Introduction

This is a book about development issues. It asks how development has shown itself over recent decades and what it means to people on the ground. I wish to be sceptical about the term 'development' and to recognise that for some it has become a form of religion. I am aware of the dangers of simply carrying on with the assumption that it is unquestionably a good thing even if we cannot really explain precisely what it is. As Swiss scholar Gilbert Rist suggests, we should 'not yield to ready-made appraisals ... [which] take it for granted that "development" exists, that it has a positive value, that it is desirable or even necessary'. But it is indeed widely taken for granted that development is necessary – an entire industry of development has grown around the term, encompassing the mission statements, activities and finances of government departments, nongovernmental organisations, charities, international financial institutions, United Nations agencies and transnational companies. As Wolfgang Sachs suggests, development 'denotes improvement, advance, progress; it signifies something vaguely positive. So it's difficult to oppose it: who wants to reject the positive?'

But Mexican activist and intellectual Gustavo Esteva refers to the era of development as the 'new colonial episode' and believes that 'the four decades of development were a huge and irresponsible experiment which, judging by the experience of the majority of the world, has failed miserably'. This post-development view supports the argument that development is an unequal and uneven process, and that as such it is an inherently political process. Like the terms globalisation and modernisation, development is predicated on Westernisation. As Hettne states, 'In order to develop it was deemed necessary for the 'new nations' to imitate the Western model – it was a "modernisation imperative"'. This modernisation imperative began with US President Harry Truman's inaugural speech to Congress in 1949, in which he cited large parts of the world as 'underdeveloped'. So saying, he set off the race for development among Third World nations.

That process of Westernisation, or globalisation, pursued first a rather simplistic form of capitalism, in which development was more or less coincidental with industrialisation and all its attendant processes of technological advancement. The benefits of this process were supposed to trickle down to the poor majority and lift them out of their underdevelopment; but as Joseph Stiglitz (former chief economist at the World Bank) argues, the trickle-down mechanism 'was never much more than just a belief, an article of faith'.

As it happened, Western companies (predominantly those of North America and Western Europe) benefited most from this post-war race for development through their already relatively advanced technology. To advance further they needed raw materials and natural resources, found in abundance in Third World countries. To get access to those resources they required an infrastructure adequate to their techniques of production and distribution. To upgrade the infrastructure in Third World countries to an appropriate level loans were required, and these came from the international financial institutions (appropriately referred to as IFIs) established at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and their offshoots such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Bilateral loans from government to government and private loans also played a role in this process. Who better to carry out these infrastructural works than the Western companies which already had the technological capacity to do so? The results effectively involved a take-over of Third World natural resources, infrastructure and production by Western companies.

The loans for these developments were made to Third World governments so that they could pay the Western companies for these works, and the results included the Third World debt crisis. This crisis reached a peak of public awareness in the 1980s and early 1990s, but has since slipped off the Western public's agenda. That does not mean that it has been resolved; far from it – many Third World countries are now permanently and unsustainably in debt to the IFIs. There are those who would argue that this was precisely the intention of the age of 'development' – Western capitalist domination and access to the natural resources of the rest of the world.

Whether that was the deliberate intention or not, we need to ask whether the development intended has occurred for those who Truman identified as underdeveloped. Esteva suggests that despite its promises of widespread enrichment, development 'for the great majority, has always signified the modernisation of poverty: the growing dependence on the direction and management of others'. Ivan Illich refers to 'development as planned poverty', and André Gunder Frank refers to, 'the development of underdevelopment'.

This perspective describes the theory of dependency which is best understood as a riposte to the free-market economics approach to economic development and international trade. Dependency theory sought to demonstrate how and why these relationships are highly unequal. The theory argues that Western capitalist countries have grown as a result of the expropriation of surpluses from the Third World, especially because of the reliance of Third World countries on export-oriented industries (coffee, bananas, gold and so on) which are precarious in terms of world market prices. The theory uses the notion of core–periphery relationships to highlight the unequal relationship, where the core is the locus of economic power within a global economy.

The most widely cited of the dependency theorists, André Gunder Frank, takes matters one step further with his notion of the 'development of underdevelopment', which stresses that it is the underdevelopment of the structures in Third World countries created by First World capitalist development that creates dependency. Above all, theories of dependency are in general agreement that the interdependence resulting from global economic expansion suppresses autonomous growth, resulting in unequal and uneven development.

Many development-related non-governmental organisations (NGOs) repeat this message, using evidence from their projects with partner organisations in Third World countries; and if the publicity material of such organisations is a part of your regular diet of information it is difficult not to become...