Denis Goulet

PARTICIPATION IN DEVELOPMENT: NEW AVENUES

Abstract Political redemocratization now occurring in numerous countries of Asia and Latin America challenges both the rule of dictators and their elitist development strategies. This essay argues that new modes of popular participation are needed in the transition to equitable development. The author classifies diverse forms of participation, assesses lessons of experience, illustrates new forms of participation in Sri Lanka and Brazil, and summarizes the strategic importance of new approaches. Participation is newly conceptualized as a “moral incentive” allowing the powerless poor to negotiate new “material incentives” for themselves, and as a leverage point permitting successful micro actors to gain entry into macro arenas of decision making. Criteria are established for authentic participation, and its indispensable role in the pursuit of equitable development and political democracy is justified.

Development experts: The one-eyed giants

Abstract ‘One-eyed giants’ lack wisdom: they consider non-scientific modes of rationality retrograde. Exceptions: For Lebret development is cultural and spiritual as well as economic and political. Gandhi favours ‘production by the masses’ over mass-production. Secularism (reducing all value to earthly ones) is bad but secularization (taking earthly values as decisive) is good. Non-instrumental treatment derives development goals from within latent dynamisms in religion. Instrumental treatment treats tradition as means to ‘modernity’. The ‘coefficient of secular commitment’ describes the varying religious rationales for working in history. Religious should reinforce secular commitment by linking morality to ultimate meanings. Authentic development summons persons and societies to ‘make history while witnessing to transcendence’.

Development ethics: a new discipline

States that “development” has long been equated with modernization and western‐ization and studied as a straightforward economic issue. Reports that the discipline of economics has been the main source of policy prescription for development decision makers and that this view is now widely criticized as ethnocentric and as economically reductionist. Reveals that change is occurring: economics itself is reintegrating ethics in its conceptualization, methodology, and analysis; a new paradigm of development is in gestation; and a new discipline, development ethics, has come into being. Explains that development ethics centres its study of development on the value questions posed: what is the relation of having goods and being good in the pursuit of the good life, what are the foundations of a just society, and what stance should societies adopt towards nature? Thinks that the new discipline emerges from two sources, which are now converging: from engagement in development action to the formulation of ethical theory, and from a critique of mainstream ethical theory to the crafting of normative strategies to guide development practice. Concludes that development ethics has a dual mission: to render the economy more human and to keep hope alive in the face of the seeming impossibility of achieving human development for all.

Development: Creator and destroyer of values

Abstract The terminology and practice of development are ambiguous. The term is used both descriptively and normatively, and it refers either to goals or to means for reaching these. Moreover, the practice has oscillated from one-dimensional pursuit of economic growth to comprehensive social engineering to transform societal structures. Development was long considered an unalloyed good. As attendant social, cultural, ecological and human costs become more evident, however, it is increasingly viewed as a two-edge sword, simultaneously creating and destroying values. It brings material and technological gains and new freedoms, but also breeds injustice, destroys cultures, damages environments and generalizes anomie . More importantly, development engenders value conflicts over the meaning and content of the good life, the basis of justice in society, and the criteria governing the stance of human societies toward nature. In thinking about, and acting upon, development we need “a wisdom to match our sciences.” This essay explores possible roads leading to such wisdom.

Obstacles to world development: An ethical reflection

Abstract Development poses choices, not only of diverse strategies or means, but also of competing goals and images of the good life. Ethics, together with economics and politics, has a role to play in making wise choices. Yet efforts in the last three decades have been disappointing. Why: what major obstacles impede genuine development? Three classes of obstacles are analysed: the bankruptcy of development paradigms, the crisis of institutional imagination in the world at large, and an array of domestic roadblocks impeding development within Third World countries. Notwithstanding failures, there is still a basis for hope: the social experimentation conducted by numerous communities of need throughtout the world. Their innovative praxis around more humane values constitutes the main building-block of an alternative development strategy as well as the nourishing source of sounder development theories.

Three rationalities in development decision-making

Abstract Development performance is, in most cases, disappointing. Numerous obstacles, domestic and international, impede success. This paper argues that, in addition to these, bad development decision-making contributes to failure. The author analyzes how three distinct rationalities, or basic approaches to logic, converge in decision-making arenas. These are technological, political, and ethical rationality. Each has a distinct goal and a peculiar animating spirit or basic procedure. Problems arise because each rationality approaches the other two in reductionist fashion, seeking to impose its view of goals and procedures on the decision-making process. The result is technically sound decisions which are politically unfeasible or morally unacceptable or, in other cases, ethically sound choices which are technically inefficient or politically impossible. The author illustrates the workings of the three rationalities in three sectors of contemporary Brazilian development strategy: a dam construction project in the impoverished Northeast region, an experimental approach to municipal government in greater Sao Paulo, and an ambitious program of incentives aimed at diversifying agricultural production in the Northeast. The conclusion: a new model of mutually respectful — and not reductionist — dialogue among the three rationalities is urgently needed in arenas of developmental decision-making.

Participatory technology assessment: Institution and methods

Abstract The subordination of technology to finalities outside it must be built into technology assessments. In order to do so, developing countries need: • technological “gatekeepers” to monitor outside development; • “focal points” to receive, screen, and distribute relevant knowledge needed for technology assessment; and • institutional arrangements to assure ongoing information exchange, concerted planning, and collaborative implementation among government, producers, and researchers. Three rationalities vie for supremacy in decisional arenas: technical, political, and ethical. Interaction among the three should be circular, not vertical. Technology assessments (TA) qualitative dimensions can be managed by using evaluative tools such as the “development flower.”

Development indicators: A research problem, a policy problem

Abstract “Development” is an ambiguous term used normatively or descriptively, and designating either a better life or the means to reach it. Economics itself, meant to be of instrumental value at the service of larger ends, tends to displace these. Diverse economic philosophies and varying images of developments goals are reflected in varying indicators of performance. Development indicators presently in use are ethnocentric, reductionist, and misleadingly aggregative. These same failings also characterize mainstream development strategies. Indicators guide policy actors and serve as bases of judgment and comparison among societies. The search is now on for alternative development strategies and for alternative indicators. What is needed, however, is NOT a new indicator, but a KEY to read indicators meaningfully. The KEY presented here is a tool for use by two categories of social actors: non-elite populations, usually the targeted beneficiaries of development actions, to assess the quality of development proposed to them; and development specialists to gauge performance. Methodological problems of expressing qualitative dimensions in non-reductionist fashion with quantiative proxies are analyzed. A model KEY is presented in the form of a Development Flower represented graphically by a figure portraying either the fully developed person or some truncated, distorted version thereof.

What is a just economy in a globalized world

This paper aims to address the ethical and social issues raised by economic development in a globalized world. It argues that development has not delivered economic wellbeing to all nations and peoples and questions the view of development as the main achievement by economics. It attempts to define what a just economy is and examines how economic justice can be achieved when the economic system is structurally unjust.

Value Orientation in Technology Policy

Let me define the scope of this article. I no not intend to consider the specifics of medical technology applications but rather to reflect on general value orientations in technology policy for development. In order to do so, I should like to devote attention to four points which are distinct but interconnected. First, what is the larger global context within which technology policy has to be framed? Second, I should like to invite you on a phenomenological journey with me to peel away some of the onion skins of technology as a process and capture, if possible, a bit of what I call the dynamics of technology transfer. Third, I wish to focus on a few of the value tensions poor nations face whenever they try to achieve two things: (1) assimilate imported technologies, and (2) build up a greater self-reliance in their own development efforts. There is tension between the need to go outside for certain technological re-