An alternative development? Rethinking development policy across the globe

Image - Prajwal Hiremath

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The past fifty years have seen development policy become a seminal part of international relations between global powers. The post-Washington Consensus, originally a set of economic policy recommendations for ‘developing’ countries popularised in the 1980s, has seen the increasing power of supranational organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in global development policy.

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Additionally, 2015 saw the spearheading of the UN ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, a set of 17 interconnected goals aimed at addressing universal challenges such as inequality, poverty and sustainability. These goals have, in theory, served as guiding principles for all United Nations Member States, in their development policies.

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Currently however, less than 1/5 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are expected to be met by 2030. With inequality and poverty rising at exponential rates across the globe, and the climate crisis continuing to disproportionately ravage countries in the Global South, it seems that development policy is broadly a failed project. One question remains: what is the alternative?

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Post development: addressing unequal power relations

The idea of ‘post-development’ first arose in the 1990s as a set of criticisms against development projects such as the Washington Consensus, which were led overwhelmingly by Western nations. In particular, post developmentalism takes issue with normative development theory’s efforts to preserve Global North Hegemony, whilst simultaneously relying on the resources and labour of the Global South. Instead, it has argued for an alternative to the unequal dichotomised power relations which have been the backbone of development-as-usual, for example in the form of ‘bottom-up’ approaches to development.

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Development policy’s colonial roots

The unequal and dichotomised power relations of development-as-usual, and in particular broad labels of ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ nations, can be traced back to the colonial era. Colonial rule, undertaken overwhelmingly by Western European nations between the 15^th and mid-20^th centuries, was based on the belief in the coloniser’s inherent racial, moral, rational and scientific superiority to the colonised. As a result, Western nations deemed it their ‘civilising mission’ to establish this superiority and repress alternative ways of living.

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As discussed by Scholar Aram Ziai, the colonial notion of European superiority is echoed in modern development policy: this conception places European societies as ideal models for development, and hence attests that ‘less developed’ societies should seek to adopt their models. We can see how this has manifested in recent development policy: a 2023 report from the global policy forum revealed that the World Bank had evolved to focus primarily on financing in the Global South, whilst still being overwhelmingly controlled by the Global North.

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Indigenous alternatives

In response to the unequal and neocolonial power relations which appear to be perpetuated by the Global North’s development policy, there have been several efforts, particularly from indigenous communities, to rethink how development is measured. The idea of ‘Sumak Kawsay’ (in Quechua), or ‘Buen Vivir’ (in Spanish) translates literally to ‘living well’ or ‘good life’, and broadly manifested into a Latin American political project which aimed to achieve collective wellbeing and social responsibility for the environment. It also signalled a shift away from traditional growth, progress and capital accumulation as sole guiding principles in development policy.

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This indigenous alternative to development was indeed adopted as a guiding principle in the 2008 Ecuadorean constitution. It manifested in a set of rights aiming to build ‘a new form of coexistence, in diversity and harmony with Nature and others, to achieve good living, Sumak Kawsay.’

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Rethinking development categorisations

Indigenous concepts such as ‘Sumak Kawsay’ play a key role in addressing vulnerable communities left behind by more traditional conceptions of development.

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However, it is also possible that we can extend Sumak Kawsay’s rejection of western-centric measures of growth to an upheaval in how we normatively classify nations in a development context. For example, this could involve rethinking and dissecting terms like ‘the first world’ and ‘the third world’, countries as ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’, or any similar such categorisations. In this way, we can conceptually reconsider and reconstruct the unequal and neocolonial power relations which have been associated with these labels for decades.

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At the moment, it seems that western-centric, growth-driven development policies pursued by multilateral development institutions such as the World Bank, are here to stay for a while longer. But when the world does start to recognise that development policy in its current form is unsustainable, perhaps it will also realise that it is insufficient to provide alternatives to development: to tackle development-as-usual systematically, we need to rethink it as an entire concept.