Towards a global development strategy

Less Pretension, More Ambition, a report written by the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), has succeeded in shaking up the aid debate. It has reiterated the urgency of thoroughly rethinking development policies. Over the past two months, more than 100 people contributed to the blog about the WRR report hosted by The Broker. Indeed, rapidly changing international relations, global crises, growing insights into what works and what doesn’t, and political, social and cultural turmoil in donor countries, make it necessary to fundamentally overhaul the traditional aid paradigm.

In a special report to issue 19, The Broker has summarized the debate so far. This 24-page report provides a springboard for further and more in-depth discussion.

In the report, the WRR team kicks off by outlining their main recommendations. The subsequent discussion is divided into four sections. First, ‘Getting the basics right’, explains general principles: the motives, goals, definitions, scale and concepts of development that determine how a policy is shaped. Second, ‘Going global’, explores one of the main pillars of the report, namely global development. It is precisely because global development requires the most scrutiny that it is given prominence over another pillar, the need for ‘diagnostics’ and a more ‘country-specific approach’, discussed in the third section, ‘Identifying obstacles’. Finally, ‘Building a new structure’ examines the consequences of all this for the ‘development architecture’, i.e. the new set of governmental and other organizational institutions that will be needed to manage new realities.

This is obviously an arbitrary classification. The report tackles so many issues that there is essentially something for everyone. Not surprisingly, responses were varied and often contradictory. Above all, we have tried to create a ‘synthesis’, a common ground upon which to build a new development strategy that will usher in a new phase of the debate and produce real alternatives.

Occasionally there were fundamental disagreements as well. Sometimes a constructive debate needs clear opposition, as it gives people something to choose from. We hope this will spark a constructive follow-up debate that will lead to the emergence of a new development architecture in the Netherlands.

We would like to set the bar even higher. The WRR calls for the formulation of a Dutch ‘globalization agenda’, an ‘analysis of Dutch interests at a global level, and a strategy to safeguard global public goods’. If the interests of the poor and the excluded are seen as a global public good, then we cannot agree more. Traditional poverty reduction should be embedded in a much more comprehensive global policy.

Although only a limited number of blog posts truly deal with these issues at a global level, the vague contours of a new policy area are beginning to emerge, which the WRR calls ‘global development’. This means a policy that focuses on global public goods, global governance and policy coherence – supranational factors that create an enabling environment and remove constraints for development and emancipation. Some advocate combining this with worldwide (and Dutch national) environmental policies and suggest that global sustainable development be used as an umbrella concept. Others look at violence and conflict, and prefer policies that focus on global human security.

This is not to say that global development should entirely replace aid at the local level. On the contrary, endogenous development is the explicit aim. And it is also at this level that context-specific analysis – diagnostics, as the WRR calls it – should lead to more strategic policy making. The biggest challenge might be how to consolidate these two different perspectives – the global and the local – into one coherent, effective analytical and policy framework.

We hope to welcome in the next round of debating the views of those who up till now have refrained from participating: the economists, political scientists, international relations academics, sociologists involved in transnational networks or global social movements, climate philosophers, experts in the field of ICT and web 2.0, ‘new wars’ or urbanization, as well as defence and energy specialists – in other words, all those who in light of their specific expertise should be contributing to new perspectives on global development.

We hope that everybody will join us again for a constructive follow-up debate on The Broker website, where you can find longer versions of the sections in this special report containing extensive quotes and links to the relevant texts.