Week 1 role of Socio, Anth in development Flashcards
What is sociology of development?
- what is the context i which he is locating his argument
- why does the context matter
- Main central argument
- techniques used by the authors: descriptive and analytical
- what is your own views on the topics (strengths, weaknesses, significance)
Learning outcome:
Understand relevance of the Sociology of Development (for professional workings of community development, social policy and related applied sectors in society)
For every writer theres a different def of development
important to distinguish between:
important to distinguish between:
- Development as a state or condition- static
- Development as a process or course of change- dynamic
Development is not a moment but a long process
Conceptual issue: Euro and America theories defined and used at third world countries, political, social etc. issues are entirely different
First World theories applied to different contexts becomes irrelevant
Mistake is made when focus more on First World countries
North-south reading
The North doesn’t know about the suffering of the poor
Illiteracy, disease, high birth rates, underemployment.. = trapped
They stay silent while the rich is vocal
“If economics is dismal, development studies are morbid”
Technological advances in transport, media, communications and trading systems allied to sentiments of concern and responsibility, the North started to see the differences between them and the South. Through media, news and volunteering, more aware
Common cry for the solution of Third World problems has arisen in rich and poor nations and on the lips of all: development
Has become a fashionable classification since it was popularised in the report of independant Comission on International Developmental issues.
To illustrate economic devide between North and South
Highlight desire for a North-South dialogue in common concern for global issies and freed from the complications of East-West political interests.
Its not accurate but its a significant proposel in terms of the geographical regrouping it suggested.
South being dependant or former colonies of the North
Development reading
Development
The leading objective of many governments
Industrial, rural, urban, institutional and social development
Developing countires, less devloped countries, least developed countries and under developed countries
“try and brush away the fantasy we have woven around devlopement and decide more precisely what we mean by it”- Seer
Since Second World War, devlopemt has been synonymous in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Carribean and South Pacific.
Fist focused on economic growth and Western industrial nations, but devloping countires were not modernising= rethink meaning of development
Social scientist redifend development in terms of progress towards a complex of welfare goals.
Seere:
- provision of basic needs
- creation of full employment
- reduction of inequality
Its argued that development should be defined by those whose lives are to be improved and not experts.
Although development is induced and can only be by institutes such as the government. Seldom do the poeple frame the objectives for the government to persue.
Conclusion on development
Concerned with the improvement of conditions of majority of population and especially poorest. Greater human dignity, security, justice and equity. More specific than this is seen as personal preference.
Development lecture
Defining development
Contexts of arguments:
Hulme&Turner - pp5,2nd par- WW||
Webster pp3- earliest thoughts of development (since 2nd world war) were that it was to bring about change in the economic, social and political structure of a country
Initially, the focus was on economic growth, and the replication of economic, social and political orders found in Western industrial nations
Hulme&Turner pp6 nineteen century idea of progress vs. predecessor- evolution- the transformation of society
America and Russia rise as 2 capitals of world, after WW2, former colonies are independent
But then developing countries did not modernise
- development was redefined (1980s) by social scientists in terms of welfare goals (realisation of the human potential= basic needs, employment & reduction of inequality)
- development not just economic, but multidimensional process involving reorientation and reorganisation of the entire economic and social system
- development is the process of improving the quality of all human lives with three equally important aspects:
1. Raising people’s living levels (income, consumption, levels of food, medical services, education)
2. Creating conditions conducive to the growth of people’s self-esteem through the establishment of social, political and economic systems and institutions which promote human dignity and respect
3. Increasing peoples’ freedom to choose by enlarging the range of their choice variables (eg. varieties of goods and services)
Third World reading
Widely used as a synonym for developing countries
France 1950’s = refrred to uncomitted, non-nuclear and non-aligned nations, mainly comprised of newly independant nations such as Nigeria, ghana, India and Indonesia.
Lessening of Cold War tensions, more used for neglect, exploitation and revolutionary potential.
First World reffered to advanced market economies
In this book Third World is used for low and middle income countries, regardless of their political system. Not to be seen as just low incomes and high populations, still diversity within country.
Social sciences and development lecture
Social sciences and development p9
Main central argument
- Change/progress and development have been constant themes in the social sciences since the last century (Hulme p9)
- Geographic focus up until 2nd world war was essentially Europe and US with theoretical and empirical studies mostly concerned with industrialisation and modernisation- the rise of the modern man in Northern Europe
- Since writers identified and analysed the process o modernisation by building on the foundations laid by the fathers of modern social science- Marx, Durkheim and Weber- approaches to development in the 3rd world was build on the work of these early thinkers (p9)
- thus- much of the thinking in developing countries in recent decades is a reinterpretation of elements of the earlier theories about economic and social change in Europe
Social sciences and development reading
Change, progress and development have been constant themes of social sciences in the last century. Up until second World War, geographical focus was central in Europe and US. On the foundations of Marx, Webber and Durkheim- theorists tried to identify and analyse modernisation in geographical areas.
Prior to Second World War only anthropologists had interest in Third World countries. They wanted to study the “untouched” societies.
Situation changed after 1945 when colonial era ended and new states came into being.
Economics remains the most influential theoretical model and practical aspects.
Sociology hasn’t had much of an influence on development
Graduates are often not prepared to have an influence
Sociologists often excluded form policy making and planning on suspicion that they’re all left wing ideologues. Untrue but more likely to say criticism.
Pre & Post WW2 lecture
- Pre WW2 Anthropologists focus on the “untouched world” - first from an evolutionary perspective (physiology/biological) and later from a functionalist perspective.
- Functionalist perspective- studies these societies as viable internally consistent social and cultural formations that allow for the members to meet their physical and spiritual needs
- As colonisation/social change spread these “untouched societies” became scarce
- Post WW2- end of the colonial era scared of newly independent states came into being and academic interest turned these new nations, eagerly waiting to see what was happening in these new nations p10-11
- Economists took a dominant position about the influence on the practice of development
- Sociologists looked at the emergence of (new) class structures, changing value systems and the influence of social and cultural factors on economic development
- Political scientists took a key interest in the political structures, processes, parties and politicians of the new states
- Anthropologists began to observe induced change in rural socities and started to report and analyse the social consequences of development strategies
where were the sociologists
- initially were dismissed- vagueness and abstraction characterise much sociological output and severely limit its practical relevance (p11)
- tertiary level sociological thinking in developed and developing worlds are not accurate - sociologists have the skills but theres ignorance amongst aid agencies and government departments about what technical abilities sociologists might process and how they can contribute
- sociologists are often excluded from planning processes
- misconception tend to be left wing ideologues (trouble makers)
- a preference by developing agencies to work with quantifiable data such as those used by economists, engineers, agriculturalists
hus, when we consider poverty and development we need to have:
webster p10
- A broad global perspective focusing on the interconnection between rich and poor countries/globalisation
- An awareness of the specific cultural and economic features of the 3rd world
- An awareness of the interaction between old and new forces at work in society (history)
- A dynamic conception (theories) of development that recognises the possibility that advances sectors of the world may decline and
- A view of development planning that recognises its inheritantly political character and impact
lecture 3: State of poverty in the world today
- poverty as a concept is directly linked to the concept of (global) startification
- in 2021 estimated 698 million people/ 9% of global population, were living in extreme poverty- living on less than $1.90 a day (R28.50)
- between 2019 and 2020, the number of people living in extreme poverty increased by an estimated 50 million due to covid-19 and result of global economic downturn
- number of people living in extreme poverty is estimated to have fallen during 2021 as the global economy has started to recover, but there remains an estimated 8 million more people living in poverty today than there were in 2019
Who are the poor lecture 3
- in 2018, 80% of people living below the international poverty line lived in rural areas
- 50% are children and women represent a majority of the poor in most regions and among some age groups
- approximately 70% of the global poor aged 15 and older have no schooling or only some basic education
- almost 50% of poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa live in just 5 countries: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Ethipia and Madagascar
- > 40% of global poor live in economies affected by fragility, conflict and violence, and that nr s expected to rise to 67% in next decade
- georgraphically, poverty is increasingly concentrated in Africa and success in ending poverty will largely depend on Afrucan fragile states
Three worlds model lecture 3
- French demographer Alfred Sauvy
- coined the tern 3rd World din 1952 article “Three world, one planet”
- in the origibal conetxt, defined as:
1. First world= United States and its capatilist allies (i.e. Western Europe, Japan and Australia)
2. Second World= Communist Soviet Union and its Eastern European satelites
3. Third World= all other countries not actively aligned with either side of the Cold War - these 3rd world countries were often poor former European colonies and incleaded nearly all the nations of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia
How do we measure global poverty p123 lecture 3
- The World Bank focuses on consumption per person when determining a person’s poverty status
- income
- consumption per capita (price levels and inflation rates, trade) - Sen (1990) (besides income and consumption), look at what people are capable of doing and being matters
- consider non-monetary measures of well-being (the HDI puts weight- health (life expectancy) and educational attainment in addition to income - Alkire et al. (2015) advocate for expandng the dimnesionality of measures of well-being exclsuive of income per capita
- their multidimensional poverty index (MDI) has three dimensions: education, health and standard of living. Each dimension has a set of indicators, weights on each indicator, and a threshold that signals deprivavtion if the household does not surpass that threshold
Poverty prior to 1990 (Jefferson, 2019) lecture 3
Why so much poverty prior to 1990? Four factors (Jefferson p122)
- Absence of industrialisation
- Colonisation
- Weak public support systems
- Lack of accountablity
Absence of industrialisation lecture 3
- in 1820 industrialisation was already underway in britain and spreading to Western Europe
- the rest of the world did not experience the impact of industrialisation (higher income and consumption) Most of the people worked in agricultural sector with limited physical capital and thus productivity was low
- by 1820, Britain and Western Europe were already twice as rich as the rest of the world
- the expansion of domestic and international trade permitted specialisation according to comparitive advantage
- people in countries that were slow to industrailise and slow to join the world trading system remained poor throughout the 19th century
lecture 3: Colonisation
- some countries did participate in the expansion of trade in 19th century- but didnt reap the benefits of that participation due to colonisation
- countries in the Caribbean, the Americas, Africa and South Asia provided the Western European colonial powers with primary products and labour- vital inputs fuelling industrialisation in Western Europe but to the determinant of the colonised
- trade between w-Europe and its colonies were anything but due to subsequent institutional arrangements
1. (unfree) labour was largely uncompensated due to the systematic enslavement enslavement of people
2. land was taken (expropriated) by the colonialists without compensation
3. colonialists did not share profits from trading with W-Europe equitably- their political and social control of indigenious populations was virtually complete
lecture 3: Weak public support systems
- ey feature of industrialisation is structural change
- with agricultural sector declining significantly during industrilisation, this sector shed unskilled labour
- the industrial sector could not absorb the exess labour- result in large numbers of people without land to farm, shops to keep and factories to work
- insufficient public suppport programmes (welfare programmes) left the churcg and private charities to respond to the prevalent deprivation
- lavk of funding for these entities and reluctant governments resluts in millions of people who were left to cope with poverty on their own
- only in the late 19th century did Germany start to provide public insurance to individuals at ridk of poverty for reasons beyond their control
Lack of accountability lecture 3
- Lack of data, however, result in governments not being held accountable for poverty and its persistence.
- First effort to measure was in 1902 & 1903 when Booth and Rowntree attempted to count the total number of people living in poverty in London and York.
- In the absence of evidence, there was no consensus within countries or across countries about whose, if anybody’s, responsibility it was to do something about the problem.
- Today, the World Bank has the task of measuring poverty – this is a massive undertaking but has become very sophisticated over time.
WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE CAUSE OF POVERTY AND WHAT IS THE ROLE OF AID? AID ADVOCATE (BANERJEE AND DUFLO 2011,3) lecture 3
effrey Sach’s (2005) The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our time.
*Sachs invokes Keynes’s work during the GREAT DEPRESSION
*Sachs argues that poverty is a result of corrupt leadership and retrograde cultures that impede modern development.
*Argues that
“poor countries are poor because they are hot, infertile, malaria-infested, and often landlocked; this makes it hard for them to be productive without an initial large investment to help them deal with these endemic problems. But they cannot pay for the investmentsprecisely because they are poor, they are in “poverty traps”.
- The argument presented is multifaceted, but there are three core components of his case:
First – Sachs (pp9) establishes the moral case for aid by detailing the reach and severity of extreme global poverty (he uses macro-level stats and stories from real people),
‘Poverty trap’ - the extreme poor are in a poverty trap whereby they are ‘too poor to save… and thereby accumulate the capital per person’ needed to lift themselves out of poverty, and
The third is the ‘financing gap’ – growth requires investment (in capital) and investment requires saving
Aid programs fail in Africa because ‘corruption is the culprit’; quality of governance is low; the latter is poor because Africa is poor; democracy deficit; lack of modern values
ANTI-AID / AID PESSIMIST - WILLIAM EASTERLY (2001 & 2006) PP3-4 lecture 3
In 2001 -The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
The economic quest (growth) – to discover how poor countries in the tropics could become rich like rich countries in Europe and North America (bias)
Initially – thought of offering foreign aid to invest in machines, fostering education to control population growth, giving loans conditional on reforms giving debt relief conditional on reforms (SAP)
BUT
1. poor countries that were treated with these remedies failed to achieve the expected growth, WHY?
2. Bad government
*In 2006 -The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good?
Top-down planning for development simply does not work – failure because implementation is NOT accountable or responsive to the people served;
Aid creates perverse incentives (for bureaucrats) that have little to do with development, and
Foreign aid led to a shift from colonisation to postmodern imperialism (China etc.,)
