Development and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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There are few ideas more contested than development, which involves a complex history of competing understandings of terms as varied as progress, geopolitics, gender, culture, and environment. There is general consensus that the development era began at the end of World War II and was tied to European Reconstruction and shifting geopolitics. Colonialism had been the central organizing practice prior to this period and was gradually receding with the increasing independence of former colonial outposts. Colonialism involved the political, economic and spatial control of various regions for the benefit of colonial empires. The colonies were established for the removal of raw materials and human labor, while being promoted as part of a larger imperial mission. In an example of this sentiment, writer Rudyard Kipling argued that the development of other regions was part of the “white man’s burden,” which spoke to a paternalistic responsibility that came with being supposedly more advanced. In addition to the decline of colonialism, a speech by President Harry Truman in 1949 helped usher in the development era by arguing that colonialism would be replaced by “a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing.” Rather than colonial empires and colonies, the globe would be divided into independent nation-states that would set the terms for political and economic engagement. Also important at this time was the establishment of new international institutions to facilitate the rebuilding of Europe and global exchange. A series of meetings at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 resulted in agreements on the rules for commercial and financial systems between the world’s major industrial states. These meetings are also remembered for establishing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which have become two of the leading institutions in promoting international development.

Development has always involved politics as much as economics. This can be seen by the labeling of countries under the development lexicon. Durign the rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, developing countries were viewed as strategic pawns. The United States and its allies were classified as members of the First World, the Soviet Union and its allies were the Second World, and all the other countries became the Third World. Although there are tremendous variations between countries labeled Third World, this became a commonly used classification. Third World or developing countries tend to rate low on development indicators that assess their socio-economic characteristics. Commonly used indicators include Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Human Development Index (HDI). GDP is a measure of all the goods and services produced within one year. HDI assesses life expectancy, education measured as adult literacy and average years of schooling, and purchasing power. Development indicators can be problematic, however, since they often overlook differences within specific countries and regions. GDP, for example, is helpful in understanding the overall economic output for a particular country, but does not show income inequalities or variations between urban and rural areas. Critics have also argued that GDP increases positively with some negative environmental conditions such as the clean-up of an oil spill. Indicators such as these provide only a limited picture and can also contradict each other. Several countries rate fairly high according to their GDP but much lower based upon their HDI because of socio-economic inequality. As such, the classification of countries for the purposes of development should be treated carefully.

Modernization Theory

The focus of much early development thinking was the diffusion of Western characteristics to facilitate the perceived necessary evolution of countries in the Third World. This was known as modernization theory. The best example of this was Walt Rostow’s “Stages of Economic Growth,” which positioned each country in a particular stage that required technical and cultural transformation to facilitate its development. The five stages were traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and high mass consumption. These stages were an ideal path, involving a linear evolution realized through increased manufacturing and industrial organization, infrastructure development, and the emergence of a social elite. Rostow argued that countries could move along the trajectory once they acquired certain economic, political, and cultural characteristics that resembled the developed world. Modernization was firmly linked with the goal of Soviet containment, as the United States and its allies believed economic development would resist the spread of communism throughout the Third World. As such, development aid was often directed toward countries with strategic benefits to lending countries.

The Role of the State

Another important element of early development thinking was theorizing the role of the state. Supported by influential economist John Maynard Keynes, the state was believed to play a large role in facilitating economic growth for developing countries. An example of this applied in practice was import-substitution industrialization (ISI). ISI was an approach adopted by a number of Latin American countries in the 1950s and involved strong state intervention to encourage domestic production for domestic markets. ISI utilized the state and market manipulation to facilitate its goals. Import tariffs were instituted to make foreign products more expensive and were eliminated on needed inputs for domestic production.

ISI was generally unsuccessful for a number of reasons. It had little impact in reducing imports, and in some cases increased them since more inputs were needed to support local industries. There was little diversification of the sectors supported by ISI beyond the industries producing sophisticated goods. In responding to market indicators about which products to create, ISI tended to reproduce economic inequality by manufacturing goods that were unaffordable to the majority of the population. The failure of ISI helped propel arguments that economic growth was best achieved through the utilization of the market, which would reach ascendancy in the 1980s with neoliberal theory. Other perspectives about international development emerged as well, including the dependency school, which argued that global integration and trade worsened-rather than improved-economic conditions in the developing world. To the dependency theorists, ISI was evidence that the global system was primarily designed to benefit wealthier countries.

The 1970s were a volatile period for geopolitics, global finance, and development. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) instituted an oil embargo that dramatically increased the price of gasoline. This produced an energy crisis that had ripple effects throughout the world. Poorer countries found it more difficult to manufacture basic commodities and were forced to pay more as imported goods increased in price. Revenues from high gasoline prices-or “petrodollars”-were funneled into the Third World by private banks. The result was that developing countries took out more loans to stay afloat.

The debt crisis was further exacerbated by U.S. policies in the late 1970s to strengthen the value of the dollar, which resulted in increased interest rates. Finance markets were tied to changes in international markets and as the prices of primary commodities declined in the early 1980s, the income generated by developing countries was reduced. Between 1973-83, the outstanding debt owed by developing countries increased fivefold, to $810 billion. This resulted in a number of countries, beginning with Mexico, announcing that they would be unable to service their debt. In order to halt a potential global financial crisis, the IMF and World Bank stepped in as brokers, thereby expanding their influence within the developing world.

Asian Tigers

During this time, development began to experience shifts in regards to economic theorizations of the role of the state and the market. Neoliberalism became more pronounced and asserted that the state was a hindrance to effective economic growth. One of the mechanisms for advancing neoliberalism was structural adjustment, which attached specific conditions upon loans to developing countries. Structural adjustment goals included the reduction or elimination of a balance of payments deficit, the resumption of higher rates of economic growth, and the achievement of structural changes that would prevent future payments and stabilization problems. State-owned businesses were sold and budgets were often directed away from supporting environmental and social services. The legacy of structural adjustment, and lending conditionality more generally, remains one of the most contested issues in development policy today.

Neoliberalism gained further prominence in the 1980s with the seeming explosive economic growth of several Asian countries. Labeled the Asian Tigers, these newly industrializing countries (NICs) demonstrated success in establishing a viable manufacturing sector through export processing. As opposed to ISI, export processing involved the establishment of manufacturing not for domestic production but for foreign export. Countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore were able to attract foreign capital to establish manufacturing bases within their borders. Utilizing a number of incentives such as reduced tax rates and low labor costs, export processing became frequently cited as a model for successful economic growth. It is worth noting that critics of this strategy argue that export processing results in significant social and environmental costs as foreign firms show little concern for local conditions. Additionally, it has been argued more recently that, rather than relying exclusively on the market to achieve economic growth, the national governments of the NICs were quite aggressive in suppressing labor costs and unions.

Concerns About Environment

A shift in development accompanied increasing concerns in the 1970s about environmental problems including deforestation, desertification, population and famine. Neomalthusian ideas of population growth surfaced, which asserted that famine and other environmental issues were the product of a rapidly increasing global population living beyond its means. Influential scholars such as Paul Ehrlich argued that human population was increasing exponentially while the ability to sustain the population through environmental resource consumption was more limited. In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich argued that human population growth would result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Also in the 1970s, the Club of Rome published a report entitled The Limits to Growth that asserted that major changes in geopolitical relations would be needed to stem an environmental catastrophe and population collapse. These events pushed environmental concerns onto the forefront of development debates and contributed in a wave of interest in merging environment and development. This popularized the idea of sustainable development, which generally attempts to combine economic development with concerns for environmental sustainability.

Sustainable development has been influenced by a series of key meetings and reports that helped frame its central tenets. One event was the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment, which was held in 1972 in Stockholm, Sweden. This was the first major summit on environment and development and was attended by representatives from 113 nations. Conference attendees agreed to a number of principles, including the idea that development and environmental protection were not mutually exclusive and could actually support each other. This seemingly upended the idea that environmental protection would always come at the expense of economic growth. The Stockholm Conference was followed by the World Conservation Strategy (WCS) of 1980, which attempted to integrate development goals with conservation planning. The three central objectives of the WCS were maintaining essential ecological processes, preserving genetic diversity, and ensuring sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems.

A watershed moment for sustainable development was the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) Our Common Future report of 1987. The WCED defined sustainable development as “[meeting] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The WCED Report identified a number of critical areas for sustainable development, including reviving growth, changing the quality of growth, meeting essential needs, ensuring a sustainable population level, conserving and enhancing the resource base, reorienting technology and managing risk, and merging environment and economic in decision making. Most important was its continuation of earlier statements that sustainable development could reconcile economic growth and environmental sustainability.

Subsequent international gatherings attempted to build upon these developmental principles. Foremost among them was the UN Conference on Environment and Development, which was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. The Rio Summit received significant international publicity and produced Agenda 21, a lengthy document that outlined 27 principles for sustainable development. The World Summit on Sustainable Development was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002 and attempted to further expand upon some of the goals established in Rio. Specifically, the WSSD resulted in an Action Plan that included halving the proportion of people without access to sanitation and drinking water, deal with climate change, and stop biodiversity loss by 2010. As a result of these meetings and reports, sustainable development has become a buzzword that has sparked a significant amount of attention in professional and academic circles while becoming a paradigm for institutions as diverse as the World Bank, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the developing world.

Issues in Development

Development has continued to expand to involve a number of concerns. One of these is development and gender, which assists in understanding the impacts of development processes upon men and women. Informed by feminist theory, scholars have shown that development differentially impacts women who are often overlooked by development agencies. Women have been shown to contribute differently to the public and private spheres, and possess different knowledge about local conditions. The UN established the Women in Development decade to focus attention upon the relationships between gender and development and various institutions have worked to include women as full stakeholders in development planning.

A second issue has been the localization of development and interests in participation. Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) involves a number of techniques to include local communities as participants in development. PRA and participatory development represent a critique of large-scale development that is blueprint-oriented and ignores the nuances of local context that often shape the effectiveness of development. A wave of interest in NGOs and social capital suggest an intention to direct attention toward local processes, communities, and actors. The growth of microenterprise lending, which provides small loans to poor groups, also fits within this trend. Microenterprise lending began when the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh began giving out small loans, called microcredit, in the 1970s. The high repayment rates, coupled with the ability to assist the very poor, have generated a great deal of interest in microenterprise lending.

The belief that we are increasingly living in a globalized world has focused attention upon global finance, flows of exchange, global environmental processes, and cultural change. Countries continue to position themselves within regional trading blocks to access new markets and protect themselves from foreign competition. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) connected Canada, Mexico and the United States, while the expansion of the European Union (EU) links countries from eastern and Western Europe. There has been continued movement toward other regional associations, as represented by the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the rebirth of the African Union (AU).

Development remains a hotly contested and challenging set of ideas and goals. This is evidenced by recent assessments of the state of international development. The UN has proposed its own Millennium Development Goals that challenge the global community to meet the following by 2015: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development. Unfortunately, recent evidence indicates that for many countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, these goals will not be achieved. Even while economic and political relationships expand at the international scale, development is increasingly the site of protests and resistance within various locations. Protests have accompanied the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings from outside, and from within as a bloc of developing countries, derailed recent agreements because of their concern for agricultural subsidies in the United States and Europe. Reactions to neoliberal economic theory have appeared particularly in Latin America as countries such as Bolivia nationalize certain industries. These events suggest that development will continue to be challenged and reworked in the 21st century.

Bibliography:

William Adams, Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in the Third World (Routledge, 2001, 2nd ed.;
Robert Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First (Pearson-Prentice Hall, 1983);
Stuart Corbridge, , Development Studies: A Reader (Edward Arnold, 1985);
Philip W. Porter and Eric Sheppard, A World of Difference: Society, Nature, Development (Guilford, 1998);
Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 1960);
Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Penguin Press, 2005);
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Alfred Knopf, 1999);
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton, 2002);
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Oxford University Press, 1987).