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WEEK 1 January 29 INTRO: WHY A POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT?

WEEK 2 February 5 THE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT ?Inequality/Wealthoxfam

WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION: WHY A POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT?

2.     Ross Coggins, The Development Set [NYU Classes]

3.     Boniface Mwangi,“An African’s Message for America,” [link on NYU Classes]

4.     Ivan Illich, “To Hell with Good Intentions [NYU Classes]

5.     Peter Singer, “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” The New York Times Magazine, September 5, 1999 [NYU Classes]

6.     Matt Ridley, “Smart Aid for the World’s Poor, WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/articles/smart-aid-for-the-worlds-poor-1406326677

7.     Dale Jamieson, “Duties to the Distant: Aid, Assistance, and Intervention in the Developing World,” The Journal of Ethics, 2005 [NYU Classes]

8.     Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power, Preface by Amartya Sen, Preface to Paperback Edition, and Introduction (pp. xi–22).

9.     Thomas Pogge, “Poverty and Human Rights,” Expert Comment for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2007 [NYU Classes].

10.   Nancy Birdsall, My Development Policy Wish List for 2015 and 2014 [see links on NYU Classes]
Recommended:

1. 
   Global Ethics Corner, Am I My Brother’s Keeper? https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/studio/multimedia/20091211b/index.html
   
2. 
   If you have time and want to see Peter Singer discuss his book, The Life You Can Save: http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/studio/multimedia/20090323b/index.html
   
3. 
   Scott Baldauf, “Five myths about Africa,” Christian Science Monitor, August 6, 2011,
   

4. 
   Nicholas D. Kristof, “D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution,” The New York Times, October 20, 2010,
   

5. 
   Pranab Bardhan, “Who Represents the Poor?” Boston Review, July 19, 2011, http://www.bostonreview.net/pranab-bardhan-who-represents-the-poor
   
6. 
   Kent Annan, “Poverty Tourism Can Make Us So Thankful,” The Huffington Post, January 3, 2011,
   

 For Mountains Beyond Mountains, think about these questions:

• 
  Is there a vision of politics that animates Partners in Health and/or Paul Farmer, and if so, what is it?
  
• 
  What's the cost and benefit of critiquing a focus on cost-effectiveness/benefit analysis in healthcare (or in development general)?
  
• 
  Is there a tension between human rights and cost-benefit/cost effectiveness analysis?
  
• 
  What's the ethical stance of Farmer/PIH and how useful is it as the basis for a politics of development/justice/preferential option for the poor?
  

You should also watch a recent video of PIH’s more recent work in Rwanda:

http://www.pih.org/blog/pbs-features-partners-in-health-as-an-agent-for-change-in-rwanda
For the other pieces, keep in mind the following questions as you read:

• 
  What do the authors mean by development? Is development different than growth? Progress? Modernization? Justice? How?
  
• 
  What vision of politics do the authors have? Where does the politics of development take place?
  
• 
  What ethical issues frame the development debate, in terms of practitioners, policies, and institutions?
  
• 
  How do we conceive our roles as development policy analysts, practitioners, and/or citizens in the context of deep inequalities of income, power, and privilege?
  

Some of the issues are grounded in Paolo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed and various works on the theology of liberation, by Gustavo Guttierez, Leonardo Boff, Karl Gaspar, Edicio dela Torre, among others. For a discussion of one attempt to apply this framework to Northerners, see Alice Frazer Evans, Robert A. Evans and William Bean Kennedy, Pedagogies for the Non-Poor, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books (1987). For a more philosophical discussion, see the Symposium on World Poverty and Human Rights in Ethics and International Affairs 19:1 (2005), which can be found at http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/journal/19_1/symposium/5109.html, Peter Singer One World, Peter Unger Living High and Letting Die, and work by Thomas Pogge. Also see work by Iris Marion Young, Matthias Risse, Des Gaspar, Jon Mandle, among others for work on global justice and its relationship to development.

1. 
   Duncan Green, Introduction in From Poverty to Power, pp. 2-16
   
2. 
   Angus Deaton, The Great Escape, Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 3
   
3. 
   Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, 2011, pp. 1–45 [NYU Classes]
   
4. 
   Gilbert Rist, “Development as a buzzword,” Development in Practice, August 2007 [NYU Classes]
   
5. 
   Alex Evans, Tearfund Think Piece [NYU Classes]
   
6. 
   Best Aid Spoofs http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/dec/19/11-of-the-best-aid-parodies
   
7. 
   Glance at Materials on the SDG website https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgsproposal and the collection of materials at http://post2015.org/
   
   
   

1. 
   Nancy Birdsall, “Reframing the Development Project for the Twenty-First Century,” Center for Global Development [NYU Classes]
   
2. 
   Duncan Green, Stephen Hale, and Matthew Lockwood, “How can a post-2015 agreement drive real change? The political economy of global commitments,” Oxfam, October 2012 [NYU Classes]
   
3. 
   Alex Evans and David Steven, “What Happens Now? The post-2015 agenda after the high-level panel,” NYU Center on International Cooperation, June 2013 [NYU Classes]
   
4. 
   Diana Mitlin, Sam Hickey, and Anthony Bebbington, “Reclaiming development? NGOs and the challenge of alternatives,” Global Poverty Research Group, 2006 [NYU Classes]
   
5. 
   Alex Evans, “Climate, Scarcity and Sustainability in the Post-2015 Development Agenda,” December 2012 [NYU Classes]
   
6. 
   “High-Level Panel Report of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda Framing Questions,” United Nations, November 30, 2012 [NYU Classes]
   
7. 
   “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development,” The Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, United Nations, 2013, Executive Summary and sample as interested [NYU Classes]
   

• 
  Is there anything worth rescuing in the concept of development? How do we know?
  
• 
  Is development about outcomes or processes? What are the costs or benefits in focusing on one or the other? What indicators would we use? Is there a difference in the politics of development if we focus on either outcomes or processes? Or on the importance of both?
  
• 
  What is the scale at which “development” is an important phenomenon? Individuals? Communities? Countries? Regions? The global economy? Humanity? What are the political implications of choosing to privilege one of these over the other?
  
• 
  What about the agents of development? Are they different than the objects of ethical concern in development?
  

If you want to follow up on the “post-development” perspective, see Wolfgang Sachs, “Development: The Rise and Decline of an Ideal,” Wuppertal Institute Paper, Number 108, August 2000, http://econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/49106/1/332536696.pdf.

Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Twenty-first Century Globalization, Paradigm Shifts in Development,” Doing Good or Doing Better, pp. 27-46. Gustavo Esteva, “Development,” in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), London: ZED Books, 1992; James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Arun Agrawal, “Poststructuralist Approaches to Development: Some Critical Reflections,” in Peace and Change, 24(4) October, 1996, pp. 464-477; Michael Watts, “Development I: Power, knowledge, discursive practice,” in Progress in Human Geography, 17(2), pp. 257-72, and his Liberation Ecologies: Environment, development, social movements, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, which also contains a nice selection of articles by Escobar and others.

Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) was one of the earliest influential critiques of Western discourse on the Third World. See also: The Post-Development Reader.

For the Millennium Villages Program, see Kent Buse, Eva Ludi and Marcella Vigneri, “Sustaining and scaling up Millennium Villages: Beyond rural investments,” ODI, October 2008 [NYU Classes] and Sam Rich, “Africa’s Village of Dreams,” Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2007, pp. 14-23 and Victoria Schlesinger, “The Continuation of Poverty: Rebranding Foreign Aid in Kenya,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2007, pp. 58-66, http://harpers.org/archive/2007/05/the-continuation-of-poverty/. Also see Neil McCulloch, Anna Schmidt, and Andy Sumner, “Will the Global Financial Crisis Change the Development Paradigm?” Institute of Development Studies, March 2009 and Forrest D. Colburn, “Good-Bye to the ‘Third World’,” Dissent, June 2006 [NYU Classes].

See also: “Greenhouse Development Rights: An approach to the global climate regime that takes climate protection seriously while also preserving the right to human development,” EcoEquity and Christian Aid, November 2006, http://gdrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/gdrs_nairobi.pdf.

1. Owen Barder, “The Implications of Complexity for Development,” Kapuściński Lecture, Center for Global Development, August 15, 2012,

http://www.cgdev.org/media/implications-complexity-development-owen-barder

2. Complexity, Ramalingan et al

3. Duncan Green, From Poverty to Power, Annex, How Change Happens [NYU Classes]

4. Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power, pp. 23-50.

5. David Damberger, “What happens when an NGO admits failure,” Engineers Without Borders, TEDTalks, April 2011, http://www.ted.com/talks/david_damberger_what_happens_when_an_ngo_admits_failure.html

6. Daniel W. Bromley, “Making Institutions work for the Poor,” University of Wisconsin – Madison [NYU Classes]

7. Episode 444: “Gossip,” This American Life, August 26, 2011,

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/444/gossip

(Listen to the whole thing if you’d like, but the assignment is Act One on the “Malawi Journals Project”)
Recommended:

1. 
   Lant Pritchett, “It Pays to be Ignorant: A Simple Political Economy of Rigorous Program Evaluation,” Policy Reform, 2002 [NYU Classes]
   
2. 
   2011 Failure Report, Engineers without Borders, http://legacy.ewb.ca/en/whoweare/accountable/failure.html
   
3. 
   Ian Smillie, “Failing to Learn from Failure,” Global Giving, January 13, 2012, http://www.admittingfailure.com/failure/ian-smillie/
   
4. 
   John Hecklinger, “Detecting and Learning from Failure,” Global Giving, January 13, 2012, http://www.admittingfailure.com/failure/john-hecklinger/
   
5. 
   James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, pp. 3-21 [NYU Classes]
   
6. 
   Dennis Whittle, “How Feedback Loops Can Improve Aid (and Maybe Governance),” Center for Global Development, August 2013 [NYU Classes]
   
7. 
   Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock, “Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA),” Center for Global Development, August 2012 [NYU Classes]