This June, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) celebrated the 60th anniversary of its foundation in the midst of the First Development Decade (1960-70).
This anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on its origins and the historic role of its earliest generation of scholars in redefining the field of development studies and the strategic priorities of development policy between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s.
The creation of the IDS resulted from an encounter between heterodox economics, central European intellectual emigrés, and the modernising thrust of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. The latter, embodied by the first head of Britain’s new Ministry of Overseas Development (ODM), Barbara Castle (1910-2002), was the political vehicle that turned the IDS project into reality. Andrew Cohen (1909-68), the ODM’s first Permanent Secretary and a major architect of decolonisation, also enthusiastically backed the project.
Yet, the main intellectual drive behind the creation of the IDS came from the ODM’s Director and Deputy Director for Economic Planning, the economists Dudley Seers (1920-83) and Paul Streeten (1917-2019), respectively a New Zealander and an Austrian emigré. Facilitating their collaboration was their shared professional link with the iconoclastic British-Hungarian Post-Keynesian economist Thomas Balogh (1905-85), a key advisor to Wilson and the leader of the working group that established the ODM. Like Balogh, Seers and Streeten rejected conventional neo-classical economics, and emphasised the need for a political, historical, and sociological approach to the study of economic change. In this sense, they followed the footsteps of other pioneers of development such as Albert Hirschman (1915-2012) and the historian Aleksander Gerschenkron (1904-78).
Like Hirschman, Streeten was also an early sceptic of the miraculous promises of big-push industrialisation, the state-led growth strategy centred upon capital investments that had dominated development economics since the 1940s. Streeten’s critique particularly emerged in the mid-1960s, when he aided Swedish Nobel Prize Winner Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) in the development planning section of the seminal Asian Drama (1968).
In this chapter, Streeten and Myrdal debunked the myths surrounding big push industrialisation, arguing that while effective at building steelworks, power stations, and refineries, it had actually accentuated inequalities between urban growth poles and rural regions, thus fundamentally failing to reduce widespread unemployment and poverty. While serving as IDS Interim Director and then Deputy Director in 1966-68, Streeten led a specific research work stream on Indian planning to reiterate this thesis.
Despite Seers’ initial support for “big push” strategies, notably while a member of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in 1957-61, after taking over as IDS Director in 1967, he fundamentally reconsidered his stance. In The Meaning of Development (1969), he attacked the development economists’ obsession with growth and industrial policy.
He denounced their misguided expectation that economic growth would automatically increase employment, combat social inequalities, and reduce poverty. Only a vigorous social policy targeting “basic needs” such as food, clothing, and shelter could achieve this. Consequently, development should not be regarded as the acquisition of foreign industrial technology, but as the eradication of poverty and structural inequalities, whilst development studies had to shift towards the analysis of their historical, political, and social causes.
Like Myrdal and Streeten, Seers strongly believed in planning, but was determined to rethink its priorities and rationale, and strengthen its political leverage. This stance particularly emerged in the papers given by Seers and IDS political scientist Colin Leys (1931-) at the Institute’s conference on the Crisis in Planning (1969), whose attendees bridged both the North-South divide and the Iron Curtain of the Cold War.
According to Seers and Leys, development planning ran the risk of degenerating into a form of “pseudo-planning”, characterised by abstract “rationalistic/economistic” models, isolation within civil administration, and little leverage over politicians. Planning agencies, Seers argued, must abandon abstractions and become the “nerve centre of the government machine”, concerned with ensuring that the government placed concrete development projects at the core of its strategy. To do so, Leys argued, planners had to adopt an interdisciplinary approach “capable of handling all social problems” rather than dismissing them as mere “obstacles” to the effective functioning of economic models.
IDS Fellows hardly limited themselves to theory. In 1970-72, the Institute partnered with the International Labour Organization (ILO) to advise the governments of Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Kenya on how to shift their development plans in favour of job creation, inequality reduction, and poverty relief programs. IDS-ILO Employment Missions were led by Seers, his future successor Richard Jolly (1934-), and Professorial Fellow Hans Singer (1910-2006), a German-born development pioneer and key architect of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The missions resulted in the publication of the IDS-World Bank study Redistribution with Growth (1974), in which IDS economist Clive Bell (1943-) stressed the need to repurpose agrarian reform, industrial nationalisations, and public works as instruments of wealth redistribution other than productivity. He also called for turning the planner into a truly “political actor”, which would treat development strategy not as a technical, but a political choice.
Bell’s contribution also raised the important theme of popular “mobilisation”, emphasising the need for “trade unions for the underprivileged”, which would become an essential cornerstone of the political framework for development strategy. Although framed as a means to consolidate political stability in the face of structural economic change, Bell’s emphasis on the need to stimulate grassroots “organised political action” as a key component of development planning, anticipated the pressing issue of participation in the drafting and execution of the plans.
By the middle of the Second Development Decade (1970-80) the IDS had articulated an alternative approach to development policy, which, without dismantling the machinery of the “developmental state”, strove to reform it by debunking the growth mystique of the 1950s and 60s, placing inequality and poverty reduction at the core of development plans, transforming planners into effective political actors, and mobilising the political support of key target groups from below. Subsequent World Bank reports such as North-South (1980) and First Things First (1981) headed in this direction.
Unfortunately for the IDS’ reformist agenda, the socialist-reformist 1970s gave way to the neo-liberal 1980s – regarded by Streeten as the “lost decade” of development – which the Washington Consensus dominated. This brave new world of structural adjustment policies, characterised by state infantilisation, privatisations, and capital market liberalisation sponsored by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), had little time for development planning and state-led poverty reduction. The first generation of IDS scholars thus either grew disillusioned with international development (Seers) or worked within the UN system to mitigate the impact of neo-liberal policies (Jolly).
Yet, 60 years since the foundation of the IDS, a world plagued by unprecedented global inequality and discredited economic abstractions struggles to look beyond the choice between a de-legitimised Washington Consensus and an attempt to consolidate a statist, capital-investment-focused, and growth-centred approach to development with Chinese characteristics.
To look beyond this choice, policymakers, scholars, and practitioners still determined to reconcile economic growth with wealth redistribution, and effective state power with grassroots mobilisation, may still find insightful lessons in the interdisciplinary approaches and the egalitarian ambitions of the IDS’s pioneers of development.
