Guardian Global Development

The future of development

Aid, politics and development: the 21st century challenges

Can we end poverty? Maybe – if we learn from the past when we look to the future

Read more on the future of development from Jonathan Glennie and Madeleine Bunting
indian workers food security
Indian labourers developing technologies in Bangalore to create food security. Photograph: Jagadeesh Nv/EPA

The way people understand and think about development is in a state of constant churn and upheaval. Some ideas are genuinely new, prompted by new technologies and groundbreaking political movements.

Old ideas, previously discarded for reasons both bad and good,are resurfacing, often to be acclaimed as radically new. New concepts are borrowed from other disciplines, such as medicine and physics, or from rich-world debates. Here are a few examples from recent months.

First, the notion of resource constraints is back, as we see violent spikes in food prices cause disastrous setbacks in global progress on ending hunger. Similarly, planetary boundaries – how much CO2 we can produce without causing catastrophic climate change, the limits on water use, fertile soil, and available energy – are starting to become recognised as serious constraints on economic activity.

If resources are limited, distribution becomes much more important, and there is a danger that poor people will be sent to the back of the queue, potentially undoing decades of progress on development. "Feeding the 9 billion" reports are proliferating but they often focus on technical solutions, ignoring the issues of power, politics and distribution. In June, Oxfam is launching a global campaign on precisely this issue.

Second, the development sector has long spoken of the 'north in the south' – rich elites in poor countries – and the 'south in the north' – marginalised groups and rising inequality in the rich world. What we are now seeing is a much more comprehensive obliteration of the north-south distinction.

A range of supposedly northern policy issues are becoming more urgent in poor countries: ageing populations, rapid urbanisation, and the role of domestic taxation rather than just aid in confronting poverty and inequality. Then there's the case for universal welfare states, guaranteeing healthcare, education and social protection; mental illness; disability and even obesity.

On this last point, Mexico is the second most obese country on the planet after the US, and obesity and malnutrition coexist in many developing countries, bringing sharp rises in diabetes and heart disease. Most traditional development organisations have struggled to address these topics either in their public messages (can you imagine an Oxfam campaign on obesity?) or conceptually (a focus on rural poverty remains deeply entrenched despite rapid urbanisation).

More generally, the "them and us" mental frame, that poor people in poor countries have different lives, experiences and issues to those in the north, is proving hard to overcome.

Third, the multipolar world is just as prevalent a cliché in development circles as everywhere else. The rise of the Brics and the relative decline of the west have changed the landscape at an astonishing speed. We have barely begun to understand what such changes mean.

The new world order will be one of networks and variable groupings rather than fixed hierarchies, such as the G8. And aid agencies won't like every aspect of what is generally a welcome redistribution of global power– the G20 seems much more interested in growth than aid.

Will the "sustainable", "resilient", or "inclusive" growth they speak of prove to be mere window-dressing? Will the world return to the delusions of Thatcher/Reagan-era trickle-down economics? If so, expect inequality to leap and poverty reduction to stall.

Finally, the way we think about development is constantly evolving. Take theories of change. NGOs and others frequently call themselves "agents of change", yet they invest remarkably little in honing their understanding of change processes and how to react to them.

What kinds of change are predictable, and which ones can we plan for? Which, like the Arab spring, are entirely unpredictable, and how good are we at responding to those? In general, aid agencies are better at understanding and responding to discontinuous change when it comes to natural disasters than political events. Why is that?

A focus on novelty runs the risk of ignoring the basic issues of development: reducing poverty; supporting citizens and their efforts to build effective, accountable states; fighting for universal healthcare, education, access to water and food; and equal rights for all women and men.

Contrary to the gloom of the aid pessimists, there has been genuine progress in many of these areas, as Getting Better, the new book by Charles Kenny, eloquently argues. The challenge for those engaged in aid, development and politics is to continue that effort, responding to the new challenges that face us, so that poverty and hunger in the coming decades rapidly go the way of slavery in the 19th century.