Development and Globalisation: Daring to Think Differently

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The book is a collection of essays written as editorials for the South Centre’s fortnightly South Bulletin: Reflections and Foresights by Tandon. These editorials were being written as events unfolded, and not with the benefit of retrospection.

Most of them are critical of the present system and global economic and political governance, and with good arguments too.

South Centre, where Tandon is director, is the intergovernmental think tank for the South.

For the past 30 years, Tandon has been challenging the "misdirected" aid and development policies meant for the developing world. He has been offering alternative concepts and paradigms of development for policy makers and peoples’ movements on wideranging issues, often with critical concrete suggestions on how to move these issues forward.

In this book, he challenges his readers to “dare to think differently.”

For African countries facing political and development crises, Tandon offers a home-grown solution. He writes that lack of clarity on development matters leads to simplistic policy prescription, or illusory “capacity building” projects in the vain hope that they will lead to good governance and an improvement in the climate of investment. He argues that the issues of poverty, land distribution and the evolving ethnic and class nature of society, have their origins in the colonial era.

The essays expose Tandon’s thinking on a cross-spectrum of issues, including the reform of the Bretton Woods institutions; climate change and food security; industry; trade; innovation and intellectual property; the global financial crisis; ending of aid dependence and the Palestine-Israel question.

The essays are essential reading for those who believe that “another world is possible.”

Tandon puts his ideas on an alternative paradigm of development as a counter to the dominant imperial paradigm of the North. He offers an alternative paradigm, an alternative perspective, often with critical concrete suggestions on how to move these issues forward well before some of the world’s leaders began to talk about the need for a second Bretton Woods conference.

Some of the ideas put forward by Tandon are well before their time, but have passed the test of time. Notable is the just concluded climate change talk in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In one of the essays on climate, energy and the food challenge, Tandon writes about returning to the open solar energy system in order to reverse 300 years of fossilfuel based closed system that is primarily the cause of climate change.

“These essays promise to stand the test of time,” writes former Tanzania president Benjamin Mkapa in the book’s foreword.

Some of the ideas are practical and doable, but there are serious psychological and institutional obstacles to implementing them, such as the idea of ending dependence on aid and working against the existing power asymmetries. Most politicians in the developing world would dismiss this idea outright, despite the logic behind it.

According to Tandon, development is self-defined. It is primarily the responsibility of the South to develop itself; the North does not have a duty to develop the South, nor should the South expect it. Development, he says, is about building confidence between governments and their people. It is not about winning the confidence of banks and global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, which is what globalisation is all about.

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A former executive director of the centre, Yash Tandon, who retired last year, was in a vantage position to view the apparent machinations of globalisation that tended to sideline the South. And it was from this position that Tandon wrote critically about the emerging international financial and development architecture that was skewed in favour of the developed world - thus leaving many developing countries out of the loop.

In Development and Globalisation, Tandon has published some of the trenchant essays he wrote while he was in charge of the South Centre, covering 2007 to 2009. Crucially, this covers the period when the world was in financial meltdown, and it was a case of survival of the fittest. It was a period of intense soul-searching about the global financial architecture and the survival of developing countries. The essays that Tandon penned make interesting reading and, as former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa said in a Foreword, "these essays promise to stand the test of time".

Indeed, Tandon's views are very radical on issues such as development, global governance, aid, trade and development, climate change, energy and food. Of course, these are the positions that developing countries support but do not have the chance for their views to be aired in the global forums.

The issue of aid is one matter that has raised hackles in development circles in the last few years - more so on the matter of aid dependence, which many argue has stunted development in countries of the South. Naturally, this is the view that Tandom takes: "For far too long, the debate on development aid has been constrained by conceptual traps and the limitations of the definitions provided by donors. If the recipients or beneficiaries of aid are to own the process, as present trends in the development literature suggest, then the conceptual reframing of the issues must itself change its location from the donors to the recipients."

I am also of the view that although aid is a good thing, in the final analysis it will hold African countries back because governments on the continent appear to have become too dependent on foreign assistance – to the detriment of development. Aid does not encourage the sort of industriousness that is needed to move the continent forward. Aid dependence, in the main, has killed the enterprising spirit of Africans.

There are those who therefore argue that developing countries should trade their way out of aid dependency. But Tandon rails against global trade, being especially critical of the Economic Partnership Agreement that African, Caribbean and Pacific countries are to sign with the European Union. One aspect of the EPA is that Europe will open its markets to goods from ACP countries. These countries, naturally, should take advantage of duty free access to Europe, goes the argument.

But Tandon quickly shoots this down: "The competitiveness of ACP products in the EU market will come under increasing pressure as the EU concludes a series of free trade agreements with other countries (India, ASEAN, Andean countries, Central American countries, etc). Moreover, some non-ACP countries (such as those in Latin America) may resent what they will see as unfair discrimination against them.

"In solidarity with our Latin American friends, we would agree that this is indeed unfair. One group of developing countries is pitted against another group of developing countries. It is difficult to escape the image of dogs fighting for the bone thrown in the middle." Tandon's perspectives on global issues are indeed incisive.