Developmentalism's fate

In their meeting during the past week in New Delhi, member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement talked not only about improving the currently declining cooperation among them, but also about their foreign debt burdens, which are growing instead of decreasing in size.

A way out of this debt problem seems nonexistent, so the members decided to appeal to creditors to have the debts cancelled, or, at the very least, reduced.

About two decades ago, Mahbub-ul-Haq, a Pakistani technocrat, in a thesis titled The Ten Sins of Development, sought to expose the misrepresentation of development programs prescribed for developing countries by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. What Mahbub-ul-Haq was criticizing was the concept known, at present, as "developmentalism" -- which is a kind of development ideology which developing countries must adopt to be eligible for World Bank assistance.

In the coming century, however, it will become increasingly clear that solutions to economic and political problems cannot be simply imposed from above. Then, developmentalism will encounter some serious challenges and quite possibly face the moment when the fate of this particular ideology will be sealed.

-- Merdeka, Jakarta