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Editorial
1/2004 |
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At the end of twelve years
It is not without feelings of sadness that I write my last Editorial. I have edited this magazine for twelve years, the first seven together with Christiane Kahrmann, the following five with Tillmann Elliesen. Before that I worked for 19 years in German development projects in Africa and the Middle East. The practical experiences I gained there were important for my subsequent work with the magazine – they helped me keep my feet on the ground and understand the problems of the practice. But it was not until I began working with the magazine that I fully realised the importance of drawing conclusions from these experiences, and of processing them into theoretical concepts. The leitmotiv of the work was this melding of theory and practice: making one fruitful for the other. The magazine was to follow German and international development policy with empathy and loyal criticism, to analyse and portray in comprehensible language the political and societal processes in and between the various parts of the world, to make practical experiences fruitful for theory and theoretical considerations useful for practice. Sometimes that has been more successful, sometimes less. The readers may decide what benefits they have drawn from our magazine.
Our effort, despite the financing by a government organisation (initially DSE, since the beginning of 2003 InWEnt), to produce an independent and critical magazine may appear paradoxical to some, but it is part of the magazine's concept and is anchored in the contracts of the editors. To maintain this concept was not always easy – there has been displeasure in the Ministry and other organisations, I was summoned before the State Secretary, and I received irritated readers' letters. The publishing company was not always sure that our editorial line served its interests. It took efforts of persuasion to save the concept beyond the organisational change. Still, this was successful over the years, and for that I thank the changing trustees of DSE and InWEnt and the senior management of the BMZ. They have understood that an open discussion of the problems of development policy is of crucial importance for improving it ("Learning from Mistakes" was the title of a BMZ publication), and that a critical magazine yields greater repute than one that is merely a mouthpiece of government.
A decisive change took place in 2003. The sister-magazines of E+Z in English, French and Spanish were discontinued, to the great dismay of many readers in the Third World, who thereby lost a unique source of information and a contact with Germany. In English, the previously editorially independent magazine Development and Cooperation has been replaced by a translation of the German publication. The important goal pursued by that step was to make the German debate on development problems perceptible in English-language regions, and above all in the international organisations, so as to give German authors a better opportunity to take part in the international discussion. At the same time, authors from other countries, in both North and South, are to be given more space in E+Z/D+C . The issues of the last year have shown this in a process of gradual change. Linked with the further development of content was a move to a more modern layout.
A special feature of the magazine was the three big series that we printed (with the exception of the last only in the German edition). The first, on donor policies, appeared as a book in 1996, the second, on new approaches to development theory, in 1999, followed by a Spanish translation in 2001. A total of 44 articles have so far appeared in the third series, Development Theory: Who's Who?, covering thinkers from Karl Marx to Walt W. Rostow, from Ester Boserup to Amartya Sen. This series will now be discontinued.
For their fruitful cooperation over the last 12 years I thank my editorial colleagues Christiane Kahrmann and Tillmann Elliesen, who, particularly in recent years, have further developed the editorial face of the magazine with ever new ideas. I also thank Dagmar Wolf, who for most of this time ran the magazine's secretarial office with great care, and without whom the editorial team could not have produced the magazine; the graphic artists Bruno Boll and Sung-Hyuen Kim, who for the last year were responsible for the magazine’s layout; the staff of the publishing and printing house who enabled the magazine to appear; and last not least the translators Malcolm Bell and John England who put the English edition of the magazine into shape. As from the next issue, the Editor of the E+Z/D+C will be Hans Dembowski, whose PhD thesis dealt with urban development in Calcutta, and who gained journalistic experience working at Deutsche Welle and the Frankfurter Rundschau. I am sure that with new ideas and new energy a younger team (enlarged by Norbert Glaser) will give the magazines E+Z/D+C fresh impetus. For myself, I shall now have more time than the daily treadmill in the editorial department allowed so far – for talks and observations, to reflect and to write.
Finally, the Focus section in this issue must be presented with some introductory remarks. That development policy (like politics as a whole) needs advice and exchange with academic research should be self-evident; but this is less understood in Germany than elsewhere. This exchange between politics and academia has been one of the basic themes of our magazine for years, and it is focused upon in this issue, once again. Three representatives of German academia discuss the subject with a representative of politics, and their talk manifests the degree of their insights and at the same time the difficulties of implementing them. The record of the round-table discussion is supplemented by an article on the demolition work going on at present on regional studies at German universities, and by another one showing how the exchange in the Anglo-Saxon countries works. Lessons to be learnt. With that I bid you farewell. Yours sincerely
Reinold E. Thiel
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