structures and functions
2.2.4 Development studies as a new multi-disciplinary field of enquiry with funding from aid budgets
From the beginning, the development cooperation effort has provided impetus and funding to an extensive multi-disciplinary development studies
12 DEVEX describes itself as “the media platform for the global development community”.
stream in major universities and dedicated research institutes, the first located in developed countries themselves but then, after some difficulties in finding successful genuinely localised models, in many developing countries (see Box 3). This sector of the aid industry is characterised by wide empirical research agendas, huge debates, and an emphasis on epistemological and political economy questions and behavioural issues within the aid business itself. It has also been highly involved at the level of country analysis and operational programming (Sumner & Tribe, 2008; de Haan, 2009). A long and still growing list of educational and research centres and think tanks attracts large numbers of graduate students and provides the workforce for research and operations across the whole aid industry, including DAC member agencies.13 The literature generated by the development studies stream is vast, with hundreds of journals and specialised divisions of academic publishing houses and with strong interfaces with the international studies literature.
Box 4: Development studies as a new knowledge resource
The OECD Development Centre, established in 1962 with its early work with the DAC described further below, helped to establish the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI). Elsewhere, the Netherlands International Institute of Social Studies, established in 1952, was a pioneer. In Norway, the Christian Michelsen Institute, founded in 1930, instigated its development studies work from the early 1960s under the direction of Just Faaland, later to become a President of the OECD Development Centre.
Contemporaneously with the Development Centre, in 1962 Harvard University established a Development Advisory Service, which became the Harvard Institute for International Development (1974-2000), succeeded by the current Harvard Centre for International Development (CID). In the UK, the Overseas Development Institute, (ODI) was established in London in 1960, and the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University (IDS), was founded in 1966 with a block grant from the then UK Overseas Development Administration. The Oxford University Department of International Development was founded in 1954 with a private grant, but with an initial focus on colonial studies (S. H. Frankel had been Professor of Colonial Economic Affairs at Oxford from 1946), then later on the Commonwealth developing countries, before moving to become an international development studies department in the 1980s.
13 The “2019 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report” produced at the University of Pennsylvania ranks 131 top international development policy think tanks, with IDS Sussex ranked first for the last two years (McGann, 2020, Table 22).
Box 4 (cont.): Development studies as a new knowledge resource
One of the first development research centres, the Institute of Developing Economies was established in Japan in 1958 and then, in 1998, was affiliated with the Japanese trade and investment institute, JETRO. The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) was founded in 1964. In Canada, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) was established by an act of Parliament in 1970.
In South Korea, the Korean Development Institute was established as a government agency in 1971 and runs a programme of studies on the global economic agenda, and international cooperation. The premier French development research institute, FERDI (Fondation pour les études et recherches sur le développement international), was founded in 2003 at Clermont-Ferrand University. The European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECPDM), founded in 1998, is funded by the Netherlands and a number of smaller European governments; its clients include the European Commission (EC). The Centre for Global Development (CGD), based in Washington DC, with a European office, was founded in 2001 with funding from a philanthropist. The Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), founded in 2002 is public institute for independent multidisciplinary studies on globalisation, security, development and international affairs.
In China, the China Academy for Social Sciences (CASS) has conducted development and area studies under the aegis of the State Council since its foundation in 1977 on the initiative of Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce has a research arm, the China Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation (CAITEC) with a Development Studies Centre. The UK DFID has funded a China International Development Cooperation Network (CIDRN) and assisted the creation of a Centre for International Knowledge on Development (CIKD) at the Development Research Centre of the State Council.
India has a Research and Information System (RIS) for Developing Countries in its ministry of foreign affairs. Brazil has the Vargas Foundation (FVG) established in 1944 and, since 2011, a BRICS Policy Centre at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. South Africa has the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) independently established in 1934, now actively engaged in South-South cooperation issues. A number of other prominent development research institutes are located in Asia, notably in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines.
For the DAC, the existence of this multidisciplinary development studies stream has been a bedrock, omnipresent in the conception and prosecution of its work, even when not visible. A major contribution has been the
human development concept, bringing gender, human security and human capabilities into the analytical frame (Stewart, Ranis, & Samman, 2018).
Further contributions include early analytical work to understand the nature of the “Asian miracle”, how the associated global transformation process might play out and how participatory approaches to aid programming can produce community-driven development. As mainstream economics itself becomes more broadly engaged with multidisciplinary issues and the sustainability and wellbeing agendas in a new digital knowledge economy in which power and participation are spreading in new forms and places, a convergence with development economics approaches is in process. A shared complex adaptive systems paradigm becomes more widely used in economics and other disciplines (OECD, 2020b).
The broader interaction between intellectual currents and DAC agendas is taken up further below, but here it is important to place the founding of the OECD Development Centre as a significant contribution to the emergence of the development studies stream. It was a proposal by US President J.F.
Kennedy, in an address given in Ottawa in May 1961, speaking of the OECD and the DAG, that launched the idea. The US then presented the proposal to the meeting of the DAG in Tokyo in July, followed up via an expert advisory group. Their report went to a DAC meeting in March 1962, which recommended to the OECD Council to go ahead with the creation of a Development Centre (Kaysen, 2002). And as explained in Chapter 5, the Development Centre initiative came as a counterbalance to the closed donor shop of the DAC, indicating that the new OECD would be open to developing country voice and participation.
Ironically, the relationship between the DAC and the Development Centre has never been a particularly close or easy one, even now when they inhabit the same floor of the same building rather than living, as for decades, at opposite ends of the 16th arrondissement in Paris. The chair of the DAC and the president of the Development Centre were not exactly rivals, but sometimes seemed so. It has been more the gulf between a donor-oriented committee and a developing country-focussed research centre that has been in play. Many friendships existed of course and some ad hoc joint work, as in the organisation of high-level dialogues on North-South issues in the 1980s involving the Secretary-General, OECD committee chairs and major figures from the Global South, and then the founding in 2007 of a joint Development Forum with an initial two-year work programme on multilateral aid. It is a gulf that should not exist of course, but the policy communities involved are
different, and that makes the essential difference. Especially in its early years, the Development Centre also enjoyed a considerable independence from the rest of the OECD, having its own budget, membership and governance structure, with an elected president. It used this intellectual independence in ways not always congenial to the official aid mindset, for example in its work on rigorous project appraisal,14 avoiding debt burdens, or identifying the real costs and hidden benefits of foreign aid programmes.