ABSTRACT
The present volume has shown us how we are at a crossroads now in our vision and practice of development. Many of our difficulties here relate to our inability to look at and participate in the field of development as a field of relationship and as a quest for a shared responsibility which brings the self and other together. Half a century ago, development began as a hope for a better human possibility, but in the last fifty years, this hope has lost itself in the dreary desert of various kinds of hegemonic applications. But at the turn of the millennium there is an epochal challenge to rethink and reconstitute the vision and practice of development as a shared responsibility – a sharing which binds both the agent and the audience, the developed world and the developing, in a bond of shared destiny. This calls for the cultivation of an appropriate ethical mode of being in our lives which enables us to realise, be prepared for and be worthy of this global and planetary situation of shared living and responsibility (Apel 1991, 2000). As Habermas tells us, ‘The moral or ethical point of view
makes us quicker to perceive the more far reaching, and simultaneously less insistent and more fragile, ties that bind the fate of an individual to that of every other – making even the most alien person a member of one’s community’ (Habermas 1990: 20). But the self-confidence that Habermas poses in the ability of an ethical perspective and ethical engagement to help us perceive and be prepared for our shared responsibility may be difficult to proceed with in its entirety as a guide to ethics and development. For many critical commentators and interlocutors, an ethical agenda has almost always implied an agenda of the care of the other in a hegemonic manner where what is good for the other has already been defined by the benevolent self. In fact, the problem with the practice of development in the last fifty years has been precisely with such an ethical agenda which has been an agenda of hegemonic application of a priori formulations in which the objects of development do not have much say in defining and shaping the contours of their development (Carmen 1996). Such an agenda makes development an other-oriented activity where the actors of development do not realise that the field and the practice of development provides, and ought to provide, an opportunity for learning (cf. Nederveen Pieterse 2001), self-development and self-transformation, both for the object and the subject of development. In this context, there is a need to rethink development as an initiative in self-development on the part of both the subjects and objects of development, and ethics not only as an engagement in care of the other but also as an engagement in care of the self. Such a redefinition and reconstruction of both ethics and development is a crucial starting point for a new understanding and reconstitution of development as a shared human responsibility, and as a shared human possibility.
