Development: What do we mean?
Note: This is one of three posts that will set the agenda for this site. This particular post is meant to define what 'development' means, and is for the non-experts who are joining the discussion. If you're already an expert you might enjoy reading this anyway!
Since my overarching goal with this website is to look to the future and map out a better world when it's time to repair damage being currently wrought, this post maps out what we can criticize about the concept of development in the Bretton Woods system, and what we can build on. Other contributors will have differing opinions, but as of now I'm the only editor here so this is where we'll start!
Development in the Bretton Woods system was essentially wealthy countries using the financial institutions established in the Bretton Woods agreement (e.g. the International Monetary Fund and World Bank) to finance the creation of modernist, rational systems of public administration and economic policy in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. With the exception of Latin America, where many countries had achieved independence from colonial powers decades prior to World War II, the majority of "developing" countries only gained independence from European colonial governments in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
The political and cultural foundations that under girded the economic and financial aspects of development were unequivocally Western, rationalist, and individualistic. Deepa Ramaswamy's fantastic article "Making a Self-Reliant Citizen: Technocracy, Rural Redevelopment and the Etawah Pilot" explores how American ideas of the individual citizen, and the rational state, were exported to newly independent countries. The Etawah Pilot program started in 1948, one of the first rural development programs of the Bretton Woods era. Led by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the American planner and architect Albert Mayer, the Etawah Pilot program served as a model of technocratic architecture and spatial planning that aimed to create a self-reliant citizen through architecture and design. As Ramaswamy explains in her article, this technocratic approach to the use of space combined with the cultural assumption of the individualistic citizen served as a political and aesthetic foundation on which to build a global financial and economic system.
Once a modernist, rational system of public administration and planning was established, economic and financial development followed. Economic development based on investment in industrialization and infrastructure was the World Bank's bread and butter until Robert McNamara, an all-timer among quantitative rationalists, took over as World Bank President in 1968. McNamara combined his statistically-driven approach to management with a new focus on poverty alleviation, driving a radical shift in the World Bank's lending and credit strategy toward investments in public health, education, and food security. He also introduced new tools and methods of evaluating World Bank programs, continuing the legacy of statistically-driven decision making he'd used to shape bombing campaigns in the Pacific Theater during World War II, automotive manufacturing, and bombing campaigns again, but in Southeast Asia. McNamara represented the platonic ideal of the technocratic development model - rational and apolitical.
Well, not exactly apolitical. The Bretton Woods system sat unequivocally on one side of the Cold War: The American side. McNamara himself stopped World Bank loans and grants to Chile when President Salvador Allende began his nationalization policies, and restarted World Bank financial support to Chile after the 1973 coup that ushered in Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship. It is impossible to separate the West's ideological antipathy to anything that hinted of socialism from the idea of the rationalist and modernist approach to economic and political development. The last 30 years marked a period where the development policy community started to evolve away from the rigid rationalism and modernism of the Bretton Woods system, and accepting the ideas of post-colonialism, critical theories of development, an admitting that historical wrongs needed to be made right. This reflective change represents something worth carrying forward.
At some point we'll start rebuilding the world after this current terrible shock to the system. Not every part of the Bretton Woods system should be discarded either - there was a lot of promise in what the technocrats sought achieve at the Bretton Woods conference. We have to value a much wider variety things though - cultural, aesthetic, and political.