Two Futures (Out of Many)

We have choices. One is to continue to get globalization and development wrong and, in turn, keep failing in our efforts to build a sustainable future. The other is to build a different future founded on new ways of gathering data, on new sources of information, and on new forms of collaboration between those in advanced economies and those living on globalization’s shoreline. Continuing on our current path meets with the least amount of resistance. For decades we have invested in ideas, studies, and solutions that have slowly but steadily refined information that does not tell us what we need to know or bring about the outcomes we hoped to see. Each study, measurement, and idea builds upon those that came before and informs those that come after. The assumptions at the heart of the entire practice of development and the perceived benefits of globalization have been reiterated so many times and in so many venues that they no longer seem to be contestable claims about the world so much as they are considered simple, self-evident, descriptive statements about how the world works. For those who live their professional lives in this world, it is extremely difficult to deal with cases that run contrary to these apparently universally held beliefs about development and globalization. The very idea that development might actually be part of the problem, and that globalization might systematically produce significant negative issues among the many populations it is meant to benefit, appears irrational. Thus, cases such as Dominase and Ponkrum, which call these assumptions into question, are dismissed as outliers, as unique exceptions that exist outside the real story of globalization and development.