Foreword
By Professor Santosh Mehrotra
The intersection of local development (LD) and human development (HD) is so obvious that it should be self-evident to all those who care to think about development seriously.
However, it has taken two Italian researchers (Biggeri and Ferrannini) to present clearly and in conceptual terms the reasons why LD happens, and why HD cannot happen without LD.Look around you in the developing world, and you will find huge intra-country inequalities in the Human Development Index (HDI), in income levels and in social indicators in spatial terms. In other words, some provinces/states race ahead, while others drag along, depending upon whether the state government plays a supportive role or not, and if the leadership has a strategic vision or not. Amartya Sen made famous the case of Kerala State in India, which became a high achiever in terms of human development, even at low level of per capita income. Kerala's experience was not repeated in another state until a few decades later (e.g. by Tamil Nadu), and then in other southern states. But that experience has not been repeated in large parts of northern or eastern India. There is almost a natural affinity between spatial compactness and HD progression. This intersection between spatial compactness and HD can also be seen to be repeating itself in the case of other territories, which happen to be compact countries: South Korea and Malaysia in East Asia; Sri Lanka in South Asia; Costa Rica and Barbados and, more recently, Chile in South America/Caribbean (on which I had written the book Development with a Human Face: Experiences in Social Achievement and Economic Growth, by Mehrotra and Jolly, 1997).
When it comes to non-agricultural employment growth, there is evidence from the late industrializing countries among the now OECD countries (e.g. Italy) that cluster development was a particular strategy that was followed successfully to achieve both income and HD growth.
The success of clusters depends upon their location in a geographically compact area, enabling local governments to work cooperatively with them to provide the infrastructure and services that are necessary for them to flourish. The successful example of another late industrializer, China, shows that the Township and Village Enterprises (located in geographically compact territories ruled by one local government) were home to Chinese entrepreneurship in the 1980s. They played a particularly important role in enabling the emergence of a new private sector, which was non-existent until after the economic reforms began in 1979; they also drove Chinese GDP growth in the 1980s and early 1990s. Township and Village Enterprises, again, could not have grown but for the support provided to them by local governments (i.e. township and county governments). Thus, in the emergence of the manufacturing industry in late industrializing countries, local development supported by local governments has played an extremely important role.This book's focus on LD is particularly timely because most of the world's poor are now located in large countries, which, despite having middleincome status, still have millions of poor within their boundaries. The book's perspective is especially relevant, as the world cogitates about the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals agenda, because in the next few decades, urbanization will occur at a faster pace than at any time in the past. It is expected that small towns will grow into big cities, and big cities in the developing world will become metropolitan cities. Concentrations of populations in urban conurbations will make greater demands upon the capacity and ingenuity of local governments in a way that is unprecedented in human history. Large countries will need to realize that local governments are likely to be far better equipped to provide the basic services that will enable individuals to realize their human potential, rather than central or even provincial-level governments. Democracies will have to adopt deep democratic decentralization as an effective means of governance, and the imperative for decentralization is likely to grow (Mehrotra, 2008).
Capabilities cannot be realized without such deep decentralization. The synergies between LD and HD that this book focuses on will become more salient than ever before.However, if central governments, especially in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where most of the world's poor are located and where the share of young in the total population is rising, do not rise to the challenge of providing jobs to them rapidly enough, they may realize that impatient youth can become a threat to their centralized forms of governments. Sub-Saharan Africans may have seen some decline in internal conflicts in recent years, but their rapidly growing populations are also joining the labour force looking for work. South Asia is already at the mid-point of its demographic dividend, with a rising share of its population attaining working age. If centralized forms of governance fail to deliver either on basic services (and hence HD) or in terms of jobs in a growing economy, disillusionment can set in and transform into resentment and anger, and even violent rebellion. India, now already the world's third largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, which has experienced the second fastest economic growth of any country in the world in recent decades (after China), is also home to a Maoist insurgency. This has been ongoing for the last two decades, and it affects around 100 of the country's 641 districts. These 100 districts are spread over 9 of its 29 states. If despite their special needs these Maoist-affected districts continue to be governed in ways dictated by the provincial and central governments, and the imperative of local governments being given a chance is ignored, it may not only spell disaster for those districts and states but also affect the overall economic growth and human development prospects of India as a whole (Mehrotra, 2014).
The short point is that policymakers will need to pay heed to the synergies that could be exploited between LD and HD, and with time the concerns of this book will only grow in the eyes of policymakers over the next decades.
These concerns will not merely be the subject that academics (like Biggeri and Ferrannini) write books about. This will be the case for a variety of reasons: growing urbanization in the developing world; a rise in the share of working-age population in the total population and the rising expectations of young populations that are living/working in ever-closer physical proximity to each other in urban areas; but also the growing demonstration effect of extreme inequality in living standards within and between the global North and the vast global South.References
Comim F., Quizilbash M. and Alkire S. (Eds.) (2008), The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Applications, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Mehrotra S. (2008), "Democracy, decentralisation and access to basic services: an elaboration on Sen's capability approach”, in F. Comim, M. Quizilbash and S. Alkire (Eds.), The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Applications, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Mehrotra S. (2014) (Ed.), Countering Naxalism with Development: The Challenge of State Security with Social Justice, Sage Publishers, New Delhi and London.
Mehrotra S. and Jolly R. (Eds.) (1997), Development with a human face: Experiences in social achievement and economic growth, Clarendon Press, Oxford.