2. Today’s program
• Discuss the importance of value judgments in
debates about the meaning and choices in
Development
• Discuss Assignment: The Story of Stuff, part 1
• And part 2 in class (if we have time)
• Form group of 3 and brainstorm over a future
development dilemma that you want to use
for your change agents project

3. “The word development has many
meanings as there are listeners*”
* cited by Alkire and Deneulin, 2009
• What do you understand by the word
‘development’?
• The more we reflect on it, we discover that
the term is ambiguous and value-laden

4. Regardless of any particular framework,
many would view development as follow:
• Development as a multi-dimensional and
multi-sectoral process, involving social,
economic and political change aimed at
improving people’s lives. Development
processes use and manage natural resources
to satisfy human needs and improve people’s
quality of life.
• Those who hold these views, may still range
from Marxist to Neoclassical Ideologies

5. Different views of what is development:
Two examples:
1. A country is considered developed because
its inhabitants command higher incomes per
capita and because investment and
employment rates are higher than in other
regions
• Economic growth and productive
investments are considered indicators of
development here

6. Different views of what is development (2):
2. In an other view concerns for people’s health
and education are important key indicators of
the development of a country
• In this example health and education are as
key indicators on the foreground of what
development means

7. “Limitations to the GDP”, extracted from a speech given
by Robert Kennedy on January the 4th, 1968:
• “ (….) The GDP of the US is the largest in the world. Truly we have a great
gross national product, almost 800 billion dollars, but can that be the
criterion by which we judge this country? Is it enough? For the gross
national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and
ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for
our doors and jails for the people who break them. It counts Whitman's
rifle and Speck's knife and television programs, which glorify violence in
order to sell toys to our children. And the gross national product, the gross
national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality
of their education, the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of
our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the
beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of
our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures
neither wit nor courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our
compassion nor our duty to our country. It measures everything, in short,
except that which makes life worthwhile (…).”
• Trackback:
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/20thcentury/68-01kennedy-speech.html

8. Legitimating development on 3 levels of analysis:
Development legitimately involves different kinds
of analyses:
1. Normative approach: development debates and
policies are normative or ethical. Based on value
judgments in that they clarify how groups ought
to behave in order to create improvements
• Not value-free, but instead ideological
• Herein lies the rationale/motivation behind
choices and actions in terms of policies,

9. Legitimating development on 3 levels of analysis (2):
• Positive approach (empirically based): It
requires learning from the past and analyzing
existing data. This approach refers to the
empirical study of development: data studies,
hypothesis testing, and other kinds of
description and analysis
E.g.
• http://www.censo2010.aw/images/stories/results/percentage%20of%20popul
ation%20with%20diploma%20after%20primary%20education%20by%20count
ry%20of%20birth.pdf

10. Legitimating development on 3 levels of analysis (3):
• Development is predictive: analysis must be
able to predict how a situation could change
over time in certain ways
• E.g. by applying techniques of scenario
planning and trends analysis
• Although different in approach, normative,
positive and predictive approaches are all
interconnected

11. Normative, positive and predictive approach to
development are all interconnected
• One needs to have a positive (empirical) and
predictive analysis in order to make any
normative assessments and vice versa
• Yet normative analysis is fundamental and in
some ways prior to predictive and empirical
analysis.
• Let’s look at an example: defining poverty

12. E.g. different definitions of poverty may influence how we
measure poverty and the actions we take in terms of policies*
“ Definitions of Poverty
A variety of ways to define urban poverty are available, each with their own strengths and deficiencies:
• income-based definitions: This approach seeks to specify a level of income per capita in a household below which
the basic needs of the family cannot be satisfied. It shares the difficulties of the next class of definitions of
imposing an official's or observer's view of necessities. It does not acknowledge variation in costs of similar goods
for different consumers. The vital importance of non-market household production and non-monetarized
exchanges in poor families is not counted.
• basic needs approaches: A set of minimal conditions of life, usually involving the quality of the dwelling place,
degree of crowding, nutritional adequacy and water supply are specified and the proportion of the population
lacking these conditions is used to estimate the degree of poverty. The advantage of this approach is that different
conditions can be specified appropriate to different settings. However, this reduces comparability of estimates in
different sites. Similarly, it does not take into account the willingness of people to accept various tradeoffs
deliberately (e.g., a lower quality dwelling for reduced transportation time and expense to work)
• participatory definitions: In this approach, respondents from communities are themselves invited to identify their
perceptions of their needs, priorities and requirements for minimal secure livelihood. Some sacrifice of
comparability of estimates in different communities or at different times is traded for better information on the
identified demands of the individuals themselves. At times such analyses supplement and reinforce the more
quantitative measures; at other times they reveal a very different experienced reality. A study in Rajasthan, India,
identified 32 conditions which individuals felt necessary for a satisfactory minimal lifestyle. Comparison of
interview results over a decade revealed that despite reductions in income of the residents, and little change in
living conditions of the kind generally surveyed in basic needs estimates, significant improvements had occurred in
experienced quality of life.”
*UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund

13. The normative approach of development
affects choices and actions
• Normative approaches to development are central to
the shaping of policies, but not enough to create it
• Normative approaches affect policy decisions (some
examples):
– They shape the data we collect
– They influence our analysis
– They give certain topics greater or less political salience
– They feed or hinder social movements
– They are ethical and philosophical credible and
CONTESTED!
– They influence the trade-offs we make in terms of
development

14. Bottom-line
• Ideas about what development should be, matter.
• Different ways of understanding what
development should improve lead to different
policies and consequences.
• Conflicts of values and interests are common on
the level of trade-offs and choices and actions to
be taken:
– E.g. how will the policy decision affect economical
progress? versus
– how will the policy affect people’s quality of life?

15. Assignment: The Story of Stuff, part 1
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8

16. Assignment, part 1
• Let’s take a look at your reflections after
studying the video

17. Assignment, part 2
• Read the following article that was a reaction
on the story of stuff:
• http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/f
eatured_articles/20090515friday.html
• What do you think of the different reactions
the documentary got?

18. Reactions to the article

19. Reactions to the article

20. Change agents project
• Form groups of 3
• Brainstorm on possible themes for your
change agents project