In recent years, we have had to become acutely aware in Britain of external pressures on not only development studies, but the social sciences at large and indeed the whole framework for intellectual interchange. We have to maintain the position of our disciplines in a context of both skepticism and mistrust by political decisionmakers, so that those of us working in higher education are becoming used to the analogy of our current position with that of the monasteries just before King Henry VIII “privatized” them. If George Orwell were alive in the post-1984 world, I doubt if he could say: “The stripe-trousered ones will rule, but so long as they are forced to maintain an intelligentsia, the intelligentsia will have a certain amount of autonomy.” The present ethos is one in which “stripe-trousered ones” (and, I suspect, bluecollared ones too) see little need to maintain an intelligentsia. Hence the responsibility for an association such as the Development Studies Association (DSA) to defend the importance of its particular intellectual activity in the face of doubt. This was one of the reasons for the time and effort given by some DSA members to take advantage of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) 1985 offer to support a workshop on the relevance of development studies to the study of change in contemporary Britain (see World Development, Vol. 15, No. 4, April 1987). The responsibility seems to me to be both a political and an intellectual one. The President, Council and members of the Development Studies Association have to keep vigilance in quasi-political arenas if our field of study is to survive. At the same time our best cure for survival is made by the quality of our work. But there are fellow academics who dispute that quality and some elements in their criticism must cause us at least some discomfort. Deepak Lal’s attempt to discredit development economics, in part on the ground that it is “paternalist,” cannot, in my estimation, simply be ignored. It is a grave and serious charge. I believe, however, that we do have answers and that we need to give them. If the current context is in one way unfavorable, it might be argued that in another sense there are opportunities to be grasped. If we look back on the last few years and see the continuing squeeze on the social sciences, coupled with a conscious philistinism among decisionmakers, we also see the extraordinary phenomenon of BandAid and the surge of public interest in the African crisis and thus at least some questioning about the reason for that crisis. Are we missing an opportunity to assist public understanding? And might we not, in so doing and in demystifying our subject, gain as a byproduct some support for it which could stand us in good stead in the difficulties which I have mentioned earlier? As President of the DSA, attempting to forward its interests and the cause of development studies, I have been confronted constantly by these issues and questions, which converge on the theme of the nature and role of development studies in Britain today. My predecessors could derive more exciting themes from the nature of development itself but I feel pressed, in the context which I have described, to look at some more limited concerns. I shall focus on three issues: the perception of development studies as essentially multidisciplinary; our relationship as British scholars with scholars from developing countries; and our possible involvement with development education.
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Sep 2, 2019
Katy Jenkins + 2
