Spot'd(evelopment)

words of encouragement. thank you. i am back. although i was not sitting around waiting for someone to kick me with a comment, it’s just life commitments are starting to roll in and everything is moving in motion at the speed of light.

i have just came back from a trip to Sydney, and before that played host to a visiting friend who came from Melbourne. Development as a term, the thought of defining a developing country and a developed country has occurred to me is sometimes narrowly defined, and sometimes bogus-ly define. I’ll give you an example:

Melbourne friend: I have this co-worker who hails from America. He is so imbued with Americanism that he views everything else outside of America as Third World. The other day we were walking in front of the town hall in Melbourne and he said “you know, Australia is like a Third World country”

That’s the bogus definition.

Another was a conversation I overheard at the bus stop after doing my groceries. A university going boy talking to girl: And I went to all these Third World countries and they were all dirty and smelly and full of smoke. It was just bad.

That’s the narrow definition. And from the sound of it I didn’t think he had past anywhere further than his first year in Uni.

A lecturer from one of my subjects who hails from Tobago and Trinidad uses the word “developing countries”, “less developed countries” and “underdeveloped countries” interchangeably to mean countries that are other than the EU’s, North Americas, the Asian Tigers and Australia/NZ. I thought it was a little too simplistic of her at the level in which she is lecturing.

I quite like Andre Gunder Frank and the terms he uses in his discussions of the dependency theory; “metropolis” and “satellite” which are less discriminating and degrading than merely pointing at a country and saying “hey you, you are underdeveloped. let’s do something about this”

To me it’s like pointing to a stranger on the road and going “hey you are ugly!” right to their face. So do you blame ministries and local councils for being defensive when someone like Jeffrey Sachs drops by “less than 48 hours” and starts giving you a list of do’s and dont’s?

Yes, exactly.

I think as with the term ‘development’ (which one can go on for days debating about what it really means) LDCs, MDCs and all the other variations has lost its meaning. Barr the fact there are other cold, hard, rational way of drawing this division like through GDPs and other economic growth measures, I really do think it’s about time we do away with such condescending terms and re-evaluate the use of it in development.