Dynamism and development

WorldDevelopment, Vol. 8, pp. 215-290 Pergamon Press Ltd. 1980. Printed in Great Britain

Dynamism and Development

*

HARLAN CLEVELAND and I. H. ABDEL RAHMAN Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, Princeton, New Jersey Summary. - In industrialized countries, the human needs and purposes to be served by science and technology are increasingly subject to greater social control. People in developing countries are also preoccupied with controlling choices in the development and application of technology - and the priceless ingredient in controlling their own destiny. The encounter between the more and less dynamic societies makes developing countries the targets of an ‘information bombardment’. Science, technology, values and organization - the ‘active ingredients’ in development - are all forms of information (a resource that is not merely renewable but expandable). The capacity of indigenous people to understand and manipulate the information flow - linking ‘science (‘know what’) and technology (‘know-how’) to human values (‘know why’) and social authority and organization (‘know who’) - is consequently the key to the dynamics of ‘development’.

1. THE ARGUMENT

IN BRIEF

ment of the resulting wealth in more technology to keep the loop spinning. At the macrolevel, the level of technology has to be reconciled with accepted social values by competent social authorities. There are enormous variations in the degree to which and the purposes for which nations have tried to ‘develop’. But the key factor in every case is not primarily economic relationships or technology flows. It is the indigenous people handling the process - their values, aspirations, attitudes, skills, leadership, discipline, authority and organization. Science, technology, values and social authority and organization - or ‘know what’, ‘knowhow’, ‘know why’ and ‘know who’ - are diffo,ent kinds of information, Information is coming

Until the 1970s science and technology were widely regarded as having a life of their own, an ‘inner logic’ and an autonomous sense of direction. Their self-justifying ethic was change and growth. In the industrialized countries, the conviction is growing that science and technology should be subjected to more social control. The social fallout of technological progress has been both dangerous and beneficent and public opinion is beginning to insist that public authorities mix explicit human values into the processes of technological choice. Developing countries are also asking: change and growth for what? and for whom? But they are even more preoccupied with issues of fairness between the older and the newer arrivals in the international economy, and with building their capacity to play the lead, not merely a supporting role, in the drama of their own development. What makes development dynamic is not only the input of technology (‘know-how’) but two mutually reinforcing spirals of change. Many microloops meld technologies with an entrepreneur, capital, labour, skills, facilities, distribution systems, payments and reinvest-

* An earlier and longer version of this paper was written at the request of the Secretary General of the UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development, held in Vienna, 20-31 August 1979. It was designed for discussion as part of the Agenda item on ‘Science, Technology and the Future’, under which Member governments were to consider analyses and recommendations prepared by nongovernmental experts and presented to the Conference directly by the Secretary General. References to material used in its preparation are available, but to assure the report’s readability we have tried to avoid footnotes. 215

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to be regarded as a resource which is not constrained by physical limits but in fact expands them. This non-depletive resource, which actually increases its value in being consumed, is in quantitative surplus. The critical development gap is ‘between what some have learned, yet others have not yet put to use’. The encounter between the more dynamic and less dynamic societies can be seen as an information bombardment. The‘ one-way flow of information engages a modernized enclave and creates a dual system in which an often much larger sector does not participate in the benefits of the information flow. Even the would-be modem sector often raises its consumption habits much faster than its capacity to produce. A prerequisite to dynamism in development is to link the two parts of the national system. The answer to the information bombardment is not to shut off the flow of useful information, but to make sure the imported information is useful. Making sure of fairness in the dance of interdependence requires the presence, inside each developing country, of people who are able to bargain with confidence with external sources of information, and able to manage internally the reconciliation of external technology with indigenous technologies, values and social authorities. Given this local leadership, . very large amounts of information can be safely imported. The developing countries should be spending proportionately more, not less, than the advanced countries on science and technology. Yet, at present, the North-South ratio of research-and-development (R and D) spending, measured as a percentage of the gross national produce (GNP), is more than 10 to one. The developing countries as a group should - selectively but urgently - increase their R and D efforts 1O-fold. Science, as the pathfinder for mankind, should remain free, open and global in its search for demonstrable truth at the frontiers of knowledge. Today’s scientific effort is the premium each nation pays for insurance of its people’s future. There will always be a need for some social control of the gross resources allocated to science. But each nation, including each developing nation, should decide and declare that broad scientific research efforts, shared with the international scientific community, are an essential part of its own national development strategy. Technology, the information called ‘knowhow’, is a problem-solver for mankind; its applications are a socially-directed engine of development. Technology should be moulded

by human needs and purposes as determined by each nation’s values, expressed through its development strategy and its social and political management. There are dangers in misdirected technology, and dangers also in stifling innovation by no-saying processes of assessment. A new analytical framework, going well beyond traditional economic criteria of. efficiency, profitability and cost-benefit ratios measured in money, is needed to assess new technologies and spur technological innovation and its application. The broader criteria will include equity and fairness, employment and education, the energy balance, the environment, security considerations, implications for decision-making, a more global perspective and the interest of future generations. A major object of international cooperation should be to help the developing countries build their capacity to cope with the information flows and mould them to their development purposes. International transfers of technology have been importantly related to military and commercial purposes; social and cultural progress, human needs, economic security and fairness should now be the object of intergovernmental bargaining. ‘Positive-sum’ outcomes are possible because of the nature of information as a resource. Within policies agreed by government, non-governmental organizations, including the growing non-profit ‘third system’, can facilitate the flows of technology much better than governments can.

2. A QUESTIONING

MOOD

In the more recently developing countries, people and their governments are beginning to see that the pace and direction of technological change are not a matter of ineluctable stages of growth but of social and political choice. Spurred by observation and example elsewhere, they have seen in ‘science and technology for development’ the means of sharing with the industrialized countries the concern about ‘security’, ‘fairness’ and ‘prosperity’ in a world of increasing ‘interdependence’. The implications of this worldwide trend are enormous. Non-scientists and non-engineers will have to learn enough about the processes of discovery and innovation to substitute a social wisdom for the ‘inner logic’ of science and technology themselves. The community of technical experts will, in turn, have to broaden the framework of their judgements to encompass not only ‘how?’ and ‘how much?’ but ‘why?’ and ‘for whom?‘. Governments, already in trouble

DYNAMISMANDDEVELOPMENT coping with a complexity of means, will have to devise strategies of purpose as well. Social guidance systems will have to be built in parallel with the development of new technologies rather than trying to catch up with them after they are off and running. No people or nation that fails to get control of choices in the development and application of technology will have control of its own destiny. * * * Until the modem era, technological change was so gradual that it was readily absorbed and moulded by, and became organically part of, the cultures that accepted it. Those cultures in their turn were modified by new technologies, at an even slower rate. The use of fire, animal husbandry, agriculture, the wheel and marine navigation, the progression from stone to bronze to iron to steel - each new ‘breakthrough’ was limited by tradition in the pace, the scope and the spread of its social consequences. The norm was the law of tradition, learning by rote, living by repetition, employment by custom and leadership by small aristocracies of status. In less than three centuries, the Scientific Revolution and its technological offspring the Industrial Revolution so quickened the pace, widened the scope and especially broadened the diffusion of knowledge that discovery and innovation eroded antique traditions and called into being new forms of social concepts, values and organization. Especially in the world’s ‘North’ and ‘West’, people came to believe that if they could only learn enough they could actually control Nature. The energy that could be placed at the service of each man and woman seemed limited only by human inventiveness. A seemingly inevitable technological progress became the basis for new structures of value and new theories of society. The prestige of science was such that it became the leading edge of social and political philosophy. First in Europe, then in North America, then in Japan and Russia the new contagious norm was the law of change, learning by experiment, living with uncertainty, employment by acquired skill and leadership by an aristocracy of achievement numbered in the millions. Until our own time, the direction of ‘modernization seemed clear: more energy use per CQ~&Q, more material goods per person, more leisure per worker, weapons with greater killratios, taller buildings, bigger cities, growing

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populations, lower infant mortality, expectancy - and as fast as possible.

rising life

* * * The starting point for an inquiry about science, technology and the future has to be the pervasive sense - especially in the most technological societies - that rational discovery and energy-based progress are somehow producing outcomes that create major problems and do not serve human purposes. Warnings about physical ‘limits to growth’, even though they proved to be greatly overstated, have helped induce a widespread ethic of prudence, reflected both in national govemment actions and intergovernmental attention. Socially-determined limits are increasingly being set to the damage people may do to their physical environments (air and water pollution controls, reservation of wilderness areas, protection of coastal zones, urban planning and zoning); to the rate at which people use up nonrenewable resources (fossil fuels, minerals); and to practices that affect the renewability of renewable resources (soil erosion, destruction of wildlife, overcropping of farmland, overcutting of forests, overfishing of lakes and oceans). With that unsystematic intuition by which the governed so often ‘catch a wave’ before their governors do, public opinion in the industrial world may simply be guessing from recent experience that there are, after all, some natural limits to the application of technology - not ‘limits to growth’ but limits to material affluence and even material power: - Two generations of cheap energy skewed the priorities of industrial development toward energy-intensive goods and services and centralised systems. The decades of rising energy costs which are evidently ahead of us will make it more and more necessary to count costs and benefits in terms of energy as well as money. - In agriculture, continuous technological innovation, including soil conservation and the application of energy - indirectly through chemical fertihzers and pesticides, directly through mechanization of production, harvesting, processing, storage and delivery - have driven productivity and production up, and driven people off the land, so that in the United States 3.6% (in 1977) of the people can produce a large surplus of food even after the other 96.4% are fed. It seems unlikely that the ratio of rural producers to the rest of society can be costeffectively reduced much further.

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- The industrialized societies are still some distance’from having abolished poverty. But near the top of the pyramid of affluence, as the work of John and Magda McHale has shown, what once seemed an exponential rise in quantitative demand and resource depletion now looks more like the familiar. biological Scurve. As far as individual consumption is concerned, people who can afford ‘more’ tend to spend not on quantity but on quality, and beyond that on symbolic consumption. Beyond a certain point, people in affluent societies seem to place a greater premium on services than on goods. - Indiscriminate quantitative growth, as measured and symbolized by increases in GNP, is in disrepute - especially in the countries that have achieved it. There is a rising awareness that problems created by previous growth patterns cannot be solved by more growth of the same kind; that indiscriminate growth by itself does not meet the full aspirations even of those who benefit most from it. This is the’meaning of the shift away from GNP toward more complex ‘social indicators’ and quality-of-life yardsticks, away from average per capita consump.tion toward individual and group entitlements, away from measuring the health, of the health delivery system toward measures of the health of people and away from educational standards expressed in years of schooling toward standards of educational accomplishment. - The logarithmic increase in the power to destroy may have put a ceiling on the scale of warfare. Deliverable thermonucleai ex: plosions and their radioactive aftermath are so obviously suicidal that those who have them are impressively cautious even about brandishing them. In the more developed nations, then, the man-bites-dog headline of the 1970s is that the power to change the human environment through technology is coming under social control - that human needs, human entitlements and human purposes, socially determined, are already beginning to mould the future of science and technology. What has been said so far reflects, but only to a limited degree, the questioning mood in the developing countries. These, while equally concerned about the future and equally anxious to see technology applied for human benefits, must worry still more about the prospects for satisfying basic needs of their increasing populations, and ensuring their more equal partici-

pation in the resources and opportunities development in the world as a whole.

for

3. ‘DEVELOPED’ AND ‘DEVELOPING’ In the developing nations, there is a lively realization that technology should be used better than hitherto as a tool in their development; and that it should be flexible enough to suit differing growth policies. But those who do this rethinking in the developing world now have to go beyond the GNP question - ‘how much?’ - and ask the value-loaded questions: growth for what? and for whom? Reactions in the developing world to the dynamism of modem technology has been a complex mixture of fear and hope, resentment and aspiration, envy and emulation. The developing countries, despite their technological stagnation, were not isolated from the more ‘advanced’ countries. There were many encounters between the two. The first encounters came with navigation (a science-based technology) and overland trade, as the earlier industrialized nations widened their search for new sources of wealth. Explorations, military occupations, colonial rule and large migrations soon followed. Then (as such imported values as nationalism and egalitarianism reinforced local aspirations for a better life and a fairer chance) movements of ‘independence’ and ‘selfreliance’ arose to assert their sovereignty and lay claim to development assistance. As the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds grew apart, the difference in dynamism between them was first regarded as a ‘gap’ which would have to be ‘closed’ by the poorer countries ‘catching up’ with the richer ones. Analysts in the industrial nations assumed they knew the path on which this global race would be run: they had just passed that way themselves. The prevailing image was a technological analogy: the proper strategy for an underdeveloped nation was to head for ‘take-off’ from the already familiar runway of national economic growth. The notion of development as a linear ‘gap’, in a procession along a path pioneered by the most industrialized nations, gets in the way of understanding the differences in dynamism between the more and the less developed. For one thing, the presently high-income nations have themselves followed very different strategies. The industrial histories of New Zealand, Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union are full of contrastine trends.

DYNAMISMANDDEVELOPMENT More recently, moreover, the view is held that the retardation of the less developed was partly due to the means by which the others ‘advanced’. The technologies transferred in the ‘North-South’ encounters were successive often those which froze dependent people into patterns of underdevelopment, institutionalized their dependence on cash crops, induced urban consumption appetites which could only be satisfied by imports from more developed nations and arrogated to imported leaders, merchants and technical assistance experts the key local leadership roles. On this reading of history, what is needed would be a change of the system of relations between the developed and the developing countries. This is the basic concept that underlies the call for a New International Economic Order. The simple observation that the least technology is where the most people are was enough to generate a global fairness revolution - that is, a growing and widespread insistence that the richer nations provide more equitable access to the observed benefits of ‘modernization’. In the earlier demands for a New International Economic Order, the emphasis was on fairness among nations. Then the scandal of internal maldistribution also came to be widely understood. In the 1970s by any measure, there were more poor people in the world than before development economics was invented in the 1940s - because of continuing structural discrimination against the poor, bath inside and among countries. Thus, it is claimed that much of the economic growth inside most developing countries had been siphoned up to the comparatively rich rather than, as the development theorists had hoped and some predicted, trickling down to the absolutely poor. The growing concern about this state of affairs, among analysts and public officials both ‘South’ and ‘North’, has given rise to the claims that ‘development’ should include the meeting of ‘basic human needs’, defined as ‘enough’ food, shelter, clothing, health, education, employment and security of the person for everyone everywhere. The rapid diffusion of modem technology, sustained by a more-is-better philosophy of economic growth, not only intensified the new ambitions for equity and participation by the newly articulate poor ‘but also created a swing toward conservatism and traditionalism in many countries, stiffening the resistance to some aspects of modernization by traditional cultures. In some places, those especially resentful of the distribution of wealth, and those especially resentful of the way traditional values

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and institutions were being bypassed or upset, found common cause in objecting to the industrialization process itself - and opposing the rulers who espoused it, managed it and were personally enriched by it. A sometimes explosive triple collision - modernization vs tradition vs equity - thus is present in differing tactical circumstances in the internal politics of many nations. The combined resistance of these very disparate forces, in a precarious alliance against foreign influences - induced by superpower conflict, commercial competition and regional militancy, and symbolized by technology transfers (tanks, automobiles, blue jeans, ‘adult’ movies) - sets its own limits to the pace of change below what is technologically possible and even raises fundamental questions about the direction of development.

4. THE PUZZLE OF DYNAMISM If technology is to be a tool of development, and made compatible with cultural tradition besides, those who assess and invent and import development technologies have to grapple with this difficult question: What is the nature of this ‘dynamism’ that produces economic growth with equity in some places, economic growth with trouble in others, and is in varying degrees almost lacking elsewhere? The international rhetoric about ‘science and technology for development’ is so loose that we think it useful to suggest a conceptual framework in which the key words are used with some precision (see Figure 1). We will distinguish among: - science (S), which produces knowledge by individual creativity in a continuous worldwide effort to understand nature and man by the use of theories about cause and effect, and experiments and observations to test the theories ; - technology (T), or ‘know-how’, producing knowledge for use; - technological application (TA ), by which we will mean systems that bring together technology (which is something in the mind) and other factors to produce goods and services; and - development (D), which includes not only the production of goods and services, but also consumption, equity, security and other social, cultural and political objectives. Technology application is only one subsystem of the development system. But it is the part

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DYNAMISMAND DEVELOPMENT that introduces new products, often the most dynamic element in the process of social and economic evolution. The instrument for continuous change called or ‘know-how’, may be derived from any or all of three sources: from the application of science (Einstein’s speculations leading to the utilization of nuclear energy), from ‘tinkering’ (Edison, who had only 3 months’ formal schooling at the age of 7, inventing the phonograph, the electric light and the motion picture machine) or from a direct response to a social-economic demand (a need for urban mass transport, hardier varieties of seed, an anti-toxin, a better mousetrap, a new weapons system). But technology is simply more information - at most, abstractly interesting - if not applied. And in the societies where the most technology is applied, the dynamism seems to be the consequence of two mutually reinforcing spirals of change. A microloop (see Figure 2) spins together the know-how of specialized technology with an entrepreneur (‘private’ or ‘public’), capital (‘private’ or ‘public’), labour, skiIl training, a productive facility, advertising, a market (‘free’ or ‘planned’) with consumers who pay for what is produced, and the reinvestment of the resulting wealth in more capital, more benefits to workers and especially more research for even more innovative technology. The linkage of these functions through organizations that bring people together to perform them (institutions for education and training, for financing, for farming or processing, or drilling or mining or construction or fabrication, for worker protection, for marketing, for management and for public regulation to protect the public’s interest in the whole process) closes the loop and keeps it spinning. At the macrolevel, in a working society we can see hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of these loops, some running down, some cranking up and some spinning with continuous innovation. Taken together, they form a composite picture of the society as having a certain level of technology, a certain value-structure ( v) and a set of social organizations and authorities (A) (some always ‘public’, others mixed with ‘private’ enterprise) in dynamic equilibrium with each other. A change in technology, values or authority may well unbalance this composite equilibrium, until changes in the other two elements produce a new equilibrium. But in the ‘modernized’ societies, each new equilibrium is different from the last and at a more sophistitechnology,

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cated level of technological complexity. What makes their ‘development’ not circular but a spiral - that is, what makes their social change a dynamic equilibrium - is the continuous injection of innovation through technology, plus the much slower but not less important changes in values, attitudes and social structures. The dynamic macroequilibrium corresponds by analogy to the harmonization of the functions of the body, including the daily functions needed to maintain life as well as the ‘growth’ functions and higher functions of intelligence, communication, learning and appreciation. This dynamism was historically lacking in the societies now labelled ‘developing’. We do not pretend to know why, and we do not think that anyone else knows why. It used to be considered obvious that Western industrial dynamism was somehow associated with Western values, parliamentary institutions and nongovernmental enterprise. This theory has not survived the 20thcentury evidence that very modem industrial technology could successfully coexist with non-western value structures (Japan) and non-western political institutions (the Soviet Union). Besides, many of this century’s ‘less developed’ lands have had their own periods of scientific creativity or technological dynamism (China, Egypt, India, Greece). But the more and less dynamic societies do not fall neatly into two well-defined categories; there are very important distinctions of degree among those that style themselves ‘developed’ or ‘developing’. Leadership in one kind of technology has not been. correlated with leadership in others. Historically, technologies advanced in separate civilizations, then seemed to decay, and neither the advance nor the decay was highly contagious outside the separate empires. Dynamism was followed not by stagnation but by downfall; almost a reversion to predynamism conditions: the fragmentation of leadership and power, the decay of great urban centres, the confusion of values. But modem technological civilization is different: it is characterized by interdependence, by the lively flows of interaction among societies which cannot control each other but must learn from each other and trade with each other. The less dynamic ‘developing countries’ have recently been working to develop their own forms of dynamism, with quite different strategies of economic growth, wealth distribution and human resource development. A few countries, starting as raw material suppliers to the world, have elected to intensify this international role - by borrowing outside

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capital and technology, or by raising (in some cases very greatly, as in oil) the prices of their exports. In neither case has internal technological capacity been the key to the strategy. Other developing countries, especially those large in size and endowed with a diversity of natural resources, widened their internal markets, established industries both for domestic sale and for export, and even undertook the export of capital goods. This strategy required major expansion of internal technological capacity. Yet another strategy has featured large increases in exports of consumer goods to industrialcountry markets; with proper technologies, this can amount to the export of lowcost, high-producitivity labour. Finally, the least developed nations and the small countries have mostly been unable to generate large increases in their income from exports. The technological dynamism achieved in each case is different; but every developing country has needed to import technology at high cost. The resulting problems and obstacles go well beyond economics or technology, and engage values, attitudes, leadership, discipline, authority, organization, skills and aspirations. That is what makes it imperative to formulate development strategy in terms of all four of the categories of information we have identified, for some part of each - science, technology, values and social authority - has to be generated internally in any country that does not opt for continued colonial status.

5. THE INFORMATION

BOMBARDMENT

The natural history of ‘development’ is a familiar tale. Some societies that early consisted mostly of farmers found it possible to increase productivity and production enough to meet their agricultural needs with only half, then a quarter and now fewer than 10% of their national populations. This trend made industry possible, expanding from artisan activity to mass production, again increasing both productivity and production, levelling off in the most successful cases to a fifth to a third of the labour force employed in the making of things. In the most ‘advanced’ societies, that left 40, 50 or even 60% of the working population for employment in services - homemaking, shopkeeping, education, culture, science, banking, insurace, governance and national defence. One aspect of all this activity, the management of the products of the human mind, has become so significant as to constitute a fourth sector in itself. In the United States, more than

half of wages and nearly half of GNP originate with the production, processing and distribution of information goods and services. Information has now come to be regarded as a resource in itself; the resource which makes it possible to enhance the productivity of the agricultural, industrial and service sectors. ‘Knowledge, during the last few decades, has become the central capital, the cost centre, and the crucial resource of the economy’, says the business philospher Peter Drucker. It is ‘obvious’, says economist Marc Porat, ‘that the introduction of the computer, the satellite and the LSI chip are technological wizardries that rival the wheel, the plow and the steam engine’. Information, considered as a basic resource, blows away some major premises of contemporary economic theory, development planning and management practice. Physical and geological resources are often non-renewable. Biological resources are merely renewable. But information is rapidly and continuously exponduble. The central problem for economists, planners and managers has been scarcity and the allocation of scarce resources things, services, jobs, skill training, money. But information, says Lewis Branscomb, Chief Scientist for IBM, ‘is in quantitative surplus. To be sure, there are great gaps in human knowledge that have yet to be filled by research and study. But the yawning chasm is between what some have learned, yet others have not yet put to use.’

In global terms, the main flows of information have been among the information-rich societies, and from the more dynamic to the less dynamic societies - in the latter case not so much a dialogue as a bombardment. Information from the outside has penetrated the less developed nations in all its modes - as imported science, imported technology, imported values and imported forms of social authority and organization (parliamentary, military, economic, corporate, financial, religious). This information bombardment (see Figure 3) has mostly affected only a ‘modernized’ enclave in each developing country. Inside this information colony, people behave in ways that reflect with more or less superficial dynamism the agricultural, industrial, service and information sectors of the ‘advanced’ countries consuming and dressing and even talking, but not producing, the way the ‘advanced’ people do - and, thus, become tied to, and interdependent with, the outsiders from whom they derive their imitative inspiration. Meanwhile a much larger, more traditional segment of the society carries on in parallel

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Figure 3. The information bombardment. with the pseudo-modem; a society in static equilibrium, much more durable in its structure, values and leadership than was earlier believed. In developing countries, the forces of traditional society may lie dormant and under some circumstances become active and powerful. The information bombardment thus intemalizes the encounter between the dynamic and static systems of information, creating in 100 countries a marked duality - in levels of technology, in economic and social activities, in patterns of development, in attitudes and behaviour and values, and in social organizations and authorities. On the traditional side of the fence, a stagnant equilibrium is maintained with comparatively primitive technologies, artisan industry, limited dependence on imports and exports, loyalty to unchanging values and settled social relationships, and continuity in the personalities and procedures of leadership. Outside influence, sifting through from the modernizing side of the fence, disrupts this old

equilibrium by raising expectations of material ‘progress’ without providing the necessary goods and services which can be realized only through more dynamic and integrated microloops. One reaction to this disruption, in countries with strong and imaginative social authorities already in place (Japan) or able to seize power (China), is to close the nation to outside influence, rearrange the society internally so that the conditions exist for dynamic equilibrium, then open the doors to interactions with the outside world in an orderly and regulated manner. Another strategy is to adopt modernization so wholeheartedly as to sweep the whole society into the dynamic spiral, making sure that the whole population has access to the kinds of education that will in time eliminate the need for foreginers in leadership roles. In South Korea and Taiwan, the reform of land tenure has helped bring what might have remained a

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tradition-bound rural sector into the modemization programme. In Singapore, strong and self-confident government played the key role in converting a colonial port into a self-reliant industrial city-state. But in much of the developing world, the attraction of the dynamic ‘North’ penetrated only skin deep, to a cluster of people who imported their language, dress, education, gadgetry and consumption habits without developing either the microloops of self-reliant enterprise or the compatible technologies, value structures and social institutions that could maintain a self-generated dynamic equilibrium. In the slum fringes of their cities and the rural slums beyond, a condition of ‘modernizing poverty’ prevailed. A prerequisite to dynamism is, therefore, to link the two parts of the national system. In most countries, the existence of two sectors cannot now be avoided, except in the long run; but much can be done through technological innovation to get the most out of the capital already sunk in less-than-modem and less-thanefficient equipment. But the long run will never come unless the management of the whole process puts emphasis on linking and interrelating the two parts of the dual system. Intriguing examples of how the modem and the traditional can be reconciled, to prevent international interdependence from creating a dual system, have been reported by many recent visitors to China: the combining of Western and traditional medicine, the promotion of both village biogas and nuclear power, the attack on schistosomiasis by sophisticated laboratories linked to a mobilized citizenry. Such creative combinations make it possible to borrow technologies from the outside without. having to buy, as part of the bargain, whole valuestructures or copies of social organization or .even personal leadership. 6. INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS If information is the carrier of change from the outside, and if information is not flowing between the two parts of the ‘dual system’ on the inside, the key to developing an ‘appropriate dynamism’ is not in the first instance physical resources but indigenous people able to generate, adapt, understand and apply technological and other information. If technology does not have ‘a life of its own’, putting it to work for human purposes is a job for educated people ‘educated’ not only in schools but by responsible life experiences and recurrent chances for informal learning.

In general, the technological information now available to developing countries must be judged small in quantity and deficient in quality. It creates more demands, distortions and expectations, but not the adaptive, generative, productive capacities to satisfy them. And what there is of it does not get around, especially on the traditional side of the dualsystem fence. Some impressively integrated microloops can be seen in the developing countries. Even in colonial times, a plantation could be and often was part of a completely linked system, comprising modem irrigation, seed selection and soil chemistry, modem processing and classification, far-flung marketing efforts, effective management and accounting practices, and continuous R and D (often conducted in the home country). In more recent times, transnational enterprise has created workable microloops, with technology, production, transportation, demand creation, financing, insurance, govemment protection and R and D all integrated with each other, and often with other worldwide interests of the transnational. But these do not in themselves complete the macrospiral of values and social authorities that are locally acceptable and, therefore, effective. Outside technical aid and development loans sometimes create isolated units of the macrospiral - research institutes, feasibility and pilotscale units, testing and control laboratories, documentation facilities, patent legislation, publication and review system, public corporations, vocational training programmes and the sending of students to complete their education abroad. But these components of a technology system form only a part of the needed systems of technological application. They may supply the crucial information for a dynamic microloop, but the entrepreneur, the capital and the rest may still be, and very often are, missing. These isolated initiatives from the outside, often thought up and funded by outsiders who tell themsleves they are doing something to facilitate ‘technology transfer’, are often even unconnected with each other at the macrolevel. Being rich in information-as-technology but poor in technological application is not better than the other way around. In either case, the connections have to be organic and continuous. The important thing is not the isolated components of the process; what makes them dynamic is the connections made between and among them, by people who understand the whole cycle of which their own actions can only be a part. The distortions and d&continuities created

DYNAMISMANDDEVELOPMENT in many developing countries by the information bombardment from the outside are only partly the responsibility of the outsiders who are guided by their own dynamic stars - profit, power or penetration, or all of’these. The prime responsibility for changing the system to its own advantage lies with each developing nation’s leaders, planners and entrepreneurs. The framework for bargaining with the outsiders is for the insiders to design. And in the bargaining process, the insiders have the extraordinary advantage which national sovereignty confers on even the least affluent nation. The trouble sometimes is that the relevant insiders, who typically dwell in the capital city’s information-rich ghetto, often share the values of the outsiders; the two then act together in ways that drive the traditional and would-be modem sectors farther apart. By and large, however, the key to fairness in the dance of interdependence lies in the presence, on the inside, of people who are bright enough and educated enough (in information about the whole macrospiral, not just about the technology or even just the microloop of which it is a part) to bargain as confident equals with entities which, however powerful in economic terms, have only the status of guests in the developing nation’s house. Each developing nation has reason to be alarmed by the information bombardment from the ouside only if it has not itself developed the capacity to cope - which means the competent (‘educated’) people, the clear-headed valuesystem, and the mechanisms of social mobilization and control that make it possible to design and adhere to a coherent development strategy. Indeed, the interest of developing countries lies heavily in attracting technological information, not in resisting it. There is no ‘natural’ limit to the technological information that a developing nation can afford to bring in from the outside, consolidate with local experience and apply for its own development. But each country’s leaders first have to learn how as a part of the bargain to scrape the ideological barnacles off the usable information. The more research is conducted at home, the more technology can be safely imported. The resulting geometric increase in innovation, not a gross and unselective increase in the national product, is the true definition of sound and rapid development. It is, thus, in the interest of developing countries to invest much more heavily in their own technological research and innovation. At present the industrial nations typically spend

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3-S% of their GNP in the R and D sector. Developing nations typically put forth less than a tenth of that effort, 0.2 or 0.3%. This is far below the minimum threshold to be effective. Increasing it by an order of magnitude (that is, by 10 times) or more should be regarded not as a distant goal but as an urgent requirement for self-reliance in the Age of Information. This proposal, to increase the resources allocated to science and technology in developing countries so as to match or even surpass the relative share of R and D in the industrial countries, is so far from the conventional wisdom that a word of explanation is in order. We are saying that planners and managers in developing countries face more difficult problems of technology selection and application than their opposite numbers in the industrial countries. They have at their disposal an enormous stock of knowledge worldwide, but it has been accumulated elsewhere; they need to understand, adapt and apply it in relevant ways to complex development programmes in environments unaccustomed to the absorption of new technologies in profusion. The logic is that they need more, not less, R and D work - more, not fewer, people educated and trained for the assessment and application of relevant technologies - to overcome the handicap of being behind.‘If, on the contrary, they spend what resources they have on hardware, they will succeed only in increasing costs, reducing benefits and perpetuating their internal retardation and their external dependence. Suppose an investment project costs 100 units, of which equipment and fixed capital is 95% and the remaining 5% is allocated to system design, technology choices, specific training, evaluation, product design and management. Our hunch is that reducing the fixedcapital cost ot 80% of the same investment and multiplying four-fold the resources allocated to software and human development might well overbalance - through lower cost, increased productivity and better management - the loss of 15% in installed capacity. (In practice, part of the cost shifted to software would be allocated beyond the specific project, but the project would also be enriched by information resources flowing from elsewhere in the economy which are not counted as part of direct project investment cost.) This whole question admittedly is tricky and speculative. The very measures used to represent ‘R and D’ or ‘science and technology’, expressed in monetary units or numbers of qualified persons (each counting as one, though they vary greatly in skill, intelligence, imagination

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and effectiveness in organizational behaviour), ’ or numbers of scientific papers (of widely varying quality and relevance), are both rough and slippery. Moreover, the actual science-andtechnology efforts represented by these figures are applied in a decentralized manner, in both public and private enterprise, some inside particular productive processes. Besides, the comparatively small provision for R and D (or science and technology) in developing countries seems justified by the lack of encouraging results from any technological applications previously tried, and by the experience of sending abroad for advanced training persons who then do not return to contribute to the development of their home country (the ‘brain drain’). Yet when all the caveats have been stated, the case for a quantum leap in Rand D spending is strong for nearly every developing country. The problem is not simply to multiply by 10 the numbers of scientists, institutes or funds devoted to research for whatever purpose. The challenge is to aim technology research at filling out the dynamic microloops that make the technology productive and self-generating; at creating the conditions for the balanced macroequilibrium sketched above, which means research on values and social organization as well as ‘technology’; and at the supporting services and infrastructure required for continuous innovation, growing productivity and fair distribution of the benefits. The increase in R and D will, therefore, have to be gradual, selective and related to a conscious ‘strategy’ for a decade or two, the span of a human generation. A limited number of key sectors for concentrated R and D is the place to start, not a generalized attempt to promote research in general. The sectors to be stressed wilI vary from ‘country to country, but some will doubtless receive a high priority in very many developing nations: animal and plant breeding and protection, water resource development and management, export promotion and food security are obvious examples. The international community has a crucial part in this intensification of developingcountry R and D. Since information, considered as a resource, is expandable, co-operation in expanding the information resources of the developing nations will not be at the expense of the industrial world; on the contrary, as a number of analysts have recently demonstrated, growing markets in the developing countries may be a key to renewed prosperity in the industrial countries. International co-operations in science and technology is the world community’s most promising ‘positive-sum game’.

7. SCIENCE AS INSURANCE FOR THE FUTURE We have said that technology stems from three sources - scientific thinking, ‘tinkering’ and response to social/economic/military/political demand. In the future, more of the technological innovation is likely to come from the explosion of scientific thought. There will always be a place in the scheme of things for the brilliant but scientifically illiterate inventor. But the ‘breakthrough’ technologies now coming over the horizon are mostly associated with realms of scientific thought that require the kind of understanding of physical, biological and human processes that come only from deep and systematic study: particle physics, microbiology, genetics, microprocessing, nuclear fusion and solar energy, the imaginative use of ‘waste’, the monitoring and protection of the global environment, space applications, the behaviour of individuals and groups of people, and unexplored psychic phenomena are only a few of the subheads of a deeper understanding of the creativity of man - who is both the source and the receiver of the information. The science system can, thus, be seen as mankind’s basic insurance policy for the future. Its care and feeding require special measures of public policy by each nation and by the community of nations. In this perspective, there is danger in bracketing science-and-technology, treating them as two parts of a single tool of public policy for development. This is in fact the way they were often treated in the writing and talking that led up. to the UN Conference of Science and Technology for Development. But if in the coming era policy-makers, and not a discredited ‘inner logic’, are going to be held responsible for the pace and direction of innovative R and D, it will be crucially important to make and maintam a clear distinction between science and technology. We believe that it is in the interest of each nation - whether its governance is ‘planned’ or ‘pluralistic’, whether its economic status is ‘industrialized’ or ‘developing’ - that: -Science should remain free, open and transnational in its search for demonstrable truth at the frontiers of knowledge. This freedom for the scientific enterprise should be regarded as a social goal and as part of every nation’s development strategy. - Technology (especially that following from scientific discovery or imported for development) should, on the contrary, be

DYNAMISMANDDEVELOPMENT socially managed and directed before it is applied, with a view to serving human needs, enhancing the human environment and maximizing choice for individuals in society. This distinction is fundamental. The human purpose of scientific enterprise is universal and international. In the global scientific community, each pioneer stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before and holds hands of whatever with contemporary pioneers nationality in his and related fields. The case for science is simple and basic: as Frank Press human institutions, says, ‘Human numbers, human expectations demand the extension of human knowledge.’ The support and defence of free scientific inquiry in all directions, following the rules and practices of open information and open criticism, is essential to ensure mankind against an unknown and unknowable future. Science is, thus, a pathfinder, not a problem solver. It increases the range and depth of human understanding and pervades - directly or indirectly, sooner or later - the farthest reaches of the human experience. It is true that scientific thinking has often in ‘useful’ results. Celestial history produced mechanics were known long before they were very ‘useful’; when space travel began, they were indispensable information. B.ut while this is correct, it is ,not the central argument for support of science. A better argument is to value knowledge in itself and seek it an an expression of the function of human intelligence - knowing that on past performance and future probabilities, science is our insurance for the future. The human purpose of technology, on the other hand, is set by cultural preconceptions, social norms, economic forces, military strategies and political decisions. The nation-state is the unit within which these human purposes must mostly be determined. Even for technologies which are inherently international weather forecasting, satellite communication, air traffic control, the use of the high seas and outer space - decisions have to be reached by agreement among the nation-states concerned. Deciding whether scientifc perceptions will be translated into working technologies - even deciding what technologies will be developed to the point of having to decide about them cannot be automatic or universal; it is a matter of national and subnational choice. The social decisions involved will in the nature of things be the product of whatever procedures (democratic, revolutionary) are in authoritarian,

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vogue in each national society at the time the decision has to be made.

8. THE SOCIAL GUIDANCE TECHNOLOGY

OF

In the past, the judgements that are coming to be called ‘the social assessment of technology’ were easier because the framework of analysis was deliberately kept narrow. The purposes to be served were profit or public policy, or both at once. A new technology was innocent until proven guilty. If something was scientifically understood and technically feasible, the remaining questions had to do with the customer’s propensity to buy it. If the customer was government, the considerations included a military or other purpose legitimated by government decision and financed from the govemment treasury. But where an overriding purpose did not set them aside, the prime criteria were the iron laws of economics. What innovations were possible depended on the roulette wheel of scientific discovery and technical tinkering, the Einsteins and the Edisons - both the province of the creative individual. But which inventions became widespread innovations depended mostly on quantitative economic analysis - the ‘old economics’ of profitability and efficiency that also gave us an irreducible unemployment and an irreversible inflation; the old economics of indiscriminate growth, in which an increase in food production and an increase in drug addiction were counted as equally helpful in boosting that grotesque symbol of an era, the GNP; the old economics of short-term costs and benefits measured in money, that analytical concentration camp in which professionals from capitalist, socialist and developing nations are found in misery together, wondering how to escape. Making technology responsive to human needs and social purposes will require more than just new analytical tools - more, even, than just a shift in attitudes toward technology. It implies a new value-structure about the human adventure - and, to support it, a new, much broader frame of analysis for leadership decisions. In this new policy drama, the analysts are increasingly important actors - and they do not need to be in government offices or executive suites to play a policy role, as environmental and anti-nuclear lobbies have shown in recent years. Indeed, if the ‘policy-makers’ are not personally participating in the analysis -

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setting the tone, formulating the questions to be answered by the experts and sifting the options and alternative futures through their most sensitive computers, which are their own brains - then they are not making policy, merely presiding while the experts decide. That the framework of analysis always contains the seeds of its own policy is not what is new. The ‘old economics’, too, used concepts to make value-judgements. ‘Effective demand’ said that anything scarce would be rationed inequitably, since money and, therefore, ability to pay, is unequally distributed in every society. When ‘unemployment’ became a status - even a status entitling one to compensation - that confirmed the failure of a full employment policy and abandoned the principle (in the 30-yr-old words of the Universal Declaration of Human Bights) that ‘everyone has a right to work’. In general, by treating wider social purposes, attitudes and values as ‘externalities’, the ‘old economics’ imposed on policy the values that inhere in its narrower criteria: growth is good even if the benefits are not equitably shared, demands are more important than needs, stable equilibrium is more important than employment and so forth. The new analytical system we now require is not a set of substitute concepts: the conventional criteria of comparative costs and benefits, profitability and efficiency still have an essential place in it. What the new framework does is to add criteria of judgement about the direction of technological advance which fundamentally change the policy purpose to be served by the analytical assessment. What the new criteria do is require attention to the human purposes to be served. That is what is different, that is what the turnaround is all about: inner logics and invisible hands and indiscriminate growth are all on their way out, in favour of decision-making systems oriented to sociallydetermined human needs, human rights and human purposes. Beyond traditional economics, there is a checklist of questions to be asked, for example, about any new technology - from the manipulation of micro-organisms to the modification of clouds in the sky. Some of these categories will be of more interest in developing countries, some relatively more important in industrial societies. But all are applicable in some degree to both.

likely effects on the distribution of wealth in the society making the decision, in other societies which may follow suit and in the relations among nations? -Employment and education. What is the likely impact on numbers and kinds of jobs, immediately and in the longer run? Will people need to be retrained from obsolescent occupations for jobs that the new technology will create? Does the new technology require for its development new kinds of education (for instance, in more integrative thinking)? -Energy balance. Beyond the costs and benefits expressed in money, what are the costs and benefits of alternative policies expressed in terms of energy use and availability? - Environment. What are the likely effects on the preservation of what needs to be preserved, and the enhancement of what ought to be enhanced, in the human environment? (‘The human environment’, a phrase taken from the Stockholm Declaration, includes not only the ‘natural’ biosphere, but the man-made environment or technosphere.) - Security. What effect will development of the new technology have on the security of those who deploy it, and on others whose counteractions have to be taken into account? _ -Implications for decision-making. How will the new technology affect the ways in which, and the time periods for which, business, social and political decisions will need to be made? Does it, for example, require longer-range planning ahead than is normal in corporations and government agencies? Will it tend to widen or narrow the opportunities for participatory process? - Global perspective. What are the likely impacts on other nations of alternative decisions the decision-making nation might make? Will the new technology require new forms of international organization (or intensified use of existing international machinery) to prevent or contain conflicts arising from its development? -Future generations. What is the interest of future generations, including those unborn, in the decision under review? Can we justify our decision to this silent majority?

- Equity and fairness. How well or badly is the new technology likely to serve the purpose of fair access to resources, jobs and human fulfilment by all nations? What are the

There is, of course, an inherent danger in thus widening the analysis and assessment of innovative technologies. The social assessment of technology got its first boost from the wide-

DYNAMISMANDDEVELOPMENT spread disillusion with the impacts of technological change - congestion of cities, pollution or air and water, nuclear dangers and the like. Against this backdrop, a widened and more integrative analytical framework may make it easier to say ‘No’ to innovation. Transient leaders and experts on term contracts could come to dominate decisions about the longterm direction of technological change. Most human beings are by nature suspicious of change - and with some reason. The excesses of modernization, the frequency with which societies have found themselves going rapidly and efficiently to where they did not want to be when they got there, has made them more, not less, skeptical of ‘progress’. But the social assessment of technology cannot be merely a device for saying ‘No’ by multiplying the complexity and lengthening the time of social decision-making. The environmental movement has had to graduate from preserving the environment the way it is to enhancing the environment the way it could be. Similarly, the new profession of technology assessment will have to become a continuous search for technologies that say ‘Yes’ to human-centred innovation.

9. THE CAPACITY TO COPE It was science and technology, and the industrial processes that they spawned, that made possible the concentration of political power we call the modem nation-state. But the complexity which science and technology made necessary now seems to have overtaken the capacity of national governments to cope. Power is leaking out of national govemments in three directions at once: downward to local communities (including ethnic communities) trying to make more of their own decisions, control their own growth rates and environmental conditions; sideways to transnational enterprise (profit and non-profit, private and public) which operate more flexibly across national boundaries than governments do; and outward to global systems for functions (weather reporting, satellite communication and regimes to assure fair treatment in the global commons) that cannot be handled by national governments acting alone or even in small clubs of the likeminded. But even if the boat of national sovereignty is leaking somewhat, it is still by far the most powerful vessel on the horizon. So it falls primarily to national governments to consider what they can do themselves to generate the

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dynamism of development, and what they can do together that they could not do as well apart. In the country papers, and other documents and deliberations leading up to the UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development, and in the Plan of Action that came out of it, the central theme is, rightly, the need to strengthen the indigenous base of science and technology in the developing countries. The first and most important thing to do to benefit from the ‘information’ which is in global surplus but not widely enough adapted and applied. This local capacity which all nations seem to agree should be enhanced consists of qualified persons, viable institutions, ‘domestic policies’ that facilitate the linkage of the many parts of national development to each other and ‘foreign policies’ which link each nation’s whole development process (its ‘macrospiral’, in our terms) with an external world that can be more readily supportive if the leadership in development is coming from within each developing country. It is only these local leaders and experts and managers that can reconcile the external technologies with the values and social organizations which together make up a successful application of technology in dynamic equilibrium. And it is only these local leaders and experts and managers that can revive age-old traditional technologies and reconcile them creatively with the newest scientific and sophisticated techniques in the framework of a dynamic national and international division of labour. For the foreseeable future, the presently ‘advanced’ countries will continue to be the source of most of the world’s technology, and will have most of its economic and financial resources. But the planetary agenda contains no more important item than building fair, workable and mutually supportive relationships between the advanced and developing countries. Recent reports by the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (the ‘Brandt Commission’) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (the OECD Interfutures study), and other recent work by individual scholars and national academies and government analysts have cast up some intriguing alternative futures. We sense a convergence on one conclusion: that a scenario of international co-operation is far more in the common interest - even in strictly economic terms - than scenarios of confrontation, isolation and autarchy.

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The facilitation of this ‘new order’ will engage the energies, beyond what governments can separately do, of both intergovernmental Interand non-governmental organizations. national mechanisms will need to be invented (or adapted from existing structures ) to: - keep under continuing review the rapidly changing world information environment; - provide an international capability for the social assessment of new technologies; - greatly intensify the seach for resources in the many parts of the world that remain virtually unexplored; - analyse the pattern of future needs and production, and suggest long-run shifts in industrial geography likely to have beneficial outcomes for the presently industrial countries and the newly industrializing ones that is, to suggest ‘positivesum games’; - identify obstacles to the flow of technological information and propose (from an international point of view) ways of overcoming them; - identify major environmental risks affecting ail peoples, and suggest the actions that need to be taken by national govemments and international organizations; - provide a forum for the international bargaining required for these purposes. But governments increasingly share the stage of international co-operation with non-govemments. An increasingly important function .of governments assembled in international meetings is, therefore, to encourage and use to their fullest potential those international non-govemmental organizations which can spur the process of technological innovations, help developing countries enhance their capacity to assess and control technology, and lubricate the international transfer of usable technologies. This is partly a question of regulating and using creatively the skills of both private and public multinational corporations. It is also a question of bringing more explicitly into the arena of

international governance the ‘third system’ of non-profit non-government enterprise. There is much evidence that the growing variety of ‘third-system’ institutions can do some things better than governments can precisely because they are not (in the political sense of the word) ‘responsible’. They can work, ahead of time, on problems that are important but not yet urgent enough to command political attention. They can shake loose from conceptual confines and mix up disciplinary methodologies. They can think more freely about alternative futures and what they imply for national and international action tomorrow. They can generate discussion among people from rival ideological persuasions, different professional fields and contending ethnic or national groups, who might otherwise not be talking to each other. They can organize ‘dialogue’ across national frontiers on issues not yet ripe for more official ‘negotiation’. * * * No matter how effective the international machinery for co-operation, the key to the effective application of technology for development is still and always educated, self-reliant indigenous people - including women, that often neglected human resource. When developing-nation leaders can bargain from a base of clear national purpose and stable social authority, there is essentially no limit to the kinds and amounts of technology they can afford to import. A nation’s ultimate resource is the quality of its own leadership. That is the one component of the development spiral that cannot be purchased from abroad. Some years ago a precious drop of wisdom was added to the ocean of international discourse about science and technology for development. The speaker was Paul Hoffman, first Administrator both of the Marshall Plan and of the UN Development Programme. ‘Technical assistance’, he said, ‘cannot be exported. It can only be imported.’