ABSTRACT

People are not equal in their struggle for access to resources. Some are rich, and live in green and pleasant suburbs or modern cities; others are trapped halfway along the path to material wealth, in polluted villages and towns; while many scratch a meagre living on tiny farms threatened by drought and soil erosion. (Rodney R. White, North, South, and the Environmental Crisis, University of Toronto Press, 1993, p3)

The North-South dimension of global developmental politics has featured strongly in literature since it was fi rst coined and popularized in the midtwentieth century.1 It is commonly associated with terminology such as: ‘development’, ‘globalization’, ‘Third World’, ‘First World’, ‘industrialized and non-industrialized nations’, ‘emerging and developed economies’, ‘polarization’, ‘distribution of global wealth’, ‘hierarchy of wealth’, ‘income disparities’, ‘injustice’ and ‘inequality’, among others. While its manifestation and severity are constantly changing, it continues to dominate the development discourse: ‘the divide between the rich nations of the former First World and poor nations of the former Third World … remains a fundamental dimension of contemporary global dynamics’.2 Even though international cooperation and concerted, collective and mutually supportive action increasingly occur in an eff ort to address many global development challenges, the world remains polarized along distinct political, social, cultural, religious and economic lines – a consideration that inhibits a comprehensive cooperative approach to global developmental issues.3