How development should work.

The following is an article I have writen for the course, Development Administration in Non Western Societies. The article has been unaltered and as such refers to this course at times but the ideas are relevant outside the course as well.



The example we have been using in class to illustrate (the wrongs of) development administration was the program of displacing people in Indonesia from the central highly populous islands to the outer lying sparsely populated islands. This in the hope that both the perceived over population on the central islands would diminish and that by some miraculous universal law that states that if you bunch enough people in a single area development will ensue. Now what I am about to say might not be the most scientific exclamation ever uttered but was there, at the time, no one who, perhaps after a night of heavy drinking wandered into his moonlit garden, vomited into his rose bushes and while he got up, into his suddenly cleared head, came the realization, THIS IS A BAD IDEA? The wrongs of this plan should be self evident.
Should we really take as our guiding project into the world of development administration such an ill conceived plan that any half sane person could tell you has to end in disaster? What does this tell us? In all honesty I’m not sure. My first response to hearing this was to say that development is a natural process. Like all natural processes it cannot be consciously created by man only influenced. This is a personal belief of mine so let me illustrate this using the example above. In 1970 the population on the Island of Java was around 75 million[1]. This was considered to be overpopulated at the time but the idea of resolving this perceived over population by moving part of the populous borders on the insane and in a very real sense the criminal. Shipping 250.000 people away from the island, although logistically an immense operation would have no consequence on the overall population on the island, indeed to decrease the population by a modest 15% you would have to move 11¼ million people away from the island and that is not even considering natural growth and migration both of which were and are very high. Indeed, the historical growth of the islands population was not halted by the program and today the population of Java exceeds 120million. Of course I need not convince anyone of the foolishness of the program but I’m not sure everyone understands why the idea was so bad. From the reactions in class many were aimed at the implementation. The sites chosen to house the people were bad or the help they received wasn’t adequate. This forgoes the larger issue, that the very idea behind the plan was false.
Each nation has its own economic centre (or centres). Even in a very atypical area such as the Rhine delta in North Western Europe we can see a clear distinction between centre and periphery. The densely populated Randstad region against the sparsely populated Northern Provinces, the highly industrious Ruhr and its immediate hinterland. In the 1970s in the Netherlands a very broad and well backed government program was set up to lure employment away from the Randstad and into the more backward and depressed North of the country. At first by government grants to stimulate businesses to the area. When that failed extra taxes for businesses in the West of the country were levied. The only result of the program was that foreign businesses considering the Netherlands as an investment location chose either Belgium, Great Britain or Germany instead. You cannot force development.
Now as to the myth of over population. It doesn’t exist. It never has and never will. Even though the population nearly doubled on the island of Java as we have seen there is still no shortage of food. There is poverty and as a result of that hunger but this is not because food is immediately scarce. Around the globe there are now more people living in cities than there are living in the country. Cities barely grow their own food and never in high enough quantities to sustain themselves. This is not a problem as the food is transported from elsewhere to feed the population in the cities. Such a relative scarcity will drive up food prices and higher prices will stimulate production, require more workers and create the need for and possibility of innovation by local and regional food producers. A higher population without the possibility of increasing arable land in parallel with population growth means that there are more unemployed people. In such an environment subsistence economy (a simple type of economy where each family grows or produces all they need themselves or acquire it through simple bartering from other subsistence based families) is no longer possible. It may still be viewed as an ideal by the Indonesian or Javan people but the ideal is an illusion. You can look at the wish for development as requiring change on a societal level as the (western) model of development requires certain facets to be present in society. This isn’t untrue but there is a far more basic truth that creates a need for change. Present third world societies are often not capable of sustaining their existence. We not only see this in Indonesia but also in Africa. Hunting bush meat (basically any edible animal living in the jungle) has been a staple of the (central) African diet for as long as man has lived in the area. Today however population increases have caused the people living on this meat to grow beyond the jungles capacity to provide it. That in turn has caused many species to be threatened with extinction. You can see this as an Eco problem that we must preserve the precious nature of the area or you can conclude that if all the animals are hunted to extinction the people will start dying anyway. In either case the need for societal change should be self evident from the immediate problem at hand not from some western ideal.
This conclusion is no different in developed countries than it is in underdeveloped countries. For example there has been an ongoing debate for decades in the Netherlands on the need for change in the social security field. The decreasing ratio of workers to non-workers (either unemployed, students or elderly) is rightly seen as a threat to the current system. Once this ratio becomes lopsided enough for workers to be unable to sustain the non-workers socialism might still be the ideal for some but change is no longer a political choice but an inevitability.

This realization has an impact on the role of public administration in a country. We have seen theories that state that governments and, as an extension of them, public administration serves the people in power and their needs rather than the people as a whole (the democratic ideal). It is my belief that there is no such thing as a people. A government is often confronted with situations where they can only serve one side. A winner take all situation where the winnings are directly and inversely related to the other side’s loss. In Venezuela we have recently seen this dichotomy in action. President Chavez was elected by in adequately fair elections. His rule threatened the position of the countries traditional elite and they stages a coup that ousted Chavez and helped a more friendly President(general) in power. The coup ultimately failed but the point is that the government (and military) were serving the interests of those in the elite and directly opposing the interests of the all others. That the reinstated Chavez government has nothing whatsoever to do with the democratic ideal can be plainly seen by looking at the subsequent developments in Venezuela. This series of events is mirrored in virtually every other developing country around the globe.

Democracy is way to legitimise governments and their policies it is not a way to overcome problems. Democratic governments don’t serve the entire population but only those people whose support they require or those who seemingly fall within the boundaries of their political ideals. In that sense they are no different from a non-democratic government. I’m not saying that democratically elected governments are not preferable to non-democratic ones, I’m saying that democratic system do not have an inherently higher problem solving capability to non democratic systems. I’m also not saying that Public Administration should not serve the peoples interests, I’m saying there is no such thing as the peoples interests. To summarise let me say that I’m all for making countries democratic as long as you don’t expect to solve any development question simply by making a country democratic.

The bread and butter of public administration is goal attainment. Without getting into the hairy and unresolved issues surrounding the freedom of the public administrator we can conclude that public administration more or less follow the wishes of its government. Most third world governments mostly serve the needs of a single group in society and democracy on its own doesn’t change that. One of the questions we have been asked to answer is what the role of public administration should be in development. In Indonesia at the time of this program the role of Public Administration was to serve the needs of the Soeharto family. To keep them in power and to enrich its members, a task it was very capable of performing. In that role it would choose as the recipient of a new logging contract not the company that offered to rebuild the infrastructure of the area around the logging site or who offered to employ the most locals even in the more demanding managerial positions but the company that offered the biggest villa or most expensive Aston Martin. The theory of democratic government would state that a democratic government would make a different choice and so it does. But exactly how would it be different?
For this mental exercise we must forget the evidence that many democratically elected governments turn out to be as corrupt as the non democratic governments that they have succeeded (as per the above Venezuelan example) and state that democratic governments serve their voters immediate perceived interests. This is where we run into difficulties. As Dr. Wuisman has stated in class the majority of Indonesians see it as an ideal to own their own plot of land and grow their own food. In essence live in a subsistence based economy. As we have seen previously in this article that ideal is simply unattainable. From a development perspective it would be required that the government educates people to stop seeing subsistence as an ideal. The likely outcome would be that the populace becomes angered at the current government and votes them out of office the first chance they get. Any government would realize that and no matter the gravity of the problem any government in country developed or not is more than capable of ignoring such problems if the dealing with them means losing their power. Again, what we see is that democracy does not, by itself, have an answer to development issues. This does not negate all the other benefits a democratic government brings nor is it true that non-democratic governments do have an innate ability to deal with development issues. What I am simply trying to get across is that democracy cannot be an answer to development issues.

So what is needed and to get back to the question what is the role of development administration if it is not to serve its voters in their direct wishes? As said before Public Administration is about goal attainment. In my opinion the role of public administration is its responsibility for dealing with obstructions to attaining its goal. In development it would the obstructions to development, which is wholly different from creating some grand scheme to satisfy an ideal. For this sometimes political realities like voters dissatisfaction need to be faced and overcome. If so than it is a governments duty to do so. Easier said than done but then development hasn’t really occurred in many places in the third world so that at least corroborates this view on development.
[1] Indonesia: Environment and Development, World Bank Country Study, 1994, page 11