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Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
The last chance: double development aid
Emissions trading:
linking climate protection and development
“We need a firm position”
Gloomy outlook for UN code
Governing globalisation
“The cotton subsidies worsen poverty”
4/2004 |
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[ Ethics of development policy ]
“We need a firm position”
The terrorist attacks of September 11 have changed the general conditions of international development cooperation. Since that date, the focus has been more on security policy, and a link between it and development policy can be seen. Many observers note even a new dominance of security policy thinking. In addition, development cooperation increasingly is being legitimised by pointing out the security interests of the North. Are we then not also duty bound to development cooperation even if no self-interests are involved? What shape could a normative framework for development cooperation take in that case?
At a conference on these issues at the Protestant Academy in Bad Boll at the beginning of March, Thomas Kesselring, of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Bern, said he believed that ethical convictions alone were not sufficient motivation to address the current developmental challenges with the required commitment. However, ethical reflections could contribute to these challenges being perceived as “common to all”. Ethics could provide a “certain guidance”, Kesselring said, which moved him to cite the theories of Peter Singer, John Rawls and Amartya Sen on international justness.
Wolfgang Sachs, of the Wuppertal Institute, said the dangers of globalisation must not be reacted to with preventive wars. Rather, the goal must be “preventive justness”: securing the right to existence, ecological leapfrogging by the developing countries, meaning skipping the resource-wasting economic processes of the industrialised nations, and seeking a just global prosperity.
Christoph Stückelberger, of the Swiss aid agency Bread for All, explained what that could mean in developmental practice. His starting point was a joint advertising campaign implemented by his agency and Fastenopfer which, among other things, used the slogans “Love thy neighbour as thyself, even if he is 8000 km away from you” and “In 2004 AD it is up to you to achieve small miracles” to promote both solidarity and a critical faith. “We need a firm position,” said Stückelberger, because development policy faced a great many challenges. The image of man upon which it was based was shifting, the basic values were changing.
Stückelberger included among the challenges the expansion of American hegemony, which pushed multilateral processes into the background, the possibly newly-arising countervailing power of the coalition of Brazil, India and China which made its initial impact in Cancún, and the North's increasing neglect of developmental issues. He said that in development practice it was a matter of considering the many facets of justness, including in benefits and distribution, gender and participation, ecology and location. The same went for freedom, understood as personal, economic, ecological and ideological freedom.
Sustainability, solidarity, peace, trust and responsible exercise of power must be brought into a balance of values, and no value must be made an absolute, said Stückelberger. That was development policy’s biggest ethical challenge.
Günther Oldenbruch
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