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Editorial, volume 5, number 1, February 1995
The themes of the 1995 World Summit for Social Development -- enhancement of social integration, reduction of poverty, and generation of productive employment -- reflect the long-term crisis facing the vast majority of the world's citizens today. According to the Report of UN Secretary General to the Summit, three quarters of the world's population share only 15 per cent of the total world income, while 16 per cent of the population (mostly in industrialised countries) command about 75 per cent of that income. One in ten people lives in extreme poverty.
Such an extreme disparity in wealth and access to resources is in itself iniquitous. More alarming still is the accelerated pace at which the gulf between rich and poor has deepened over the last 50 years. Economic modernisation has, for most people, entailed a process of impoverishment and heightened vulnerability. In shifting the balance of responsibility for development -- and, therefore, for human well-being -- from the public to the private sector, 'free market' ideology has tended to reinforce social and economic polarisation between and within countries. Jobs in the formal sector have been cut, and public institutions weakened, in the course of economic restructuring. Deprivation, disintegration, and disenfranchisement are most acutely visible in the form of the growing number of wars, armed conflicts, and `complex emergencies' around the globe. Almost all of these are internal, a trend that is likely to continue, as secessionist or similar movements currently exist in over sixty countries. The result has been to increase the total number of poor people, and to increase the depth of their poverty. Women in particular are paying the price of social and economic disintegration, because the burden of -- generally unremunerated -- work involved in holding their families and households together falls largely upon them.
The challenge facing the World Summit, and the development community at large, is exactly how to put people at the centre-stage of social and economic policy-making: how to ensure not only that their rights are not eroded, but that people develop the capacity to generate sustainable alternatives to the damaging legacy of today's global institutions. For while many development agencies would claim to seek relationships of solidarity or consensus with people who are living in poverty, the practical mechanisms for achieving these -- and for creating a ground swell of demands for social justice -- continue to be elusive. Development NGOs in particular need to analyse whether, by acting as a safety-net, their work tends to reinforce the negative processes described above; whether they can genuinely serve to stimulate new understandings of development which represent diversity rather than exploiting it; or whether, as so many have tried to do in the past, it is still feasible to do both.
This issue of Development in Practice brings together a range of views and critical perspectives on social development in the context of political transition, and institutional change -- in some cases, from relative stability towards uncertain transformation, in others from periods of intense and violent conflict towards uncertain reconstruction. Jude Howell looks at the existing patterns of social and political organisation in China, and reflects on the types of relationship that international NGOs might seek to establish with these in the future. She draws special attention to the twin risks of ignorance and opportunism in the context of the 1995 UN International Conference on Women, which will be for most delegates their first exposure to the country. Ruth Pearson and Vivienne Lewis explore a similar theme in the context of Cuba, concentrating in particular on how (hitherto absent) non-governmental collaboration might most effectively support the processes of change, while safe-guarding the many social and economic achievements that have long distinguished Cuba from the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean. Ian Cherrett, Phil O'Keefe et al. explore the variety of roles adopted by environmental NGOs in southern Africa, another region emerging from years of conflict. They are critical of the way in which outside agendas have largely dictated the discourse and practice of local development agencies. Eduardo Klien describes the situation in Central America, a region no longer in the international public eye now that peace processes are under way. He argues, however, that the long-term impact of the current economic transition is just as dramatic as that of the wars which engulfed the area during the 1980s: the irony is that the ordinary people who played such an active part in bringing about change during this period seem now to be almost by-standers in the reconstruction process. One role for NGOs is to engage with people's organisations in devising alternative visions of what development should be.
Turning to the challenge of how to respond to the immediate human crisis of poverty, Christine Whitehead and Paul Spray contrast the ways in which the international financial institutions -- namely the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund -- have conceived of poverty alleviation, with how people actually experience impoverishment. John Grierson elaborates on the potential mis-match between people and profit when agencies attempt to promote social development aims through the specific means of limited-liability companies. Rosalind Eyben describes the dilemmas inherent in trying to link the various social development criteria of the British government's aid programme with the necessarily different perspectives of those intended to benefit from it. Miloon Kothari, responding to the theme of crisis and population movement which was explored in the most recent issue of Development in Practice, offers a detailed exposition of recent UN legislation on forced evictions, and suggests how local organisations and NGOs can use the legal framework to expose and fight against this violation of people's rights.
Deborah Eade
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