Rethinking Technology for Development

The role of technology as an engine (or perhaps more accurately the driver) of development has been a constant since colonial times. There are striking parallels between science and colonialism and technology and modern development – a coupling of science and technology and economic development to forge change, to generate new connections within the world and transform societies into facsimiles of an idealized social order in the name of 'progress' (Ferguson, 2004). Within these ideas is a strong sense of the certainty and inevitability of change, a feeling that the future can be mapped out, and implicit within this is the notion that past histories and context are somehow unimportant. Only the future counts.

More explicitly in the case of modern development, theory holds that technology and economic development can generate new connections within the world, and transform 'developing countries' into their modern, industrialized, developed counterparts; this would advance humanity 'from kinship to contract, agriculture to industry, personalized to rational or bureaucratic rule, subsistence to capital accumulation and mass consumption, tradition to modernity and poverty to wealth' (Edelman and Haugerud, 2005: 2). The idea of a linear trajectory from one stage to another, from pre-technological to technological, from traditional to modern, from indigenous to scientific is implicit within most mainstream development thinking, and was implicit – if perhaps considered less of a priority – in most colonial thinking. Colonial and development thinking, so different in terms of aim and ideology, are stitched together by the shared idea of the application of technology.

The introductory chapter quoted Harry Truman's inaugural address as an illustration of how closely the relationship between technology and development was conceived: global poverty would be solved by vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge (Truman, [1949] 1964). Development remains as bound up and enamoured with science and technology as colonialism was, and certainly as Harry Truman was. Indeed, if anything, a series of recent high-profile initiatives, reports and policy documents have signalled a renewed belief (and calls for renewed investment) in the role science and technology should play in development. For example, the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Science, Technology and Innovation reiterates the need to harness science and technology sustainably to accelerate development (Juma and Yee-Cheong, 2005). The October 2004 UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report on 'The Use of Science in UK International Development Policy' drew on a wide range of expert knowledge to illustrate the importance of generating real capacity through development, partnerships, and science and technological innovation. Building science and technological capacity is seen as a lever to draw together the 'yawning divide between North and South' (House of Commons, 2004: 44). The Commission for Africa report, Our Common Interest, juxtaposes our ability to map the human genome and 'clone a human being' with our inability to prevent African women from dying in childbirth. Africa's lack of investment in science and technology is contrasted to Asia's investment. The document calls for a series of centres of science and technology excellence to be set up across the continent (Commission for Africa, 2005).

This chapter seeks to examine why science and technology are regarded so universally as the lever through which development can be ratcheted up a notch or two, and in doing so will discuss ways in which we can undertake a more critical exploration of the relationship between science, technology and development. Case studies of trajectories of development in various countries, seed breeding in Southern Africa, information and communication technologies, and science policy, amongst others, are used to illustrate some of the thinking and narratives that have driven science and technology as the key to development.

Modernization, linear progressions and 'technological determinism'

Rostow, in his highly influential Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), elaborated a 'take-off' that all countries would eventually achieve (note the technological metaphor). Rostow characterized countries as passing from one stage to another of a five-stage model; from 'traditional society' characterized by 'pre-Newtonian' technology and little rational decision making, through a pre-take-off stage, then 'take-off' in which 'traditional' impediments to economic growth are overcome, to a 'drive to maturity' which is marked by technological innovation and enlargement of the industrial base, and finally to the 'age of mass consumption', exhibiting widespread affluence, urbanization and the consumption of 'consumer durables'. In all these stages Rostow was careful to couple advancing technology and new knowledge (in giving up 'traditional' ideas) to economic development and industrial modernization.

Development in this context becomes a macro-economic drive towards modernity, 'an expression of modernity on a planetary scale' (Berthoud, 1991: 23). Rostow sought to develop a rejection of the inevitabilities that Marx portrayed in Capital but in the process succeeded in producing something similar in the narrative of the 'inevitability of take-off' it portrayed. In some respects it projected something even grander, an inevitable transformation of every country, if they were to follow the rules. From a different perspective this can be seen in terms of a discourse of the 'non-existent': developing countries may desire to become developed, but cannot because something is missing (Sorj, 1991). Rostow's ideas, and the concept of modernization they influenced, represent a highly temporalized historical sequence: poor people and poor countries 'were not simply at the bottom, they were at the beginning' (Ferguson, 2006: 178). From this perspective, development would be the 'black box' that would enable take-off, while the poor, the 'less developed', were expected to be passive receivers of development, of Western values, knowledge and technology (Rist, 1997).

The UN Millennium Report on Science and Technology for Development echoes Rostowian and modernization theory: 'Economic historians suggest that the prime explanation for the success of today's advanced industrial countries lies in their history of innovation along different dimensions: institutions, technology, trade, organization, and the application of natural resources' (Juma and Yee-Cheong, 2005: 27). The report goes on to discuss the economic development of Finland, asserting that since the 1980s it has transformed itself from a country dependent on natural resources to one at the top of the list of most indices of global...