 thankyou very much my name is Adam Swallow and I'm the commissioning editor for economics and finance for Oxford University Press and it is my hona to be able to introduce this book and two of the editors David and Ravi who will be speaking to it and we also have two discussants I don't know what they're going to be speaking to who will follow up and hopefully on matters of rising from this or if any of you have read the book yna'r cyfnod o'r byw'r cyfnod i'r gweithgareddau. Mynd yw'r gweithio i moeth, o'n ddweud o'r cyfnod o David, sy'n ddweud o'r cyfnod i'r ddefyn. Gweithio gweithio, Adam. Ynw'n gwybod i'r ddweud. Mae gennym i'n gredig o ddweud. Mae rhaid i'r gweithgareddau o gyfnod i'n ei ddweud o ymwysgwad o ddweud o gyfnod o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud. ac rwyf am ymddangos o'r economiaeth, yn ymddangos o'r perspectifol o'r cyfnodau yn ymddangos, rwyf wedi'n ffortunad i'r cyfnodd yn ymddangos ymddangos, ac rwyf wedi'n fydag i'r cyfnodd yn ymddangos. Felly, rwy'n ddod i'n meddwl i'r cyfnodd. Y genesus yma'r bobl yw'r cyfnodd ar y Cymru ymddangos yma'r ddiweddau ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos, idio'r llyfr, mae'r prydysesor yng nghymru, maireen o Neil, yn cysylltu'r llyfr o'r llyfr 40 yma, o'r ideiadau hynny'n idio'r llyfr. Yn ymgyrch chi'n gwybod, dwy'r llyfr yma, mae'n hynod o'r hystrydol, fe was clearly what she was aiming for but it was a very good book. Those of us there at the time thought, well good, we now have an institutional history but we're still short of ideas and this history of ideas in the field of development. So why don't we go about that but losing the IDRC Connection? Let's look at the ideas that have driven development ..y sgwmraeth, sydd y stryd yn gyflaesio yn ynglyntydd... ..ynd ymddangos o'r llwyth dda... ..y'n meddwl o'r llwythau... ..y'n meddwl am y dyfodol sydd y ddweud... ..yna'r ddweud yn ymddangos yn yma... ..y'r ddweud yn ymddangos... ..ynd ymddangos. y basic idea behind the project. As you can see it's a big book. We had wonderful authors, many of them in the developing world. Many of them quite young, I'm happy to say. We're very grateful to Oxford University Press for taking the risk of putting out a book with such a diversity of points of view authors and so on. a so ond, under the banner of development ideas and practice. Why was I personally engaged in development, although it's not really my academic field? As a boy of eight, I went to live in the developing world. In 1962, my parents moved to Iran, a wonderful country, which it's hard to believe today was then the poster child for development. They were doing everything right, the Iranian government thought so, all of the international experts thought so. In fact, they thought everybody else should be doing what Iran was doing. And what was Iran doing? The Shah of Iran, the ruler of the country, had had to leave his country rather ignominiously in 1953 under pressure of his parliament. Came back later in the year and realized he hadn't been a flaming success as a ruler if his parliament had managed to get rid of him. And so he needed a project and his project became a forced march for Iran towards Western style modernization. And in 1962, some years later, it seemed that was a great success. The indicators were all extremely positive. In the midst of this success story, there was occasional turbulence. Six months after my parents got to Iran, there were widespread riots, which took as their targets evidence of this modernization march, particularly women in professional jobs were targeted. Emancipation of women had been a centerpiece of the project and women in these riots were targeted. A name we would later hear much about was behind the riots, but he wasn't alone, Ayatollah Khomeini. But the riots were treated by international observers and by the Iranian regime as an aberration. This is just turbulence, an air pocket. It has no significance whatsoever. The march continued. In the midst of the march, there were some dissenting voices. A small group of Iranian and French sociologists and anthropologists kept publishing articles in obscure journals nobody read, saying that, in fact, Iranian society was under huge stress that this program was not popular in rural areas. It was not popular in the growing slums of the big cities. It seemed to be essentially popular in the Iranian elite, which made common cause with the international development community. We all know how the story ended in 1978 and 1979 in the decomposition of the regime and in the fact that since then Iran has been performing way below its potential, as we all know. Although curiously, women and the emancipation of women has continued in Iran where many more women wind up in professional jobs today and in the universities than in surrounding countries. So, all of this left me as I remained very attached to Iran with a deep suspicion of unchallenged expert communities or insufficiently challenged expert communities, particularly in the field of development. Now, coming to this project after many years of living in the developing world and elsewhere in a variety of jobs, I concluded that although economic factors are tremendously important in development, probably the predominant factors, ignoring other factors is a recipe for disaster and a number of international institutions have illustrated that at times by being excessively economistic. What matters in a country beyond the economy is, of course, as we heard from Kaushik so eloquently this morning, society actually matters. Social preferences which vary from country to country, which vary within countries, matter tremendously. Unless we accept that and recognize that our analysis is going to be narrowly gauged and often wildly misleading as we've learned over the last 60 years. So, those were some of the ideas inspiring me as I came into this project, but we were extremely fortunate that somebody much more knowledgeable than me came along to join my two co-editors, Bruce Currie-Alder and Rohinton Medora, Rohinton an economist, and that person was Ravi. So, Ravi, over to you. Thank you very much indeed, David. We want to leave time for our discussions really to raise issues and have group discussions, so I'll be quite brief. Basically, the charge that we gave to our authors, very distinguished authors in the 52 chapters I believe in the book, covering a very broad range of issues in development, sectoral issues, broad economic policy issues, country-specific perspectives and so on. The charge we gave to the authors was actually to answer three questions. Firstly, what have been the major changes in thinking in your specific area, whether it's agriculture, whether it's nutrition, whether it's health, whether it's this, whether it's that, what have been the major changes in thinking in your area over the last 50, 60 years? Secondly, what explains this change in thinking? And in particular, as David said, how is the interaction between the ideas and experience led to a change in the ideas? And thirdly, what are the implications of these changes in the ideas as we go forward? So, what was the change in thinking? Why was the change in thinking and what are the implications? That was the charge that we gave to the authors. And of course it's impossible for me, for us to summarise what they came up with. But what I thought I'd do just very briefly is to highlight one aspect which strikes me as being quite important over the last 50, 60 years. It strikes me how much a particular paradigm of the nation-state has structured our thinking in terms of development. It is what might be termed the Westphalian paradigm of the nation-state. The unitary nation-state, deciding policies within its borders, and that's pretty much it. That's the story, essentially. And of course that paradigm, that framework has been very important for us and I think is coming under challenge, both from the positive perspective and from the normative perspective. The positive analysis side is fairly straightforward and we all understand that in terms of cross-border externalities, cross-border spillovers and so on, so I won't go into that. But let me raise one question in terms of the normative aspects of the Westphalian paradigm of the nation-state. And it comes through in the area of development assistance. As Andy Sumner and some others have pointed out, the following facts are true. 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 90% of the world's poor lived in low-income countries. Today, three-quarters of the world's poor live in middle-income countries. So the tight connection between an individual being poor and the country in which that individual lives being poor has dissolved, is dissolving before our very eyes. And yet the graduation rules of development agencies, be they multilateral or bilateral, are pretty much designed for the reality of 50 years ago. And it's very clear that if we run, for example, the Ida graduation movie forward, the World Bank soft-loan agency movie forward, in seven to ten years' time, the fund which was created to engage with the world's poor will be disengaged from the bulk of the world's poor. Because the design of it was this Westphalian notion that you target the country and that's how it works. Now, of course, there are instrumental reasons for using the nation-state, but there are also normative reasons, which is what I find in a lot of the discussion, that when a country crosses the poverty line, somehow the global moral responsibility for the poor in that country diminishes. And that is quite a strong notion, certainly in the polities of the northern states. And the point is that that issue, as an issue of thinking, as an issue of ideas, didn't arise, didn't need to arise 30, 40 years ago. But it is now there before us. And very interestingly there's a very interesting debate in political philosophy between what might be termed the global Rawlsians, who took the Rawlsian paradigm and essentially globalised it and said, therefore, we're all behind the global veil of ignorance, and it's the poorest of the poor who should be the object of policy, no matter where they are. It's the maximum principle applied to the global setting. And interestingly, the major critic of the global Rawlsians was Rawls, who argued that you can apply whatever machinery you want, but you cannot apply the Rawlsian machinery to this argument. Why? Because the Rawlsian machinery is based on contractarian theories of justice, which relies upon the essence of it, is that there's a sovereign and subject, and there's a contract between the sovereign and the subject, and essentially what we're doing is fleshing out the contours of that contract. And that's what leads to the Rawlsian discourse. And Rawls says, well, however imperfectly, I can see that in the context of the nation-state, the Westphalia nation-state, the sovereign, the subject, and so on. But you show me where that compact is in the global context. So in fact there's been this debate between those who've been trying to use Rawls, according to Rawls in a very loose way, to try to get a breakdown between a person being poor and the person's country being poor. Well, that's where we are. This is how the ideas have needed to evolve as the reality on the ground has changed. And I don't think we have a resolution to that. There's a big debate between the Rawls on the one hand and global Rawlsians on the other. Well, there you are. That's an example, I think, of how the Westphalian paradigm, which has structured so much of our thinking, now needs to be rethought. Thank you very much. And so to Michael, if you'd like to discuss. Thank you, Adam. And thank you for this opportunity to comment on this volume. I'm not going to talk about the economics, or indeed the ergonomics of a 1,000-page volume. But I am going to sort of take on this idea of what this book is not about since when you published a book with 52 chapters, what's interesting to me almost is what's not in there as opposed to what is in there. What is in there is a wonderful list of topics that would be familiar, I assume, to pretty much everybody in this room. All of the big questions sectorally, all of the big questions country-wise in terms of strategies that these countries have followed, et cetera. And my full-time job is with the research department of the World Bank, but for nine of the last 14 years, I've also had the great opportunity, and I've been authorised by a succession of directors of the research group of the World Bank to teach at the Harvard Kennedy School. Indeed, other discussions is a former student of mine. So among the many upsides of simultaneously trying to apply and I teach four days a week and then try and actually make it stick on Fridays, is that you get to hang out with the cool kids. You get to hang out with the leading generation of people that are going to be the future for taking this whole business forward. And what struck me upon looking at the table of contents of this book was in one sense what the rising generation seems to think is all interesting and cool about the development problem and by extension, what we should do in response to that seems very different. So in one sense, I think this book is a landmark volume in the sense of providing a way of a representational summary of how the prevailing intelligentsia thinks about development at the moment. But I've always been concerned in some sense that when you talk to our own students today about their own backgrounds, what they aspire to and when you give them a license to set up a conference on development entirely where they get to choose the content, the speakers, the whole bit, they don't set up conferences like this. They don't talk about, unfortunately, they don't talk about, actually, a lot of the stuff that this book talks about. They don't talk about energy strategies. They talk about kicking soccer balls around in the villages of Kenya that are able to generate electricity at night times so they can start little candles. They don't talk about agriculture. They talk about very specific targeted programs to work with poor people. They don't talk about infrastructure. They don't talk about public financial management. It really bothers me that they don't. When I look at this book, I think it's an important statement. About how, in fact, we should be thinking about development in a way that is consistent with how countries in the post-colonial moment envisioned what they thought development was about. I think it's very telling that in the 21st century, when we look at a new generation imagining and discussing and implementing this thing called development, it actually feels, to me at least, rather different from how that has been done in the past. I think that the juncture is critical for me because I think we don't want to be seeing the cumudgeonly old-school sort of funny duddies that sort of haven't got with the program and haven't figured out how to create new apps for development and haven't sort of got with the program with regards to cutting-edge evaluation techniques and all that sort of stuff. To me, it is almost an existential kind of challenge for that if we lose the sense of the historical context and deep politics that created the aid architecture in which we live, if we don't have the capacity to help our students think through the kinds of philosophical issues that Ravi just articulated, if we don't have a sense that countries like Iran back in 1962 were the jewel in the crown and kind of now they're not, and when the epicenter of our thinking starts going towards these very micro-targeted cool interventions, I think we've lost a lot, actually, about what this business that we're in is actually all about. So I love this volume just because it really tries to lay down, I think, a really comprehensive statement about what big development questions are about. It's about agriculture, it's about infrastructure, it's about jobs in a big sense of what we can get states to implement. And I worry that we're losing that. So how we reconcile all of these things to me seems to be the big thing going forward. Take a look at the chapter on evaluation for that, right? You talked to my Kennedy School students now about what a course on program evaluation should be about. When I took that class as a student at Harvard 20 years ago, it was all about trying to assess the impacts of subsidies and the way in which we should be, what sort of balances on controls we should have in order to be able to maximize the net present value. What do the cool kids think they're taking a class on now when they take something called program evaluation? How to do an RCT, right? The beauty of this chapter on program evaluation is that it rightly doesn't dismiss any of that. It just says, RCT is a one tool among many. There's a whole bunch of other issues that we have to wrestle with when we're trying to make or defend claims about the effectiveness of entire ministerial portfolios, about organizations that we work for. All of these are evaluation challenges and yet that's not what the cool kids are learning, that's not what they're studying. I think, for example, one passage in this chapter is about something called process evaluations that Ray Paulson and others have done. I would, without putting asking for raising of hands, how many people who teach in development programs in this room would teach a class or even know what something called process evaluations are? Not too many, right? I think this is a landmark volume for me because of the content and especially the tone that it sets in regards to how we, in the 21st century, are true to the legacy, the professional legacy and the imperative for what development meant and yet also find ourselves at a very big crossroads moment almost in terms of how we define development in a very basic sense. If it's allowed to be exclusively seen as targeting micro information technology-based solutions or concerns of specific people living in specific times in specific places, then we've kind of lost something really fundamental about what this business is about and I love this book precisely because it helps us to get back to a world in which what we really can and should be talking about is these big political, public management questions about how we can get 21st century states and 21st century sensibilities to be able to engage with big 21st century problems. Thanks very much. Thank you very much, Michael. Thank you very much. It's hard to follow once my professor's fix, but I'll try. I really enjoyed reading the book. As Ravi said, it's 52 chapters so I had to be selective and one thing that struck me most is related to what I'm doing now in Tanzania and pretty much looking at the structural transformation. So very quickly I looked at the chapters that are talking about transformation and the one, and only I see Munga here and Justin Lin, that was informative and then there was another one on rural transformation and also a little bit about how Asia has Asia is a model of development. I thought that one was also very interesting and another one as the one that was sharing experiences from sub-Saharan Africa. I will not discuss the chapter by Munga and Justin because I know they have a session later and I think they will capture that. But the one that struck me most was with regard to the rural transformation and in particular because a lot of times when we implement policies for instance in Tanzania we look at other countries and we simply copy what they're doing without looking at the evidence within our own country and I like the classification that the authors of this chapter shared. For them for instance it is one thing when you're speaking about having a rural area it is something else when you're talking about rural development and it is totally something else again when you're talking about rural transformation and I really like the distinction that they've created in such a way it forces you to think outside the box when you are to advise any policy makers or any actors who have to put up a project. But then out of that then one thing that I also liked a lot from this particular chapter was the historical transformation that they have seen with regards to ideas. Ravi was talking a lot about that they had asked authors to do that and you could see like the three main things that they peak as the issues that are driving a rural transformation. The first one is with regards to diversification of rural economy. I really like the idea that a lot of times when we think of the rural people we simply think they work in agriculture but for them they put everyone in a gradient in such a way you could be in Denmark but still be in a rural setup and then come again as Michael was saying how do you cater for those people? What you find is right now a lot of people are being left out just because the normal classification that is existing is taking them out. Now the other thing we talk about a lot which they also touch about is with regards to globalisation of agri foods and system we talk a lot about value chains and what they do to us but then the approach that the authors take is cautioning us that it is one thing to follow a system and people get rewarded accordingly but it's something else if systems are not put in place where some people are going to be hard by the system and I thought that was a very strong statement coming out from them and the last bit which for me yes I knew about it but I never thought of having it in the way the authors put it up it was with regards to the urbanisation and for them they create urbanisation not necessarily moving from a rural area to the big cities but rather going to the medium and smaller cities and for them they call if the world can create environment whereby a lot of people can move to the small and medium cities that will tend to include more people but wanting to jump from rural areas straight to the urban areas then we see lost of the problems that we are seeing in our countries and then maybe just to finish off with one thing that also I really liked that they linked also to the urbanisation discussion was with regards to once people are developing especially their view was with the rural population once people are developing it is one thing to think about them being better off we as outsiders and it is something else for themselves to view that and they give a very good example whereby we as economists talk a lot about being trapped in poverty and for them what they want about is not being trapped in poverty because they say that is just a persistent level of deprivation but if you are trapped in an equality trap in any country that would be the worst situation and they explain in some countries even when they develop the people who are still below continue to be trapped there because the people in power will continue to push them and want them to be there and I thought that was very, very interesting and I learned that very much indeed so there's a few other statements and factoids about the book and supporting materials but I'll come to that in 12 minutes time so in the meantime there's a couple of microphones and you have an opportunity I'll give priority to those that have read the book no they want to buy it okay yeah why should you buy the book that's the first question if there's a show of hands and identify yourself if you'd like to ask the rector of UNU Ravi or one of the discussants then now would be your opportunity yes sir Han from UNU and I have read some chapters of the book I'm referring to chapter 36 on ICT for development I think the authors did a very good job of giving a history about technology and development how it was seen to deliver people from dire situations but of course we've learned that it's not the panacea but so what is the current thinking how do we approach technology in development does it still deserve a place as a focal point to borrow from Kaushik in the morning or is it better to see it as something that should be mainstream in the sectors such as education and health thank you Michael I wondered if the cool kids in the apps if their response to ICT in development the good part of this book is that it has it tips its hat to that stuff it says yeah sure it's really interesting it's one thing going on in development but there's a means ends distinction here and I want us to focus the problems we should be focusing on all these big fundamental sectoral questions around infrastructure around agriculture around energy and fixing health public health systems and then ICTs become useful to the extent they help us solve those problems unlike how we tend to think about it I think today which is that they become cool in and of themselves because they've got lots of bells and whistles around them and then we can unar our way at them and think by virtue of their appearance that they become useful to the extent they help us solve a problem and so what I like about this book is that it doesn't say this stuff doesn't matter it doesn't sort of assign it to third order status it just says the first order status is these big sectoral questions of social transformation and political transformation that's what the development challenge is and everything else should be assessed in some sense to the extent to which it helps us engage constructively legitimately effectively with those particular problems that's the criteria or the space within which I think we should be assessing what the 21st century has given us which is a whole new technology for engaging with these questions, great but there was a whole bunch of previous eras of new technologies that came along too and so history should be a source of instruction for how we make sense of all this anyway I'm speaking too long, let the authors do is their book not mine on a lighter note than that I used to live in India like many people in this room and as you know India is a country you come to love very often and I was going around with a very serious friend who was looking into local impacts of the spread of ICTs in India and this friend was extremely upset to find that the main local impact seemed to be that people were able to enjoy very cheaply calling their cousins at the other end of the country that in fact ICTs had brought joy and to a degree liberation from isolation so speak to many Indians so that's one dimension I think of ICTs that's been lost track of yes they can be extremely useful in the economy but in society they've had a very big impact which is favourable and satellite television has had in many ways much more impact in India than telephones why? Indians in rural areas are much better informed now than they used to be and it makes them more demanding of government and it puts government under more pressure than it used to be some decades gone by give you another factoid nothing to do with the chapter and what I'm about to say is not about that chapter it's that it's a basic rule which is that 10% of the authors give you 90% of the problems so bear that in mind those of you who are going for big editorial editorial tasks what I was going to say is that when David said ICTs had brought joy I thought he for a minute said RCTs had brought joy yes please hi I'm Rachel Gislequist from UNU wider so this is as Michael was saying a hugely ambitious project and it covers a wide variety of topics and so I'm sure it always invites questions about what's missing so with apologies I wanted to ask a question about what's missing it struck me in reading some of the book and looking through the table of contents that there's nothing on ethnic divisions and ethnic diversity and the relationship between ethnic divisions and development which of course has received quite a lot of popular attention and research attention especially in political science looking at say the relationship between ethnic divisions and public goods provision and ethnic divisions and slow growth in sub-Saharan Africa so it's also a topic I think that resonates quite well with both of your comments about the topic this morning or this afternoon so I guess my question broadly is about how did you decide what topics made the cut and which topics don't and why specifically this one didn't make the cut as a chapter great well thanks so much for your comment and you're right that there's a great deal of literature about this in other places but not so much in development so it's a very good question you raise when you take on a topic as broad as development ideas you really have to pick and choose and we had a lot of telephone conferences Ravi will remember the hardest part for us was first the table of contents which we established at the outset before we even thought of authors and then to try to find the best authors we could corresponding to the topic so that's how we proceeded one or two topics dropped off the list by the way not this one I should add it was never there simply because we couldn't either find the right authors or the right people weren't available but we did try to make sure that the principal topics were there one other thing I'd like to mention as an editor I don't know if Ravi would agree he's edited many more books than I have is that peer review was very helpful to us when we first took the outline of the book to OUP of course they sent it out to peer reviewers and the comments that came back from the peer reviewers actually profoundly influenced the way we decided to go the peer reviewers had their own blind spots because they didn't know a number of the people who we were hoping to involve because they were young and new and so on but the depth of their advice and the relevance of their advice to a volume of this sort I'm struck when I think back to the project how important it was to us so for young authors inclined to be very very impatient with the peer review process as I have often been it can be extremely helpful some of the country specific papers do address the thing when it's relevant in that context but I'm very sympathetic to the point that you raise in general particularly in light of the Westphalian points that I was making earlier and I've sort of spoken about this before that in some sense one could view the African post-colonial project as being one of trying to construct the Westphalian state from those straight lines on the maps that have been bequeathed to Africa by the colonial powers and so on so I'm very sympathetic to some of those issues are indeed taken up in the individual country specific point but I'm very sympathetic to the point you raise I haven't read the book so I'm totally innocent but I'm looking forward to read it after what I heard however I'm going to be struck by the discussion that sort of us the book and them the non-book us the big things the big policy issues, first order of importance them the cool things the ICT, the RCTs kind of the bottom up et cetera I would hope that there is room for both I would hope that the keys is complementarity I would hope that what has been really very important in the last years is precisely to democratize development to open opportunities students at the Kennedy school students at Berkeley, students at J-PAL and whatever can have a chance to participate to identify low hanging fruits that can make a lot of difference that can also be areas for learning for demonstration, what can work experimentation, failure, successes so I think it's good to kind of re-elevate the game maybe the deflow energy work book being sort of in contra position to maybe what Michael has been discussing here but let's not close the door let's see complementarities let's give value to what has been achieved in recent years but let's not forget in the sense that the state is important, transformation is important big issues are important and we need to see complementarities we may have lost some perspectives in that sense and the book may kind of help us re-balance the issues but certainly not at the cost of turning our back to what has been achieved Thank you very much for your comments and on that note there is in addition to the book there is the website which is developmentideas.info when the authors were invited to submit their chapters they also invited abstracts keywords, a further reading list a list of questions and during the author workshops most of them were videoed as well and so as a teaching resource the website contains the questions the further reading it's also got the working paper versions of the chapters as well and it's all free and accessible and this has all been arranged with IDRC and if you want to keep in contact with the website of course it has its own Twitter handle which is at dev ideas how cool is that for those who are a little more old fashioned there are copies of the book available outside for sale and we have order forms so that you wouldn't even have to carry it you can order it and have it delivered to you courtesy of Oxford University Press on that note can I thank the panel can I also record my thanks to all of the contributors and to the IDRC administration who helped to facilitate the book and to the organisers of this conference for allowing us to showcase it for you this lunchtime thank you very much