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Editorial, volume 11, number 1
Editorial Deborah Eade
Just as the idea that economic growth and the creation of wealth will naturally trickle down throughout society has been largely discredited, so it is also now recognised that development and humanitarian relief interventions will tend to reproduce (and even reinforce) social exclusion, unless deliberate efforts are made to prevent this from happening. This does not mean cordoning off a given set of people and then targeting them for assistance. But it does mean recognising the need to understand the often subtle ways in which discrimination is exercised, and seeking to diminish or circumvent their impact.
In this issue of Development in Practice, Karen T. Fisher and Peter B. Urich look critically at the belief that direct investment by transnational companies in countries that are characterised by poverty and inequality will generate economic expansion, with social benefits to follow later. Their case study from the Philippines suggests quite a different pattern of events. In her study of Islamic versus non-Islamic firms in Egypt, Karen Pfeifer finds that cultural institutions will shape economic behaviour, even within an established market economy. Coming at this issue from a different angle, Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane underlines the social divisions that can be caused when communities are assumed, by outsiders, to be both homogeneous and to share common interests. Sheridan Bartlett argues that anti-poverty initiatives must incorporate the needs and perspectives of children if they are to be effective, and Barbara Thomas-Slayter and Genese Sodikoff show, with reference to five African countries, that when women have greater influence over resource management, there is a marked improvement in livelihood and environmental security. Philip Szmedra, writing about the use of pesticides by sugar workers in Fiji, demonstrates the critical importance of stakeholders having access to adequate information. Likewise, Leonie J. Pearson and Craig J. Pearson show, with reference to an agricultural systems project in China, that to be truly inclusive in their impact, it is necessary for such systems to elicit and incorporate the various perspectives of different sets of actors; while Susan Landfield describes the problems of moving from a top-down healthcare system in the Republic of Georgia, to one that stresses professionalism and accountability to the local population. User-led approaches are also the subject of the paper by Martin Roberts and Finbar Lillis on an approach to NGO capacity building being piloted in Nigeria.
Finally, we have two papers on how NGOs engage with and shape their working environment. Rob Wells underlines the inherent weakness of a sector that is largely aid-dependent, particularly when those resources come from outside the society in which they will be spent. He calls for NGOs to be more creative and more strategic in grounding themselves in their own operational settings, and mobilising support - financial as well as moral - for their cause. While his focus is on Southern NGOs, the lessons hold true also for those Northern or international NGOs who depend on official funding sources rather than on generating solidarity from ordinary citizens. As questions are increasingly being asked about the political legitimacy of NGOs in the wake of the anti-WTO demonstrations, NGOs might do well to ask themselves how they might either prove that they do indeed have a broad public following, or set about generating such support.
One of the common charges levied against the demonstrators at Seattle is that they are just a variety of ill-defined and sometimes spontaneous "radical" groups - environmentalists, feminists, anarchists, neo-communists, and assorted non-aligned malcontents, a rag-bag of protesters informed at best by fears, genuine if muddled, about leaving the poor behind&. (1) Those of a different political hue, or with direct experience of international solidarity efforts, would take a different stance. However, in trying to drum up support for a complex issue, especially one that concerns a distant people, campaigners will often focus on a human-interest story with which everyone can identify, and which can act as an icon. Larry Reid looks at the pitfalls of this approach, arguing that the necessary over-simplification not only invites sceptics to disprove the validity of the martyr (and hence reject the cause they represent), but also locks solidarity efforts into a treadmill of needing to produce ever more dramatic accounts of suffering as a means of keeping supporters motivated. The risk is that once the body-count declines, so international concern diminishes - at just the time when informed solidarity may most be needed. In other words, the tendency to simplify development issues - whether by inventing target groups for special assistance, or by sanctifying an individual in order to whip up support for their cause - may well end up producing perverse effects.
Notes
1 This is the description given in The Economist, 25 September 2000 in a Business Special entitled Angry and effective, filed from Washington DC.
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