Target not the poor, but the processes that relentlessly lead to more poverty (..especially since there is seemingly no current international binding obligation to eliminate extreme poverty). It is not about targeted poverty alleviation, but about disparity reduction!

The old conceptual clarities and development prescriptions are breaking down. The emerging challenge for progressive thinkers is thus to rethink and change strategies and tactics and then get involved in doing a whole set of new things. This calls for a break with the ruling development paradigm. It points out that a growing new development ethic is emerging that calls for working with those rendered poor as protagonists rather than passive recipients of development handouts. Actually, strong scientific, ethical, and political imperatives are gaining new momentum in relation to acting on disparity reduction. We, therefore, need to critique our own existing personal and professional agendas and look for new windows of opportunity to replace a ruling development paradigm that is not delivering. We have to come up with a way of breaking the inertia and building effective coalitions and networks across sectors and across boundaries, fully knowing that imposing a new paradigm is a political task.

Despite growing lip service support, ‘sustainable development’ has not been able to break the ruling development paradigm. Therefore, ways of getting from the old ruling to the new sustainable development paradigm must be explored based on the fact that neither the state nor the free market is truly up to significantly reverting hunger or to putting an end to global extreme disparities and environmental degradation; both are prisoners to particular vested interests; both need to be democratized or else be bypassed in favor of working through increasingly active civil society organizations and social movements.

The brand of sustainable development called for here is said to have to be guided by a scientific causal analysis, be ethically and politically explicit, be beneficiary driven and participatory, and be demands-focused (not just advocacy).

I have for long been asking whether social gains justify economic growth sacrifices. The response given is a resounding yes. We must accept the fact that the central issues of equity and poverty alleviation are not social but rather economic objectives. The sustainable development here advocated for needs to assure an ongoing shift towards decreasing the skewedness in the income and wealth distribution. It has to have a built-in poverty redressal objective also necessarily based on looking at wealth redistribution tactics.

A strategy combining capacity building, social mobilization, and empowerment will be central. The promotion of empowering activities and processes is key. The appeal is to be made to claim holders to understand that the new truly sustainable development paradigm is dealing not with many problems but with several aspects of the same problem. Finally, the role of moral advocates, mobilizing agents, social activists, and political advocates needs to be explored in the context of the new Sustainable Development.

A development paradigm in need of replacement

Today, as in the late nineties, the development challenges in the countries progressively rendered poor are still pretty much the same. Governments and the Northern Aid Establishment have had their chance and have basically failed; more people are poor and hungry today, and our planet is in greater environmental distress. Actually, as for expectations, the prescriptions of international aid have failed for both the rich and the poor. In the external development funding schemes, ‘bottom-up development,’ decentralization, and participative democratization of decision-making still denote more lip service than reality. Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) took an inordinate toll on those rendered poor. The debt burden is increasingly more intolerable to countries rendered poor, and net financial flows from the South to the North continue. (The world atlas of wealth is shrinking while the one of poverty is expanding). Relatively newer evils such as urban malnutrition, street children, AIDS, high maternal mortality, displaced people, and urban and gender violence are increasingly with us.

In development circles it is now amply clear that it is not enough to do the things right, but rather to do the right things; trying harder is simply not enough; development agents need to think and act differently today.

Old conceptual clarities and development prescriptions are breaking down. In the past decades, we have had summits, post-summits, and so many purported development landmarks that were to represent ‘true turning points.’ But I am not alone in thinking that we have still to see such turning points; their boundary is fuzzy at best. The ‘international development community’ simply has a faint memory and a poor follow-up record. Public opinion—fed through exposure to daily TV and social media-- also has an inordinate capacity to forget (not to speak of world leaders and politicians who are busy managing daily crises).

After UNCED, Rio 1992, sustainable development—encompassing economic and ecological sustainability and equity-- actually represented a repackaging of development strategies. Despite broad-based (mostly NGO) support and some new reconceptualization, ‘sustainable development’ has, in all honesty, not been able to break the ruling development paradigm.

The fact that the existing development paradigm is still dominant means we must learn to work from within to change it. This does not mean that we give up the effort to replace it, but rather that we recognize the reality of our situation and respond and organize ourselves accordingly.

We probably, therefore, need to first go into a critique of our own existing personal professional agendas [after all, some of us act as advisors to or are staff members of (pre-sustainable) groups of development decision makers…]. Then, we have to take up the challenge of our age and look for new ‘ways out’ or for ‘windows of opportunity’ to replace a ruling development paradigm that is not delivering.

Windows of opportunity to take advantage of (Normative aspects)

The challenge thus still remains to install a new progressive sustainable development paradigm. Is the timing right? Are we at the brink of a paradigmatic breakpoint? After the proclamations of the above-mentioned UN Conference and its respective parallel NGO fora, I think we can safely say we are at such a point, and, being long overdue, proclaiming it loudly is our duty. But if we do, we have to have a counter-concept to propose instead.

To advance towards the next order, we need to change the terms of the discussion; if not, we will weary as campaigners, and the campaign will die out. Such a new effort has to marry the visionary with the practical; the vision has to suggest a route for effective action. A dream is not to be confused with naivete. (“Be realistic, ask for the impossible!” Paris, 1968). There being no forbidden agendas, the moment cries for us to press for more: windows of opportunity have a way of slamming shut.

We need to become experimenters, risk takers, innovators, intensifiers and diversifiers, pioneers, addicts of new information, practitioners of committed common sense, and socially and economically rational beings.

The challenge is to get away from the circularity in current Northern development thinking; see not only what is wrong, but also what there is to build on; and intervene upon the status quo. We cannot merely denounce; we must also announce. We are in a race with time to overcome the problems before they overcome us (it is as simple and as deadly as that—particularly for mothers and children the world over).

The society we want, we must shape, and a change of development paradigm is needed for that. The role of an avant-garde is to cause fermentation; nobody is going to do it for us. We may not exert effective political leadership yet, but we cannot run away from showing intellectual leadership at least.

A strategic overhaul of our actions requires a crisis in our thinking, and if the crisis is not there, we have to precipitate it. Development is about change, and change brings conflict, pain, and confusion; out of this emerges a new understanding.

Therefore, a constructive confrontation is unavoidable. You may ask, "With whom?" With governments, members of learned societies, editors of scientific journals, international agencies, Northern and Southern NGOs, and individuals freelancing advice on development—in short, whoever is indecisive towards reverting current trends of maldevelopment. We have to be willing to come into conflict with the ideas and values of the majority (…or a powerful minority?) and to precipitate public discussion; it is only through conflict that new (or perhaps not so new), ‘unpopular’ ideas become thinkable.

We need to explode the myth that things are fine, that some things have improved, and debunk the myth that the causes of ill health, malnutrition, illiteracy, poverty, and environmental degradation are independent (since all are connected). The challenge is to join hands with as many ‘single-issue’ constituencies as possible (environment, women’s, youth, human rights, health/nutrition, peace, AIDS, etc.) to launch a progressive movement incorporating individuals, institutions, agencies, and budding civil society organizations.

The three pillars of an emerging sustainable development paradigm

Strong scientific, ethical, and political imperatives that oppose the current prevailing development paradigm in countries rendered poor are gaining momentum. Each of these three areas of global concern has distinct constituencies; each carries imperatives that have traceable underlying sources of motivation and identifiable basic theoretical and practical determinants at its roots. Explicitly stating these sources of motivation that lead to the day-to-day decision-making on development issues is crucial to the new paradigm. This is in a double attempt to find out where every actor is coming from and to help identify and select our strategic allies and strategic enemies in this battle for a more truly sustainable development process.

All social problems have a scientific, an ethical, and a political aspect or dimension, and each of these has a theory and a praxis. Therefore, it is essential for the new sustainable development paradigm to integrate the scientific, the ethical, and the political bases for change. The key is to take into account the existing correlation of social and political forces in each historical context. (This is indispensable to avoid falling into political naivete, a frequent development-linked disease).

This expliciting of the different development actors’ positions calls for regularly carrying out social and political mapping exercises as baseline and follow-up activities in regular development work under the new paradigm. (See below).

Getting from the old to the new paradigm: The time for consolidating a transition is now!

The transition process of reaching the desired sustainable development outcomes will be determined by the interactions of science, ethics, ideology, and contingent politics acting as a veritable umbrella on the evolving processes leading from the present context to the various desired sustainable development outcomes. In each specific context, concrete transition strategies will have to be invented or discovered to fit local realities.

If we are to pursue the desired outcomes, we are to tacitly or explicitly accept the idea of the need for a new sustainable development paradigm. (The old one is simply not taking us there, at least not fast enough). Quite a number of the processes to be embarked on still need to be identified, preferably locally, making them fully relevant to the local realities in each case.

The question we are left with then is what to do next. both strategically and tactically, to build and consolidate the desired transition.

First, our strategy, of necessity, must be political; that simply is the way the world ticks. Depoliticizing issues certainly does not lead to a more rational or faster resolution of conflicts and contradictions. The political and the social factors in development are simply inseparable, as are the economic and the social factors. But what we are still seeing today, though, is that mostly economic growth interventions are being applied to solve social problems, ignoring the, by now, well-documented fact that economic growth does not lead to the alleviation of poverty. The ruling paradigm is telling us that underdevelopment is primarily an economic problem and that its associated poverty is a secondary social problem (or, to use a parody, when the workers enter the workplace, they are an economic factor; when they leave work, they are a social problem).

Let it be noted here that current orthodox Bretton Woods institutions’ practices are still not giving social, health, nutrition, ecological, and other objectives prominence enough in their (stubborn) attempt to maximize economic growth. This simply perpetuates inequity, as we know that the fruits of economic growth do not really trickle down. Faster growth does not lead to (fast enough) poverty eradication. Period. Token calls by the World Bank for addressing the social costs of structural adjustment policies to the most destitute never worked, because the process that leads to their impoverishment and ultimate poverty remains untouched—as are the rich!

Poverty reduction is a declared ‘high priority’ for the World Bank itself, though. For them, poverty reduction is “one of two WB benchmarks,” the other being… economic growth. But it so happens that the structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF deepened poverty. The primary focus of SAPs is simply not poverty reduction (…a vintage World Bank contradiction?). The World Bank is of the opinion that the direct assault on poverty must come from “wider development and investment programs.” (…??). It even defines success as a “turnaround in per capita growth”; this clearly calls for emphasizing macroeconomic, fiscal, and monetary policies. These policies have, almost by definition, no impact on poverty reduction. With World Bank/IMF-imposed reforms delivering only low levels of growth—and not even that-- the impact on poverty reduction is almost nonexistent. As such, many World Bank “star countries” would begin achieving poverty reduction goals a bit before the middle of the 21st century…does one really have to wait that long?

The State and the Global Free Market—traditionally called/relied upon by the World Bank/IMF (and by the ruling development paradigm) to solve development issues-- basically serve the same vested interests. Neither the state nor the free market is today truly up to reverting hunger and putting an end to misery and environmental degradation; both are prisoners to particular interests, not those with a vested interest in sustainable development—hence the need for disparity reduction measures.

The solution, therefore, is to change the direction of the development process. Both the state and the free market need to be democratized before they can genuinely serve the local needs and public rather than narrow private (increasingly foreign) interests.

Short of that, the new paradigm would require that both the State and the global free market be bypassed in favor of working through social movements and civil society structures and by strengthening ‘real’ markets (defined as actually existing local networks of exchange among specific producers, traders, and consumers who themselves determine the conditions of access to needed goods).

But focusing on the process of transition to the new paradigm shows only half the picture of the challenges ahead. What the new paradigm is going to strive for is what is explored next.

Reevaluating the major development objectives in the late nineties: Should social gains justify economic sacrifice?

Economic objectives are traditionally measured by growth and efficiency indicators, both translated into net monetary benefits (thus putting costs and benefits in monetary terms).

What the new sustainable development paradigm suggests is that economic objectives be measured more as economic development objectives, i.e., in gains in equity and poverty reduction (thus also measuring costs and benefits in non-monetary terms). Adequate social policies are, therefore, deemed a prerequisite for achieving economic development objectives in an effective, sustainable economic reform.

We are aware this will require a change of mentality by orthodox economists, i.e., to make them accept that equity and poverty reduction are not social but economic objectives. This trade-off entails a replacement of the ruling development paradigm.

By choosing this approach, the new sustainable development paradigm attempts to demonetize the optimization of development goals. What is needed is to trace improvements in non-monetary indicators that measure the achievement of social, health, nutritional, environmental, and other objectives.

Keep in mind that the above refers to relative weights society decides to place on improving the indicators—with all the ethical, scientific, ideological, and political connotations this choice carries.

The new development paradigm thus firmly advocates that social gains justify economic growth sacrifices! Its focus is, therefore, on the not-necessarily-monetary benefits and tradeoffs/payoffs of poverty reduction, as well as specifically focusing on measures to reduce disparity.

The key for the new paradigm to succeed is to strike the proper balance between growth-mediated and support-led security. One should constantly be measuring the tradeoffs between gains and losses when emphasizing one type of security more than the other. The equity issue (poverty reduction, social justice, and distributional fairness) is very much No. 1 in the trade-off equation. Economic growth alone does not guarantee trickle-down, as was said earlier. And direct interventions leading to the provision of targeted public health/nutrition/environmental services promote equity only very indirectly and weakly. Therefore, directly increasing poor households’ income sustainably is a must, in the long run, to improve the standards of health, nutrition, and the environment. Targeting the provision of public services to the neediest remains indispensable as well. I ought to add here that direct interventions leading to disparity reduction (in the taxing and other realms) are indispensable as well.

One has to prominently keep in mind that, from an equity perspective, effective income or wealth redistribution is equivalent to ‘economic growth,’ at least for the lower quintile income group. This is because an increase in their disposable income will then occur, even in the absence of increasing the size of the overall economic pie as a whole! Actually, the resources required to eliminate poverty amount to approximately 10% of total national income in Sub-Saharan Africa and India for extreme poverty eradication. If growth rates of income per capita reach 1% a year, poverty in these regions could, in principle, be eradicated in 10 years and extreme poverty in 4 years, if the entire increase in income per capita accrues to those rendered poor. India has routinely exceeded growth rates of 1% per capita, and income has not trickled down…

The new sustainable development paradigm contends that the proper balance between growth-mediated and support-led security can be reached if and when periodically measured indicators of income maldistribution consistently move in favor of the lower quintile income group. In other words, the mixture of direct income redistribution measures (e.g., estate taxes, taxes on luxury goods, land reform, and targeted subsidies) and the provision of direct interventions in public and environmental services would have to assure an ongoing shift towards decreasing the skewedness in the income and wealth distribution. (Preferably, the financing of the expansion of services to the poor should come from targeted direct interventions in public health/nutrition/education/the environment and others, financed with state revenues mostly collected from the two upper-income quintiles).

Such a sustainable development emphasis would require the setting up of a frequent (semi-annual?) household-level monitoring system (on a sentinel basis) of one or two easy/proxy indicators of income distribution: One could be the “proportion of the population consuming less than $10/week at purchasing power parity exchange rates”; another could be the “percentage of income spent on food by the lower quintile income group” in light of competing non-food consumption choices that come with modernization.

If the income maldistribution indicators do not move in favor of the poorest, that would be an indication that more direct redistribution measures are needed. What this achieves is to make sure that a tilt towards support-led security does not slow down or hamper growth-mediated security for the lower quintile income group. A ‘poverty redressal objective’ and its corresponding indicators are thus built-in and monitored ongoingly. Poverty alleviation will then lead to a decrease in certain types of environmental degradation.

Ultimately, it needs to be understood that the new sustainable development paradigm is dealing not with many problems, but with several aspects of the same problem! (As the pieces of meat in a shishkebab are united by the skewer). And this understanding needs to be promoted and disseminated from the transition period on.

Capacity building to bring about the new paradigm is to expose people to relevant information they themselves get involved in collecting, especially information about the real causes behind the problems they are facing on a daily basis. This is indispensable for better understanding the causes of maldevelopment; it will educate and train people and will prepare them to assess, analyze, and act on their surrounding reality and to press on with the needed demands through effective lobbying activities.

The aim is to have people go through a politically motivated and empowering “Assessment Analysis and Action (AAA) process” that can take them from their felt needs to making concrete claims and to exerting effective demands on those claims; from there they have to go on to exercising their de facto new power and engaging in networking and coalition-building.

We are faced with the challenge to convince and to persuade others and to build growing constituencies; and for that to happen, we have to plan new strategies and to launch bold interventions. The problems of maldevelopment have to be ultimately made global social and political issues to create a ‘global embarrassment’ among our leaders.

The new approaches called for by the new sustainable development paradigm thus require new types of civil society involvement and a new type of development worker actor/activist.

There is a role for (in separate or the same individuals)

  • Moral advocates who will influence perceptions by giving guidance on what is permissible and fair.

  • Mobilizing agents or social activists who will influence action by giving guidance on what is possible and doable, on how it can be done, by whom, and by when.

  • Political advocates who will raise political consciousness by giving guidance on what people’s empirical and de facto entitlements and rights are.

The role of these three types of cadres is to engage in capacity building and social mobilization that leads to empowering development’s beneficiaries so they can become real claim holders and protagonists. They ultimately have to help other potential claim holders to gain access and control over the (human, financial, and organizational) resources they need to solve their own problems—with or without external help.

As a closing remark, it is perhaps fitting to quote Herman Daly, the ex-senior economist of the World Bank’s Environment Department; he is quoted as saying, “I’m going to continue to work toward the way I think things should be. My working hypothesis is that the movement I am a part of will ultimately be successful. I have independent evidence that I’m not a genius and that other people are very smart. I think that the same arguments and facts that convinced me will ultimately convince others. I have faith that they will. Of course, I have to remain open to persuasion as well.” That is what this global forum on the cutting edge of progressive thinking is all about. Remaining indifferent will only give us more of the same.