A Contested Concept
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Theories of Global Development
In this course, Professor Katie Willis (Royal Holloway, University of London) explores theories of global development. In the first lecture, we look at development as a contested concept, and at some of the ways it has been defined and measured. In the second lecture, we consider modernisation theories and their development since the Cold War. In the third lecture, we look at their relationship to neoliberalism. Next, we think about dependency and world systems approaches to explaining different levels of development across the world. In the fifth lecture, we look at sustainable development and the incorporation of environmental issues into development theory and practice. In the sixth and final lecture, we turn to post-development theory and the critique of development as a concept.
Development: A Contested Concept
In this lecture, we think about contesting interpretations of development as a concept, focusing in particular on: (i) two of the most common ways of measuring development - the GNI (Gross National Income) per capita, which is solely economic in nature, and the HDI (Human Development Index), which includes social indicators; (ii) the roles of normative value judgements and power relations in shaping how development is defined and put into practice; (iii) the terminology we use to classify levels of development, such as First and Third World, and Global North and Global South.
Hello.
00:00:06My name is Professor Katie Willis,
00:00:06and I work at Royal Holloway University of London.
00:00:08In this set of lectures,
00:00:11we're going to consider ideas about development and think about theories
00:00:12of global development as well as what that means for development,
00:00:16practise and policies.
00:00:20So for the first lecture,
00:00:22what I want us to do is to think about development as a contested concept.
00:00:23So if we talk to anybody around in the street,
00:00:28or if you think about what you think about development,
00:00:31there are probably some quite common ideas about
00:00:34what we think is an indicator of development.
00:00:37It's likely that some of you are going to be
00:00:40thinking about urban landscapes with tall steel and glass buildings,
00:00:42landscapes like central New York or maybe Shanghai in the present day.
00:00:48You might also be thinking about high tech industry,
00:00:53so thinking about something ICO economic and the nature of our economic systems,
00:00:56others of you may be thinking about services.
00:01:00For example,
00:01:03hospitals that are clean and hygienic and have many different facilities,
00:01:04high tech services as well as well trained and sufficient numbers of staff.
00:01:09Others of you may be thinking about consumption.
00:01:16The fact that people are driving cars are
00:01:19wearing the latest clothes using the latest gadgets.
00:01:21So we all have different ideas about what development might look like,
00:01:25what a developed situation might look like.
00:01:29And of course, those are all very subjective.
00:01:33So let's think about things that look slightly
00:01:36less subjective, maybe look more objective because they are numbers.
00:01:39So there are lots of different indicators of development
00:01:44that we can come across in the world today.
00:01:46I'm going to pick up on two.
00:01:49The first of those is the GNP per capita, so gross national income per capita.
00:01:52And this is a measure that's used by the World Bank and it
00:01:58uses to classify different countries of the world into different income groups.
00:02:02So G and I gross national income is the value of the production of services
00:02:07and goods in a that are claimed by the population of a particular country,
00:02:13so the production may take place elsewhere.
00:02:17The profits, for example, come back to that country.
00:02:21So it's the all of the income that is claimed by the occupants of that country,
00:02:23divided by the number of people in that country, because its per capita
00:02:29and the World Bank uses this every year to indicate levels of income.
00:02:33So in other words, we've got an economic idea about what development is.
00:02:38The second indicator is the H. D I. The Human Development Index
00:02:43developed by the United Nations Development Programme,
00:02:48sometimes called UNDP
00:02:51and launched in 1990.
00:02:53And the UNDP did this because they were concerned
00:02:56about the presentation of development as just being economic.
00:02:59And so the HD I
00:03:03includes an economic measure.
00:03:05It includes GNP per capita,
00:03:07but it also includes a measure of kind of health and standards of living
00:03:09in terms of life expectancy at birth. And it also includes a measure of education
00:03:13looking at expected and mean years of schooling.
00:03:19And then you get a number. And again, the UNDP publishes this every year,
00:03:22and those two numbers the GNP per capita and the HD I can
00:03:28be presented in graphs and tables and on maps and so on,
00:03:32and it looks very objective because it's a number.
00:03:36But of course, it's based on a particular idea about development,
00:03:40an idea about development that might be economic in
00:03:46the case of the World Bank or might be
00:03:49more expansive in terms of the UNDP but is
00:03:51still based on a particular idea about development.
00:03:54So in a sense it may look objective and neutral. But actually somebody.
00:03:57Some organisations has made decisions about what development is in that context,
00:04:02and that's important when we move on to thinking about theories of development.
00:04:08If we think about what theories are there ways of
00:04:12explaining patterns in the past and in the present,
00:04:15but also potentially to predict what will happen in the future.
00:04:19And if we're thinking about theories of global development,
00:04:24obviously the definition of development that we use will be part of those theories,
00:04:27so we need to think about what the definitions are.
00:04:33The other thing about global development is there's often
00:04:37an idea about how the world should be.
00:04:40There is an idea that there's a normative idea about what the world
00:04:44should be like because it's seen that development is seen as positive generally.
00:04:47So we've got this kind of collection of ideas that
00:04:53are very clear that development is not objective or neutral,
00:04:57but is based on values and particular perspectives of what development is,
00:05:01and that's a really important thing that we need to
00:05:07remember all the time when we think about development.
00:05:08And of course, key to this is an idea about power.
00:05:12Who has the power to decide what development is, Where it happens, how it happens.
00:05:16You know who is involved in it happening.
00:05:23And that, of course, depends on, uh, different international institutions,
00:05:25governments, different groups of people with different kinds of power.
00:05:30And again,
00:05:34we're going to pick up on some of those themes
00:05:35as we go through the rest of the lectures.
00:05:36Finally,
00:05:40I want to say a little bit about another
00:05:40bit of terminology around how the world gets classified.
00:05:43So I already mentioned the World Bank and their
00:05:47annual classifications by income using GNP per capita.
00:05:50But we might also think about other terms that we use sometimes in general speech.
00:05:55So in the past,
00:06:00people would talk quite a lot about the First World
00:06:01and the Third World identifying different kinds of development.
00:06:04But we use that term
00:06:08generally less now, particularly since the collapse of what was the second world,
00:06:10the communist Soviet led bloc.
00:06:15But we still use commonly ideas about
00:06:17developing countries, more or less developed countries,
00:06:21so ideas about development being used as a way
00:06:25that we classify different parts of the world.
00:06:28In this set of lectures, I'm going to use a different set of terminology.
00:06:32I'm going to use Global North and Global South.
00:06:36This is not because it doesn't have a very, uh, series of problems.
00:06:40It's still dividing the whole world's population into two groups,
00:06:45but it doesn't have development of the core of its, uh, its definition.
00:06:49The Global North Global South Division was developed by
00:06:54the Brandt Commission that published its report in 1980
00:06:58and there it was trying to think about
00:07:02countries that had been economically more advanced but
00:07:04had particularly have been the colonial powers compared
00:07:09to parts of the world that were colonies.
00:07:12So, in other words, the Global North, our countries in Europe, uh, Japan,
00:07:15Australia, New Zealand, but also the United States and Canada,
00:07:21whereas the Global South is used as a term
00:07:25that refers to the countries of Latin America,
00:07:28the Caribbean,
00:07:30Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands that are not Australia or New Zealand.
00:07:31So I will use global north and global South in this set of lectures,
00:07:37but you may decide that you want to use other terms, such as
00:07:40less economically developed countries and
00:07:44more economically developed countries.
00:07:46The key thing to remember is to think about why you're using your terminology,
00:07:48and what is the impact of that?
00:07:52Having gone through some kind of discussions around definitions,
00:07:55I'm now looking forward to talking through different
00:07:59theories of global development in the following lectures.
00:08:02
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Willis, K. (2021, August 23). Theories of Global Development - Development: A Contested Concept [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/theories-of-global-development/development-a-contested-concept
MLA style
Willis, K. "Theories of Global Development – Development: A Contested Concept." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 23 Aug 2021, https://massolit.io/courses/theories-of-global-development/development-a-contested-concept