Human Development Report deserves our participation
By LLOYD BEST
LAST week at the Hilton, we launched this year's Human Development Report (HDR). The Prime Minister made sundry noises but the highlight was a presentation by Richard Jolly who coordinates the HDR Office and is Special Adviser to the Administrator at the UNDP New York Headquarters. The chief author had flown in from the London launching of the 10th report since the series began in 1990. This year's edition contains a special note by Paul Streeten, one of the deans of development on campus in the Fifties and Sixties when we were still enchanted. Streeten reminds us that HD is about enlarging choices, in terms less of consumer goods, more of people's capability to get things done for themselves. Also a note by recent Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. It recalls his own early doubts about the Index (HDI), happily quelled by the instigator of the whole HD thing, the Pakistani, the late Mahbub ul Haq. Cannily, ul Haq had gone for "just one number, of the same level of vulgarity as GNP, but one not so blind to the social aspects...'' Well, we have it now. Over the years, the HDI has established itself as gauge of a country's overall progress. It combines three basic dimensions: longevity, knowledge, standard of living. These in turn are taken to mean life expectancy, education attainment (adult literacy and primary, secondary and tertiary enrolment), as well as adjusted income. Each country emerges with a value and a rank. In computing the 1999 Index there has been extensive revision of the data series. An improved method has also been devised for weighting income. The new rankings show 48 countries which rose five places or more, 43 which fell. The fact that a country drops in rank does not necessarily imply any worse performance. T&T drops six places from 40th in 1998. Its income level underwent a significant downward revision. However, higher school enrolment and longer life expectancy compensated enough to improve overall performance. In spite of lower rank, the score has risen from 0.792 to 0.797 confirming a positive long term trend which reaches back to at least 1975 (0.746). Within the ACS, T&T ranks fourth, topping countries with medium HD. Barbados, Antigua and Costa Rica, enjoy high HD, all rank higher. The HDI already gives us a broader view of performance than does GNP, the standard measure. Over the 10 years, HD has been explored in other vital dimensions, some actually caught in measures. The gender-related development index (GDI) captures inequality between men and women in the three basic areas The gender development measure (GEM) records the extent to which women are as active as are men in economic and political life. Also focussing on the three basic areas is the human poverty index (HPI). This ranks countries (developing HP-1, industrial HP-2), according to their success in keeping rates of deprivation low. T&T put in a notable performance. With a 3.5 per cent rate, the country ranks second to Barbados (2.6 per cent). Last year, using different data series, it ran first with 3.3 per cent. For the period 1990-97, a world balance sheet of HD allows us to take a medium term rather than a year to year view. It captures gains and losses in the domains of health, nutrition and food, education, income, poverty, women, children, environment and security. Despite enduring deprivations and some new setbacks, real progress is being achieved. Infant mortality dropped by 1/5; the proportion of girls in secondary school jumped by 2/3; food production per head rose, despite rapid population growth; while developing countries with a life expectancy over 70 doubled in number. HD work has brought discussion of social and human issues well into the mainstream. Successive HDRs have served this end by exploring sundry themes: poverty eradication, gender equality, people inclusion, environment care, human rights, consumption. In the 1980s, the imperative was stabilisation and growth, giving fresh impetus to purely business concerns. In pursuit of fiscal balance and public sector reform, governments and funding agencies placed an uncompromisingly high priority on rapid downward adjustment. In the end, putting people first-the poor, the young, the women and the excluded-was still a compelling consideration. This year globalisation with a human face is the HDR theme. The benefits promised to society are seen as very real. But old as the global process is, new waves are transforming the seascape through new actors, new markets, new rules and norms, new tools of communication... The new disparities are perhaps the most striking. So stark are they, the richest 20 per cent enjoy 86 per cent of world GDP leaving to the poorest 20 per cent a mere one per cent. Parallel data for internet access are 93.3 and 0.2 per cent. What is to be done? HD calls for a globalisation tempered by ethics, equity, inclusion, human security, sustainability and development. It seeks to invent new patterns of governance, global and national. It proposes steps to avoid marginalisation through more connectivity, more community, more capacity, more content, more creativity, more collaboration, more cash. This amounts to more than hopes-or ideals; the HD programme contains specific detail. More than our support, it deserves our participation. We can begin with the new Report and even earlier editions, available from UNDP. A new HD Journal will also soon appear. Dr Jolly numbers among a distinguished cadre of professionals, not a few in the UN, who, from the start, have worked to transform at least the multilateral system from being tools of diplomatic and political interest into agencies of...HD. It is fitting that this year's offering is dedicated to the memory of ul Haq whose successors have upped the technical level and expanded the vision. Some still doubt HD can prevail. The dynamic of the global project is still supplied by migration of capital and systematic disembedding of economies from their local settings, social and political. How much of their prestige, if not their legitimacy, do HD agencies owe to their association with this process? The view is humane, sensitive about sovereignty, participation and choice. But the auspices may be too ecumenical, the methods too universalist, too free perhaps from the concerns and restraints of the parish. Do some of the concepts and measures not mean very different things in different settings? Is the risk not that localities might be stripped of precisely those resources of culture and of selfhood which give them their soul-force? Hoping to find wisdom
August 14, 1999 IN some ways, the human development movement is like early Christianity. A humanising mission operating in the bosom of empire. The church gained its catholic appeal mostly on account of the pax romana. By the same token, it may be the pax americana, more than anything else, which explains why the development industry, including HD, has shown so many of its wares since the fall of the Soviets. That, surely, must be what the current HD Report compels us to take due account of, when it suggests that though globalisation is an old and venerable process, it carries significant new features: tools, markets, norms and rules as well as an awesome new order of disparity between winners and losers. All of this arithmetic is new, yes-the specifics and peculiarities of the age of instant communications and annihilated distance. What is stubborn and immutable is the algebra, the mercantilist impulse. That cupidity which insists on level playing fields and free market competition but cannot in them discern the hallowed exclusive. Not even when the resulting inequity is starker than ever. Professor Joan Robinson once deemed 19th century free trade as the new mercantilism. What effectively we witness in the 20th is an acceleration of the global spread of corporate business, the feverish migrations of capital between increasingly integrated markets, the pressing of knowledge services into use as vehicles for huge fees and rents, colossal transfers of income. In an early incarnation, Columbus named it Enterprise of the Indies. It was not long before the UN, in the person of Alexander VI, a Spanish Pope, was awarding Spain the bigger half of the world in a dispute with Portugal. That was 1496. One hundred years later, the other maritime nations of Europe were querying the Papal Bull and the Treaty of Tordesillas, that testament of Adam. War and trade were the watchwords then. Folly to think it is really different now. Not least since form more than substance was changed-from political to economic-by the comprehensive collapse, the sudden retreat, of empire, over the course of this century, enhancing the comparative advantage of the USA. Difficult to see what effective limits on exploitation and domination we are talking about now in the guise of the new rule-based dispensation for global governance which still employs the UN System, the regional blocs and the Bretton Woods institutions, only adding the World Trade Organisation as a splendid new flagship. Professionals are too busy with their own agendas and projects to realise to what extent multilateral agencies are invented and re-invented; staffed, managed and manipulated; funded or starved; vilified and terrorised, though seldom suppressed, for no other purpose but to be kept in line with G-7 interests (or G-1). Of course, the vast majority of actors know on which side bread is buttered. All so civil, amicable even. Global governance, however, is not philanthropy; it is naked interest, not always, admittedly, untempered by objectivity or ideals. Within and among agencies, even the Bretton Woods ones, there have been numerous oases of courage a virtue, people refusing simply to swim with the stream of orthodoxy or cynicism. Centred in UNDP, the HD movement has worked hard to put the social question on the agenda of decision and to pose the issue not in terms of bad guys and good but of alternative measurements and other concepts. As early as 1961, the canny Frenchman, Rene Dumont, warned of a bad start in sub-Saharan Africa (L'Afrique noire mal partie). In particular the World Bank went along with every manner of hare-brained scheme to bring technological civilisation, modernity and enlightenment to the dark continent with catastrophic consequences, so easy to attribute to you know what. How long did it take to accept that low technology was high, if it delivered productivity and output? That native ways of doing have intelligence and logic? That simply to uproot the economy from its moorings in culture, society and politics was not only to sacrifice the social aspects but to open the door at home to a cynicism and plunder which in its heyday had been the hallmark of colonialism? So humpty-dumpty is re-assembling pieces. Agencies routinely now build in safety nets. Gender equality, poverty eradication and environment protection are priority issue for every journeyman and smartman. The public is required to own the planning process. Everybody goes through the motions of empowering and consulting. NGOs are everywhere. In some familiar places, they are mostly GOs funded by officialdom, making a mockery of putting people first. Of course the balance sheet records significant progress. The concern is how much more might we not have had, had we from the start respected all traditions and cultures? The challenge for HD is how now to disentangle empire from church. Can it distance itself from the Enterprise of the Indies? Will it win means to establish a global dispensation of minimum budgets for human concerns? The global human security fund, economic security council, world central bank and international investment trust? Will there ever be an anti-monopoly authority? Timetables for eliminating gender discrimination; thresholds for women's representation, realistic agendas for poverty eradication? That is the minor. The major problem HD shares with the imperial school, here in the West Indies. Not the selfishness or the wilfulness. It's not simply that by its nature the development industry seeks markets and profits and the devil take the hindmost HD being mostly promoted to the cosmetic. It is the decision posture, the unwitting premise, of a world with only a few centres of observation and appraisal, in the North Atlantic. Innumerable problems of interpretation, outside of culture, institution and history. Does school enrolment in Trinidad underdevelop or develop? Can Parliament empower women when making crapauds of men? Probably because HD enjoys the prestige and resources of a posture of dispassionate and universal science, free from all cultures (save one), it too attracts the best from the parishes, misallocating talents. Aware of the paradox, it is sensitive to sovereignty, participation, freedom of choice, the validation of locality. By their nature, can these attributes be conferred? Or made media of empowerment, without vast new complications? Development is a path by which people achieve what they themselves consider improvements. With the best will in the world, it cannot be achieved by any indirection. True they may not live to pose the issue of another way of proceeding, not if in crucial ways they fail to emulate their technological, military and economic superiors. Does HD have a choice but to hope they find wisdom?
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