Rethinking development

Rethinking development

1. Crisis of development

   • What are the main reasons that explain this crisis?
     • Development has been normalized in modern discourse
     • Development is thought of and measured only in terms of the positive side of the material ledger.
     • Development is in terms of capitalism and not of human beings and their relationship with their natural conditions
     • Does sustainability make sense when there is so little left to sustain?
     • Crisis of development has a double meaning: 1) rollback of public goods; 2) how to understand and measure development.
     • Nonmarket values
       • Recognition that market-driven metric is no longer adequate to assess human wellbeing
     • Politicizing inequality
       • the disembedding of the market from society
     • New geography of inequality
       • Three -quarters of the world`s poorest population lives in middle countries, such as BRICS and therefore more difficult to reach
         • Because poverty may be turning from an international to a national distribution problem
       • Social exclusion has become a discursive strategy of pathologizing the poor as embodying deficiencies that assign personal and individual responsibility for their condition.

2. Paradigm Change

   • Unthinking development
   • recogizing values to ecological balance
   • Development futures will be governed by tensions between the one world ontology, symbolized by the descriptor concept globalization, and the pluriverse world view, symbolized by an alternative descriptor, localization, and its appeal to cosmopolitan localism.
   • Important: the recognition of the limits of conventional development thinking.
   • Reinforcement of the institutional appreciation for human development.

3. Transition movements

   • The Slow food movement
     • progressive social change can be sparked by transformation of attitudes about food and practices of eating
   • Transition Towns
     • movement that emphasize relocalization, a network by and cross communities anticipating peak oil and climate change
   • Degowth economics
     • Degrowth economicsmovement to create integrated, self-sufficient and materially responsible societies (against social ills). This is a propose to change our values that are systematic. (downshifting movement in USA).
       • The shift to a right-sizing the global and national economies, involving degrowth in wealthy parts of the world to preserve environmental space
         • protecting the commons in the developing world.
   • living well (Ecuador y Bolivia)
     • Ecuador and Bolivia, reinvented development in their national constitutions as living well (buen vivir), which complements legal passage in each state of the rights of nature alongside human rights
   • Pachamama (planet earth)
     • represents a unprecedented biocentric turn