This is What Development Looks Like

In Aid Thoughts:

We take for granted that there is a vision of ‘development’ or ‘developedness’ that poor countries are striving to, but how accurate is this? There are many different paths that can be taken to the same aims of better incomes, life expectancy, health and education. These paths will lead to a different kind of economy and society, with different advantages and drawbacks. Yet, it doesn’t appear that development policy, certainly not from the donor side, takes into account the myriad approaches to development. From the developing country side, the mania for strategies, visions and plans, while well intentioned, seeks to hit specific targets rather than laying out a conception of what kind of society and economy is desired.

If we accept that developed countries have used different methods to get where they are, and that they have created economies, state structures and societies that have different sets of advantages and disadvantages, there is a case to be made that development policy should focus on individual countries. Specifically, perhaps we should be looking at how the population, state, geography etc. might best develop as a functioning economic and social structure, rather than focusing on the outcomes and outputs that these structures are supposed to achieve to merit the tag ‘developed’.