How could one word bear so much weight?
Is it raw growth? Bridges we raise? Infrastructure, the crops we grow, or the technology we design?
Development is a contested term that has emerged throughout history. Politicians can talk about development under our bottom-houses. Academics can debate it in our classrooms. Yet communities are the ones who must live that development.
Rostow's Ladder and Its Limits
Rostow's theory suggests that societies move through five linear stages of economic growth: from agrarian societies to the emergence of entrepreneurial and technological activity, and finally to mass production and consumption.
Central to Rostow's theory is the idea that economic growth would "trickle down" to the poor, since economic expansion could ensure high levels of employment and competitive payment in the final stage of a society's development.
But Rostow's theory is linear, and rooted in colonial and Western globalization. Critics have long regarded it as a tool of control rather than liberation.
Development here has to hold water, soil, and numbers. Not a slogan.
Sen's Alternative: Capability, Not GDP Alone
In contrast, Amartya Sen defines development as freedom: the capability of persons to lead the kind of lives they have reason to value. Sen was keen to note in Development as Freedom that substantial development cannot proceed without extensive use of markets, but that does not preclude the role of social support, public regulation, or statecraft when they can enrich rather than impoverish human lives.
Sen's view was instrumental in the United Nations Development Programme articulating the Human Development Index. The HDI assesses long-term progress in three basic dimensions: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living, rather than sole economic growth.
According to recent HDI rankings, Guyana sits in the High Human Development category. Yet classification on an index is not the same as lived dignity. How exactly does this translate into everyday experience for citizens along the coast and in the interior?
The International Labour Organization, in Guyana's Decent Work Country Programme, notes that although Guyana has made advances in human development, important inequalities persist. In 2019, the latest year for which comparable data are available, nearly half the population lived on less than US$5.50 per day, with this figure rising sharply in the interior.
The Question That Won't Go Away
If Rostow's theory states that prosperity trickles to each corner, why do inequalities pool and bubble instead? Why is the reality so much starker than the numbers would have us believe?
And in the same sense, why must the periphery drink only the rainwater that drips from the eaves, their protest silent, but no less real?
That is why the numbers are not enough. You have to model development as people live it.
Training and strategy matter. So does the fact that some people still drink what drips from the eaves. If that does not change, the word "development" is a lie.
Science can put tools in more hands. That is the useful part. Not a key. Not a slogan.