Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous
application of modern scientific and technical knowledge' (Porter, 1995).
Enlightenment values were thus combined with nineteenth-century
humanism to justify the new trusteeship of the neocolonial mission, a
mission that was to be accomplished by authoritative intervention, pri-
marily through the provision of advice and aid programmes suggesting
how development should occur (Preston, 1996). Clearly, the 'modern
notion of development' had a long history.
It is, therefore, perhaps not too surprising that, in its earliest mani-
festation in the 1950s development became synonymous with economic
growth. One of the principal 'gurus' of this approach, Arthur Lewis, was
uncompromising in his interpretation of the modernizing mission, 'it
should be noted that our subject matter is growth, and not distribution'
(Esteva, 1992: 12). In other words, increasing incomes and material
wealth were seen as being of far more importance than making sure
that such income was fairly or equitably spread within society. During
the second half of the twentieth century, therefore, the development
debate came to be dominated by economists.
The prominence and influence of development economics in the 1950s
and 1960s have clear repercussions on the way in which underdevel-
oped countries were identified and described, a point covered in
Chapter 1.3. The earliest and, for many, still the most convenient way
of quantifying underdevelopment has been through the level of Gross
National Product (GNP) per capita pertaining to a nation or territory.
This can broadly be seen as measuring income per head of the popula-
tion and its method of calculation is explained in Chapter 1.2.
22
Wider Definitions of Development:
Social Well-being and Freedoms
Classical economic-inspired approaches thus dominated development
thinking in the 1940s and 1950s, based on concepts such as moderniza-
tion theory, and top-down development. Little changed until the 1960s
when, in the wake of the Vietnam War and a number of other develop-
ments, radical dependency approaches were advanced (see Chapter
2.2). The approach argued that the development of the West had acted
as an inhibitor of development in the emerging developing world. The
1970s then witnessed another counter movement, one that argued that
