International Development should be about well being of individuals and communities argues Prof. McGregor, based on his research and empirircal studies in four countries (Bangaldesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand).
A lot, argues Allister McGregor, Director of the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) Research Group at the University of Bath. The wellbeing of men, women and children ought to be the fundamental objective of international development, but we have displaced or lost sight of this objective both in how we study the relationship between development and poverty and also in the formulation of policy to address widespread illbeing and suffering in developing countries. The result is that international development policies and spending throughout the 20th century failed to have the impacts on poverty eradication that we might have hoped for or expected.
In any processes of social change and development there are winners and losers. In many developing countries, however, while some people benefit greatly from development, for many others poverty persists through their lifetime and across generations. The WeD research group, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council has been developing a new research methodology which seeks to provide a better understanding of why poverty persists in many developing countries The group has carried out detailed research in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand; studying a wide cross-section of people and households in a range of rural, peri-urban and urban communities. Using the idea of wellbeing as a focus, the research reveals what the obstacles are, in each society and community context, to people finding ways of achieving wellbeing.
The particular strength of using wellbeing as a way of organising analysis and thinking about development policy is that it encourages us to critically reflect on the wisdom of analytically dissecting the person: for example, by studying their economic ‘life’, disconnected from the political, social, and personal dimensions of that life. It compels us to consider the whole social human being and the relationships that different human beings have to the organisation of societies. Wellbeing cannot be equated simplistically with wealth or with happiness. Being happy when you are chronically hungry cannot be regarded as wellbeing. Wellbeing, we argue, is a positive state that arises from the material, relational and psychological conditions that people experience in society. The material benefits from economic growth matter, but so too does the type and quality of the relationships that people experience, alongside their subjective evaluations of how satisfied they are in achieving what they regard as important for wellbeing. All three of these dimensions work together in social processes to generate what we each experience as wellbeing or illbeing.
The empirical studies in all four countries (Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand) confirm the value of a wellbeing approach. In the poorest countries we find many examples of poor people trading-off important elements of their wellbeing in order to meet immediate and pressing material needs. This cannot be described as development, nor can it be a sound basis for future, healthy development. In the more developed of the four countries we find widening gaps between the rich and the poor, but not only in terms of material wealth. There are systematic inequalities in relationships through which people might realise a modern notion of wellbeing, and there is a growing aspirational gulf, where the poorest and most excluded members of society cannot even aspire to the same levels of wellbeing as some of their fellow citizens. These structural problems produce irresistible political pressures which unless addressed are likely only to make current development successes unsustainable.
The research indicates that the concept of wellbeing has great promise for how we understand the relationship between development and poverty and can offer new ways of thinking about policy for international development. The notion of wellbeing has been taken up as a major focus for policy in Thailand and the WeD Thailand team will work to develop the research approach with government in a major conference in Bangkok this summer and with local government staff over the coming years. The wellbeing research approach developed at Bath has also attracted significant interest amongst international agencies including in the OECD Development Centre and in the Swedish International Development Agency.
This month Cambridge University Press publish ‘Wellbeing in Developing Countries: From Theory to Research’ edited Ian Gough and Allister McGregor. And, for further information on the work of the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) Research Group see: www.welldev.org.uk
