Globalization And Development Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Globalization is an increasingly important phenomenon affecting the world in political, economic, social, and cultural arenas. In her 1999 article “Gender and Globalization,” Valentine Moghadam describes globalization as “a complex economic, political, cultural and geographic process in which the mobility of capital, organizations, ideas and discourses and peoples has taken on an increasingly global or transnational form” (p. 367). Further, globalization in both practice and ideology concerns the growing and deepening global relationships in governance, capital flows, trade, civil society, migration, and other areas.

Development is part of and affected by globalization. Broadly defined, development includes the social, economic, and political structures and processes that enable all members of a society to share in opportunities for education, employment, civic participation, and social and cultural fulfillment as human beings, in the context of a fair distribution of the society’s resources among all its citizenry. For example, some people or communities may lack the resources, facilities, or networks available to other community members necessary to benefit from development projects. Educational opportunities necessary to access created jobs or investment programs may vary across communities. Development is also affected by gender relationships and structures, social relationships and hierarchies, family arrangements, and networks that affect the distribution of resources and the information offered through political and economic development programs. Although globalization can overcome the downsides to such structures through exchanges of ideas or social norms across national or cultural groups, it has also facilitated development led by developed countries, with their perspectives on gender issues, economic productivity, and institutions or social networks. Programs are often planned with these perspectives yet applied in quite different contexts. Furthermore, globalization is often dominated by liberalization policies that can place undue burdens on the poorest residents of developing countries by removing economic and political safety nets.

Development studies, especially post–World War II (1939– 1945), held basic tenets that included the third world and its inhabitants as homogenous, a belief in a linear concept of progress, and the nation-state as the central unit of analysis. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, globalization challenged this approach. Diverse experiences in development, such as those of oil-producing states, of the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan), of Latin American countries with respect to the role of their militaries, and of the newly independent African states contested any theories that previously tried to capture all developing countries under one umbrella. This largely resulted in an end to the belief that development was an inevitable, linear path toward modernization as experienced in industrialized nations and to a shift away from postmodern thinking, such as dependency theory. The new priority became micro-level, actor-centered research.

In light of the varied development experiences in the developing world and the growth of globalization, both macro/institutional and micro/local actor aspects had to be included in the conversation and planning of development. Thus, an understanding of development must include considerations of economic and political policies and institutions as well as educational levels, resource access, and social networks available to individuals and communities. A realization of the increasing gap in development between first and third-world countries, and of the presence of higher levels of environmental destruction and the use of abusive labor practices that led to development in industrialized nations in the first world, called into question the inevitability or desirability of other nations replicating the same path of development.

Key events of globalization underpin this shift in thinking. Economically, the debt crisis across the developing world in the 1970s and the fall of the Bretton Woods system led the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to become debt collectors and capitalist economic modernizers. Politically, the cold war and its political pressures intermixed with the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs in the developing world. These events encouraged an assessment of development in light of globalizing political and economic forces.

This assessment includes various themes that bridge the fields of development and globalization, including global economic policies such as trade regulations through the World Trade Organization; environmental impacts of development across water, air, and land that are not confined to one national entity; and migration of people in and out of country due to economic realities or safety/conflict situations that require the response of multiple state governments. Globalization has led to certain realities that shape these themes: the predominance of the neoliberal, capitalist economic viewpoint; the results of structural adjustment programs in developing countries; international multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations’ efforts; and global resource changes due to climate change, lived-poverty requirements, and the increased flow of people and goods. Globalization thus requires the field of development to ask such questions as the following: How should people live? What should states and economies look like? How are the economic, social, political, and cultural actions of people in one part of the world linked to and affected by the activities of people in other parts of the world? How does culture affect the interplay of development and globalization? How is good governance defined? What determines access to and control over the flow of globalized technology? How is knowledge controlled across the globe?

Knowledge is an increasingly important purveyor of development, and access to expert knowledge and the control of intellectual capital are crucial determinants of development inequality. The state is taken as the necessary central actor in the international arena in dependency, modernization, and world-system theories of development. With the increase of globalization, this centrality as part of development is challenged. What role is there for state sovereignty given the increasing impact of inter and intrastate actions? Political (international accords), economic (deregulation), and cultural nationalism (identity) all challenge state sovereignty.

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