Week 7 – Crafting the human development agenda through the thinking of Dudley Seers (1977)

Dudley seer argues in setting development yardsticks we should depart from abstract measures of economic growth and seek to answer the fundamental question:

“What are the necessary conditions for a universally acceptable aim, the realization of the potential of human personality?” Seers Dudley

1. An obvious absolute necessity is food – basic food. Below a certain level of provision, man recoils to animalistic existence. Gandhi’s repeated use of phrases like “the dumb, semi-starved millions” showed the attention he paid to nutrition. In an increasingly urbanized world food is bought with money bringing in the necessity of a living wage to meet the bare necessity of food

2. The next basic necessity is productive engagement – a job. It may not necessarily be paying (it could be studying, house or subsistence farm work). Without this a human person is chronically dependent on another, a condition incompatible with self-respect especially for one who spent years of formal schooling preparing for active engagement.

3. A third element to this development is equality. The social barriers and inhibitions of an unequal society (based on trivial differences such as accent, language and customs) distort the personalities of those with high incomes no less than of those who are poor. To achieve this however, there has to be a consistent deconcentration of property ownership from the elite few. Education can be key to gradually progressing this agenda as a “reducer of inequality” by offering access to lower income groups, increasing supply of highly billed professions, as well as using education for nation building in articulating shared vision and citizenship concepts.

The right questions for development are therefore:

1. What has been happening to poverty?

2. What has been happening to unemployment?

3. What has been happening to inequality?

A ‘plan’ which conveys no targets for reducing poverty, unemployment and inequality can hardly be considered a ‘development plan’

In the lived reality however, we have been battling these three issues, even though the path has been more zig zag than straight. Overtime, policy makers grow weary and numb to the possibilities of realizing change.

Dudley Seers suggests a paradigm shift from target planning to perspective planning where time is not just a lag between input and output; but a critical dimension in overcoming the psychological inertia. Instead of achieving set targets, short and medium term plans would then need to be reconstructed to form steps towards long-term targets for the reduction of poverty, unemployment and inequality.

Seers, D. (2016). The meaning of development. In Development Studies Revisited: Twenty-five Years of the “Journal of Development Studies.” https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315827902