ABSTRACT
The relationship between technology and development has been a long and often controversial one. This chapter explores issues relating to technology and development policy from an anthropological perspective, and argues that the relationship can only be meaningful from the point of view of contributing to sustainable development if lessons are learned from past experience. It focuses on the context of Bangladesh, an archetypal developing country that has throughout its 40-year history routinely been affected by extensive poverty, environmental instability, and weak institutions. It was famously referred to as a “basket case” by one of Henry Kissinger's aides shortly after it seceded from Pakistan in 1971. Yet more recently, Bangladesh has come to be seen differently as a partial success story in relation to its subsequent progress linked to technological change (Lewis, 2011). First, the so-called “Green Revolution” in agriculture that took place from the 1980s onwards on the basis of new hybrid seed, irrigation and fertilizer technologies rapidly succeeded in transforming the country from one that many international donors saw as destined to endure chronic food shortages and regular famines, to one that since the 1990s has approached food-grain self-sufficiency. Second, Bangladesh has become strongly associated with the emerging new mobile phone technologies through the promotion of the well-known Grameen Bank and its Grameen Phone associate company. Although this technology was developed in Western countries, Grameen has pioneered its introduction in the developing country context and its local adaptation for development purposes. Grameen's capacity to identify and disseminate the technology across the country has helped to stimulate the rapid growth of cell phones as “platform technologies” that have been adapted to address a range of poverty-focused development challenges, from income generation to information scarcity.
