Development is based on a deficit view: developing countries lack what developed countries have – this may be knowledge, wealth, industry, education, life expectancy, markets, purchasing power, military power, political power, investment, etc.
The deficit view assumes that if certain ingredients are applied to an economic system, it will develop. If people have access to education, clean water and sanitation, energy, food, property rights, they will be able to become active economic agents, consumers that provide the demand base for domestic markets, successful entrepreneurs, and spur economic growth. If the country industrializes, capitalizes, becomes more connected to international markets, is able to attract investments, it will develop. The number of ingredients may vary, from more simplistic to more comprehensive accounts, but there is an underlying sense that there are levers that can be pushed to move towards development.
Development is a change in identity of the system: developing does not simply imply a move from A to B, but a change in the economic structure, in the pace of growth, and in living standards. This change in identity has been associated as the transition from backward, traditional to modern. Can a change in identity be governed?
The complexity view is that economic systems are adaptive systems, becoming systems, self-organising systems. That is, as new ingredients are inserted, the system adapts, and self-organizes into a different configuration. The new configuration may or may not be the condition of being developed. The point is that the result does not follow linearly from the action(s) taken. Adaptive systems are not as susceptible to planning as machines may be. Machine metaphors abound in the complexity literature, and are often used as a criticism to determinism and the idea (or wish for) controllability.
An example of becoming system is informal settlements, or slums. A case study I have analysed in my research is the informal settlement of Enkanini, in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The population of Enkanini grew from 4,000 dwellers in 2012 to 8,000 dwellers in 2015. The population pyramid, however, changed completely during the same period. Population growth is not just a matter of more people, but of a change in identity of the system. Initially, the settlement was composed mainly of single household adults of working age, who established their settlement close to their workplaces. With time, the spouses and children of the first settlers moved to Enkanini, others got married and had kids, some elderly family members also moved in, and the population pyramid changed shape in a matter of just 3 years. The informal settlement went from being a provider of labour to a population to be sustained, with children and elders who need education and care.
What type of science informs development? Mainly economics, whose knowledge base rests on equilibrium models, on demand- and supply-driven theories of growth, on trade and comparative advantage, at the country level, and on empowerment, capabilities, micro credit, which skips down to the individual level. What type of epistemology does complexity offer? One of interconnectedness, one of systems and components with multiple horizontal interactions (between systems, as in between developed and developing countries, and between components, as in between economic sectors of a country) and vertical interactions (between components and systems, as in between international capital and cheap labour, multinational corporations, NGOs and governments). Complexity may be useful to discuss the challenges of scaling up the actions and innovations of economic agents and firms to economic growth, and the limits of trickle down logics in the context of persistent and growing inequalities in terms of non-linearities between lower level and higher level system components.
Complexity offers an epistemology of diagnosis and not of prescription, the underlying grand narrative is not that of problem solving but of problem explaining. Is it fruitful to use an epistemology of diagnostics for governance? The tension turns on the role of science: if science is expected to guide policy, then a diagnostic epistemology falls short of being useful. If science is used to explore the policy option space, then complexity is fruitful. For the science-policy interface, complexity thinking leads to governance in complexity rather than governance of complexity.
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