The road not taken: international aid's choice of Copenhagen over Beijing

Abstract

A decade after the United Nations conferences on gender equality and social development, this paper explores their policy origins and discusses their differential impact on international aid since 1995. The author draws on her direct experience to consider why Copenhagen led to Poverty Reduction Strategies and the first Millennium Development Goal, whereas Beijing has become largely invisible in the mainstream world of aid. She argues that the powerful influence of economic rational choice theory associated with bureaucratic modes of thought has meant that the central debate in development policy has remained that of growth versus equity. Beijing's agenda of societal transformation offered another paradigm of development that has remained marginal. The paper concludes with a proposal. If international aid policy could handle more than one paradigm and thus be more open to different ways of thinking about economy, society and politics, aid agencies would be better able to support transformative processes for social justice.

Notes

This article is based on a longer background paper commissioned by unrisd for its report on Beijing plus 10, ‘Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World’ (www.unrisd). I am grateful to Andrea Cornwall and anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier drafts.

1 From Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken.

2 The Overseas Development Administration until 1997 and then in its successor, the Department for International Development.

3 Particularly to the Secretary General, Juan Somavia, a Chilean sociologist and diplomat.

4 The originally proposed title for this third pillar had been ‘social cohesion’ but the oda/dfid social development advisers thought this sounded so conservative they asked the UK delegation at a preparatory meeting to get it changed it to ‘social integration’.

5 We officials were informed that it was because of this focus on poverty that the (Conservative) British prime minister chose not attend, on the basis that there was no poverty in the UK. This position was reversed in 1997 when Labour came to power with a domestic poverty reduction and social inclusion agenda!

6 This account was given to me by the senior British official attending the meeting and shortly after the event.

7 Although right until the late 1990s, economists in dfid considered Sen a dangerous radical.

8 See Bergeron's point: ‘The new (“modern”) economic theory's emphasis on institutions is not, however, based on the kinds of holistic or complex social and institutional analyses of development called for by feminists and other “outsiders”. These sorts of analyses are instead often pushed to the margins of the Bank's discourse because they have failed to base themselves on rigorous theoretical notions such as individual optimization’ (2003: 401).

9 See also Pieterse's (2002) similar view of the contest between economists in US domestic policy on poverty.

10 I am arguing rather differently from what is sometimes suggested concerning the failure of gender mainstreaming, namely that this was the result of conflict between the feminist goal of gender equity achieved through state-led redistribution and the neoliberal goal of efficiency achieved through market-driven economic growth (True, 2003).

11 See the discussion by Geyer (2003) on this matter in relation to the relevance of complexity theory for helping those involved in shaping public policy realise that there are multiple ways of understanding problems, and multiple solutions.