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Rebekah and Derrick Charles are the Country Representatives for MCC Nicaragua & Costa Rica.
A little while back, our team had a discussion on Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999). The book is often cited as a significant work in broadening the thinking in international development from thinking primarily about economic development to thinking about development through the lens of “freedoms.” What is a person able to be and to do? What about access to health care, education, rights and political participation, and so on? What are the “unfreedoms” or the barriers that need to be identified and removed so that people can experience freedom?
Sen must be a really interesting person himself, born in Dhaka, India which is today Bangladesh, and working in various academic settings around the world.
One thing that is a question for me about the book was how closely he ties his thinking to Adam Smith’s. It may be that there is a gap between what Smith advocated for and what capitalism has become, but it does seem to raise the question about whether “freedom” is always the best lens. Simply opening up to the market mechanism doesn’t seem to be bringing these freedoms for the most disadvantaged.
A second book I’ve read more recently which aims to build on Sen’s thinking is Duncan Green’s How Change Happens (2016). Green writes from the UK and has worked in aid organizations and policy analysis. His argument, is that to improve freedoms for the disadvantaged, it’s necessary to build alliances at different levels of power and formality.
Many international development organizations work with concrete planning structures and logical frameworks, and Green leans in the opposite direction– looking for unanticipated moments and connections, the “unusual suspects” and catalysts who together can affect change. Over time, he has moved from being suspicious of the big players to getting to know and understand them, which gives opportunity for big policy change opportunities and avoiding “islands” of success.
A third book that I’ll tie into this is from outside of the development literature, but I think has some interesting parallels. A couple months ago I read John Paul Lederach’s The Moral Imagination (2005), which is written for people working in peace building.
Lederach also writes about being open to these surprises; he talks about having peripheral vision to notice opportunities.
And Lederach advocates for building varied alliances which he describes through the metaphor of webs. It’s necessary to connect at different levels of power, being connected to the grassroots while also having a voice with decision makers. And, increasingly important in our world divided by self-selected social media, it’s necessary to connect with people across the spectrum who we don’t agree with.
Sen wrote about moving the conversation from “human capital” which has an emphasis on work or production to “human capability,” with an emphasis on freedom. Lederach reminds us that the term “capacity” which it seems is mostly used to talk about skills, can also be understood as space. Is there opportunity for time, imagination, building relationships, and so on.
An additional lens or measure for “development” might simply be “community.” Freedoms and mutual responsibilities seem to work together. What work will serve for more just relationships? How can we reduce the information gaps that cause inequality and barriers to freedom? Who do we need to connect with in the process? And how might I/we need to change for a more equitable reality to be possible?
MCC Nicaragua & Costa Rica partner gathering. January 2019.