The fourth, in a limited series of micro-essays, thinking about the background and context of six development theories commonly taught by Geography teachers. If this is the first one you're reading, then I suggest starting here with Rostow and the theory of modernisation.
Flying the Blue Olive Leaf Flag
Buckle up, bat in hand, I'm coming out swinging.
I've heard the United Nations be called the world's moral compass.
This is the same United Nations that ignored reports from Amnesty International that under-age girls were being kidnapped, tortured, and forced into prostitution for the UN Peacekeeping forces deployed in Kosovo.
That was in 2004. I get that it sounds like a long time ago, so you're probably thinking that the UN is doing a much better job now.
So, what was the punishment for the 41 UN peacekeepers accused of sexual abuse and exploitation in the Central African Republic in 2015? They were repatriated. Let's be clear, that's not repatriated, charged and sentenced. Just repatriated.
How many of the 100 UN Peacekeepers that were found to be running a child-sex ring for over ten years in Haiti do you think faced jail time? The answer would be none of them.
The former first lady of Mozambique, Graça Machel, commented that "In 6 out of 12 country studies on sexual exploitation of children in situations of armed conflict prepared for the present report, the arrival of peacekeeping troops has been associated with a rapid rise in child prostitution."
Six out of twelve. Half the time UN peacekeeping forces are deployed, it triggers a rapid rise in child prostitution. The evidence for endemic corruption permeating every level of the United Nations is overwhelming. When UN workers were identified as the source of a cholera outbreak that killed 10,000 Haitians, what was the response? Invoking diplomatic immunity and refusing to offer compensation.
After the United Nations ignored evidence of a planned genocide in Rwanda, refused to act when it was underway, and lied to refugees who were relying on them for protection about withdrawing, what were the consequences? A report was filed.
The United Nations is tasked with some lofty goals; preventing future wars through maintaining global peace, promoting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, and upholding international law. Should we expect it to fall short? Perhaps. Probably. On occasion.
To investigate corruption in the United Nations Security Council, Ilyana Kuziemko and Eric Werker looked at the differences in the development aid paid to non-permanent security council members holding temporary seats between important and unimportant years. The importance of years was determined using the New York Times, the more times the United Nations Security Council was mentioned, the more important the year. Their findings? Aid expenditure to non-permanent temporary seat holders was 170% higher during important years. They felt this met the criteria to be classified as cash for votes.
The origins of the United Nations lay in 1945, among the rubble of the second world war and the ill-fated League of Nations. It shares its roots in this post-war landscape with the Bretton-Woods Accord and, according to all but a few historians who doubt it's existence, the Keynesian Consensus. Less than a year after meeting in San Francisco, the fifty founding nations had codified the United Nations Charter.
Its membership now stands at 193 sovereign nations, making it the largest intergovernmental organisation in the world. In their 2006 book, Snakes in Suits, authors Babiak and Hare comment that few organisations in the Western world could survive with the allegations of mismanagement, scandal, and corruption that permeate the United Nations.
Full disclosure: I'm not a fan, and I feel it’s important I clarify my positionality here.
So, why start with such weighty criticism of the United Nations? Mostly for balance. The United Nations has an impeccable public relations program coupled with an outstanding recruitment tool that sees more than 400,000 young people participate in Model United Nations each year. Unless it's prompted by personal experience, the United Nations is an institution that people rarely call out. We're warming up with this lens because the theory of development we're going to examine, the very idea of sustainable development, is a product of the United Nations and its worldview.
Development, but at what cost?
In the early 80s, the era of neoliberalism was just getting started. Economic policies favouring export-orientated approaches were fast becoming the order of the day. Neither high, middle, or low-income countries were considering moving away from the model of industrialised, manufacturing-orientated, economic growth.
With nations of every economic category and administrative persuasion chasing economic growth, the tension was building. The pollution of water systems was increasing, as was the rate of deforestation in the rainforests. The destruction of the ozone layer and desertification were intensifying. The early warning signs of a changing climate were already clearly visible to those who knew where to look.
The need was tangible, even in the early 1980s, for a model of development that would improve the quality of life for people in the lowest income countries, without exacerbating environmental degradation. As the would-be moral compass of the world, the United Nations launched a commission.
You'll remember the United Nations has a checkered history of launching commissions. I'm sure you'll be aware of the earlier Brandt Commission, that's the one that gave us the Brandt Line and reinforced the stereotype of the prosperous north and the poor south. A stereotype that is so persuasive and so damaging that even now, forty years later, geography teachers in classrooms the world over are still working to dismantle it.
The Remarkable CV of Dr Brundtland
Formally titled as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WELD), it became known by the surname of its chair, Brundtland. Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland was appointed by the then United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar in December 1983.
Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland is an Oslo-born trained doctor who completed a master's degree at Harvard University after first graduating with a medical degree from Oslo's University.
Dr Brundtland was seven years old when she enrolled in the children's section of the Norwegian Labour Movement. After working as a doctor for ten years, specialising in children's health, Dr Brundtland was invited to take a Council of State position as the Norwegian Minister for Environmental Affairs from 1974 to 1979. For those, like me, who are a little unfamiliar with the finer workings of Norway's Parliamentary Constitution and the role of the King in making appointments, we can think of a Councillor of State as the equivalent of a member of the UK's Cabinet.
A year after accepting the Councillor of State position, Dr Bruntland was appointed as the Norwegian Labour Party's Deputy Leader. In 1981 she became Norway's first female prime minister, and, at 41, its youngest. Dr Bruntland oversaw the last nine months of the Norwegian Labour Party's five-year term before losing the 1981 election to Norway's Conservative Party.
Winning the next two terms from 1986 to 1989 and 1990 to 1996, Dr Brundtland was head of the Norwegian government for more than 10 years. Dr Brundtland's premiership is held in high regard, and among a broad cross-section of Norwegian society, Dr Brundtland is affectionately known as 'Landsmoderen' or 'mother of the nation.' Dr Brundtland appointed women to almost half of her cabinet posts, Norwegian Councillors of State, and it's an informal quota that's remained as a legacy ever since.
In 1998, Dr Brundtland moved on to work as the Director-General of the World Health Organisation. She earned an international reputation for leading the global response to SARS, negotiating an agreement on tobacco control, increasing access to life-saving drugs, working towards polio eradication and promoting awareness of the links between poverty and disease.
Dr Brundtland has continued to advocate for gender equality, with a particular focus on ending child marriage. She has acted as a UN special envoy on Climate Change, as well as being a founding member of 'The Elders', a group of world leaders who collaborate on addressing human rights issues. In short, Dr Brundtland is a poster-girl of the globalist, social-democratic movement. In 1997, she summed up her position as "[striving] to change society in such a way that it is healthy for people, enhances equality and distributes primary needs in an honest way".
Our Common Future, Modernism.
After 900 days the Brundtland Commission produced its 420-page report, optimistically titled "Our Common Future".
Advocating we transition to a carbon-neutral economy is a radical act in 2020, in 1987 it would be a revolutionary one. So, what happened? With the UN as the largest intergovernmental organisation in world history and a commission headed by a poster-girl of the globalist, social-democratic movement, its supporters felt that by now, its impacts would be palpable.
Alarmed by the increased impacts and threats of climate change, commentators point out that almost thirty years have passed since modern global institutions officially set out on the course towards sustainable development. In that time, no single viable economic, environmental or social policy model has been elaborated or implemented to address the increasing challenges of environmental degradation while meeting the needs of addressing poverty.
"Our Common Future" defined sustainable development as "meeting the needs of current generations without compromising the needs of future generations". For many in 1987, this sounded like a breakthrough; finally, its advocates were saying, world leaders and development experts would set about atoning for the environmental sins of pursuing export-driven economic policies.
Critics would later start to pull the phrasing apart, arguing that it all but endorses the status-quo. For some, this status-quo is the environmental degradation that the Brundtland Commission was convened to address, for others the status-quo was the position through which "development" was still seen.
The approach of sustainable development can read as saying that focussing solely on economic growth ignores social development and impedes efforts to preserve the environment. Indeed, economic, social, and environmental concerns and factors are the pillars of the sustainable development model; you might, fellow teachers of Geography, have just realised why those phrases are so embodied within our shared discipline. Like the Brandt Commission, the Brundtland Commission has had an oversized impact on Geography classrooms.
The paradigm of sustainable development is that social and environmental concerns must also be addressed, while still maintaining that economic growth is a necessity. For those advocating a modernist approach to development, the inheritors of Rostow's (1960) paradigm, there is much to agree with. Economic growth, its positivist advocates will argue, drives up incomes for all, albeit at differential rates. In the time-frame of the late 80s, an era of neoliberalism, the export-driven model of economic growth was gospel. Any alternative was heresy. How quickly does "meeting the needs of current generations without compromising the needs of future generations" come to be "ensuring the needs of future generations are met by meeting the economic needs of the current generation". After all, if the issue is that people are living in poverty, then lifting them and their descendants out of poverty through economic growth looks to be an elegant solution.
This paradigm of sustainable development, can, therefore, be interpreted as an earlier discourse on development dressed up in new clothes. Sustainable development maintains the position of economic growth as a core component. Critics make the case that his was interpreted by world leaders as a linear pathway to an export-driven economy, and can be read all too easily as ethnocentric positioning. Rostow was absolute in holding this view; to his eyes, the backwardness of traditional societies was a barrier to modernisation that needed to be overcome. Was this what "Our Common Future" intended?
We must recognise that the Brundtland Commission was caught in a bind. To move away from the ethnocentric position of modernisation theory was to put forward an approach so radical as to be unacceptable to those holding the reins of power. Frank's Dependency Theory did just that, and for the world leaders of OECD nations, it remains an intolerable interpretation. On the other hand, to recognise the role of economic growth in lifting people out of extreme poverty was seen by its critics to implicitly endorse the status-quo and empower the prevailing economic model of the time: Neoliberalism and the Chicago School of Economics. The harshest critics of how sustainable development is defined, point to its meaning being enacted as nothing short of "gratification of our present needs at any cost".
In trying to walk this tightrope between producing a document that was both agreeable and impactful, between reformist and status-quo, Middleton, O'Keefe, & Moyo (1993) suggest that "Our Common Future" leaves us to expect merely a modification of business as usual. We can carry on, they might say, so long as we put our recycling in the green bin. It's unclear whether Brundtland's intended it, or was even aware, but the 'business-as-usual' approach, even if slightly modified, is still underpinned by modernisation theory. That theory of modernisation is based on Western notions of rationalism in which all societies are on a linear pathway to be 'America'. Any differences in those societies can be explained as a difference in their level of 'development'. Middleton (1993) calls this out directly, writing that "by advancing an environmental agenda the North has once more concentrated on its own interests and has called them 'globalism'".
The Devil’s in the Details.
"Our Common Future" is short on detail and explicit direction, something which its proponents highlight as one of its strengths and its critics criticise. We might expect a document that was designed to be broadly acceptable and accessible to be light on explicit instruction and direct orders. Indeed, for those critics pointing to sustainable development as the exportation of Northern Globalism, the inclusion of precise instructions would be cause for further criticism. In her own words, Gro Harlem Brundtland describes "Our Common Future" as the starting point of a conversation, not as its destination.
Having a broadly interpretable definition allows for many ships to sail under the same flag. Countries which have little in common otherwise might find a shared interpretation, or intended destination, through the concept of sustainable development. While this is a noble intention, there's little evidence to suggest that it led to broad sweeping multilateral approaches to tackle issues of environmental degradation. Hove (2004) suggests that "the all-encompassing definition of sustainable development has meant that its conceptual framework has been used as a rhetorical shield to conceal underlying economically-based initiatives, thus allowing a variety of actors to evade responsibility for the environment and social justice itself".
It would seem, in light of this criticism that the Brundtland Commission and "Our Common Future" should be discarded as unhelpful, or worse: an explicitly damaging document which acts as a shield for the worst excesses of environmental exploitation in the name of poverty reduction. That might be a little premature, as we know from earlier UN Commissions, the impacts of their creation are oversized and long-lasting.
The Brundtland Commission and "Our Common Future" articulates, however vaguely, that the pursuit of exponential economic growth is unsustainable. However much its critics might feel that the pressing dangers of an impending ecological crisis were watered down to make it acceptable and favourable to governments; it still raised those concerns. Even among the most export-orientated nations, the word 'sustainable' was now in front of the word 'development'.
The language of sustainable development has entered common parlance, and the idea that consideration needs to be made for the future is now commonly accepted. There is, indisputably, a mismatch between what players at every level might say they want in terms of a sustainable future, and the actions they are willing to take to achieve them. Blaming the Brundtland Commission for this requires a sizeable cognitive leap beyond the scope of this micro-essay.
It's hard to credit the Brundtland Commission with little more than the expansion of our lexicon. The UN has held Earth Summits every decade since 1972. The publication of "Our Common Future" informed much of the agenda and focus of the '92 Rio Earth Summit. Agenda 21 was established as a direct result. The 21 in its title referred to its original target date; 2021. Now considered overly-optimistic, the ambition is to achieve global sustainable development by 2030. Implementing actions suggested by Agenda 21, or Agenda 2030 as it's been rebranded, remains voluntary, and has grown over time to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals.
Critics of the UN point to what this as a repetitive pattern of behaviour. Having failed to meet its own targets, the targets are rehashed. In the process, a new layer of bureaucracy is created for which nations have to foot the bill. I new future date is set, which is, again, missed, triggering a repeat of the process. The only 'progress' that is made say its critics, is the expansion of the remit and bureaucracy of the UN.
I imagine you’ve shrugged that criticism of the UN off. Remember how this micro-essay started.
The Brundtland Commission Legacy
We might need to look less at being able to credit the Brundtland Commission for its work in achieving any of it's stated goals and instead recognise it for a different achievement entirely. The Brundtland Commission unintentionally created a greater sense of unity amongst those who are opposed to the modernist paradigm on which it's constructed. The intersection of those promoting environmental and social justice, identifying the role of state agencies both at local and national levels, holding anti-neoliberalist, anti-market and anti-globalist views, can now all share a universal distrust of the paradigm of modernist development implicit in "Our Common Future".
In the eyes of its critics, the prevailing world economic order of neoliberal capitalism is now inseparable from the adverse environmental and social outcomes that the Brundtland Commission was tasked with reporting on. Since its publication in 1987, the gulf between those advocating 'business as usual with recycling bins' and those demanding radical change has grown wider and wider. We might consider that the failure of "Our Common Future" to achieve sustainable development, has led us to the polarised landscape of our present in which there is an increasingly organised opposition.
A Thought on Positionality
I think about development with the words of Andre Frank, Dambisa Moyo, Jeffrey Sachs, Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, Milton Friedman, Thomas Piketty, John Maynard Keynes, Frantz Omar Fanon, Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, Mahmood Mamdani, Deepak Lal, Peter Frankopan, Paul Collier, William Easterly, Jong-Dae Park, Thomas Sowell, and Albert Memmi.
I also think with what I've made from all the people I've met, the conversations I've had, the countries I've lived in, and the languages I've learnt. We think with what we know.
Our standpoints on development discourse are constructive. Mine is imperfect. I’m consenting to learn in public. Ancora Imparo.