Comments on: The Democratic Developmental State: Goal, Utopia, or somewhere in between?

By: Rosa

Rosa — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:35:52 +0000

Hi Duncan, the Google Reader feed for your blog has been giving some trouble – most of the words clustered together on the left side, one over the other. Has anyone else complained about a similar issue or is this just me? I tried unsubscribing and then re-subscribing, but doesn’t seem to have helped. Can you help? Thanks, Rosa

Richard pp Duncan: Thanks Rosa, this has caused some head-scratching here – we hope to have it sorted by the middle of next week at the latest.

By: Andrew Dorward

Andrew Dorward — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:57:45 +0000

Duncan
What is the evidence that active citizenship is part of the mix? Are any of your examples of developmental states also examples of active citizenship? Are there ’stages of development’ here, and is the extent to which democracy involves ‘active citizenship’ (and the nature of de,mocracy itself) highly context dependent – on culture, cultural homogeneity, attitudes to traditional authority, etc?
I hope yi are nejoying your holiday … Andrew

By: P Baker

P Baker — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:28:13 +0000

Good stuff Duncan and sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

I especially like ‘active citizenship’ – it sounds so much like the Big Society.

Seriously though, is it the job of Oxfam to expatiate on such generalities? What will it achieve? Do you think governments and ’society’ (does it exist?) will listen?

I’ve listened to so much stuff recently about how everything has got to change, but so little pragmatic realism about what to do when it doesn’t.

Shouldn’t the job of Oxfam be to select a few scenarios for each region in which it is active and develop its own resilience to be ready to confront what will be a limited menu of choices for the banquet of consequences that the last 30-odd years of excess has so ill-prepared us for?

By: Takumo

Takumo — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:03:54 +0000

Democratic developmental states have historically been a rarity, which is why INGOs like Oxfam should be careful, when working with Asian civil societies, not to get carried away by the non-Washington-Consensusness of their countries’ developmental paths.

In this regard you might find interesting this interpretation of Korea’s development by a progressive Korean development think tank NGO Re-shaping Development Institute.
http://www.kofid.org/upfile/file_11112418201654148.pdf

Picked up by the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/28/south-korea-development-model

By: Makarand

Makarand — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:57:38 +0000

I think it is more an admission of realities. Like for instance, conventional wisdom states unequivocally that corruption makes government functioning difficult, inhibits private sector, detracts from creative energies and in general hampers growth. This is the line that is taken by development agencies.

On the other hand, as Huntington argued way back in the late 1960s,
“… when there is a paucity of ‘good laws’, corruption is the only way to drive growth. Corruption in those cases is the grease that allows individuals and corporations to circumvent bureaucracy and inefficient rules.”

The latter is of course not a defence for continuation of corruption and lack of strategies to open out governance. It is just that, one accepts realities and adjusts priorities and time lines.