Author Archives: Jim Hodgson

Migration and the development prescription: Let’s do better

A new president is in office in Washington. For the sake of immigrants, LGBTIQ people, women, and racialized and religious minorities, one cannot help but be glad of this change, and of the opportunities that are re-opened for people who were excluded or attacked during his predecessor’s term. 

But once again, the notion of development is again prescribed as a remedy for whatever it is that drives migrants—notably and urgently, those from Central America—towards the southern border of the United States. 

On his first day in office, President Joseph Biden’s administration promised to invest $4 billion in the region to address issues of security and employment. A new immigration reform bill, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, was introduced. Aid and investment from the United States, it is hoped, will encourage people to stay home.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Jim Hodgson photo)

Two days later, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, spoke with Mr. Biden and concurred. “We believe that the causes of the migration phenomenon must receive attention. People do not abandon their families, their towns, their cultures, out of pleasure. They do it because of need. We want migration to be optional, not forced, that all the people of the Central American nations and our own have options, that they be able to get ahead where they were born, where their families are, where their cultures are. And for that, development cooperation is very important.”

With history as a guide, however, we can see some problems with the prescription. Two decades ago, another new president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, launched the Plan Puebla Panamá for regional economic development. The name has changed several times since then, depending on which countries were in and which were excluded because their citizens had made electoral choices that were unacceptable to donors. Airports were expanded, highways widened, mines dug and hydro-electric dams built, but still, people left by the thousands, tens of thousands, especially from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. 

Those large-scale projects enable the rich, expanding the divide between rich and poor within the region and indeed, everywhere. And no one is acknowledging that among the root causes are wounds left from US-sponsored coups and civil wars, along with deportations of alleged criminals into unstable systems—or rather, into systems whose only sector capable of their social integration is the criminal one.

We know what to do differently. Development assistance should always be focused on building “economies of solidarity”—innovative agriculture that respects ecology, local markets, cooperatives and credit unions, leadership by women, full consultation with communities and civil society organizations. Indigenous people and farmers should never be driven from their land by transnational corporations—a key consequence of a generation of free trade agreements in Mexico, Central America and Colombia and driver of migration—but rather trade and investment should benefit all people.

With this post (during International Development Week), I am reviving a blog I that I used while I worked with The United Church of Canada as its Latin America/Caribbean program coordinator. Please look here for more information about me.

What does development mean?

Maybe you have already figured out the relationship between the word development and the idea of a closed envelope—something that needs to be opened up or unwrapped. De-enveloped, if you like. Inside the envelope, there must be something that already exists.

The Spanish word desarrollo is similar: unroll something to see what is inside. In Portuguese, desenvolvimento implies unwrapping.

After more than 20 years of work in support of development organizations and projects, and employment by at least two organizations that had included the word in their names, I finally got the point in 2007 when I got around to reading several books by Octavio Paz, including his classic, The Labyrinth of Solitude.

The word means the opposite of what a lot of people do in the name of development. Too often, we try to impose ideas and structures that come from some other place, and fail to see the values and systems that are already present among the people. Think of the European arrival in the Americas. Think of the resource extraction companies that refuse to consult—much less gain the consent of—the Indigenous communities whose land they seek to exploit.

Development Vision

Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, decried decades of misnamed development and vowed that his people will find solutions for the problems of health, education, employment, unequal distribution of resources, discrimination, migration, exercise of democracy, preservation of the environment and respect for cultural diversity.

La Paz, Bolivia (2015)

Morales and others are critical of approaches that facilitate the advance of globalized capitalism led by giant corporations. Those approaches focus strongly on building infrastructure (roads, ports and canals) to support an export of raw materials or cheaply-produced manufactured goods. Most free trade agreements contain provisions that facilitate the movement and protection of capital investments—and that also inhibit government action to protect local economies, health systems and ecology. 

Thought of this way, we begin to see that the so-called “developed” countries of the global north have our development issues too. The much-reported water crisis in the city of Flint, Michigan, is a development failure. Why can’t a country that can deliver a cruise missile to a target in Yemen or Afghanistan get clean water to people’s homes? Canada’s inability to get clean water, quality education and decent health care to First Nations communities is also a development failure. But we can dig up one-eighth of the province of Alberta for a fossil fuel that will soon be superfluous, and expand a pipeline across British Columbia to get it to tidewater. A provincial government in Ontario begins to allow factories into the long-fought-for green space around greater Toronto: that’s a development issue too. In our different contexts, let us ask ourselves: what are our development priorities?

Churches, development and the crisis in the multilateral system

Oct. 21, 2018

Panel on human rights, faith and sustainable development

This year marked the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In their final declaration, the religious leaders who attended the recent G20 Interfaith Forum in Buenos Aires noted the religious “inspiration and moral teachings of the religions” in the Declaration, and they re-affirmed their commitment to defend human rights. They also expressed concern for the course of globalization that has produced new forms of slavery, and rejected all forms of human trafficking.

The global partnership program of The United Church of Canada supports the work of CREAS, a centre that provides training and support to faith-based organizations (FBOs) across Latin America and the Caribbean. Like other ecumenical initiatives that we support—from the World Council of Churches to KAIROS—CREAS engages with political and economic systems to open space for discussion of ethical values.

During the G20 Interfaith Forum panel on religious liberty, Elena López Ruf (at left, in photo above), the religion and development program manager at CREAS, said her organization works with others on sustainable development goals (SDGs) to bring perspectives that reflect moral and ethical values to that common agenda. These, she said, are centred on the human person and, as the SDGs proclaim, are to ensure that “no one is left behind.”

In a subsequent panel on human rights, faith and sustainable development, Elena and two colleagues from the Argentina office of the UN Development Program described how they work together and with others to achieve SDG 17 (“partnerships for the goals”). This is a process to work among FBOs to exert influence on implementation of all the goals. FBOs bring an ethical dimension to the SDGs, and recognition of the role of religious organizations in development. Such recognition is now greater than before, Elena said. “Development is not just economic; it is integral and multi-dimensional, including religion,” she added.

During the period after World War II, as the concept and structures of international development were being created, global leaders may have thought religion would simply disappear as education improved and secularism took hold. In a sense, the UNDP work with CREAS in Argentina is a kind of pilot project of how UNDP can work with FBOs in ways that measure results of proposals, actions and projects. Marcos Lópes of the Christian Aid office in Brazil said this is “not just green-washing,” but is rather “promoting a new future.” Elena noted some historic elements—some as recent as Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudate Si’ (May 2015). The encyclical speaks of integral development, though not explicitly of the SDGs that were launched a few months later.

This discourse about religion and development reflects what I heard a year ago in Geneva at an ecumenical gathering on diakonia and sustainable development. And I think it’s good that FBOs press governments harder on ethical dimensions of development—including human trafficking, impacts of climate change, mass migration, gross inequality, and gender justice.

Multilateral systems of development, human rights, under threat

But I worry sometimes that the cost of access to such tables is dilution of the justice messages. The times we live in require prophetic voices.

Together with the human rights declaration, the notion of international development was born in the late 1940s as nations re-ordered their relationships in the wake of the two disastrous world wars. They created new institutions to shape political and economic relations, and to bring the global “south” (or “third world,” we used to say) into this new order.

In June, when Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland received an award as diplomat of the year, she talked about a “rules-based” international order that was under threat from what she called “authoritarianism.”

We may differ about which rules—trade rules, for example, are made for corporations, not for people’s well-being or the environment. The authoritarians she mentioned most often were leaders of Russia and (incorrectly, I believe) Venezuela. But I think she was also levelling criticism at the right-wing populists who are taking over in the United States, Philippines, Turkey, Colombia—and more locally, in Ontario and now Quebec. In Brazil, perhaps the worst of them all may win power in an election at the end of October.

“The truth is that authoritarianism is on the march—and it is time for liberal democracy to fight back,” said Freeland.

Part of the problem is that liberals (and social democrats) seem to forget the struggle to win rights from the old land-owning elites, even while it’s the spiritual heirs of the old elites who are winning power today.

A few days after the G20 forum, during a round-table meeting of CREAS with its global partners, a panel tried to address the issues of this “epoch-changing” time. We celebrated proposals to address issues and systems. It’s not that we’re doing nothing. But we need to “cut the distances not only between our projects and communities and partners, but also between countries and communities and religions.”

In our times, we all face the same perils. We must continue to build alliances North and South for, in the words of Pope Francis, the benefit of “the poor and the Earth, our common home.”