Paul Ekins, A New World Order: Grassroots Movements for Global Change (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.200-9

CONCLUSION

It should be obvious that the people and projects in this book bear witness to solid, important achievements with immense potential for the future. Bertrand Schneider (1988) calculates that development NGOs currently benefit some 100 million people out of the 2 billion rural poor with whom he is principally concerned, and have brought them great benefits at a cost of only some US$6.50 per head per year (p.213). He then calls for an annual investment of US$13 billion per year to reach the other 1.9 billion people in his target group (p.236). Schneider does not say whether he considers this should be ‘new money’ or resources transferred from existing allocations. He does make clear, however, that it should be an investment in rural areas in small-scale activities in which the beneficiaries ‘retain the initiative, choice and responsibility for development decisions which are aimed at answering their real needs’. Such large-scale projects as may still necessary will then proceed from a quite different motivational, practical and political basis, in which ‘the starting point of development efforts is the village or community’ (p.226 ).

A group of South Asian scholars has studied in detail the various processes and conditions by which village-based development can be achieved:

A social transformation of enormous magnitude has to be envisaged. In Third World countries the critical structural changes relate to a shift of decision-making power towards the poor by initiating a ‘bottom-up’ process, the village becoming the focal point of development, and a change in the education system redirecting it towards raising mass consciousness and remoulding elites. There is in the light [end p.200]

of this no easy way to bring about the structural changes required, which themselves have to be supported by an integrated process of total mobilisation, involving raising peoples’ consciousness and the inculcation of democratic values, the transformation of labour-power into the means of production, the fullest utilisation of local natural resources and the systematic development of appropriate technology.

(De-Silva et al. 1988, p.22)

Furthermore, as one of the scholars quoted above has noted elsewhere:

A truly participatory development process cannot be always generated spontaneously, given the existing power relations at all levels, apathy, and the deep-rooted dependency relationship between rich and poor, common in most countries of the South. It often requires a catalyst or initiator who can break this vicious circle, a new type of activist who will work with the poor, who identifies with the interests of the poor and who has faith in the people.

(Wignaraja 1988)

This ‘new type of activist’ is a fairly unusual human being: someone with a clear intellectual grasp of social trends and forces, an understanding of commercial and local and national bureaucratic processes, an empathy with and sensitivity to the poor and, usually, a willingness to live on a low income. It is the involvement of such people in NGOs which has propelled those organisations to a position of perceived importance in development work. It is to train, equip and support such people, most of whom will be drawn from the ranks of the poor themselves, that the bulk of Schneider’s US$13 billion is required.

The good news is that the sum of money itself is relatively trifling and could certainly be found within existing aid and development budgets if the political will were there, simply by cutting out some of the waste and absurdities identified by Hancock (1989) in current development practice. The bad news is that these absurdities are the predictable consequence of the priorities of highly entrenched vested interests in both North and South which have much to lose from the kind of development advocated by Schneider, Wignaraja and Another Development. The likely result is that people’s organisations will continue to turn in highly cost-effective results [p.201]

which are well below both their potential and the need; while large sums of money continue to be squandered in the name of development in ways which often hurt those whom they are supposed to be helping.

Thus it would be wrong to overstate the current importance of most of the initiatives in this book and the wider movements they represent. As the first two chapters make clear, most of the major global trends are still going in the wrong direction, some at an accelerating rate. Most of the initiatives themselves are still very fragile. Even the larger ones, especially in developing countries, could all too easily be swept away by the sort of social, political and economic instability which is so common in the Third World, and may well become more so elsewhere.

As much of the earlier argument has shown, this instability is not simply an unfortunate, remediable byproduct of an otherwise beneficent power structure. Rather it is an inevitable result of an economic order which, since the earliest days of the industrial revolution, has in broad terms divided the affected population into three distinct and these days more or less equally sized groups: those who benefit from the order (industrialists and elite workers, professional middle classes); those who are dependent on it and, in effect, become its servants, with little remuneration and less control over the direction of their own lives; and those who are surplus to its requirements, the ‘disposable people’, the Narmada Valley oustees, the 50 per cent of some developing country populations who have not only been bypassed by mainstream development but are being systematically impoverished by it, or the part of the population of the ‘free market’ industrial countries, up to 20 per cent in the us and UK, who languish fixedly below the poverty line. These disposable people are not a new phenomenon of capitalist industrialisation, rather they are one of its most enduring features, discernable at least since the Enclosure Acts in Britain from the seventeenth century when the process began of depriving peasants of their independent means of subsistence and forcing them into wage labour or penury .(Disposable people have also been a feature of state socialism as well. It should be clear that no simple capitalism-to-socialism transformation is being advocated here).

There are three immensely powerful forces which are tending to reinforce this division of society into three groups -beneficiaries, servants and the dispossessed. These forces I am here calling scientism, developmentalism and statism. [I owe several of the [p.202]

following ideas to a most stimulating meeting in Mexico of the International Group on Grassroots Initiatives in January 1990 and especially to D.L. Sheth from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, who participated in it]. By scientism I mean the hegemony of modern science and, beyond this, the attempted monopoly of the Western scientific mode of knowledge. Fritjof Capra has described how Western science has changed since medieval times:

The medieval outlook changed radically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The notion of an organic, living and spiritual universe was replaced by that of the world as a machine, and the world-machine became the dominant metaphor of the modem era. … From the time of the ancients the goals of science had been wisdom, understanding the natural order and living in harmony with it … the basic attitude of scientists was ecological. … Since Bacon the goal of science has been knowledge that can be used to dominate and control nature.

(Capra 1983 pp.38, 40)

Modern science is used to dominate people as well as nature. Its elevation and promotion as the only valid way of knowing the world dismisses the major part of the creativity , intuition and tacit and traditional knowledge, that comprise the principal perceptive, expressive and cognitive powers of most people; in short, it devalues the ideas, experience and accumulated wisdom of the majority of humankind. Indigenous systems of health care, medicine, education and agriculture, as well as ways of understanding the world and the place of people in it, have all been subject to the relentless onslaught of the modern scientific worldview. Moreover, this worldview has even failed to keep up with the advance of science itself, embodied in the post-Einsteinian scientific thinking, which emphasises uncertainty, subjectivity , cognition and the subordination of individuality to relationship. Instead the thrust of scientism has been technocratic, mechanistic, deterministic, materialistic, atomistic and anti-ecological.

While appreciating the achievements of Western science, Willis Harman has forcefully expressed the need now to look beyond it:

The scientific view has been, in its way, outstandingly successful – yielding both technological and predictive [p.203]

successes – and hence has gained tremendous prestige. It has been broadly accepted as the nearest we can come to a ‘true’ picture of knowledge. But it is nonetheless also true that the cosmos described by modem science is devoid of meaning and largely lacks relationship to the profound spiritual insight of thousands of years of human experience.

…

Few would gainsay the accomplishments of reductionistic science. For the purpose toward which it evolved -prediction, manipulation and control of the physical environment – it is superb. The issue is whether it needs to be complemented by another kind of science that can deal more adequately with wholes, with living organisms, and particularly with human consciousness.

…

It is impossible to create a well-working society on a knowledge base that is fundamentally inadequate, seriously incomplete, and mistaken in basic assumptions. Yet that is precisely what the modern world has been trying to do.

…

It begins to look as though all of the global dilemmas of which we have so recently become aware … [what this book has called the global problematique – PE] … in the end stem from our modem Western picture of reality , which we have equated with the ‘reality’ of reductionism.

(Harman 1988)

Elsewhere in Harman’s remarkable article he specifies more particularly how he feels science could and should be restructured, emphasising participatory research; the recognition of a hierarchy of sciences, moving upwards from physical to life to human to spiritual sciences, with different methodologies appropriate for each and mechanisms of downward as well as upward causation; and a redefinition of the scientifically possible to include the total experience of humanity.

The second force, developmentalism, can be seen to derive from [p.204]

scientism and is the motive power of the monolithic model of development, expressed in such words as industrialisation, modernisation, consumerism, growth, etc., and measured by monetary aggregates. Developmentalism defines the principal social objectives of all countries as consumption and accumulation. These objectives are promoted by two complementary strategies. The first, from which it derives its power, can be described as the carrot of consumerism, through which it manages to create a system of total demand. Ancient cultural norms and value systems crumble before the images and artefacts of the consumer society .Even those who have no objective chance whatever of benefiting from it, who have indeed got everything to lose (i.e. the disposable people) nevertheless tend to capitulate to its perception of reality.

The minority who would resist the consumerist carrot are treated to the competitive stick of enforced economic participation. The resources and social structures that give independence or relief from the market are ruthlessly assaulted or sequestered; families and communities are ruptured; and water and biomass expropriated, not in the name of oppression but with the justification of economic efficiency and wealth creation. In a bizarre and profoundly irrational piece of sophistry , it is often claimed that those who are impoverished and immiserised by the forces of ‘development’ are actually (or will be imminently) its beneficiaries through some ‘trickle down’ process whereby some portion of the resources taken from them will be returned in more modern form. At the start of the Fourth UN Development Decade, it is clear that such claims are a cruel deception for the majority of people to whom they relate.

However, it is unlikely that the consumerist carrot or competitive stick could by themselves have wrought the transformation in the name of development which we have witnessed over the past four decades. For that the third force of statism was required, the ‘sovereignty’ of the nation-state, which amounts to the legitimised exercise of omnipotence over the lives of its subjects.

Competition can only rule where there are markets, which in turn depend on the allocation by price of commodities produced for exchange. Where resources are controlled by community structures and goods are produced principally for self-consumption, as was the case in most rural areas of non-industrial countries and therefore was the way of life of most of humanity until relatively recently, [p.205]

competition is impotent. Markets might have corroded such community self-reliance in due course, but nothing like as fast as the wholesale redefinition of property rights, effected by the nation-state in favour of exchange-oriented elites, that has occurred, especially in those countries most under us influence such as Brazil and the Philippines, in a global replay of the English Enclosure Acts of the seventeenth century which deprived the common people of their means of livelihood.

It is often forgotten that the notion of a nation-state is an extremely recent one for most of the ‘sovereign’ governments which now comprise the United Nations. The great majority of them date from the post Second World War period and many have been constructed along boundaries which may have suited the bureaucracies or real-politik of colonialism but which have little to do with the human realities to be governed.

The results of endowing these awkward, artificial political entities with absolute power over the people within their boundaries has been disastrous for hundreds of millions of their citizens. As the statistics quoted earlier show, many national governments have been supremely irresponsible in the conduct of their affairs: wasting their substance with massive arms spending, prestige projects and luxurious lifestyles; using those arms both to attack their neighbours and repress and torture their own citizens; ruthlessly enforcing the dominant development model on their poor people in order to finance their projects and lifestyles; and laying waste their natural environments. The most dramatic recent example of the excesses of ‘sovereignty’ was Saddam Hussein’s renewed assault on Iraq’s Kurds following the Gulf War.

None of these activities is the sole prerogative of the rulers of nation-states, of course. Despots have behaved similarly from time immemorial. But the concept of the nation-state, whose rulers have legitimate power over their subjects, allied to modern security , information and industrial technologies, has given the nation-state a penetrating power unknown to earlier tyrants. The world over, in Sarawak, Brazil, India and many other countries -peoples who have lived largely free from outside interference for millennia are now feeling the oppressive, often genocidal, impact of state power.

The promise of statehood, as of development, has thus often proved a cruel deception. So much more was expected of it than tyranny. The Charter of the United Nations, for example, began with the ringing phrase of ‘We the peoples of the United Nations’ and [p.206]

then interpreted this as ‘We the governments …’, clearly assuming that the governments and their people had something in common. The forty intervening years have proved the assumption to be deeply questionable. Time and again the independence movements which have succeeded in mobilising the people to throw off some foreign domination have coalesced into or themselves been replaced by a new tyrannic force spuriously legitimised by state sovereignty.

These, then, are the three central forces behind the modem project: scientism – the belief, essentially formulated in the nineteenth century , that the scientific worldview is the only valid way of perceiving and understanding the world; developmentalism – the belief that economic and, indeed, human progress as a whole depends on an expanding consumer society ; and statism – the belief that the nation-state is the ultimately legitimate form of political authority . As well as creating an explosion of commodities, technologies and material expectations, these beliefs have brought humanity to the brink of wars, repression, poverty and environmental collapse of a potentially terminal nature. And it is in their practical foundation of antitheses to these beliefs that the hope for the future engendered by the initiatives described in this book resides.

Thus, in place of scientism, these initiatives celebrate the knowledge and wisdom of common people. Compared to some such knowledge, for example the understanding of their habitat possessed by the indigenous dwellers of tropical rainforests, Western scientific knowledge seems deeply deficient. But the traditional knowledge of other people regarded as ignorant from the modem viewpoint, peasants, women, slum-dwellers, is increasingly coming to be viewed as a cultUral resource as valuable and valid in its own way as anything emanating from a laboratory.

This intrinsic value of traditional knowledge is augmented by the growing realisation that such knowledge is in fact the only possible basis for anything that might go by the name of ‘development’. This development is a far cry from the industrial monolith with its monetary aggregates described earlier. It is development in the sense of achievement of human potential, of enhancing capability , of increasing control over the human circumstances of daily life while maintaining a healthy symbiosis with the natural processes which sustain it. Such a development can only start from what people know already. From this foundation their knowledge can, of course, be extended and enriched, by the scientific and other [p.207]

insights of experts, among others, but it will only remain effective knowledge for as long as it is rooted in the culture and experience of those who are developing.

For knowledge, however intrinsically relevant and effective, to be productive, there must exist the freedom and access to the necessary resources for it to be deployed. Herein lies the challenge of these initiatives to the nation-state. They can only yield their fruit through processes of participation and democracy, which demand not the abolition of the state but its transformation. State power has a vital role to play in people’s self-development. It must provide the basic institutions to encapsulate and frame the market so that the market mechanism may work to general advantage. It must guarantee continuing access for all people to the resources for production and development, both monetary and non-monetary in nature. And it must implement basic norms of social justice which narrow differentials in society by progressively enabling the disadvantaged to provide for their own needs from their own resources and participate fully in its mainstream life.

It is the people’s initiatives themselves which are seeking to push the state painfully towards this transformation, which is a prerequisite for a fruitful interaction between them. Repression by the state of these initiatives either kills them or hardens them into perhaps violent confrontation. Co-option by the state quenches their dynamism. The achievement of their potential by these people’s processes, their very power, depends on their continuing autonomy and independence in a supportive social context.

This is a perplexing situation for those trapped in such notions as the ‘capture’ of power. Capturing the power of people’s organisations ensures that either it will evaporate or will be put to other uses than those for which it was created. In the latter case it transforms the power of people over themselves into power over other people. Avoiding such a situation depends on the continuing maintenance and creation of political and social spaces within which people’s power can be effectively exercised.

Thus at a fundamental level the common thrust of the new movements for social and economic change represented by those described in these pages can be expressed by the word democratisation: democratisation of knowledge, democratisation of development, democratisation of the state. It is a democratisation based on a new articulation of people-to-people and people-to- nature relations, which provides for, indeed promotes: [p.208]

• Cultural diversity within a global perspective, rather than Western industrial hegemony;
• An ecocentric perception which places humanity within and as part of nature, rather than as external and superior to it;
• The development of people in the round, both as individuals and members of social communities, a development which caters for their needs of being, doing and relating, as well as for the now dominant consumerist need of having;
• And a mode of governance which promotes autonomy, initiative and capability, based on a commitment to social justice.

From this perspective it is clear how the battle lines for the future are drawn. On one side are scientism, developmentalism and statism, backed by the big battalions of the establishment: modern technology, and the institutions of world capitalism and state power. On the other are the people, principally the 30 per cent of humanity that is disposable as far as the modern project is concerned, but aided and abetted by many from the other 70 per cent who regard this project as ethically, socially and environmentally intolerable. The organisation of this people’s power into a force that can both resist the big battalions and further the common good is a formidable and uncertain task, but this book has shown that not inconsiderable successes are possible.

Expressed like this, the big battalions against the people, there would seem to be little new in the situation and in many ways there is not. The story now, as it has always been, is partly one of resistance against exploitation and the struggle for justice. But today there is a crucial difference, because for the first time the big battalions have the power not just to destroy the people, which they have always had; nor is their reach limited to the present. Now it is also the future, the long-term future, which is at stake, and life on planet earth itself. The big battalions are fast embarking on a future which simply does not work. It remains to be seen whether the people’s alternative, as outlined in this book, a future that works through a new world order, will prevail. [p.209]

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