Development Today: Its Facts

Abstract

This chapter consciously takes a naïve view of facts, avoiding (at this stage) much effort on viewing just how they are socially constructed, and taking the reader through the images of development easily found through mainstream standard sources. These suggest that it makes sense to use a language that implies that a thing called development exists and that there can be more or less of it. In these terms countries are more or less developed: the concept is one-dimensional—the metric only goes up or down. Further, it shows how these facts are usually averages, and asks—When can an average represent the population whose characteristics have been collected and then averaged by statisticians? It would be perhaps trite to reply ‘when the employer or teacher requires it’. It concludes that (1) the facts of development are words that refer to statistics, which are averages of the characteristics of large human populations, (2) the basic idea is that development has a level, although we may measure this in different ways to get a correct gauge—high or low and (3) the central task is to develop, and this is seen as a shared task in that it is measurable across different contexts. It shows that there are alternatives to this way of making sense of facts. Pointing to what is to come in the book, it argues that a central issue is the tension created between strong evidence that meanings are often relative and variable, so that assertions that pretend to be true are easily seen as displaying ignorance, and certainty that change requires some true, shared belief in how the future and the present relate to each other. Thus, mainstream development practice has a strong tendency to label.