Vol. 5 No. 1 (2002)

Since the founding of the United Nations there have been five “development decades.” Each of these periods served as a global goal-setting agenda intended to transform LDCs (Less Developed Countries into progressively improved economies, governing systems and social systems. Despite prodigious efforts, each of these planned periods of development has failed. Planners, administrators, political leaders and workers have through various international and domestic development
agencies undertaken to apply their skills and best thinking to raise the standard of living of peoples who have long suffered from too little food, too little comfort, too little quality of life and health. Yet expenditures of such great effort and wealth donated by various states governments have failed to achieve the goals set for each decade. Indeed, the level of world poverty is, in many respects, greater now than it was fifty years ago. While the United Nations Development Decades have clearly failed (2
billion and more impoverished worldwide) is it the case that those who seek the improvement of life for so many millions of people are inept, lacking in skill or both? Why have the efforts of so many been unable to transform the world?

Perhaps the problem is less in the people and even the institutions than in the conceptual framework. Maybe “development” is the wrong focus. Maybe the idea that human beings can and should dominate the natural environment, progressively change the life condition of people through “programs and aid” and promote modernity is erroneous. The authors of essays in this issue of the Fourth World Journal offer
alternative ways of thinking about the wealth and life quality of peoples in the world. While “development” is assumed by most who use the term to be an “ultimate good” maybe there is a difference between “introduced development,” or “imposed development” and “self-directed development.” Maybe the problem with all the failures is that someone on the outside presumes to have all the answers for inside-nation needs. Maybe “sustained development” and externally introduced
development produce serious problems and failures because human culture doesn’t respond well to imposed solutions, but works much better when human societies adapt and absorb outside ideas, technologies and ways of life according to the dictates of inside-cultural pace instead of outside ideas for success.