theories and work programmes
2.4.4 Development as human development – wellbeing, poverty and the MDGs
The human development paradigm as it is known today was specified in the first UNDP “Human Development Report” issued in 1990. There human development was defined in terms of enabling people to live long, healthy and creative lives, thus enlarging peoples’ choices, which choices could include, additionally, political freedom, guaranteed human rights and self-respect (Stewart et al., 2018).28
Human capital was already a concept embedded in economic growth theory, but human development-wellbeing was set as an objective in itself, as indeed it has become in the OECD’s own branding – “Better Policies for Better Lives”.29 And in its further extension by Amartya Sen in his iconic
“Development as Freedom”, freedom is defined in terms of the capabilities and the circumstances needed for individuals to be able to choose how to live, breaking out beyond traditional, contextual or forced constraints (Sen, 1999). Wellbeing and freedom in this sense are personal, but they depend upon social and institutional systems. And human capabilities contribute centrally to economic performance and notably to breaking out of the
“middle income trap”.
The DAC held meetings on education, health and population (managing fertility) in its first decade, essentially in the framework of development policies, whether as transformation or neoclassical factor accumulation.
Such meetings continued sporadically until the 1990s, without ever becoming systematic. The emergence of sector-wide approaches (SWAP) in these fields was encouraged from the 1980s, notably in the DAC “Principles for Programme Assistance” (OECD/DAC, 1992, pp. 67-85) and featured in these later sector meetings, but the action was on the ground. Then the key issues were taken up in the WP-EFF and its joint ventures, and in the monitoring process as an issue of using country systems. How to help build systemic capacities became the focus of ongoing work on building effective institutions in a governance frame.
28 This definition is all but identical with that issued by Cicero in the Rome of 2000 years ago: the role of the state is to promote the safety, health and wellbeing of its people in an inclusive political system.
29 The road by which the OECD found its way to this vocation had an early connection with the MDGs.
Thus, human development as such never emerged thematically in the DAC.
Nevertheless, in the DAC and in the development community generally, after the Great Recession of 2007-9, social protection programmes came to be regarded not just as a safety net, but as an indispensable investment in human capital, and in human wellbeing, seen also as an essential concern of the international community. Social protection programmes, born essentially in Mexico and Brazil, thus became mainstream (Commission on Growth and Development, 2009).
But two key contributions to the human development agenda did emerge from the DAC – gender, first conceptualised as women and development, and the MDGs.
2.4.4.1 Gender equality as human development and wellbeing The gender story in the DAC is told in Chapter 13. Suffice it to say here that its incorporation into mainstream thinking in the DAC was an arduous process, driven by a determined group of women from aid agencies backed by academic work, notably from the IDS Sussex, which became a basic source of analytical work, with a team led by the most eminent expert in the field, Naila Kabeer. Under Kabeer, the whole DAC Secretariat went through a training programme on gender and gender equality. In the DAC, even at senior level, for many, gender remained a marginal development issue, with token paragraphs added to communiqués. However, in 1995, the working party on women in development was responsible for one of the most far-reaching and long-term development impacts of the DAC – the financing and organisation of developing country delegations to the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing. Still, the struggle in DAC communiqués to get beyond formulaic references to gender issues continued, until at one SLM, the head of the Dutch delegation exploded: “if you cannot understand the key role of gender dynamics in development you are not professional!”
2.4.4.2 The MDGs as human development and wellbeing, with Neo-Gramscian impact
In Chapter 10 below, the story is told of how the MDGs emerged, in two Acts, the First Act in the form of 1996 DAC international development targets in “Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development
Cooperation”, (OECD, 1996) and then, in the Second Act as an outcome of the 2000 UN Millennium Declaration.
Here, the MDGs are placed into the broader context of development thinking, where their formulation and impact were time-critical and impressive, if contestable in terms of development progress as a wider endeavour.
As characterised in the aforementioned history of the human development idea, the MDGs epitomised a major switch in development thinking and even constituted a culmination point at that time in the evolution of development thought (Stewart et al., 2018, p. 5). They were comprised entirely of human development goals, with sustainable development built on, and were subscribed to by every major institution and government, North and South.
In a chapter of a 2008 volume on the OECD and transnational governance, Arne Ruckert explores the role of the DAC in the articulation of a new policy consensus in the mid-1990s, thus contributing to the construction of the global development regime (Ruckert, 2008). The key elements of this contribution were identified as the promotion of international development targets, country ownership of development policies and poverty reduction strategies, as integrated in “Shaping the 21st Century” (OECD-DAC, 1996), no dense technical report, just 24 pages with impact.
In neo-Gramscian terms, hegemony refers to a political process where domination is not based solely on economic and thus material power, but it is also a function of its ability to provide cultural and ideological leader-ship offering an integrated system of values and beliefs that is supportive of the established social order and projects the particular interests of the dominant social forces as the general interest of all members (Ruckert, 2008).
In this sense, what the DAC was doing here was to modify the neo-liberal consensus in the direction of becoming an inclusive neo-liberal consensus (Ruckert, 2008). The response was immediate. The Managing Director of the IMF (Michel Camdessus) printed wallet-sized cards with the DAC targets on them and enthusiastically passed them around at the annual Bretton Woods meetings in September 1996. And three years later, with political push from the “Utstein Group” of DAC ministers, the G8 at their Cologne Summit inaugurated a major debt relief effort, to become the HIPC (heavily-indebted poor countries initiative), on the basis that countries must have poverty reduction strategies in order to qualify. Thus came the era of PRSPs (Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers) that needed to receive the stamp
of approval from both the World Bank and the IMF, in order for them to access debt relief and financing.
A further out-of-sight neo-Gramscian impact at the OECD came when the DAC International Development Goals (IDG) had become the MDGs following Act Two where the scene had changed from Paris to New York (see Chapter 10).
The OECD Director of Statistics at that point, Enrico Giovannini, became intrigued by the MDGs, seeing them as a set of statements of wellbeing, of a kind that in principle could and should be applied universally. A series of exchanges with this author and with the then chair of the DAC Richard Manning, helped inspire Giovannini to conceive of an OECD agenda to measure wellbeing not just in member countries but across the world.
He initiated a series of international conferences to this end and a work programme at the OECD, which has constructed the go-to OECD website on wellbeing (OECD, n.d.). And in the latest move, there is now a new OECD Centre for Wellbeing, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunity (WISE) (OECD WISE, n.d.). Together with the OECD branding of “Better Policies for Better Lives”, the MDGs and the human development school can be seen to have captured the OECD, a neo-Gramscian process of some note, to say the least.
At the same time the MDGs as human development goals did leave outside this framework the economic, social and political processes that generate ongoing development progress, and left out also the governance agenda, including human rights. Achieving the goals implied major political commitment and major policy and institution building efforts.
In fact, of course, it was only by leaving these matters outside the MDG framework that agreement could be reached. In the development field the debates at that time were fierce as we have seen, with no truce in sight on the Washington consensus and the Asian Miracle activist government front. The Bretton Woods institutions were under attack literally from the “Fifty Years is Enough” movement protesting against structural adjustment programmes.
The MDGs were a rescue operation for them.
But leaving out the surrounding economic, social and political dynamics also had a cost in terms of understanding what was really going on inside countries and the progress being made (see Chapter 10). The most thorough exploration of the merits and demerits of the MDGs, and the process by which
they were specified, has been conducted by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, director of the “Human Development Report” from 1995 to 2004. Her essential findings:
the impressive and irresistible power of goals; but alongside that, unintended consequences, including the use of communications and accountability devices as hard planning targets; and the absence of the core Millennium Declaration values of human rights and capabilities. Fukuda-Parr went on to identify the very different origin and nature of the Sustainable Development Goals which came to be universal goals, and to include everything that had been left out of the MDGs (Fukuda-Parr, 2017).
With the SDGs, then, development processes came back. And development finance came back. The DAC would constitutionally and practically have been incapable of this achievement. Another policy community, working with a more fundamental concept, sustainable development, and inventing new processes at the UN in New York came into the gap. The Chair of the DAC at the founding of the DAC IDGs, James Michel, wrote a 2014 account of the issues and processes emerging for the definition of the post-2015 development agenda (Michel, 2014).