Many Development Studies programs, including mine, are going through some soul searching about their place in academia and the broader international development ecosystem. This is due to a range of factors, but one major one is that a critical mass of people feel uneasy with the power dynamics involved in asserting that “we” in Development Studies (a “we” that lives in high income countries) study the problems of “them” (a “them” that lives in low or middle income countries). One can layer onto this base criticism a range of related ones, like those having to do with race for example.
One key question at stake here is “What should we be studying and teaching?” and one answer that is becoming increasingly common is that “development happens everywhere and so we should be studying and teaching about development problems that take place anywhere.” For example, in my institute our undergrads can pick 1 of 5 areas of emphasis and one is “Development in the Canadian Context.” I’m sympathetic to this view, and I know it comes from a good place, but I think it has a major blind spot. Here I’m going to first explain my agreement and then explain why despite this agreement I think orienting development studies programs towards the poor in rich countries is a bad idea. I’m writing about this publicly because I know at least a few other programs are having similar discussions and, frankly, I hope to influence them.
First, my agreement: I agree that “development happens everywhere,” or we at least hope that it does. I believe this because I’m fully on board with a Sen-style capabilities understanding of development. Development is about expanding people’s options to do things. This truly applies to everyone, everywhere. I also feel unease with many of the power dynamics involved in knowledge production in international development. I’ve written about this.
Despite my unease and capability understanding of development: I think schools of Development Studies should remain focused mostly on things that help poorer people in low and middle income countries. To be very clear, this means that I think we should not study things that only help poorer people in high income countries. I’m all for studying how rich country policies, like migration or trade policies, affect the global poor, but I think the locus of our attention should be on ways to improve life for something like the bottom third of the world’s population. My reasoning is quite simple:
I think that all human lives should count equally
I think that the problems of those with the least are morally most pressing
I think most Development Studies scholars agree with me on these points. Aside from having lots of personal anecdotes, when I recently did a survey of this community, almost 80% of the people surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that “From a moral perspective, people should care about the well-being of all human beings on the planet equally; they should not favour the well-being of people who are especially close to them either physically or emotionally.” Points 1 and 2 lead me to think that everyone has—but academics in Development Studies in particular have—an obligation to work on problems that affect the worst off people regardless of where they live.
The final step in the argument then is a simple empirical point: the vast majority of poor people in rich countries are not globally poor. In fact, they are globally well off. This may be surprising to many people, but it’s quite clearly true when looking at any population aggregate. Of course one can find a single person somewhere in the United States or Canada that is worse off than, say, the average of the bottom decile in Malawi, but one cannot find very many people like this. For example, look at the graph below that I made using povcalnet data (and credit to Branko Milanovic for this style of graph).
The graph is showing average income or consumption in dollars per year (left axis) or day (right axis) for each decile in the population of 6 countries (note the axes are logged). One straightforward reading from this graph is that the poorest 10% in Canada (on average) earn more than the richest 10% in Malawi (on average). But the inequality is larger still, because the richer country surveys measure poverty using income while LIC surveys typically measure poverty using dollars of consumption. I’ve discussed this issue before, but the crux of it is that when people in Canada report having zero income they typically have positive consumption (e.g. health insurance, food from food banks, room in a shelter). So the graph is overstating how badly off the poorest Canadians are, and even with that overstatement we are globally privileged. To be utterly clear: Canada can and should do better on poverty in Canada, but that isn’t the question at stake here. The question at stake here is whether the poor in Canada are comparable in size or deprivation to the poor elsewhere in the world, and the answer is clearly no.
For this reason, I think that the only way to defend re-orienting Development Studies towards problems of the poor in, say, Canada is to assert that Canadian lives are morally worth more than non-Canadian lives. Worse, the multiple has to be very large. Even if you feel that Canadian lives are worth 100x more than the lives of others, about 99% of people living under $2 a day would still live in other countries (I made a simulation so you can see how this works for yourself, more discussion here).
I understand that Development Studies programs are in a weird position right now, but I really hope that the brutal level of inequality across countries continues to enrage us enough to clarify our focus. The vast majority of deprivation in the world exists in low and middle income countries and, morally, this is where our attention ought to stay.