Growth or Development? (1)

For a long while, I’ve been cruising charity and development organisations’ websites, looking for jobs, ideas, and general awareness of issues in developing countries. Doing this, you’ll notice that they all talk about ‘sustainable development’. Development is itself a more slippery term than you’d like to think, adding ‘sustainable’ does little to make it much more specific. What I find more interesting, though, is the fact that we only really talk about sustainable development as something other countries do.

In the west, we talk about ‘growth’, our euphemism for development. When you look more closely at these two superficially synonymous terms, you start to see a disconnect in parallel with the disconnect between our two worlds.

We adopt a different term because our political masters don’t want to suggest - by using the term ‘development’ for their own nations - that they are in any way underdeveloped – we are, after all, the developed world. 

We just grow.

I’ve never heard anything about ‘sustainable growth’. Of course not – no one in government will dare suggest that growth is anything other than ‘sustainable’ because growth is the holy grail of capitalist economics. During the financial crisis, growth became one of the biggest metrics by which we judged a politician’s success or failure. To introduce this small qualification is to question the basis of the West’s economic trajectory over the past century. 

But poor countries need ‘sustainable development’. We qualify the nature that their development must adopt. The term has different facets of meaning, encompassing use of natural resources and the preservation of the environment, and the necessary sense that the development is not being imposed, but simply helped along – ‘sense of ownership’ being a stereotypical key phrase.  All of these facets come together into a system that circumscribes certain kinds of development and promotes others at the discretion of powerful NGOs, IGOs and donor governments.

To do ‘sustainable development’ in the first-world capitalist system is a contradiction in terms – our development is not sustainable. In the long term, it only consumes. We create things certainly, wealth, huge buildings, marvellous technologies – but only through consumption of primary resources. To be sure, we can recycle, when we can be bothered, but there’s no recycling oil. The linchpin of nearly all the development the western world has undergone in the last hundred years.

Many of our unsustainable activities are outsourced from the Growing World to the Developing World. The domestic and industrial waste we can’t easily deal with – we export it. Think PCBs, for example. The food we can’t manage to grow ourselves – we just buy up land in Africa, pushing up prices and depriving those whose land this has been for thousands of years, whilst lining the pockets of crony regimes, landowners and the military. In short, we harness powerful people in these countries for our own ends, they enable this outsourcing and become fantastically rich.

With all this in mind, it isn’t surprising that most of those working in the NGO world are fairly left-wing. But is this a natural response of a system, or the cop-opting of idealistic lefties by the dark forces of capitalism?