International Roundtable 2008

Whither Development?: The Struggle for Livelihood in the Time of Globalization

Among the salient features associated with the making of the “modern world-system” has been the phenomenon of “combined and uneven development.” Moreover, since the end of the Cold War and the consequent demise of the statist paradigm, the idea of private ownership, emphasis on unencumbered accumulation, stress on individual initiative and choice, and a drastic shrinkage of public power have become a powerful orthodoxy, often referred to as “neo-liberalism.”

If the age of globalization is seen, by some, as a “cut” in the world’s prior history, a time marked by a complete triumph of liberal democracy and market economics, for others globalization is primarily a normalization as well as an acceleration of an old and singular contradiction, though at times in a new guise: dizzying technological changes, massive concentrations of economic, cultural, military, and political power in core regions, and, simultaneously, exclusion of and pervasive deprivation and social disintegration in vast zones of the “Global South.” One acutely telling manifestation of this great divide is the nature of urban living: about six percent of the city populations in the core countries live in slums; the comparative estimate for urban populations of the countries of the South is over 78 percent and growing. Even in the highly celebrated “dynamic and developing societies,” such as the People’s Republic of China, India, Brazil, and South Korea, slum populations are staggering and expanding. For countries like Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Peru, slum dwellers constitute two-thirds of the total of the urbanites.

Given the nature of contemporary processes of globalization, then, a revisiting of the concept of development seems timely. Thus, our conversation will revolve around the following questions:

• What is development?
• What does the concept mean in the various regions of the world?
• Is development compatible with globalization?

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