Development

Many international development organizations, like the World Bank and the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tend to be populated mostly by economists, political scientists and lawyers. Moral and political philosophers represent at most a small minority in such institutions. Arguably, this is because most of the members of such international development organizations believe that their work consists mainly in identifying and implementing the most effective means for realizing given ends. They may think this because development constitutes the overarching goal that their work

must realize. They may point out that to put into question the desirability of development involves a contradiction in terms, because development simply stands for change that is socially desirable. Therefore there is no need for normative reflections and justifications of the philosophical kind. This kind of reasoning apparently explains why such organizations rely almost exclusively on personnel of the above-mentioned sort who are capable of responding to the instrumental, or technical, questions as to how one achieves development. This chapter will show that – contrary to this reasoning – the work of international devel-

opment organizations requires a constant reflection of the moral and political philosophical kind. A major reason for this is that while people agree that the abstract concept of development, in its normative usage, indeed, simply means social progress or good, or desirable, social change, they disagree profoundly about what social progress consists in exactly. There exists a normative disagreement about the conception of development that expresses best how social progress ought to be defined in concrete terms.1 For example, should we really think of social progress only in terms of economic growth, that is, in the accumulation of goods and services? Or should we instead, for example, think of it in terms of the eradication of extreme poverty? Or in terms of yet something else, like the expansion of options for human choice? The next section begins by articulating more clearly how to define a normative conception

of development and in which way such a normative conception relates to what this chapter refers to as the “development practice”. The three following sections go on to differentiate the very influential normative conceptions of economic development, human development and sustainable development. The subsequent section exposes them to the radical critique of postdevelopment theorists who argue that any normative conception of development is parochial. The final section concludes by explaining why the normative debate about who is responsible

for achieving development is likely to receive a lot of scholarly attention in the near future – owing mainly to the nascent multi-polarity in the global economy.