July 6, 2003

Neil Thin argues for development based on social progress

COMBINED with my proposal that social development be relinked with the concept of society, we can now identify four common themes. These are the main categories of desirable processes that can be meaningfully described as social:

• justice — equal opportunity and the achievement of all human rights

• solidarity — cohesion, empathy, cooperation, and associational life

• participation — opportunities for everyone to play a meaningful part in development

• security — livelihood security and safety from physical threats.

These are in general mutually reinforcing and essential to all aspects of sustainable development, but there can be trade-offs among them, as well as trade-offs between them and the short-term achievement of more specific tangible objectives...

As with any list, this one will certainly provoke some worries about what is left out, or about whether important distinctions are lost in the conflation of categories. Some commonly used categories I have left out because they cross-cut all of these. For example, many people will wonder why gender equity is not put in a category of its own as is commonly the case in development policies and strategies and in the organization of development agency staff.

Gender equity is probably for most agencies the single most important category of social goals and principles. But it seems important that this is seen as a cross-cutting set of issues: gender issues are not confined to equity issues — there are also gender dimensions of strategies for building solidarity (for example combating the empathy gap, which so often divides women and men in cultures with gender-segregated schooling), participation (men’s participation in gender equity strategies, women’s participation in areas of debate, work, and decision-making from which they have been unfairly excluded), and security (such as the practical and moral priority to reduce the physical and sexual threats that women experience at home, in public, and in the workplace).

Other similarly cross-cutting categories are ethnicity, age, and disability, all of which are dimensions of social and cultural patterns which often cause injustice and exclusion. ‘Social inclusion’ is often used as a catch-all objective to address the various forms of disadvantage suffered by various categories of people.

But this likewise cross-cuts all the above four themes, and is mainly useful at the level of policy rhetoric, particularly in broadening beyond traditional basic needs approaches and emphasizing multiple and intangible forms of disadvantage and their social causes.

Other common labels for social objectives are subsumed within specific categories among the four I have chosen. The concept ‘human rights’ could well have merited its own category in a short list like this one. I have subsumed rights and equity under a broader ‘justice’ rubric, which seems better suited to including informal, diffuse and contested aspects of fair play, compared with the more formal and historically specific concept of our current set of human rights.

Social cohesion and social capital could also have served as labels: they probably have more common currency than solidarity, but solidarity seems to capture better the emotional dimension, and the social capital concept is too instrumentalist and contentious to serve as a policy rubric.

Empowerment is another common label, but unlike the four labels I have chosen it is both socially divisive (it is a strategy focused on some people, not on everyone) and is only a means to an end, not an end in itself (power implies capability to achieve something else). Peace could have served as an alternative to security and is just as commonly used as a policy label; but if peace were used we would need another term like security to cover the various aspects of stability and safety which are not covered by the idea of the absence of war.

 

Social justice: equity and rights

We all agree that justice is good idea, but are bothered by the diversity of possible justices. There will always be cultural and situational variety in the details of what is regarded as fair and unfair. Over the past 50 years there has emerged a consensus that the idea of universal human rights reflects values that are fundamental to all cultures provided that they can be phrased in general terms.

If social justice is to have a universal core despite the diverse cultural specificities, the core must be articulated persuasively in philosophical terms which would be readily appreciated in all cultures. The most frequent criticism of the human rights movement is the same as the usual criticism of the concept of development: that Eurocentric or western ideologies are being promoted in the name of universal aspirations. Two generalized philosophical positions on justice have been very influential, utilitarianism and Rawlsianism. Both have intuitive appeal but they are mutually contradictory. The utilitarian philosophy judges an action as just if it brings the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people. It has become closely associated with the promotion of economic growth on the assumption that, although there may be some losers, in general wealth trickles down to benefit the majority.

As it becomes ever clearer that poverty persists even in countries with high GDP, and that current development trajectories are likely to impose high costs on future generations, the utilitarian philosophy looks increasingly like a contributor to injustice now and in the future. By contrast, Rawls’ concept of justice has much greater ethical appeal: a just world is one organized in the way we would order it if we were about to be born into it and did not know who we were going to be. This can simply be extended to cover intergenerational justice: if we did not know when we were going to be reborn, how would we want to organize the world so as to bequeath fair opportunities to future generations?

Both philosophies beg important questions about the possibly wide range of responses to the same philosophical position. Because of cultural diversity, actual policy responses will vary regardless of which philosophical position is taken. After all, even victims of what many regard as culturally sanctioned practices such as genital mutilation frequently assert that they do not see themselves as victims of injustice. Justice, then, is not likely to be a simple known target, but will always be something that requires ongoing debate.

Although the idea of universal human rights was established rhetorically over 50 years ago, the rapid rise of global communication, collaboration and trade makes it much more possible to bring that vision closer to reality. So although I have argued that there is no specific model of a good society to sustain, a ‘rights-based’ approach to development helps to set parameters within which a range of social formations can flourish.

Rights-based approaches — emphasizing the importance of honouring political claims for social justice and freedom — are typically contrasted with needs-based approaches to development, which emphasize the technical challenges of meeting basic (and mainly material) needs. In practice there is considerable overlap and it is probably more fruitful to see a rights-based approach not as an alternative but rather as encompassing both the strategic emphasis on social transformation (addressing root causes of injustice and poverty) and practical steps to ensure that more immediate needs are met.

To some extent, also, the basic needs/rights-based distinction echoes the human development/social development distinction. UNDP, the main proponents of the human development concept, rather belatedly adopted a rights-based approach in recognition of the need to address not just the deprivation of basic needs but the social causes of those deprivations, as well as promoting social justice for its own sake.

The advent of rights-based approaches in national and international development agencies is therefore also associated with a broadening of the concept of poverty to include social dimensions of poverty — which are both causes and symptoms. Thus, empowerment of disadvantaged people, strengthening of social solidarity more generally, and participatory processes are viewed as components in the ‘right to development’ as well as being instrumental means of meeting needs sustainably.

Gender strategies are often seen as primarily about justice, but in fact they cross-cut most areas of social concern... One set of concerns which does not seem to be prominent in national and international-level gender plans is those that come under ‘solidarity’: gender relations are a vital dimension of social cohesion, and conversely gender is the most common form of social exclusion. Gender-based exclusion is perpetuated by gender segregation in social institutions such as schools and clubs, so we might expect to see national gender strategies paying more attention to the need to strengthen cross gender understanding and empathy. No doubt such issues are downplayed because they are hard to describe and because strategies for addressing them are diffuse and informal.

Social analysis has repeatedly confirmed that a major impediment to justice worldwide is the way in which the division of labour by gender and age ensures social, biological, and cultural reproduction at the cost of inequities in the present generation. Thus the reproduction of the workforce tends to be achieved through unpaid labour mainly by women and older people. Much the same is often true of the community or social work of generating and maintaining social solidarity and informal social security networks and conflict resolution mechanisms. This illustrates how dangerous the idea of a separate economy has been. If economics is seen as part of society, and as a way of looking at livelihoods in the broad sense, then prospects for social justice are better.

 

Solidarity

Of our four labels for social progress, solidarity is the closest to the concept of society itself. The other three concepts can be construed in non-social terms. Justice, to those who believe that ethics come from divine or biological sources, can be seen as a set of codes that are given rather than socially constructed. Participation and security can both be seen as primarily technical concerns. Solidarity can be construed only as social, and the associated ideas of connectedness and belonging are right at the heart of how we conceive this abstract idea of society.

Solidarity is as central to the concept of society as production and exchange are to the concept of the economy. It can therefore serve as a synonym for social cohesion or social capital, but unlike these two it takes a step towards defining society in non-circular terms. It suggests not only linkages between people but good linkages. It implies a degree of shared identity, mutual understanding, and common objectives.

Social capital has been mentioned as a concept likely to help promote positive approaches to social development. Goodland has defined social sustainability as ‘maintaining social capital’. This concept has rapidly taken hold in social science and development policy since the early 1990s, some 30 years after the arrival of the human capital concept. It has helped to ensure that economists and policy makers take social dimensions of development more seriously than they have done in the past. Much of the research done so far under the ‘social capital’ rubric has been by economists. This worries the skeptics from other disciplines.

 

Excerpted with permission from

Social Progress and Sustainable Development

By Neil Thin

ITDG Publishing, 103-105 Southampton Row, London Website: www.itdgpublishing.org.uk

ISBN1-85339-556-0

182pp. price not listed

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