DevISSues volume 5, number 2, September 2003

Edward Said on ethnicity

DevISSues DevelopmentISSues

Volume5/Number2/September2003

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CONTENTS

CSOs: cooperation must recognise differences As Habermas observed: over the past centuries peoples’ life worlds have increasingly been ‘colonised’ by the systemic forces of state and market. In the current phase of internationalisation known as ‘globalisation’, political forces seem to be giving way to economic ones, sometimes voluntarily on the basis of prevailing neo-liberal dogmas, more often imposed as conditions of, for example, aid or structural adjustment programmes. This growing monopoly of market forces is full of risks: uncontrolled economic processes tend to widen inequalities in incomes, purchasing power and access to resources, and are likely to lead to unsustainable patterns of resource use. In so far as states could be regarded as representing the political will of the people, they could potentially act as countervailing powers to these economic forces but that is now becoming less likely. This – somewhat rosy – picture of the state has been said to be too optimistic, as it assumes that states not only have adequate powers but also want to be responsive to people’s wishes and opinions.

Since the nineteenth century labour has found it necessary to create unions. And, more recently, a whole range of other non-governmental organisations have emerged. With growing globalisation, we have also seen an internationalisation of these NGOs. They have been forming increasingly effective international networks, as witnessed by their presence at and influence on international discussions and global conferences, such as those on women, development finance and sustainable development. These are examples of people organising themselves to protect their lifeworlds or reclaim them from the colonisation Habermas wrote about. We nowadays often refer to them as ‘civil society organisations’ (CSOs).

Many social scientists regarded the emergence of CSOs as beneficial: more of them implies less state power, more CSO influence means more democracy, etc. Globalisation was seen as providing CSOs with a new space: globalisation ‘from below’ to counter globalisation ‘from above’. It was often assumed that CSOs would almost spontaneously work together as they had the same, or parallel interests, norms and values, and thus create effective and hopefully adequate countervailing power. Such views have now been recognised as naïve. Dwindling states do not in themselves make for more autonomy as market forces fill the vacuum. CSOs do no always have

parallel interests, and they are not necessarily democratic.

A more realistic approach is now emerging, recognising these ambiguities and contradictions. In its programmes, ISS tries to contribute to that approach. To mention one example, in an area I have some familiarity with: the role of NGOs in the environment and development debates in Africa. I recently came across a research project in the same field (that of environmental issues and action) but in a different geographical context, conducted by colleagues of ours at CEDLA in Amsterdam, and in Mexico.1 It was an enlightening study of transborder interactions in a network of environmental NGOs in Mexico, the USA and Canada trying to influence the setting up of NAFTA and involved in other regional environmental issues there. The project indicated that transnational cooperation between CSOs can be effective, but it also showed that there were differences in views and analyses related to contextual differences. There were asymmetries (in terms of constituencies, financial power, access to information, etc.) notably between US-based and Mexican environmental organisations to the effect that, at the end of the project, the former’s priorities were apparently more effectively pushed to the fore. There were, of course, also differences not relating to geographical context, such as between radical and moderate organisations. All these elements proved to be important and qualified the performance of the various actions (concerted or not) of the CSO networks concerned. These kinds of studies should be conducted more often, also at ISS, and we should put them together in a comparative setting – not only by bringing together studies done in different regions, but also by comparing intra-national and international activities, and by comparing CSO involvement in different sets of issues. That would no doubt lead to an accumulation of knowledge and enhance know-how on where, when and how CSO action and cooperation may be effective and further real development.

Hans Opschoor, ISS Rector

1

Hogenboom B, Cohen M.A., Antal E (2003), Cross border Activism and its Limits: Mexican Environmental Organisations and the United States, Amsterdam, CEDLA, Cuadernos del CEDLA, 13 (www.cedla.uva.nl/fs_publications.htm)

The Institute of Social Studies

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4 / Pure Ethnicity is a Delusion Interview with Edward Said

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6 / Erotic Disguise: Female Fertility Rituals in the Dancehall Culture Prof. Carolyn Cooper

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8 / Alumni News

Page 10 / Jan Tinbergen and Economic Development Dr Jacob Kol Page 13 / For & Against Two commentators make a case for and against a contentious issue Page 14 / ‘When There is War, the Global System Protests’ Interview with Prof. Syed Mansoob Murshed Page 16 / Sudan: a Plethora of Political Parties Marianne Nolte Page 20 / NGO Response to the Educational Marginalisation

ISS is an institute for advanced international education and research offering Diploma, Masters

of Street Girls in Kenya

and PhD programmes. The Institute generates, accumulates and transfers knowledge and know-how

Auma Okwany

on human aspects of economic and social change, with a focus on development and transition.

ISS is a leading centre in this field.

Development ISSues is also available on the ISS website at www.iss.nl

4 / INTERVIEW EDWARD SAID

INTERVIEW EDWARD SAID

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Pure ethnicity is a delusion

Interview Edward Said

During last year’s 50th Anniversary celebrations, the Institute of Social Studies awarded an honorary doctorate to the American-Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said. The doctorate was awarded for ‘his consistent

graphy Out of Place, an obscure sponsor funded a ‘study’ intended to bring the ‘terror professor’ into disrepute. Even the fact that Said once threw a stone near the Irsaeli-Lebanese border was exaggerated as ‘world news’.

international and eclectic approach in his literary and cultural criticism, addressing universal themes such as nationalism, the individual versus society, moral choices, majority versus minority rights and political repression.’ Unfortunately, Professor Said was unable to attend the award ceremony in October because of illness. In May, he visited ISS

Said himself says that he has had enough of the media. He has stopped giving interviews, especially for the American press. ‘I get a lot of requests,’ he says with a deep sigh. ‘But all those sound bytes, and it takes so much time.

I would rather write or speak. I sometimes do a radio programme, but short, no longer than 20 minutes.’

to receive the doctorate. While he was in The Hague, he spoke of the continuing struggle for peace in the Middle East, his hope for the future and his long fight against leukaemia.

‘I am feeling reasonably well at the moment, but next week could be a different story. I keep myself going with medication. I can still do everything, but less intensively. The leukaemia and the treatment are very tiring. Sometimes I get very ill. Between April and September of last year, I was ill almost constantly.’

The first impression of Edward Said is of a tired and ageing man. But as soon as he begins to speak, the tiredness falls

away and there is a passionate fire in his eyes. ‘I see the award of the doctorate as a recognition of my people, the Palestinian people, who are in danger of being forgotten.’

His relentless engagement with the Palestinian cause has made Said many enemies. He has often received death threats and his office at Colombia University in New York was set on fire.

After the publication of his autobio-

Said is a pleasure to listen to, a gift that may be related to his musical talent. He is a gifted pianist, and already enjoyed playing Haydn and Mozart as a child.

Some years ago, together with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim, he organised a masterclass for young musicians from the Arab world in Weimar.

HUMANISM Said is a believer in humanism, which he has rediscovered through the works of the Italian philosopher Vico. ‘Humanism is a taboo word, especially among postmodern intellectuals. But when I speak of humanism, I do not mean something

grounded in wide reading, but in involvement and engagement. I have written a book about this, the capacity of the individual to rediscover, create, recreate or record his or her own history, even if it has been taken away. I believe strongly in genuine human values like dignity and solidarity. I believe that we can live in peace with others and that we are capable of creating sustainable forms of economy and environment. Those are things we can learn. And that is the basis of my optimism.’

He likes most to spend time with young people. ‘In the long term, the solution lies in better upbringing and education.

That is why I continue to teach. In the past six months I have travelled through America, giving lectures. It was mostly young people who came to listen. They know where I stand and what I have to say: I am against war, and against current Israeli policy. They were very enthusiastic and keen to learn. I discovered another America, an America of immigrants, rather than that of Bush and the oil companies.

They have hijacked America. But it does not belong to them, why should they take it?’

them. Sharon is a war criminal, while Bush calls him a man of peace!’

Nor does Said believe that the US can bring democracy to Iraq. ‘What is democracy? As if America knows what it is. In America, you can buy democracy if you have a billion dollars. Take Michael Bloomberg: he spent 60 million dollars of his own money to become mayor of New York. Bush needed 200 million dollars to become president – and he wasn’t even elected! The Supreme Court had to help him to the White House. Is that democracy?’

According to Said, the Bush administration has assigned Noah Feldman to write a constitution for Iraq. Feldman is a 42-year-old assistant professor of law at New York University. He is an orthodox

there is always somewhere or another an alien element. If you recognise that, your identity opens up. But if you suppress it, you hang on to your identity fearfully. That is what the Israelis do. But who is really Dutch, American or Muslim these days? These are just fabrications to make yourself more important and demean the status of others. That is exactly what Hitler did with his theory of racial superiority. Identity is not something simple. History has shown us very clearly and painfully that pure ethnicity is a delusion. That makes the exile a genuine citizen of the world, a successful example of globalisation.’ * This article is based on an interview by Heiko Jessayan originally published in the Dutch daily newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad

‘Couldn’t they find someone better qualified among the Iraqis, or the three-hundred million Arabs, or the billion Muslims in the world?’

Said mentions his new book, The Other America, in which he describes how the language has also been hijacked. ‘They talk about “our values”, but they are not my values, or those of white puritans like John Adams or Jonathan Edwards.’

Jew who started to learn Arabic when he was 15 and is now a specialist in tenth century Islamic law. He has never been in Iraq and knows little of the Arabic world. ‘Couldn’t they find someone better qualified among the Iraqis, or the three-hundred million Arabs, or the billion Muslims in the world? That’s crazy. Alice in Wonderland. Insulting.’

ROAD MAP Said has little faith in the ‘road map’ for peace in the Middle East. ‘You can’t say: “We support human rights” and then ignore them where the Palestinians are concerned. That is what has happened: saying one thing and doing the opposite.

Israel has fifteen objections to the plan.

Bush has already conceded twelve of

A strong critic of not only the Israeli occupation policy, but also of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Said describes himself – after Spinoza, who called himself a non-Jewish Jew – a non-Palestinian Palestinian. ‘My last book, Freud and the non-European, was about this.

Freud showed that, in the case of peoples with a deep-rooted sense of identity,

BIOGRAPHY Edward Said is Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and writer and world-renowned commentator on the culture and politics of Islam and the Arab world. He is largely recognised for his book Orientalism, an examination of the way the West perceives the Islamic world. He has worked toward promoting the consideration of Third World literature as a major cultural force within the Western world. His other books include: Culture and Imperialism, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process and Entre Geurre et Paix.

6 / E R O T I C D I S G U I S E - P R O F. C A R O LY N C O O P E R

E R O T I C D I S G U I S E - P R O F. C A R O LY N C O O P E R

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Jamaica- Erotic Disguise: Female Fertility Rituals in the Dancehall Culture Jamaican dancehall culture at home and in the diaspora is a potentially liberating space in which working-class women and their often more timid middle-class sisters claim the freedom to play out eroticised roles that may not ordinarily be available to them in the rigid social conventions of the everyday. The dancehall becomes an engorged erogenous zone in which the celebration of female sexuality and fertility is ritualised.

Representations of the black female body in colonial discourse reveal the complexity of the disguises employed by enslaved women to survive their dehumanisation. Their erotic rebelliousness is manifested in contemporary Jamaican dancehall culture. The eighteenth century popular song, ‘Me Know No Law, Me Know No Sin,’ is a relatively early literary expression of emancipatory erotic disguise.1 The official, written histories of enslavement, voicelessness and erasure that seem to have absolute authority are vigorously contested by alternate oral discourses that reclaim the self and empower the speaker.

The issues of gender, race, class and voice intersect: the transgressive black woman, bearer of the composite burden of master, overseer and mistress, is triply oppressed – or so it seems. Reduced to the function of mere sex object, she signifies both the dehumanisation of the black person and the disempowerment of woman in a slave society. But kisses go by favour and in the inverted hierarchies of her deformed society the enslaved black woman is often the pre-

ferred sex object. Not simply a helpless victim in a racist/sexist society, she does exercise a complex measure of control over her own sexuality, that of the black man and of Massa.

In the very first verse of ‘Me Know No Law, Me Know No Sin’ the woman flaunts her cunning ability to capitalise on her body, selling her ‘maidenhead’ several times over ‘to many a handsome fellow.’ The qualifying ‘altho’ a slave me is born and bred’ declares her refusal to be commodified by anybody but herself. A legal ‘slave’, she is nevertheless free to exploit her status as commodity in the sexual marketplace. She seduces gullible men into purchasing a non-existent product, not her body, but the illusion of virginity and first conquest of undiscovered territory: the imperial myth (dis)embodied.

The disguised body of the black woman is oftentimes displayed with similar cunning in contemporary Jamaican dancehall culture. The fantastic dress code of the dancehall is the visualisation of a distinctive cultural style that allows

women the liberty to demonstrate the seductive appeal of the imaginary – and their own bodies. Transparent bedroom undergarments become street wear, like the emperor’s new clothes. And who dares say that the body is naked? Only the naive. In the dancehall world of make-believe, old roles can be contested and new identities assumed. The elaborate styling of both hair and clothes and the dangerous bleaching of the skin are permissive expressions of the pleasures of disguise.

Indeed, everyday Jamaican dancehall culture permits the black majority to enjoy the pleasures of release from the prison of identity that limits the definition of the person to one’s social class and colour. There are, it is all too true, profound psycho-sociological underpinnings of this desire to be/play the other that cannot be simply written off as mere entertainment. Role-play both conceals and reveals deep-seated anxieties about the body which has been incised with the scarifications of history.

The dancehall thus constitutes a paradoxical social space in which race as a marker of identity is contested and sexuality, especially that of the woman, is celebrated with abandon. This affirmation of the pleasures of the body, though often misunderstood as a devaluation of female sexuality, is an assertion of control: ‘Me Know No Law, Me Know No Sin.’ Woman as sexual being claims the right to sexual pleasure as an essential sign of her identity.

The flamboyantly exhibitionist DJ Lady Saw epitomises the sexual liberation of

Carolyn Cooper

many African-Jamaican women from restrictive Judaeo-Christian definitions of appropriate female behaviour. She embodies the erotic. But one viewer’s erotica is the other’s pornography. So Lady Saw is usually censured for being

‘Me Know No Law, Me Know No Sin.’ far too loose – or ‘slack,’ in the Jamaican vernacular. In an act of feminist emancipation Lady Saw renounces the demands of moral guardianship. Her erotic performance in the dancehall can be recontextualised within a decidedly African diasporic discourse as a manifestation of the spirit of female fertility figures such as the Yoruba Oshun. In Jamaica, Oshun reappears as the River Mumma of folklore and religion, both myal and revival.2 Lady Saw’s brilliant lyrics, reinforced by her compelling body language, articulate

a potent message about sexuality, gender politics and the right to public space in Jamaica. She is a woman who knows the power of her own sex appeal. As an entertainer, she fully understands the function of performance as a strategy for masking the self. She unambiguously declares, ‘Lady Saw is an act.’ Distinguishing between her job and her identity, she claims a private space that allows her the freedom to escape her public image: ‘I’m a nice girl. When I’m working, you know, just love it or excuse it.’

Daughter of Promise, Mother of the Sweet Waters.

It is from your throbbing Womb that the rhythm of Music springs.

It is from your bouncing Breasts that Dance is born.3

Indeed, erotic disguise extends beyond the dress codes and roleplay of the celebrants in the dancehall. It encompasses the cunning strategies employed by outspoken women like Lady Saw who declare subtle truths about their society. In the spirit of Oshun, River Mumma, Lady Saw cuts loose from the boundaries that would contain her. She is river of sensuality running free: Iyalode Oshun, Goddess of the River,

3. Luisah Teish, ‘Daughter of Promise: Oriki

1. See Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, London: Macmillan, 1993, 19-36.

2. I am indebted to L’Antoinette Stines, Yoruba Priestess and Artistic Director of the L’Acadco Dance Company, for this insight.

Oshun,’ Carnival of the Spirit, San Francisco: Harper, 1994, 75.

Carolyn Cooper is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica.

She can be contacted at ccooper@uwimona.edu.jm

Congratulations Els Mulder, Senior Project Officer at ISS, is to receive an award from the University of the West Indies for her role in the ISS/UWI Project Teaching and Research in Women and Development Studies. The award is seen as recognition of the contribution of ISS and the Dutch government to the project, and of Els Mulder’s ‘professionalism, help and support over the two phases of the project’. The award is to be presented at the 10th Anniversary Conference of the

Centre for Gender and Development Studies to be held at UWI Mona Campus, Jamaica, at the end of August. At the Conference, the theme of which is ‘Gender in the 21st Century: Perspectives, Visions and Possibilities, Ms Mulder will give a talk on the history of the project, the roles played by ISS and key UWI figures.

Els Mulder can be contacted at mulder@iss.nl

8 / ALUMNI NEWS

ALUMNI NEWS

Alumni News

Alumni News News from Alumni Associations

Profile

Reflections on ISS K. Mensa-Bonsu Ghanaian Ambassador to Togo

ISS is pursuing an active alumni policy. ISS alumni associations can play a crucial role in creating strong ties, leading to various forms of cooperation of benefit to both parties.

This section contains news on the setting up of new ISS Alumni Associations in the Philippines and Uganda, and on the strengthening of our ties with ISS alumni in Syria. The ISS Alumni Associations cooperate closely with Netherlands Alumni Associations, which are supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

THE PHILIPPINES

I participated in the Postgraduate Diploma Course in International Relations and Development (IRD) at ISS from September 1986 - April 1987. Although, I had previously studied at two major universities in Europe, not to mention that of my own country, I found ISS to be an institution with a difference.

My first impression of the Institute was formed at Schiphol Airport. I arrived there with two other participants from Ghana. At the airport to welcome us was a smiling delegation of three students from the ISS students’ association SCHOLAS, including the Secretary. They took us by train to The Hague and to our respective hostels. The following morning, we were assisted through the registration process.

Later, I joined other Netherlands Government Fellowship holders for a briefing session.

My second impression was formed by the international and intercultural nature of the Institute, among both the staff and the participants. It seemed as if the whole world was represented there. The fourteen participants on the IRD course came from as many as eight different countries and five continents: Ghana, Nigeria and former Zaire in Africa; Peru (2) and Argentina in South America; Nepal, Philippines (2) and Thailand (4) in Asia; and Yugoslavia in Europe. Many other countries were represented in the other Diploma and Masters courses.

The intercultural nature of the Institute was especially pronounced on the annual cultural night when participants dressed in their traditional national costumes and performed cultural dances and other activities.

I had many other impressions of ISS, but since they are well known I will not dwell on them. I must, however, mention the last one, which I formed after I left the Institute. I became aware of the deep interest the Institute takes in its alumni, through the regular provision of Development Issues and invitations to continuing seminars and courses to update their knowledge. I was amazed when in 1999, twelve years

after I had left the Institute, I received an invitation to attend a seminar on Democratisation, Human Rights and Good Governance in Africa being organised in Malawi by ISS. It was a very useful topic dealing with issues of immense relevance to Africa and I looked forward to meeting other alumni and sharing ideas with them. Unfortunately, I could not attend the seminar due to communication difficulties between Southern and West Africa.

I cannot conclude without reference to the IRD course itself, with its unique blend of foundation and theme courses and seminars, which also allowed participants to sit in on other courses. I benefited a lot from this arrangement and took part in most of the lectures in the related course on International Law and Organisation for Development.

I equally benefited from the useful field trips to Brussels, Rome and Berlin.

These courses and the experience I gained at ISS have been very useful to me as foundation stones in my new position as Ghanaian Ambassador to Togo. I remain grateful to ISS and to the Netherlands Government, which provided a fellowship so that I was able to participate in the IRD course.

K. Mensa - Bonsu can be contacted at ghmfa01@cafe.tg or ghmfa01@1aposte.tg

Sixty-eight Filipino ISS alumni were present at the Philippine Stock Exchange Centre on 23 April 2003 at a meeting to set up an official Filipino ISS Alumni Association. ISS would like to thank in particular Marcelina Bacani, Romulo Neri and Ave Rodriguez-Baxa, whose organisational talents and efforts made this gathering so successful.

After a welcome word, Aveline Baxa read a message from the ISS Dean. This was followed by a speech by Mr Ric Hettinga, the representative of the Dutch Ambassador. Finally, a core group of six alumni were chosen to work out the Association’s bye-laws and work plan. During the dinner, an ISS promotional video was shown and ISS memorabilia were given to selected awardees. ISS wishes the new Filipino ISS Alumni Association a long life, and hopes to receive a work plan with interesting suggestions for closer cooperation in the near future.

Mrs. Marcelina Bacani can be contacted at mebacani@neda.gov.ph

Prof. Mohamed Salih

materials and in the ISS video. We wish Dr Duistermaat and the Dutch Embassy success in promoting a strong and vibrant Netherlands Alumni Association in Syria. ISS was pleased to receive an invitation from Dr Duistermaat to organise lectures by ISS staff at the Dutch Institute for Academic Studies in the near future.

Syrian students who are interested in studying at ISS can obtain promotional materials from promotions@iss.nl or alumni@iss.nl, or from the Dutch Institute in Damascus Dr. Kim Duistermaat can be contacted at naid@scs-net.org

SYRIA

UGANDA

On 24 June, thanks to the wonderful hospitality and organisational abilities of Dr Kim Duistermaat of the Dutch Institute for Academic Studies, ISS was able to invite its ISS Syrian alumni to a guest lecture in the country. Professor Mohamed Salih spoke on higher education in the Netherlands and on the wide range of teaching programmes ISS has to offer future Syrian students. ISS was pleased to welcome such a mixed audience: ISS alumni and members of the Dutch Netherlands Alumni Association, Ms E. Tonckes of the Dutch Embassy, and representatives from ministries, higher educational institutes and international organisations.

The Ugandan ISS Alumni Association has been set up on 25 July 2003. More details in the next Development ISSues.

Contact: Paulo Kyama (paolot.kyama@fmcmofted.co.ug)

The purpose of the ISS visit to Syria was to renew contacts between the Institute and its Syrian alumni and to attract future students.

Those present showed a great interest in the promotional

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10 / JAN TINBERGEN AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

JAN TINBERGEN AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Jan Tinbergen and Economic Development The Highest Priority

THE FIRST CONFRONTATION In 1951, while visiting India at the invitation of the International Statistical Institute, Jan Tin-bergen was shocked at the poverty he saw in New Delhi and Calcutta: ‘Although in Holland we had been hungry during 1944-1945, the last winter of occupation by Hitler’s army, the poverty prevailing in India – as a normal situation – was such a contrast that it redirected my thinking and main activities.’1

Jan Tinbergen

This year is the centenary of the birth of Nobel Prize-

In 1955 Tinbergen left the Central Planning Bureau in The Hague, of which he had been the director since the end of World War II. His part-time professorship at the Netherlands School of Economics was converted into a full-time one, offering ample possibilities for research. This enabled him to contribute to economic development in poor countries – for him, the highest priority from a humanitarian viewpoint.

PROFESSOR JAN TINBERGEN Jan Tinbergen was awarded the first Nobel Prize in economics in 1969, together with Ragnar Frisch. In his presentation speech, Professor Erik Lundberg praised the two men for aiming ‘to lend economic theory mathematical stringency and to render it in a form that permits quantification and a statistical testing of hypotheses.’

winner for Economics, Professor Jan Tinbergen. To mark this anniversary, a former student and research assistant of Tinbergen, Dr Jacob Kol of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, looks at his contribution to the field of economic development.

In addition to being a prominent scholar, Tinbergen held many executive and advisory positions. He worked for a time at the League of Nations, was Director of the Dutch government’s Central Planning Bureau, and advised governments and international organisations. He also published dozens of books and hundreds of articles.

Professor Tinbergen became one of the Institute of Social Studies’ first Honorary Fellows, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1962. He died in 1994.

It was not for the first time that Jan Tinbergen had changed the course of his career on humanitarian grounds. In 1929, whilst studying at Leiden University, the living conditions of the city’s poor prompted him to switch from physics to economics. He went on to design policies to counter cyclical movements in the economy. Until then, economics had been mostly theoretical and speculative, and not very suited to policy-making.

Tinbergen transformed theoretical insights into mathematical relationships and models, and confronted these with observations in reality. This made effective policy-making possible and, in his own words, made economics ‘mature’.

Tinbergen applied his approach to many areas: business cycles, economic policy in general, economic integration, income distribution, economic development, and the economic order, nationally and internationally.2 It met with scepticism in many quarters, including from Keynes. But later on, his approach was more widely adopted and resulted in 1969 in him being awarded the first Nobel Prize in Economics, together with the Norwegian economist R. Frisch.

THE DESIGN OF DEVELOPMENT In 1955, at the request of the World Bank, Tinbergen wrote a general guideline on policies for economic improvements for poor countries: The Design of Development.3 Publication of this booklet was held up for nearly three years, as some of Tinbergen’s recommendations were not favourably received, especially those on the leading role of the public sector in economic development.

In ‘The Design of Development’, Tinbergen formulated four principle objectives for economic development: 1. To create the general conditions favourable to development; 2. To acquaint the government itself, the business community and the general public with the potentialities and advantages of development; 3. To make a number of investments, usually of a ‘basic’ type;

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4. To take measures designed to facilitate and stimulate private activity and investment.

The study described how realistic targets can be set for economic development, and how the instruments of economic policy should be identified to attain these targets. It specified criteria for economic evaluation of government investments and methods for exploring, appraising and stimulating private investment. Lastly, it discussed the dividing line between public and private economic activity. According to Tinbergen, the government had the following tasks in the economic field: 1. To create and maintain healthy monetary conditions, including low inflation; 2. To regulate the degree of activity so as to avoid mass unemployment; 3. To correct for extreme inequalities in income distribution; 4. To supplement private activity in certain basic fields where for one reason or another that activity falls short of meeting legitimate requirements.

The details of development policy, Tinbergen observed, will vary with the structure of the country’s economy, as determined by its natural resources, climate and geographical situation, as well as with temporary bottlenecks that may arise, including in particular the quality of the administrative apparatus.

PLANNING IN STAGES ‘The Design of Development’ was followed by publications on ‘Planning in Stages’.4 Tinbergen’s idea was that planning for economic development should have three phases: a macro phase, a sector phase, and a micro or project phase.

In the macro phase, a number of economy-wide variables should be determined: the overall growth rate, investments and savings. The sector phase had to specify these macro variables in terms of sectoral development, giving priority to sectors that could be expected continued on next page

12 / JAN TINBERGEN AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

to contribute most to economic development. This would provide the framework for the micro phase, where projects were to be identified, evaluated and prioritised. The procedure allowed for consistency between the various phases.

too much on disciplines less relevant to economic development, Tinbergen looked at how to determine the mix of human skills needed for development.

Such an approach is still very recommendable, also in rich countries.

Many people believe that

THE DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE NORM In the 1970s the UN declared that the rich countries should transfer 0.7% of their GDP to developing countries in the form of development assistance. Tinbergen was critical of the norm, claiming that it was not clear on what it was based.6 He proposed any such norm should be dependent on the relative wealth of each donor country and the degree and speed of reduction of the income gap between the rich and poor countries.

Tinbergen went on to design a world economic model to calculate how long it would take for equality in wealth to be attained between the rich and poor countries, at the then average rate of transfer of GDP of 0.35%. This period turned out to be 500 years. To reduce the North-South income gap in a more acceptable period of time would therefore require much larger development transfers. This could well be as high as 25% of GDP, a figure clearly outside the realms of political reality. The figure underlined however the seriousness of the development gap. This at a time when rich countries were spending around 25% of their GDP on keeping income distribution at home tolerable.

That begged the question why solidarity should stop at national borders.

the concept of planning is no longer relevant since the fall of the Berlin Wall The quality of projects might, for example, not sustain the growth rate established in the macro phase. An iterative procedure would then harmonise the outcomes of the various phases.

Many people believe that the concept of planning is no longer relevant since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is wrong: the 1990s proved only that complete central planning cannot cater for the needs of a growing economy. But planning as an instrument of economic policy complementing market forces is widely applied, by both governments and multinational corporations. And with increasing technological capabilities the need for planning will increase. A good illustration of this is the quotas imposed by the EU to protect fish stocks. Overfishing has only become a problem as huge trawlers have replaced the smaller fishing boats of the past.

THE ROLE OF EDUCATION Tinbergen noted that one of the clearest characteristics of underdevelopment is capital scarcity. With physical capital so visibly in short supply in underdeveloped countries, it is understandable that early theories gave a central place to the need to expand the stock of capital goods in these countries.

Later, when it was realised that scarcity of human capital was another important obstacle to economic development, Tinbergen investigated how best to redirect schooling systems to facilitate the development process. This led him to devise an educational planning model, based on the three levels of schooling, which included coefficients for intake, failure to pass and graduation at all levels, and distinguished between disciplines.5 Next, given the fact that many developing countries had a tendency to focus

FOR AND AGAINST

during its still short history, development strategy had been subject to an intensive learning process.8 This can be seen in the attempt to shift to other activities so as to avoid repeating previous mistakes and to fight negative forces blocking the road toward higher prosperity, in this case the well-being of the poor masses in the Third World.

Some of the clearly negative forces we are facing, Tinbergen continued, are ignorance in many forms, short-sightedness (such as narrow nationalism), polarisation (which often implies a waste of energy), and cynicism (which discourages action).

The learning process included a shift from an exclusive focus on the creation and transfer of physical capital to that of human capital, and from employment creation in cities to its creation in rural areas. Another lesson was to recognise the role of both self-regulatory markets and market regulation, depending on whether markets are stable or not. An ideological stance on these issues was not very productive.

Finally, Tinbergen pointed out that in the 1950s, development cooperation was seen as an act of idealism, but gradually the developed countries realised that it was also in their own long-term interests.

The tragedy is, Tinbergen concluded, that this down-to-earth view is not shared by the short-sighted politicians that we elect.

Dr Kol can be contacted at kol@few.eur.nl 1 J. Tinbergen (1984), Development Cooperation as a Learning Process, in: G.M. Meyer and D. Seers

Oxford, pp. 315-331.

2 This article focuses on economic development.

For an overview of Professor Tinbergen’s work see J. Kol (ed.), Jan Tinbergen: The Centennial Volume, Erasmus University, 2003. For an inspirational account of the present day significance of

DEVELOPMENT AID SHOULD BE ABOLISHED In this first ‘For and Against’, we would like to engage in a discussion that has been going on recently in the Dutch media, about the value of development aid. The proposition, ‘Development aid should be abolished’, was the title of an article by Professor P.C. Emmer of the University of Leiden, published in the NRC Handelsblad in February. Professor Emmer here presents the ‘For’ argument. The ‘Against’ argument is presented by Professor J.B. Opschoor, Rector of the Institute of Social Studies.

For Development aid, like hot snow or dry rain does not exist. Development and aid are two separate things and the history of the past fifty years has shown that they have nothing in common.

Giving aid might reduce poverty, starvation and hunger, but it will not trigger off an economy producing long term, self-sustaining growth.

There are a few exceptions where the rate of development has indeed been increased dramatically by large-scale money transfers, notably the Marshall Aid to Europe after WWII and the industrial take-off of Asian countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia.

However, the lack of growth in most low-income countries during the last fifty years has shown that aid and development have nothing in common.

Why then should the rich countries continue to give development aid? Humanitarian aid must remain, but we should no longer harbour the illusion that by giving aid we will obtain sustained economic growth. In order to imitate the growth rates of the Industrial Revolution in the West, only an innovative elite in combination with a period of free trade and free migration can make the input of foreign money effective.

Long-term growth is best served by using Western aid at home in order to pay for a restructuring of the economies of the rich countries and to make them ready for the entry of produce, services and temporary labour migrants from outside. That will bring about real growth. After more than fifty years of negative experience, the West should give up the illusion that aid and development are linked.

Tinbergen’s vision, see J.P. Pronk, Jan Tinbergen, Inspirator and Idealist, Address at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 9 April 2003.

3 J. Tinbergen (1958), The Design of Development, The Economic Development Institute, IBRD (World Bank), The John Hopkins Press, Baltimore.

Professor P.C. Emmer, Department of History, University of Leiden. Email: p.c.emmer@let.leidenuniv.nl

Against It is widely accepted that the abolition of trade barriers offer some countries better opportunities to develop economically, resulting in many more benefits than they have acquired from all development aid now and in the past. But stimulating economic growth in developing countries requires more than opening up markets in the North. It demands the accumulation of financial resources in the broadest sense. Domestic savings have to be stimulated, domestic companies must be given the opportunity to grow and foreign companies must invest in the country.

Foreign direct investment – which by far exceeds total development aid – only reaches a limited number of developing countries and their inhabitants. In addition, the crushing debt burden of the poorest countries in particular must be reduced or removed altogether. This requires a development strategy based on a wide package of funding sources, and the role of development aid in this whole is far from played out.

Development is far more than just a matter of stimulating economic growth. It also means creating more jobs and combating poverty. It is concerned with a fairer distribution of the wealth created by development and with sustainable development. The latter is more than just economic in scope, also encompassing the social and ecological aspects of development. ‘More market’ at best increases efficiency and thereby growth, but does not inherently devote attention to the wider problem.

This is not to deny that development aid is open to a great deal of criticism. Funds can end up in the wrong hands, projects do not get off the ground or implode after a good start. There is a risk of dependency. But that is only part of the story. Serious studies have shown that development funds invested in economies with a reasonable institutional structure can make a significant contribution to economic growth. And where that structure is not yet in place, aid funds can help to strengthen in.

4 See, among others, J. Tinbergen (1962), Planning in Stages, Statsekonomisk Tidsskrift, No. 1, pp. 1-20.

5 H. Correa and J. Tinbergen (1962), Quantitative

Professor J. B. Opschoor, ISS. Email: opschoor@iss.nl

Adaptation of Education to Accelerated Growth, Kyklos, Vol. 15, pp. 776-786.

6 J. Tinbergen (1990), World Security and Equity,

A LEARNING PROCESS In 1984, looking back on 30 years of experience, Tinbergen observed that,

For and Against

(eds.), Pioneers in Development: a World Bank Research Publication, Oxford University Press,

Tinbergen also compared expenditure on development aid and on defence,7 and concluded that, in terms of the postulated targets for the world economy: growth, equity and safety, there was clear overspending on aggressive armament and underspending on development transfers.

This approach was typical of Jan Tinbergen’s work from the beginning.

Explicit formulation of targets, using a mathematical model based on realistic data to arrive at numerical conclusions, such as the number and size of the appropriate instruments, ensures a constructive approach towards systematic policy-making which is still relevant today.

/ 13

Edward Elgar, Aldershot, UK. 7 J. Tinbergen (1990), op. cit.

8 J. Tinbergen (1984), op. cit.

‘For and Against’ is a new feature that we would like to publish in DevISSues on an occasional basis. It will consist of a proposition relating to a topical issue in development and an argument for and against by two contributors. The arguments will not take the form of a response to each other, but will stand alone. They will be short, sharp and to the point and are intended to provoke further, more detailed debate. The editors therefore welcome reactions from readers.

14 / INTERVIEW DR SYED MANSOOB MURSHED

INTERVIEW DR SYED MANSOOB MURSHED

‘When There is War, the Global System Protests’

Queen Beatrix and Princess Máxima at the inauguration of Dr. Murshed at the University of Utrecht.

Interview Dr Syed Mansoob Murshed

On 6 March 2003, Dr Syed Mansoob Murshed was inaugurated as the first holder of the Prince Claus chair at the University of Utrecht, in the presence of Queen Beatrix and Princess Máxima. Dr Murshed, from Bangladesh, was nominated for the chair for his work in the field of trade and liberalisation, peace and conflict management in relation to economic development. He is currently a member of the academic staff at the Institute of Social Studies, which created the chair jointly with the University of Utrecht. Dr Murshed talked to Heiko Jessayan.

‘It took me a while to get used to the Netherlands,’ says Dr Murshed. ‘Especially the directness of the people. But what I admire is their tolerance. There is no country in the world as free as the Netherlands. I’m especially impressed by Article 1 of the Constitution, which forbids discrimination.’ Murshed does not give himself much time to acclimatise. He flies up and down between the Netherlands

and Birmingham, where his partner works with mentally handicapped people.

‘I met her in Ireland,’ he says.

‘Sometimes I go over there at the weekend, and sometimes she comes here.’

Murshed went to study at the London School of Economics when he was 18, and has stayed in Europe ever since. He mainly focuses on global economic issues,

such as globalisation. He says that globalisation is currently in an impasse, and draws parallels between the demonstrations against the war in Iraq and the state of the global economy.

‘War is an old-fashioned solution. When we resort to war, you can ask yourself what the value is of an international marketplace. At the moment there is considerable confusion and lack of order in the international community. I see that as a psychological response, with an implied protest. Apparently financial markets have an aversion to war: share prices fall, investors become uncertain, oil prices rise, banks take refuge in gold, the dollar is exchanged for the euro or, in the absence of any other hard currency, the Swiss franc. The global system protests. War is not an incentive to economic growth. And certainly not for developing countries.’

Over the years, Murshed has become more interested in development issues, especially in conflict situations, than in the globalisation of the economy as

such. ‘I have inherited that interest from my father, who was a lawyer and a judge. He made me aware of the importance of freedom and human rights. I think that is more important than globalisation of the economy.’

Murshed has a clear perspective in the notion of development, a notion that has itself developed over time. ‘The concept of development has actually completely disappeared. It was first seen as a necessity, especially after decolonialisation. After that, aid was provided to prevent poverty from getting out of hand and to avoid large-scale humanitarian disasters. Now it has acquired a security aspect and has become more a matter of containment.

This dates back further than 11 September, to the time of Ronald Reagan.

Development gradually disappeared from the international agenda and was replaced by security concerns, particularly for the West.’

And there, Murshed notes wryly, lies a serious inconsistency. ‘Because of a lack of development, security aspects are actually neglected.’ He sees this inconsistency also in the way in which the international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO, approach development. ‘These institutions are not at all democratic.

They represent no one except themselves. They remind me of ancient Athens under Pericles, where women, slaves and immigrants were excluded from the decision-making process.’

never be feasible in developed countries. Let me give three examples: first of all, in the EU and the US, protection of the weak in society is regulated by law and is embedded in their budget policies. The industrialised countries devote around 40% of the gross domestic product to public spending. You cannot just remove that safety net. Yet the World Bank and the IMF demand that countries with a much smaller GDP roll back their government spending.’

‘Secondly, the way central banks respond to financial crises: in rich countries, they lower interest rates, while the IFIs advise developing countries to raise interest rates in times of crisis. Thirdly, protectionism in the form of subsidies and other instruments of trade policy.

These measures are used in the rich OECD countries to protect their markets from goods exported by developing countries. But at the same time, these countries are told that they would be better off removing all their own trade barriers.’

What Murshed finds really unacceptable is the TRIPS Agreement, which regulates trade-regulated intellectual ownership rights within the WTO. Because it provides increased patent protection for pharmaceutical products, the agreement makes it difficult for poor countries to develop their own medicines and pushes up the prices of protected drugs. This constitutes an obstacle for millions of people who seek access to cheap medicines to treat HIV-AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

/ 15

agreement. It is complex, bizarre and Kafkaesque. It serves the commercial interests of the developed countries.

TRIPS is anti-development. It is bad.

Look at the WTO negotiations. In Doha, in Qatar, in 2001, the poor countries were promised access to cheap medicines. But the patents were not opened up. Monopoly rights were intended to be temporary, not permanent. In this way, you deny countries the right to determine their own development.

During the Cold War, such a situation would not have been possible. During that period, South Korea succeeded in developing itself from a very poor country to one of the world’s richest. It is very cynical to speak of the Doha development round.’

Nevertheless, Murshed holds out some hope for the Doha negotiations.

‘Developing countries are no longer divided and isolated. They are making an increasing effort within the WTO to work together to present a united front.

This makes it less easy for the US and the EU to get their own way. You can see that in the tactics of large countries like India and Brazil. And the admission of China to the organisation has resulted in a completely different balance of power. That makes the decision-making process in the “Green Rooms”, where the US and the European Commission used to divide up the bounty from the negotiations, increasingly a thing of the past. In that respect, the WTO is looking more and more like a genuine multilateral organisation, unlike the UN Security Council or the World Bank.

And that is what I would like to see: international institutions that are a representative and democratic reflection of the people of the world.’ * This article is based on an interview by Heiko Jessayan originally published in the Dutch daily newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad

Dr Murshed’s inaugural speech as first holder of the Prince Claus chair, entitled ‘The Decline of the Development Contract and the Development of Violent Internal Conflict’, is available from Utrecht University. To order a copy, please contact j.sutorius@econ.uu.nl and quote ISBN 90-393-3401-3. Dr Murshed can be

‘The policies imposed by these institutions on developing countries would

Murshed: ‘The developing countries did not realise the implications of the

contacted at murshed@iss.nl

1 6 / M A R I A N N E N O LT E

M A R I A N N E N O LT E

the Islamists staged a coup to prevent the Sharia laws from being repealed.

Sudan- A Plethora of Political Parties

RESORT TO ARMS In the-mid 1960s, several regional and ethnically based political formations emerged. When peaceful advocacy failed to sensitise successive central governments, several of these groups transformed themselves into armed movements, encouraged by the example of the SPLA in the South. Some of these groups, such as the regional movements in the Nuba Mountains, Southern Blue Nile regions and Abyei, became integral parts of the SPLA.

Marianne Nolte

The long-running conflict in Sudan between the government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) continues to dominate the political playing field in the country. The conclusion of a peace agreement has been further delayed after talks early in July made little progress. A plethora of political parties in the country do not take part in the peace talks, but do what they can to influence their outcome.

Marianne Nolte looks at the history of the various political parties in Sudan and how they are trying to bring the conflict to an end.

In May of this year, the leaders of the SPLM/A and the two main opposition parties met in Egypt for talks and issued the ‘Cairo Declaration’. The declaration stated that ‘an agreement on the capital city, which is national and treats all religions and beliefs as equal, is an indispensable necessity for the preservation of our country’s unity on a new basis’.

This led to angry protests from the ruling National Congress Party as the position of the Government is that Islamic Sharia law should apply to the capital after the conclusion of a peace agreement. In addition to the SPLA, the parties that signed the agreement were the Umma (Hizb al-Umma) and the Democratic Unionist Party (al-Hizb al-Ittihadi al-Dimuqrati). These two parties were the first to hold power in Khartoum, through coalitions with other parties, after Sudan gained its independence in 1956. Umma and the DUP traditionally draw their constituencies from the leading religious Sufi sects in the country, which espouse a mild and tolerant form of Islam. Over the years, they have been joined by a wide range of other parties across the political spectrum. At one end is the National Congress Party (Hizb al Mu’tamar al-Watani), formerly the National Islamic Front, which is rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood Movement and adheres to a militant form of political Islam. At the other end is a cluster of small ideological leftist and Arab natio-

nalist parties, including the Communist Party of Sudan, once the the largest and best organised communist party in the Middle East and Africa.

Both the leftist and Arab nationalist groups and the radical Islamist movement have historically drawn their followers from modern urban elites. During Sudan’s brief democratic interludes, both groups sought to exert pressure on Umma and the DUP by mobilising militant student and trade union movements. They have also covertly cultivated Sudan’s professional army, the Sudan Peoples Armed Forces.

The role of religion in the state has been a major contentious issue throughout Sudanese political life. Leftist and liberal forces supported the 1969 military takeover by General Nimeiry, because the elected parliament was about to adopt an Islamic constitution. After initial opposition, the Islamist movement reconciled with the Nimeiry regime and, in 1983, the Sharia laws were introduced. This, however, was one of the leading causes of the popular uprising that ousted the Nimeiry regime in 1985. In the democratic period that followed, the ruling traditional parties gradually became convinced that repeal of the Sharia laws was the only means to end the civil war with Southern Sudan. But on 30 June 1989, as the government prepared to convene,

After the military takeover in 1989, the NIF banned all political parties. In January 1999, now renamed National Congress, it introduced the Law on the Regulation of Tawali, which allowed political parties to register once again.

In his 1999 report, the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Sudan reviewed this law: ‘Section 3 of this law reads that every association in political movement must adhere to the ideology of al Ingaz (Salvation: this is the term the regime uses for itself. MN). Thus this provision requires that all political parties must agree to adhere to the ideology of the ruling party in order to be registered.’

A new Political Parties and Organisations Law was introduced in February 2000, permitting parties to exist without the registration requirement. However, if they want to participate in elections, they must register under the same conditions as set down in the Tawali law.

In the South, the SPLM dominates politically as well as militarily. In addition, there are several parties representing the interests of Southern Sudanese in the North.

The Alliance of Democratic Forces, of which the human rights activist Ghazi Suleiman is the Secretary General, campaigns for the unity of the Sudan and draws its members from both Northern and Southern Sudan.

In 1989 political parties opposed to the government, along with trades unions, officers of the Sudanese Armed Forces, several armed factions and individual personalities, signed the Charter of the National Democratic Alliance, in effect a coalition of forces opposed to the government. Mohammed Osman

al-Mirghani, the leader of the DUP, became the president of the NDA, which established its headquarters in Asmara, Eritrea.

The NDA’s strategy is to combine military and political means to oppose the government. The SPLM/A signed an agreement with the Alliance in March 1990 to restore democracy and in 1996 a unified NDA command was formed, resulting in the opening of a second front in Eastern Sudan and a third one in Southern Blue Nile. In 2002, after being excluded from peace talks sponsored by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the NDA attempted to underscore its relevance by increasing military activity in Eastern Sudan.

DEFECTION AND FACTIONALISM The National Congress has employed several strategies to counter the NDA and to break the unity between the northern opposition and the SPLA. Combining incentives, in the form of limited power-sharing arrangements, and pressures, such as confiscation of property and sustained security crackdowns on militants, the NC has persuaded splinter groups of the two main traditional parties to defect. It has also co-opted breakaway factions of the SPLM/A. Some two dozen armed wings of southern political groupings have been integrated into the Southern Sudan Defence Forces, which operate as a de facto reserve force for the national army.

National Congress too has suffered from factionalism. In 2000 the long-time covert struggle between the party’s mainstream, represented by President al-Bashir and supported by the military, and Professor Hassan al-Turabi, the spiritual leader and organisational architect of the rise of the Islamist movement to power, finally broke into the open. Turabi and his followers pushed for a gradual return to a form of civilian constitutional rule, but the NC’s mainstream saw the proposed reforms as potentially threatening to the party’s hold on power. Turabi and his followers went on to form the Popular National Congress. One of the PNC’s main initiatives was to sign an agreement with the SPLA in February 2001, in which they agreed to coordinate their efforts to topple the government through nonviolent means. The government responded by placing Turabi under house arrest and by repeatedly detai-

/ 17

ning PNC militants. It has also banned the PNC’s official newspaper and continues to deny the party the limited freedoms of association and expression that are currently available to other opposition parties.

PEACE PROCESS However, Sudan’s peace process, which was jump-started by the Danforth Initiatives in the Nuba Mountains region in 2001 and received an extra boost in mid-2002 in the ongoing IGAD-led talks, has gradually become the most decisive driving force determining the political dynamics of the country. The peace process is structured along the North-South paradigm, with the government and the SPLA as the sole participants. The NDA and the northern opposition forces are pressing hard to be included in the process. They argue that only the broadest possible participation in the negotiations will guarantee the stability of any agreement.

Regional groupings fighting for a greater share of political power and wealth for the peripheral regions and marginalised communities of Sudan have also opposed the bipolar structure of the talks. The IGAD mediators and other international facilitators have accommodated the demands of these groups by prevailing on the government to allow parallel negotiations on the three contested areas of Abyei, Nuba Mountains, and Southern Blue Nile. This has encouraged other regional groups, for example from Eastern Sudan and Darfur, to intensify their political and military pressure on the government to be included in the peace process.

Although the majority of political parties in Sudan are excluded from the formal peace process, they have a prominent role to play in the country’s future. Free elections are a central component of the sixyear interim period that will follow the signing of a peace agreement and will prepare Sudan for democracy. Despite its periods of military rule, Sudan has a rich history of political and civil society activism.

Critics argue however that, for democracy to be sustainable in a post conflict situation in the Sudan, issues like factionalism and lack of internal democracy in political parties urgently need to be addressed.

Marianne Nolte works as a conflict analyst for the office of the UN Resident Coordinator in the Sudan.

She can be contacted at mnoltenl@yahoo.com

18

19

Book launch

In Memoriam: Dr Nguyen Ngoc Luu

Transition, Institutions, and the Rural Sector More than ten years after the collapse of the USSR, in December 1991, a critical review is warranted of the transition experience in Eastern Europe (the CEE and FSU) in terms of its impact on institutions and markets, in particular with regard to the – often ignored – agricultural and rural sector. Macro policies have focused on market and price liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation, although the latter has taken a myriad of forms when it concerns land.

However, the real ‘Achilles heel’ in transition strategies towards the rural sector has been the issue of missing markets and institutions. While original expectations were focused on the positive effects of price and market liberalisation, very little attention was given to the buildup of markets and their corresponding institutions. Various unexpected phenomena, such as increased barter trade, regional self-sufficiency tendencies, dependency on household plot production, and stagnation in the emergence of a viable commercial and peasant farm agriculture, can be observed. The dramatic state of the agricultural (and rural) sector in quite a number of transition countries is such that lessons have to be drawn from transition policies and their impact.

The volume Transition, Institutions, and the Rural Sector presents state of the art work in the field of rural transformation in the ‘transition economies,’ bringing together papers written by renowned scholars in the field of agrarian transition (Childress, Davis, Davidova, Ellman, Kandiyoti, Kopeva, Lerman, Serova and Swinnen) and a number of young researchers (Bezemer, Chaplin, Doichinova, Gorton, Pelkmans and Visser).

The book includes a number of analytical comparative studies focusing on the lessons to be drawn from transition, combined with unique case studies from various countries, such as Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, the Central Asian States and Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Uzbekistan, based on recent fieldwork. The papers were originally presented at a conference hosted by the Centre for the Study of Transition and Development (CESTRAD) at ISS in December 2001. With countries such as China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Mongolia, the Central and East European economies and the successor states of the FSU, there are nearly thirty transition economies in total, many of which can also be considered developing countries. Although the rural sector is important in most of them, and particularly in the Asian transition countries, it has nevertheless been the Cinderella of reform, the stepchild that did not receive adequate attention in the economic reforms. In the 1990s, reform was primarily directed towards macroeconomic stabilisation, the extractive industry, the finance sector and the restructuring of international trade. Lessons from the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences, which have a longer transition path, were paid insufficient attention, or were misinterpreted, as demonstrated through the expectation that by the mid-1990s a substantial part of

agricultural output in Russia would be produced by a thriving peasant sector.

MACRO-STABILISATION In the early 1990s, there was a tendency, supported by the mainstream ‘Washington Consensus’, to focus exclusively on macro-stabilisation, while the very important institutional dimension of the transition was underestimated or ignored.

Perhaps there was a naïve belief in the appearance of markets when these measures were implemented. And in fact, markets did appear, but often not in the forms the economics literature would have predicted, as many of them were inefficient, monopolistic, fragmented, operating with high transaction costs, and under strong political interference in combination with criminal influence over parts of marketing chains. Public and private institutions, understood as organisations that are essential for a working market economy, were weak and only slowly developing.

Institutions, understood as the ‘rules of the game’, building a new legislative framework with enforcement mechanisms, were even further away. Even though many countries produced large numbers of decrees and laws, most remained paper tigers, in the absence of enforcement mechanisms.

After more than a decade of policy reform and research in this field, a return to the blueprint approach of the early 1990s is to be avoided. The initial, nearly sacrosanct, belief in a rapid transformation overlooked or ignored the enormous institutional gap between the former centrally planned economies and the market economies that were to be constructed. It is now generally accepted that policy reforms need to be more focused on the building of public and private institutions, which will improve the working of markets. At the moment, markets clearly do not work in favour of small producers in rural areas. Land markets are very important, but rather than increasing the welfare of these farmers, they often bring greater insecurity. Rural financial services are even crucial, as they can provide the options for investments and the introduction of improved technology in farm production, while institutions that promote savings can contribute importantly to accumulation (as the Chinese experience has shown in terms of rural household savings).

Spoor, Max (2003). Transition, Institutions, and the Rural Sector (Lanham and Oxford: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers), 235 pages.

ISBN 0-7391-0546-9 (Cloth: US$65)

On 6 May, Dr Nguyen Ngoc Luu, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, passed away at the age of 61. Luu was a member of ISS Staff Group IV, ‘Rural Development, Environment and Population Studies’.

Luu taught at universities in Vietnam before he came to ISS as a student in 1974.

After obtaining the MA in Rural Development Studies with distinction, Luu started his work at ISS as an assistant to the late Dr David Baytelman in a research project on the World Food Programme. He also worked, with Ken Post, in research on Vietnam’s transition to socialism. Later on, he joined the teaching staff as a lecturer, first in the International Relations Diploma programme and later, as a senior lecturer, in the Rural Policy and Project Planning Diploma programme and the Agricultural and Rural Development specialisation of the MA programme.

Throughout his academic career Luu kept his focus on Vietnam, his home country. His dissertation, Peasants, Party and Revolution: The Politics of Agrarian Transformation in Northern Vietnam, 1930-1975, gave a careful analysis of the political changes in Vietnam in that period, changes that affected Luu’s personal life in a significant way. He defended the dissertation in 1987 and received a doctorate cum laude, a very rare distinction in the Netherlands. He published a number of important papers on agrarian reform and development in Vietnam.

In the late 1980s, Luu returned to Vietnam as member of important advisory missions organised by the UN and others. He was also involved in projects in the field of Forest Management (through the Tropenbos Foundation) and on training local government officials, and was advisor to the Vietnam-Netherlands Research Programme.

In the 1990s Luu was central in the conception and design, and later in the implementation, of the VietnamNetherlands Project for the MA in Development Economics.

This project, a collaboration between the National Economics University in Hanoi, the University of Economics in Ho Chi Minh City and ISS, set up an English-language MA programme in Development Economics in Vietnam and used this as a channel to introduce modern economics teaching and modern teaching methods into this transition economy. Luu was the resident ISS project leader in Hanoi between 1994 and 1998.

Luu was a true scholar in the Vietnamese tradition, with great dedication to his students. He is remembered as setting high standards for himself and for his students.

On 14 May, the ISS community came together with Luu’s

family at a memorial session at the Institute to commemorate Luu as a scholar, a colleague, a teacher and a friend.

Luu was a modest man, with dignity, tremendous courage, and a strong sense of duty to his family and to any task or challenge coming his way. We wish Luu’s family much strength in the difficult period ahead.

Dr Karel Jansen

To my dear Teacher, I was a Vietnamese student of Dr Luu for ten years. I remember him not just as the best teacher, but also a brilliant Vietnamese scholar and a very close elder brother and father.

In his life, I always respected him as a special Vietnamese teacher who had great love for his country. He usually told us that ‘As a Vietnamese, you should feel painful to wonder why Vietnam is so poor. What is your responsibility for Vietnam as an intellectual?’

This is the major message he wanted Vietnamese students to keep in their hearts and their minds forever. To him, it does not matter how many diplomas and academic certificates you receive. The most important thing he is concerned with is how you contribute to your country.

He has not just contributed to Vietnam by his teaching, but also by devoting his whole life to Vietnam’s educational development. He has trained and helped many generations of Vietnamese students to open up to the outside world. He has not just taught students, but also other teachers to teach students. We usually called him a teacher of teachers. I myself have become a teacher after learning from him. His students have played a very important role in the development process of Vietnam. We are very grateful to him for his contribution.

Vietnamese students also respect him as a very kind elder brother and father. He has not just been concerned with academic life, but also social and daily life. He spent most of his leisure time on understanding and helping students. I myself never saw him stop to help students.

Two weeks before he passed away, we visited his home. We asked him ‘What is your wish that we do?’ He still expressed his major concern about learning and the academic life of his students. He wanted us not just to learn advanced academic knowledge, but also elegant ways of life.

Although he has passed away, his teaching and his image will live forever in our hearts and our minds. To express our love and our respect to him, we will do our best to follow his guidance and teaching.

Mr Nguyen Manh Cuong PhD student

20 / AUMA OKWANY

AUMA OKWANY

PhD News

Reaching the Unreached: NGO Response to the Educational Marginalisation of Street Girls in Kenya Two-thirds of children out of school worldwide are girls. Although governments in many developing countries insist on the importance of investing in girls’ education, few have gone beyond the rhetoric. As a consequence, marginalised girls have been abandoned to non-governemental organisations, which have gained remarkable credibility as agencies of social assistance. In her thesis ‘Reaching the unreached: NGO response to the educational marginalisation of street girls in Kenya’, new ISS staff member Auma Okwany assesses the validity of this view of the role of NGOs in the specific case of street girls in Kenya.

Auma Okwany Despite the centrality of females in the slums as single parent heads of households and increasing visibility of girls on the streets, there is a dearth of programmes targeting girls relative to the abundance of programmes serving street boys. Street girls are thus doubly marginalised because they are both poor and female. Many are invisible to child welfare reformers because they are hidden in exploitative invisible labour (particularly domestic work and the commercial sex sectors). This invisibility worsens their marginalisation because they are ignored and do not receive policy support. The paucity of research literature on the plight and education of street girls further support these conclusions.

The study focused on the Undugu Basic Education Programme (UBEP) in Nairobi, which enjoys strong support and a sound reputation locally, nationally and internationally. UBEP is considered a successful model, exhibiting the best strategies not only in providing basic non-formal education to street children, but also in addressing youth unemployment by preparing them for entry into gainful employment or self-employment.

To examine how the programme is serving girls, Okwamy carried out a yearlong case study of the UBEP School located in Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa. Since the study aimed to redress the absence of street girls’ experiences and voices in

the literature, the methodology was premised on feminist epistemology and research methods, which are concerned with the historical patterns of overlooking and silencing women in research.

Multiple data sources – including group and individual interviews, observations to triangulate data, and documentary analysis – facilitated a rich description of the learning milieu, the programme practices, girls’ experiences and the institutional procedures of the school.

The data revealed that, while the programme is effectively providing for boys, there are serious doubts about the extent to which it is designed to serve girls’ specific needs. When the graduating class joined the programme there were 32 boys and 28 girls. Four years later in their final year, there were eighteen boys and one girl!

POWERFUL COALITION The main question addressed by the study was: why, in this best case, do girls remain unserved?

Okwany posits that the answer lies in a powerful coalition of interconnected issues: policy inertia, a dominant patriarchal ideology, economic and institutional constrains compounded by abject poverty.

This swamps best efforts like UBEP and renders them powerless to meet girls’

practical or strategic gender needs. The implication of the Kenyan educational situation for the poor is obvious.

Education creates opportunities but distributes them unevenly, because the gender and socioeconomic status of learners determine access to and continuation in public school. The high dropout rate for girls in in UBEP is a manifestation of female deprivation showing how gender interacts with poverty to disadvantage them. The social situation of urban poor girls is bleak and the predominant single-parent female-headed households in low-income locales like Kibera reflect the feminisation of poverty levels. Gender and visibility determine the manner in which street children are served, and thus girls’ educational and occupational aspirations are not adequately addressed. Clearly, there is insufficient understanding by programme planners and teachers of gender issues in curriculum and instruction.

The finding that girls continue to dropout of UBEP even when the direct costs of education that push many children out of formal schooling are eliminated is instructive. It casts doubts on the assumption that girls will benefit from gender blind programmes as they expand. On the contrary, it reinforces the point that efforts to equalise educational opportunity must go beyond access to viewing schools as gendered institutions.

Economic constrains can be seen in labour market restrictions in the thriving informal sector, where male occupations dominate and the options open to girls

are not lucrative. Thus the economic and sociocultural constraints beyond the school system that have resulted in the perpetuation of the gender gap in education must be challenged and changed to ensure that girls receive the benefits of education. This will help in sustaining girls in school in a girl-friendly environment and providing education that will increase their life chances and be attractive to girls and their parents.

VALUABLE LESSONS The UBEP programme contributes valuable lessons for providing basic education to overage out of school youth, as well as addressing youth unemployment by preparing young people for entry into gainful or self-employment. However, it casts doubts on the widely held belief that NGOs necessarily enable disadvantaged groups, especially females, to be empowered in a sustainable manner, especially if all they do is provide access and address practical needs. UBEP is a successful programme for boys, but Okwany’s findings raise serious doubts about the extent to which it is designed to adequately serve girls. UBEP’s practices do not facilitate articulation of girls’ voices, so the girls are talking very loudly with their feet. The state has blundered in the formal system by excluding stakeholders who are required to pay so much but are excluded in planning and delivery. This study shows that NGOs do not necessarily represent key stakeholder preferences and blunder by excluding the beneficiaries of the interventions, who are mere objects of development. UBEP’s processes must

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be adjusted to specifically address girls’ needs so that they benefit from the programme as much as boys do. The key stakeholders in UBEP – girls, boys and teachers – must be active participants rather than passive recipients. Further, actively involving children in decisionmaking, planning and implementation keeps the programme relevant to their needs and builds organisational skills, as well as impacting self-esteem and confidence.

The study posits that only the state has the institutional capacity to universalise education. An organisation like UBEP has successful practical experience, which gives it a position of strength in influencing policy making and planning for the education sector. It must therefore focus its efforts on challenging the underlying reasons that push many children out of the formal system. Clearly, the route for progressive social change is through the political action of social movements.

Overall, the powerful combination of factors that doom best efforts like UBEP call for a powerful alliance to redress existing obstacles to equality of educational opportunities and outcomes. The street children phenomenon necessitates a partnership between government and nongovernmental organisations and mobilised communities to provide for policy, legislation, funding and resources to translate programmes into concrete action.

Auma Okwany is lecturer in Rural Development, Population Studies and Environment at ISS. She can be contacted at okwany@iss.nl

ISS Staff news New staff

Staff leaving

Dr Jan Kees van Donge, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Development Management

Eva Charkiewicz, Lecturer in Women, Gender, Development

Dr Auma Okwamy, Lecturer in Social Policies

Dr Aart van de Laar, Associate Professor in Development Economics

Dr Lee Pegler, Lecturer in Human Resources and Employment

Dr Saskia Wieringa, Associate Professor in Women and Development Studies

Barbara MacDermott, part-time Lecturer in Academic Skills

Congratulations

Peter Bardoel, part-time Lecturer in Academic Skills

Dr Freek Schiphorst, promoted to Senior Lecturer in Labour Relations

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ISS NEWS

Conference

ISS news

iCCYS

Congratulations

International Centre for Child and Youth Studies

After successfully competing with a number of full professors, Dr Liaxiang Sun has been appointed Professor in Chinese

A joint initiative of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague and International Child Development Initiatives, Leiden

A two-day conference is scheduled for 13-14 November 2003 at the Institute of Social Studies to launch the new international Centre for Child and Youth Studies, jointly established

by ISS and International Child Development Initiatives (ICDI), Leiden. The conference will consist of a public forum on day one and two parallel workshop sessions on day two.

Some 50 representatives of national and international development, professional, donor and governmental agencies with a special interest in children and development will participate.

the protection of children and young people, the promotion of their rights and welfare and their capacity to play an active role in their own and their society’s development. This is also reflected in a growing need in international and national agencies and NGOs for trained professionals with specialised skills in dealing with childhood and youth issues. At present, many staff in such agencies lack appropriate training and relatively few institutions provide training for young and mid-career professionals focusing on childhood/youth and development issues.

Keynote speakers at the conference are Marta Arango of CINDE, Bogotá, Katarina Tomasevski of the Office of the Commission for Human Rights, Geneva, Tove Wang of Save the Children, Oslo, and Nora Godwin, of UNICEF, New York.

The conference should lead to a better understanding of the training needs of professionals and this should, in turn, lead to improved training opportunities and related action research.

Recent years have seen the emergence of important new trends in this field. New academic perspectives tend increasingly to view children and young people not as docile recipients of socialisation or passive victims of abuse but as more active participants and contributors to their own development and social worlds. In international policy discourse the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has played an important role in promoting child-centred and rights-based approaches to issues of child work, education, health etc. These developments have far-reaching implications for our understanding of children’s competencies, responsibilities and needs and of children and young people’s (potential) resilience in the face of risk, adversity or abuse.

ICCYS The iCCYS is a specialised unit for training, research and policy analysis. The Centre’s activities focus on the needs of children and youth in developing, transitional and developed societies. This focus extends in equal measure to the periods of early and middle childhood and adolescence and, for some specific purposes, to young adults. The iCCYS collaborates with NGOs, government agencies and research institutions and is active in international partnership networks.

As guiding principles the Centre promotes the holistic development of children and youth and believes in children and youth themselves as agents in development. Issues affecting children and youth should be promoted on political agendas everywhere. Specific problems affecting children and youth must be seen in the broader contexts of widespread poverty and conflict, in the global as well as the local context, and against the cross-cutting perspectives of vulnerability and resilience, gender, child/youth rights and agency.

CHILDREN AND YOUTH IN DEVELOPMENT – emerging needs for training and research Growing awareness worldwide of the large numbers of children affected by poverty, hunger violence, abuse, exploitation, inadequate health care and education has led to increased concern at international and national levels for

New interests, new problems and new understandings of childhood and youth world-wide also point to new needs for research, whose results should feed into policy work and training. There is also increasing awareness that childhood and youth issues and problems, even those experienced at local levels, are best approached within a broad global framework of analysis. Contributions in research and training are needed not only from the disciplines traditionally concerned with childhood and youth (such as psychology, pedagogy and paediatrics) but most of all from those that deal with the macro and meso environments in which children and young people live and grow. Development studies, with its commitment to interdisciplinarity and holistic approaches, is particularly important in this respect.

For more information please contact Loes Keysers at keysers@iss.nl

The Minister invited the group to come to the Ministry to continue a discussion on human rights and development, with particular emphasis on Africa and NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s Development). This discussion had started during an earlier seminar organised by the Netherlands International Law Association, where the Minister spoke about the Dutch presidency of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). During the 1 July meeting, the Minister solicited the participants’ advice and views on using development cooperation as a political instrument, and on how to respond to situations of flagrant human rights violations such as in Zimbabwe.

The discussion also touched on the universality of human rights, the death penalty, the role of the European Union and the importance of coherence (i.e. consistent policy responses).

AIID-World Bank Award for Business and Management at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Dr Liaxiang Sun was awarded his PhD at ISS in November 1997. His thesis was entitled ‘Aggregate Behaviour of Investment in China (1953-1993): Investment Hunger, Supply and Distributional Barriers and Growth Cycles’.

DLSJ visit to Minister of Foreign Affairs On 1 July, the Development, Law and Social Justice (DLSJ) participants, accompanied by Dr Karin Arts (DLSJ staff), paid a visit to the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.

ISS library New acquisitions by period and subject are now available on-line on the ISS library website. Use the grey download format button in the left-hand corner.

Mark the titles first.

Please send your announcements to the editors of DevISSues in good time

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ISS MA Student In May, former ISS MA student Sebastian Torres Ledezma, was awarded the prestigious AIID-World Bank prize for his thesis ‘An Empirical Analysis of Economic Growth for Uruguay and the Latin American Region: 1950-2000’.

The prize, awarded jointly by the Amsterdam Institute for International Development and the World Bank to the best theses in international development, includes US$ 3,000 in prize money.

Sebastian Torres was a student in the 2001-2002 Economics of Development programme and was awarded the ISS Research Paper prize for his thesis in December 2002.

An edited summary of his prizewinning thesis will be included in the next Development ISSues.

24

Working Papers ISS Working Papers can be found

ISS Working Papers General Series * ISSN 0921-0201

on the ISS website at: www.iss.nl, Publications/Working Papers.

They can also be ordered in hard copy from The Bookshop, PO Box 29776, 2502 LT The Hague,

375 376 377

Rosa Marie V. Rivera, Managing risk and sustainability in micro finance: war and its impact on micro finance clients and NGOs in the Philippines (May 2003) N.C.Narayan, For and against the grain: politics of rice in Kerala, India (June 2003) Lee Pegler, Factory modernisation and union identity: new challenges for unionsreflections from Brazilian case studies (July 2003)

the Netherlands

Development and Change The journal Development and Change is published five times a year by Blackwell Publishers (Oxford, UK) on behalf of the Institute of Social Studies. For more information, see the ISS website or email us at d&c@iss.nl.

Available online at http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/online

Volume 34 / Number 3 / June 2003 Jan P. Pronk

Aid as a Catalyst: A Rejoinder

Barsha Khattry

Trade Liberalization and the Fiscal Squeeze: Implications for Public Investment

Paula Kantor

Women’s Empowerment through Home-based Work: Evidence from India

Victor Agadjanian and Ekaterina Makarova

From Soviet Modernization to Post-Soviet Transformation: Understanding Marriage and Fertility Dynamics in Uzbekistan

Monique Nuijten

Family Property and the Limits of Intervention: The Article 27 Reforms and the Procede Programme in Mexico

Emily Yeh

Tibetan Range Wars: Spatial Politics and Authority on the Grasslands of Amdo

Kai Schmidt-Soltau

Conservation-related Resettlement in Central Africa: Environmental and Social Risks

Volume 34 / Number 4 / September 2003 Simeen Mahmud

Actually How Empowering is Microcredit?

David Slater

On the Spatial Dynamics of Democratic Politics: Analysing the Bolivian Case

Maarten Bavinck

The Spatially Splintered State: Myths and Realities in the Regulation of Marine Fisheries in Tamil Nadu, India

Ben Rogaly and Abdur Rafique

Struggling to Save Cash: Seasonal Migration and Vulnerability in West Bengal, India

Massoud Karshenas

Global Poverty: National Accounts-based Versus Survey-based Estimates

Edsel E. Sajor

Globalization and the Urban Property Boom in Metro Cebu, Philippines

Karel Jansen

Calming the Shock Waves: Can Financial Reform Do It? (Review Article) Calming the Shock Waves: Can Financial Reform Do It? (Review Article)

Colofon Development ISSues is published three times a year by: Institute of Social Studies PO Box 29776, 2502 LT The Hague, The Netherlands, Tel: +31 (0)70 4260 443 or 4260 419, Fax: + 31 (0)70 4260 799, ISS website: www.iss.nl, Email: DevISSues@iss.nl Editors RenĂŠ Bekius, Andy Brown Editorial Board Karin Arts, Erhard Berner, Kristin Komives, Sandra Nijhof, Peter de Valk, Emily Clare Wilkinson (Scholas) Editorial assistants Karen Shaw, Marie-Louise Gambon Photos Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are by courtesy of Jager & Krijger Design and Production MUNTZ Marketing Communication Group Circulation: 11,000. Material from Development ISSues may be reproduced or adapted without permission, provided it is not distributed for profit and is attributed to the original author or authors, Development ISSues and the Institute of Social Studies.

ISSN: 1566-4821. The views expressed are those of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute.