Mail & Guardian December 13 to 19 2019 31
Comment & Analysis
Human development is under threat
Achieving real global
progress means we are
going to have to ditch
neoliberal capitalism
capital to batten itself on cheap
labour in the global South, it has
also privatised public services and
restricted social provisioning by the
state. Although this has thrown up
new markets in which profits can be
made, it has also made purchasing
power, rather than social citizenship,
the defining prerequisite for access
to the kind of health care and education the UNDP regards as necessary
for human development.
In contrast to social citizenship,
purchasing power is neither universal nor unconditional. What’s more,
it is undermined as a result of the
increasing inequalities of income
and wealth that have accompanied
the consolidation of neoliberalism.
SOCIETY
Alf Gunvald Nilsen
e are nearing the
end of a turbulent
decade marked by
large-scale waves
of popular protest.
This also leaves its imprint on the
2019 Human Development Report,
which was published by the United
Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) earlier this week.
“The wave of demonstrations
sweeping across countries is a clear
sign, that for all our progress, something in our globalised society is
not working,” writes the UNDP’s
Achim Steiner in his foreword to the
report.
According to Steiner, the connecting thread that runs between the
eruptions taking place in countries
and cities across the North-South
axis of the world is woven of “deep
and rising frustrations with inequalities”. He is right — and it is this scenario that provides the report with
its rationale, namely to propose an
innovative diagnosis of and remedy
for 21st-century inequality. This is a
laudable ambition, but one that the
UNDP’s report ultimately fails to
deliver on. It is important that we
understand the hows and whys of
this failure.
At the core of the report is the
claim that, to truly understand inequality in the 21st century, it is necessary to move beyond a single-minded
focus on income. Inequality, the
UNDP proposes, must be understood
in terms of how it affects health,
education, dignity and respect for
human rights — and these cannot
be reduced exclusively to economic
metrics.
“A human development approach
to inequality takes a people-centred
view,” the report states. “It is about
people’s capabilities to exercise their
freedoms to be and do what they
aspire to in life.”
Adopting this people-centred view,
the UNDP calls our attention to a
new pattern that defines inequality
in our time.
On the one hand, there is convergence in basic capabilities, which
means that more people, especially
in low-income countries, are able to
ensure early childhood survival and
access to primary education. On the
other hand, there is divergence in
enhanced capabilities, which means
that rich countries are moving ahead
in terms of more advanced indicators, such as access to high-quality
health and education across all
levels.
In other words, there has been
substantial progress in ensuring the
basic needs for the majority of the
world’s population. Accordingly, the
task that remains is that of distributing enhanced capabilities more
evenly and fairly by implementing
appropriate policies. This fits well
with the overall narrative that has
been at the heart of the UN agenda
since the announcement of the millennium development goals and
after that the sustainable development goals — namely that while
humanity faces daunting problems,
progress is not only possible, it has
been made and it continues to be
made.
W
nd here we arrive at the
main shortcoming of the
Human Development
Report and the UN
development agenda more generally, which is that it consistently
fails to admit the systemic nature of
the problems that it calls our attention to. In this year’s report, this is
evident in Achim Steiner’s opening claim that “something in our
globalised society is not working”.
In making this statement, Steiner
is effectively papering over the fact
that our globalised society is working
very well for some privileged elites
— for example, the 1% of the world’s
population that, according to Credit
Suisse, holds 47% of global wealth —
and that it has been deliberately constructed by specific social forces to do
precisely this.
As the philosopher Juan Telleria
has argued, this is a result of how
the UNDP imagines societies as
essentially peaceful and harmonious wholes, populated by people
who share common interests, rather
than as conflictual entities held
together by asymmetrical power
relations that allow some interests
to systematically trump others.
Accordingly, the difficulties that we
confront — whether it is poverty,
hunger or disease — tend to be portrayed as abstract ills, rather than
as the consequences of systemic
contradictions.
And, finally, the solutions that are
offered are presented as choices to
be made at the intersection of shared
moral concerns and neutral expertise and that will benefit everyone,
rather than as struggles that have
to be waged and won against vested
interests.
True to this template, the Human
Development Report, while paying lip service to the importance
of social movements and cautioning against the concentration of
power and state capture, concludes
by asserting that we can make the
choice to bring about human development in a sustainable way —
and that this choice will have to be
made according to pragmatic views
of what will work best in specific
national contexts.
The fact of the matter is rather different — it is that achieving human
development is dependent on breaking with global capitalism, and doing
so against the determined opposition
of those that profit from this system.
If we fail to acknowledge this in our
debates about human development,
we betray those who most acutely
suffer the systemic pathologies of
persistent poverty and deepening
inequality.
A
Unequal, unfair: Surgeons in Paris operate on a patient in a high-tech theatre (above) but a market trader
selling tea and spices in Mombasa, Kenya, could not afford such treatment and the country’s health system
could not deliver this high level of healthcare. Photos: Gerard Julien/AFP & Luis Tato/Bloomberg/Getty Images
But there are good reasons to
question this narrative and the way
in which it reads the current global
development scenario. This becomes
particularly clear if we compare the
UNDP’s message to that regularly
touted by the World Bank. Only
10% of the world’s population lives
in extreme poverty, the bank tells
us — and this is the lowest poverty
rate ever recorded in human history.
But when we consider that extreme
poverty is estimated in terms of living on less than $1.90 (about R28) a
day, the message immediately loses
much of its hopeful sheen.
If we probe even deeper, we find
what the economist Andy Sumner
calls a new geography of poverty, in
which there are fewer low-income
countries, but still many poor people, and the majority of these people
— 70% when estimated at a poverty
line set at $2.50 a day — live in middle-income countries such as India,
Brazil, and South Africa.
This new geography of poverty is
not a temporary condition that will
soon be overcome or an incidental
glitch that can be easily rectified. On
the contrary, it is one of the central
pillars of the neoliberal economic
order that has been constructed by
powerful social forces since the late
1970s, in which global value chains
enable transnational corporations
to boost their profits by tapping
into vast reserves of cheap labour
from Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Consequently, there is every reason
to believe that this scenario is the
best that global capitalism has to
offer the majority of humanity, and
This new geography of
poverty ... is one of the
central pillars of the
neoliberal economic
order that has been
constructed by
powerful social forces
since the late 1970s
that the persistence of poverty alongside growth reveals the systemic limits to human development that prevail under this economic order.
A similar argument can be made
in terms of the scenario that is at the
heart of the Human Development
Report. The discrepancy between
improvements in basic capabilities and deepening inequalities
in enhanced capabilities is less an
indicator of gradual but incomplete
progress than it is a symptom of the
same systemic limits that are evident
in the intertwined coexistence of
poverty and growth.
As the UNDP states in its report,
securing improved enhanced capabilities for all requires, among other
things, universal systems that provide equal access to comprehensive
social services and specific policies
to eliminate group-based discrimination. But it is difficult to understand
how this can be achieved within the
parameters of a neoliberal economic
order.
After all, at the same time as this
order has enabled transnational
Alf Gunvald Nilsen is professor
of sociology at the University of
Pretoria