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2011 | Buch

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Delivering Development

Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future

verfasst von: Edward R. Carr

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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Über dieses Buch

Calls into question the very universal, unquestioned assumptions about globalization, development, and environmental change that undergird much of development and economic policy. Compels the reader to question conventional wisdom and explores alternative ways of achieving meaningful, enduring improvements to human well-being.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Taking It All Apart

Abstract

In the early evening of July 8, 1997, I found myself sitting in the courtyard of a house in Dominase, a small rural village in Ghana’s Central Region. I was there to pay a social visit to some of the people who were kind enough to share the history of Dominase with me. It was pitch dark, and my 24-year-old Ghanaian research assistant, Francis Quayson, and I had walked about 500 meters from the slightly larger village of Ponkrum, where I was staying. We had used a flashlight to navigate the overgrown, uneven remnants of a dirt road between the two places. As per “official” local custom, I had brought a bottle of (appalling but cheap) local gin with me as a gift. This was accepted by Kwame, one of three brothers of the only family still living in this village. We sat and talked by his wife’s cook fire for a while, drinking the gin and discussing everything from the history of Dominase to the cost of living in the United States.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 2. Getting to the “Beach”

Abstract

The villages of Dominase and Ponkrum are located in Ghana’s Central Region, about 90 miles west of Accra, the capital. This description does little to illustrate what it means to live on globalization’s shoreline. To explain what this means, we must first leave the comfortable hotels and restaurants of Accra and make the journey to these villages, starting with a trip to the town of Elmina. The only way to do this is to drive along the two-lane highway between Accra and points west. Until recently, describing the condition of the road as poor and potholed did not do it justice. My friend and colleague, Ben Kankpeyeng, came much closer when he referred to these ruts as “potwells,” as they were usually deep and full of water. Traffic on this road routinely slowed to a crawl as it passed through busy towns, such as Kasoa and Mankessim, or as cars and buses bogged down behind giant old trucks with top speeds of 40 miles per hour. People and animals from the villages that line this highway dart across the road constantly. On my first trip between Accra and Elmina, the bus in which I was riding hit two goats and a dog. I stopped paying attention after that. Even in the best of conditions, the trip between Accra and Elmina routinely took more than four hours.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 3. A Day at the Beach

Abstract

Dominase sits on the eastern edge of roughly 11 acres of flat land surrounded by hills to the east, south, and northwest. It is comprised of a tight cluster of a half-dozen earth-walled structures with tin roofs and a single open well with a concrete shaft. The ground around and between these structures is packed earth. There is no vegetation at all within the boundaries of the village. Though it is only three miles from the highway and the high-tension lines, Dominase has no electricity, no running water, and no formal toilets or sanitation facilities.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 4. Living with Uncertainty

Abstract

While daily life in Dominase and Ponkrum can be repetitive, it is not predictable. The environment and economy of these villages, as in many other places on globalization’s shoreline, are subject to sudden changes (often called “shocks”) that create constant uncertainty. In Dominase and Ponkrum this uncertainty is deeply ingrained. Every night when Francis and I parted, I would say, “See you in the morning.” Francis would always reply, “In the morning … if God permits.” In these villages, even going to sleep for the night requires a caveat.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 5. Nothing Has Always Been Like This

Abstract

When I first started working in these villages, elderly residents of Dominase claimed an early chief of the village had been one of those who greeted Portuguese explorers who reached the coast five miles to the south in 1471. Since my arrival I have conducted fairly extensive archaeological investigations in both Dominase and Ponkrum, but have yet to find any evidence of occupation that dates to the late 1400s, when European contact occurred. The earliest materials I have uncovered that relate to the current settlements date to sometime around 1825.¹ Artifacts from the late 1800s and early 1900s are far more numerous than those from the early 1800s, as might be expected from a settlement that was growing after its founding. The bulk of structures standing here by the mid-twentieth century were constructed in or after the late 1800s.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 6. The Tide Goes Out

Abstract

We have clear evidence from the 1940s on that the residents of Dominase and Ponkrum had some understanding of the larger networks in which they were caught up, and they understood how to manipulate those in charge of those networks to get things they wanted. Farmers in these villages were growing cocoa and oil palm as well as various food crops. They buttressed their agricultural incomes with wage and commercial activities facilitated by the road through their villages and the logging operation to the north. Archaeological evidence suggests that by the 1960s livelihoods in these villages were stable and robust.¹ For example, my field crew and I found relatively large numbers of glass shards from bottled beverages littering the yards of houses in Dominase. These bottled drinks were expensive and had to be purchased in town, usually with cash. In 2010 it is rare to get such bottled beverages in the village. The bottles are actually more highly prized than the drinks inside, as the bottles can be reused to hold everything from kerosene (for oil lamps) to akpeteshi. As a result, glass bottles are guarded jealously and rarely broken, never discarded. This makes the large amount of glass found in the 1960s-era yards of Dominase surprising. The number of glass fragments suggests a much larger number of these bottles and, likely, the drinks they contained, in these villages in the 1960s than I saw during my fieldwork between 1997 and 2006. This suggests, in turn, that the households living in Dominase in the 1960s were able to make these purchases because they enjoyed greater incomes than do their twenty-first century counterparts.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 7. The Tide Comes Back In

Abstract

The story of my involvement with Dominase and Ponkrum nearly ended with the gradual reoccupation of two marginal villages in Ghana’s Central Region. In 2003 I accepted a position in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina. I began to write up my data and conclusions through my 2000 field season, with an eye toward closing up the project and moving on to something new. But I was missing some data that was useful for my interpretations of events in these villages. So, in the summer of 2004 I went back to tie up these loose ends. As part of this last field season, I ordered some satellite imagery of the villages and the farms around them in order to map and inventory farms, which would provide data to fill in missing information about agricultural practice in the area. My work in Dominase and Ponkrum seemed to be coming together in a nice, neat bundle. However, as I have lectured many students on the unpredictability of fieldwork, I should have known better.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 8. Scaling Up: Why the Lessons of Dominase and Ponkrum Matter to the World

Abstract

The case of Dominase and Ponkrum calls into question many prevalent but not ubiquitous assumptions about globalization and development. The current conditions in which the residents live are not the result of an absence of development. Instead, they are closely tied to more than 150 years of engagement with global markets and various development interventions intended to facilitate that engagement. These interventions, and the resultant engagements with global markets, have not resulted in sustained prosperity or improvements in the quality of life in these villages. If anything, their history of globalization and development is one of everincreasing instability and uncertainty in the residents’ day-to-day lives.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 9. Losing the Signal in the Noise

Abstract

How we measure globalization, development, and human well-being has important implications for how we understand the human condition around the world and the likely economic and environmental future toward which we are moving. Contemporary development policy, like economic policy, is grounded in a tremendous amount of empirical data. For example, global trade patterns are analyzed via a variety of measures. Some are well known, such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Others are far more esoteric; for example, the Baltic Dry Index, a measure of shipping costs for commodities. In the months leading up to the economic collapse of 2008, this database recorded a precipitous decline in the cost of shipping, as the supply of ships greatly outstripped the number of goods being shipped, warning of the collapse to come.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 10. The Long Emergency on the Shoreline of Globalization: It Is Not Their Problem

Abstract

The global economic downturn that began in 2008 wrought spectacular damage on the global economy. In June 2009 the International Monetary Fund projected a contraction of the global GDP by 2.9 percent for the calendar year 2009. However, if we disaggregate the IMF’s statistics on the global economic downturn, we find its effects are not really global. The only economies that are actually losing value are the “advanced economies,” for example, the United States and the countries of the European Union, which the IMF projected in July 2009 will lose 3.8 percent of GDP that year. The economies in the developing world, along the shoreline of globalization, continue to grow. For example, the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase by 1.5 percent in 2009, after successive years of growth in the 5–6 percent range. While this slowdown is certainly significant, it is also important to note that in the midst of this economic crisis, economic growth is continuing in Africa and other developing areas.¹ The 2.9 percent contraction in the global economy is actually a product of a massive downturn in developed economies, not in all economies in the world.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 11. Understanding the World Anew

Abstract

The world is not the same place it was only a few years ago. The ongoing economic crisis has cost the advanced economies a tremendous number of jobs and a great deal of wealth. Global assessments show the environmental cost of human economic growth is too high to bear for much longer. In addition, globalization’s shoreline is no longer a place we can think of as being detached from our lives or our fate. Our standard of living and rate of economic growth have been predicated on a particular form of globalization, and the access to resources (both natural and human) that allowed for the accumulation of material wealth and goods in advanced economies. Yet, we have operated with very little sense of how globalization, as a process, played out along globalization’s shoreline, or what the implications of various changes along this shoreline actually were, not only for people living there but also for those living far away in seemingly isolated advanced economies. Our professed concern for that shoreline was charity, or perhaps pity. Now, we must recognize this concern is in our own self-interest.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 12. Truly Participatory Development

Abstract

To address the challenges that events on globalization’s shoreline present to the world, it is not enough simply to build a network from which new and much-needed information can emerge. Information can frame policies and projects, but without the help of those living along the shoreline, we will simply continue to fail where we have failed before. Until now, those living in advanced economies have attempted to guide and control, directly or indirectly, activities along globalization’s shoreline in an effort to both maximize the benefits we receive and mitigate the challenges emerging from this part of the world. However, as illustrated time and again in this book, these benefits and emerging challenges have such complex, and locally specific, causes that their centralized management is impossible.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 13. Two Futures (Out of Many)

Abstract

We have choices. One is to continue to get globalization and development wrong and, in turn, keep failing in our efforts to build a sustainable future. The other is to build a different future founded on new ways of gathering data, on new sources of information, and on new forms of collaboration between those in advanced economies and those living on globalization’s shoreline. Continuing on our current path meets with the least amount of resistance. For decades we have invested in ideas, studies, and solutions that have slowly but steadily refined information that does not tell us what we need to know or bring about the outcomes we hoped to see. Each study, measurement, and idea builds upon those that came before and informs those that come after. The assumptions at the heart of the entire practice of development and the perceived benefits of globalization have been reiterated so many times and in so many venues that they no longer seem to be contestable claims about the world so much as they are considered simple, self-evident, descriptive statements about how the world works. For those who live their professional lives in this world, it is extremely difficult to deal with cases that run contrary to these apparently universally held beliefs about development and globalization. The very idea that development might actually be part of the problem, and that globalization might systematically produce significant negative issues among the many populations it is meant to benefit, appears irrational. Thus, cases such as Dominase and Ponkrum, which call these assumptions into question, are dismissed as outliers, as unique exceptions that exist outside the real story of globalization and development.

Edward R. Carr

Chapter 14. Uncertainty Is Hope

Abstract

This book, at its heart, is an effort to lay bare a colossal failure of imagination behind the creation of economic and environmental policy and development projects. If there is one thing the histories of so many of these policies and projects have in common, it is the urge to organize, control, and somehow influence a complex, unruly world to create new opportunities for people, wherever they might live. While these efforts have usually been undertaken with the best of intentions, they have resulted in a woefully inadequate, often incorrect understanding of life along globalization’s shoreline. The urge to control and fix the events and processes in play in these areas is evident in existing policy initiatives, such as PRSPs. This urge pervades efforts to address the long-term failure of development and globalization in order to meaningfully change the situations of those living along this shoreline. The clearest example of this, but hardly the only, is the MVP, which is predicated on problems and solutions designed in advanced economies and implemented in villages along globalization’s shoreline in a manner that marginalizes community participation.

Edward R. Carr

Backmatter

Titel: Delivering Development
verfasst von: Edward R. Carr
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-230-31997-4
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29327-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230319974