In the 1990s we had a long conversation about the ‘continuum’ from ‘relief’ to ‘development’. Over the past decade that has been repeated under the ‘nexus’ label.
But today, what development are we talking about?
· Is it mostly about livelihoods, at the fairly local level?
· Is it about national ‘development policies’? In which case there is a specific field of learning to travel: public expenditure choices; public debt and debt markets; global seed markets; global commodity markets; patents; tax policies and global infrastructures for tax evasion etc. You may also need to learn about the new approaches to ‘development’, that now rely much more on trade than aid, and on investment – attracted with ‘blended finance’. Perhaps you need to go into the question whether all goods and services that were funded by aid are likely to attract investment? And who will pay the expected return-on-investment? This is a very different world from ‘humanitarian aid’ – with different key players, different worldviews and discourses, different appreciations of what is worth putting money into, different measures of success. That require different collaborations. Different universes rather than a ‘continuum’.
· Or are we ready to tune in to the urgent, and gradually spreading, reflections on different economic paradigms: that question the obsession with ‘growth’ (for what and whose outcomes?), and GDP as the key measure of success; that recognise that our planet has finite resources which we are dramatically overexploiting – to the great detriment of our children and grandchildren. That are developing a new economics and financing purpose and paradigm that works for the global majority (across ‘North’ and ‘South’) instead of a global elite minority; that calculates in the cost of environmental damage and avoiding or restoring it. In short, a regenerative rather than extractive-destructive economic paradigm that actually works for people, the public good, and our unique and irreplaceable planet.
This brief elaborates these observations in some more detail, and offers some relevant – English language- references. Get it here.