Dossier, Volume 13 #5: Development Upside-Down

Economic Development's New Partners

Bill Ryan SJ is an economist, a former provincial of the Jesuits of English Canada, the director of the Jesuit Project on Ethics and Politics, and a contributing editor of Compass. In 1994, on behalf of the Jesuits and the Ottawa-based International Development Research Centre (IDRC), he travelled to Asia, Africa and Latin America and interviewed 188 people in an inquiry aimed at finding ways of better integrating cultural and spiritual values into economic development. IDRC has just published the results of his research under the title Culture, Spirituality and Economic Development: Opening a Dialogue. In August, IDRC organized a meeting in Val-Morin, Quebec, to ask participants what follow-up should be given this novel research. Fr. Ryan was able to renew acquaintance with some of the people he had earlier interviewed. Shortly afterward, he shared some thoughts with Compass associate editors Wanda Taylor and Louisa Blair. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Louisa Blair: One of the issues that emerges in your report is that one model of development is not enough. There has to be a plurality of models. But when we have such a monolithic theory of global economic development that has no real challengers at the moment, don't we need something global to challenge it with, something more focused? It's easy to dismiss a plurality of development models. It's not so easy to dismiss one that everybody has agreed on.

Bill Ryan: We had another and we just lost it--the experience of "real socialist" development. It's dead. Although it's interesting that people are still saying the same things, but they don't use ideology to say it. The people who are critiquing the predominant economic model are now very pragmatic, and as a result, you can't dismiss them. Some of our top economists are beginning to use a different language. Amartya Sen, who's president of the American Economic Association, and Samuel Bowles, a Marxist economist from Harvard, and Kenneth Arrow all got together to recommend to the MacArthur Foundation that it rethink its screening strategies for funding. They recommended putting money into nonconventional research, people who are trying something outside conventional research. This is quite significant.

Amartya Sen's research is very concrete, very detailed. For example, he's looked at the role of women--especially in Kerala and in Sri Lanka. He's come to the conclusion that healthy women who look after healthy babies and who are educated are just as effective, maybe more effective, than any kind of draconian control over population.

Louisa Blair: Obviously you're working out of the social teaching of the Catholic Church. So you do have a solid foundation of values. It's from that position that you can recommend pluralism.

Bill Ryan: Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the director of Just World Trust, a Muslim organization. He's a brilliant man, running this huge foundation out of Malaysia. And he's coming out of Islam. I was amazed at how we could agree on so many things. And I don't find his criticism of the West much different from our own. He is western-trained much as I am, but he is Islamic-based.

People from various intellectual and religious disciplines meet. You have the whole gamut of disciplines and religions and a lot of countries. And you find areas of agreement. What is amazing is that on a first round the agreement was much broader than it would have been even a few years ago, even in Canada.

Now a weakness is that these people crossed our screen because somebody had met them or heard about them. But this too is interesting. The people we met are practically all trained in the same way as the people they're criticizing. The world elite is something real. They've all got doctorates from the elite universities. If I didn't have a doctorate from Harvard in economics, I wouldn't be able to do this. And at the same time, if I were just an economist and not also a Jesuit, the Muslims wouldn't trust me, the Buddhists wouldn't know what to say to me, and the animists wouldn't have any conversation.

I think I can honestly say, whenever I was dealing with religious people I always felt there was a synergy. In dialogue with world religions, you don't pretend for a moment that you're in total agreement with them. What they want is some assurance that you're not a materialist, that you respect their beliefs. There is a spirit world--Teilhard de Chardin calls it the "divine milieu"--that is accessible to all religions. For some religions, the idea of God being human is blasphemy or an impossibility. But there is overlap in whole areas of mysticism, and in the notion of creation and of ecology.

Louisa Blair: You say in your book and elsewhere that ecology is a western agenda. Did it come up when you were talking to people?

Bill Ryan: Well, I honestly have to say, nobody raised the issue unless I raised it, with the exception of five or six people who are professionally working in the area.

In fact many know a lot more about it than we do. Some of the women I met are working close to the ground, with local communities. They are cleaning up marine areas, the fish and wildlife, or they're planting trees. And they have a very concrete sense of it all.

But they don't believe that the West is serious. On the one hand, the West gives them a pittance of foreign aid and it's conditional on ecology. And at the same time, there are barriers to trade, and the West takes all the money away through interest on debt. So there's no proportion. Those I spoke to say, "We're not against ecology, but don't expect us to jump up and down for it while we have these injustices in the political structures of the world."

Wanda Taylor: Can you talk about some of the local initiatives, especially what women have been doing?

Bill Ryan: Well, so many significant nongovernmental organizations are run by women. Men usually won't take the jobs. They're too uncertain and there's not enough money in them. These NGOs have a good work ethic. They don't have a good salary ethic. And that's why there are so many women there, especially well-trained women.

Louisa Blair: You mentioned that a lot of the NGOs that gave you hope were made up of people who had left the university system because they were disenchanted with western textbooks and approaches.

Bill Ryan: Many of the NGO people in the age of dictatorships were kicked out of universities. And they are mistrustful of government interference within the universities. These people look on universities with scorn. But you're really looking at university-educated elites on both sides. Many of the NGO people seem almost to have a religious drive in them, and a deep sense of injustice. They are closer to the people, whereas the elite that works with the World Bank or agencies or the university quite often doesn't have any contact with the poor, their own people. Just look at Venezuela. The elite go over to do their shopping in Florida.

In Zambia, where the World Bank has done atrocious things, particularly in terms of structural adjustment, people are dying. The average life span is decreasing. My friends who know the World Bank people there say they are lovely people, but they are absolutely convinced they have the truth for Zambia.

Louisa Blair: You're talking about a kind of fundamentalism.

Bill Ryan: Yes, and this fundamentalism has helped cause other kinds of fundamentalism, especially in Islamic countires. The World Bank doesn't just say, "Here's a good program." It's totalitarian in its own way. The free market system is being preached as a gospel. It's really a religion. But there's no global alternative that's got legs on it, that's operational.

Another big weakness in westerners is that we are only aware of the reality touched by some western agency or other. Usually NGOs are known or documented or reported because some personnel or money touches them. But there are thousands of other NGOs out there we don't know anything about. And we assume they don't have any influence. There are people who do things without outside money--and in India you're not talking about tens or twenties, you're talking about hundreds, even thousands. That reality of development is ignored.

Wanda Taylor: But do these NGOs have any real power?

Bill Ryan: The Indian scholar and activist Vandana Shiva would say the reason India is not starving right now is because of community work, often led by women, not because of anything that's happened in the West. But it never gets documented.

And this is where value and religion come in, at the level of community development. I found in every continent that people want to develop an informal society that doesn't fit the urban pattern. It's within the city, but really it's a village grouping. They draw on their village-life values. The community then becomes much stronger. It isn't a case of everyone with a gun. It's really the powers of community.

Wanda Taylor: What about the arts? Was there any grassroots development that you saw in the area of the arts?

Bill Ryan: At the local level, people are always involved in the arts. That's one of the forms of education. Women especially are very aware of that. They always talk about how they get people to sing.

I learned about it negatively in the very strong reaction everywhere against the control of the media internationally. Even people who are not angry with the development model think that media control is the new colonialism. They're told that they're not free countries unless they let the media in. But once the media are in, there's no competition--CNN all over the place. Then the interpretation people get of their own history is one that comes from North America. It comes with a package, along with all the movies that come out of Hollywood. People fear that this will ultimately be most erosive of what they are.

A lot of people in the West believe in moving towards a kind of monocultural system, as Vandana Shiva calls it. Copyrights are taking over local knowledge that has been around for four or five thousand years. It's packaged differently and all of a sudden the people have to pay for their own medicines. To my mind, this is the most cynical approach. It isn't a case of meeting in the middle and saying, "Here's a medical discovery we made using your traditional herbal remedies. Let's work out a fair deal." It's unilateral. It's more destructive than just coming in and cutting down the forests and moving on. It's cutting right to the heart of the culture.

Louisa Blair: You spoke of local economies and African ways of doing business.

Bill Ryan: The secretary of finance in Kenya pointed out how hard it is for a western economist to understand that an African is building up social capital by having a beer with a friend. The pittance he can earn by going out and working isn't going to help his future. Or again, why do people steal from the World Bank if they're working for it, or steal from the church if everything is going well and they are working? Their morality is a family morality. What is good for the family is moral. So they don't have a loyalty to business. It's to their friends. This is not understood. When we go in with our structural adjustments, it's always assumed that if you get all the financial organization straight, it will work. But it's based on the business values that we have.

There are people who want to end the practice of gifts. Because people have been so poor, almost everything in Africa has been looked on by the givers as gifts, which means there's no partnership. Taking partnership seriously is the biggest hope for the future.

Wanda Taylor: How do you move from the spiritual discussions that you had to achieving some of these practical solutions, like partnership?

Bill Ryan: You need to get a movement of groups like IDRC and smaller NGOs to begin to influence the UN. The UN is finally the voice for the poor. I don't mean the Security Council, but UNICEF, ILO, FAO, UNDP --the nonpolitical side of the UN. This new thinking is already partly there, but the big nation-states, the Group of Seven, still control so much of the ideology. But if we do get a forum for this, it will be because governments won't know what else to do. Right now, they keep pushing the free market and all the things that go with it. They need to see that there are parts of the world that we cannot model on ourselves because the resources are not there and also the time-frame isn't right.

In the new UNDP human development report, Amartya Sen shows that in some countries with only $300 or $400 per capita GDP, babies don't die. The role of women is enhanced and the most basic needs are being fulfilled.

Louisa Blair: How can we be in partnership with a country and say to them, "You can make do with $300 per capita GDP," if we aren't prepared to do so ourselves?

Bill Ryan: It's evident that we have to take the consequences if we want a partnership. One of the things that will help us is seeing that the problems we once thought were problems of poor countries are in every country now. Once you globalize, the differences become less strong. International communication helps. We can begin to have a more realistic view of unemployment, for example, because it's a common experience we are sharing, and will increasingly share.

Louisa Blair: What about for women? Religious or cultural values might be exactly what have kept them down. The funding implications of taking culture and religion seriously in development may be a horrific prospect.

Bill Ryan: No doubt, power works in different ways. On the other hand, there are different views of women in Africa. You meet women who are self-confident leaders and who will tell you almost immediately that they are feminists but not in a western way. Almost all of those I met seem to have discovered how to be fully alive in their society. They can also see all the problems. Women are always very involved because they see much more clearly the relationship between education and health and children. But what they don't accept, neither women nor men, is that political and individual rights are the only agenda in town. The best agenda that the women have right now is the right to eat, to be educated, to health. It's a community or social agenda. They are suspicious of an agenda that comes from the West because political and individual rights don't cost the West anything. It's cheaper to solve the population problem by saying, "Women should not have the babies they don't want," than by saying, "Let's meet the health needs and build the foundation for producing enough food."

Louisa Blair: You're saying there's in fact a much stronger threat to women through the old development agenda than if you start to take culture and values more seriously.

Bill Ryan: These are my own thoughts. We don't know what their future is going to be in their own cultures. But they aren't necessarily getting that much help from outside. One thing that worries me at some of these international meetings I go to is the agencies from the West that push the women's movement. Like the economists, they come with their own package, and it's always that a woman is free only if she has fewer children.

Wanda Taylor: So what you see as hopeful is not so much a model of development, then. It's a process, and it has more to do with communication and sharing than with implementation.

Bill Ryan: And hopefully it will work, so that anything originating as a package from the West will be looked at much more critically than it was. The scientific method has to change, and we have to say that there is more than one science, if you will. All that knowledge, indigenous knowledge, is left outside. We have to include the rich cultural knowledge that doesn't get into the box of science.

Louisa Blair: In the Northwest Territories, the government pushed through a requirement that mining companies had to consult indigenous knowledge, and so that indigenous knowledge became a commodity like all the rest.

Wanda Taylor: How do you guarantee that this cultural knowledge won't be co-opted?

Bill Ryan: It has to do with power and money. But it is usually put it under the title of science. It's power associated with science. We need to start breaking those bonds. People say we are going backwards by giving religion or spirituality--nonmeasurable knowledge--status and influence. Even inside our own society we know that there are types of knowledge that don't come through the university system, which is itself breaking down.

There is endless knowledge and experience out there and energy that we have to begin to take into account, take seriously, not wipe out or ignore. After the Berlin Wall came down, I was commissioned by the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security--which has now gone out of existence--to explore the influence of religion on the overthrow of Communist governments. Again, if you use traditional ways of doing research, you really can't get at the subject. But if you look at who was in jail, who met whom, then you discover the invisible networks. It's amazing, especially in Poland: you gradually begin to see another world. You can't say it was determining, but you wonder whether the Wall would have come down without them. What made Solidarity?

Wanda Taylor: I was in Poland in 1979 during the pope's visit. That visit inspired a whole political movement there.

Louisa Blair: On the other hand, I've just been in Rwanda, the most Catholic country in Africa, ironically celebrating its hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Christianity. I can't listen to that without feeling shivery.

Bill Ryan: If you knock all religion out, you'd still feel shivery. The Holocaust and the atomic bomb are not of religious inspiration. Because you believe in God, that doesn't stop you from being humanly weak.

It's hard to get people to see that multiple views are good to have. And we've got to have vision. Without a vision, people die. You don't know that three feet down the road you won't have to switch your views again. The only thing driving you is simply the conviction that there is a solidarity that has to be recreated among people.

There is a spirit world, as de Chardin explains. I don't understand all he writes, but looking at all the NGOs, I do believe there is a unifying force coming in the world. If you look at all those networks across the world, sharing communication, a lot of it's hopeful. This is new. We are closer to the possibility of being one than we were ten years ago.