What is meant by 'development?' This paper attempts to answer this question by examining how the status of least-developed, developing, and developed nations has affected the cultural perception of what constitutes development. It also traces the definition of the term from the early days of colonialism to the contemporary era and suggests changes in how we view development.
Country Development: Economic, Social, Political, And Moral
On a very basic level, development means 'growing.' In the language of political science, development is often referred to in terms of 'developed' and 'least developed' countries. Development has thus become synonymous with industrialization, and being able to provide a certain level of material comfort for all citizens. Poverty may be common to all nations, but 'least developed' countries have entrenched forms of poverty in which even basic necessities like sanitary water are scarce. According to the United Nations, a country is deemed to be 'developed' when its citizens can be able to 'lead long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable, to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living and to be able to participate in the life of the community" ("What is development," Volunteering Options, 2013). Nations that are considered to be 'developing' like China and India, are in the process of extending more middle-class comforts to a wider range of citizens.
However, for some individuals, this idea that 'development' is synonymous with industrialization is problematic. In indigenous cultures, before colonialism, the culture was not mechanized but people could still live long lives, obtain knowledge, subsist, and live as a community. It is only because of the changes fostered by the developed world in the environment that indigenous ways of life are often no longer sustainable, as seen in the examples of the decimated Brazilian rainforest to Australian aborigines to Native Americans. If our lifestyle has had such a negative impact upon others -- and upon the environment in general -- can we truly call ourselves 'developed' as a society in the West?
Development was once conceptualized as a hierarchy, and 'primitive' persons were seen as less developed in terms of their culture and were viewed as innately inferior. Even those who idealized so-called 'natural man' often saw residents of the Americas, Africa, and the Far and Near East as living closer to the animals on an evolutionary scale of cultural development. Culture was seen as something that had to 'advance' and 'develop' in a linear fashion. However, even Europeans who encountered native people, such as one German settler admitted: "they are very courteous, friendly, and hospitable towards strangers, with whom they quickly become acquainted" ("European-Americans and Native Americans view each other," NCH, 2009). The idea of 'savageness' as applied to natives in the writings of other observers judges the natives based upon European terms. But it could be said that there was a great deal of savageness in terms of how the natives were later treated by Europeans: the natives were divested of their land and nations populated by non-white people were used a source of enrichment for the 'Mother Countries.' This treatment was often justified as 'beneficial' for the natives, because Europeans were seen as 'carrying the white man's burden' of bringing civilization and development to non-Europeans.
The notion of 'development' thus raises the question: if development is a moral state of being as well as an economic state of being (and it seems to be regarded as such, since democracies are regarded as more 'developed' than autocracies), how 'developed' is the 'developed' world, given the atrocities and injustices it has perpetrated in the past and the fact that there are such wide discrepancies in terms of standards of living even within Western democracies? We regard nations in Latin America where there is a wide gap in terms of quality of life between the haves and the have-nots as a sign of underdevelopment, but the lifestyle of virtually all industrialized democracies has been founded to some extent on the exploitation and disenfranchisement of others. No matter how great the accomplishments of Western civilization, those developments have come at great cost.
Development has also come at great cost to the environment, and other critics of the term 'development' have called into question its fundamentally human-focused nature. The Deep Ecology movement suggests that 'development' and 'progress' has come at the expense of the earth, and we should ask ourselves to move forward in a way that supports the planet, not simply our own species. According to Deep Ecology: "the short-term, shallow approach stops before the ultimate level of fundamental change, often promoting technological fixes (e.g. recycling, increased automotive efficiency, export-driven monocultural organic agriculture) based on the same consumption-oriented values and methods of the industrial economy. The long-range deep approach involves redesigning our whole systems based on values and methods that truly preserve the ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems" (Drengson 2012).
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