Prepared by the Think Sangha for Sulak Sivaraksa as part of the Lambeth, UK meeting with the World Bank and religious leaders (February, 1998)

The following draft attempts to re-evaluate the process of "modern development" from a "Buddhist" perspective. As such, it draws largely from the "development" experience within Asia while incorporating insights into the recent Asian financial crisis. The paper, however, is also intended to re-envision development as it concerns not only the rest of the "developing" world but integrally the way all societies in the world have been pursuing "development". It consists of three parts: a critique of "modern development", a "Buddhist" vision, and propositions for present engagement. While the critique may at times be rather acerbic, the intention of this paper is to broaden dialogue with disparate groups in the "development" process and to avoid pigeon holing those perceived "at fault".

A) Incompleteness of the Modern Development Model
In re-evaluating the role of "development" for the 21st century, we need to make a fundamental re-assessment of the values and methods of envisioning human and social development which have evolved during the modern period of the last 200 hundred years. From perspectives which stand outside of the modernist approach, such as Buddhism, the over reliance on quantitative and structural frameworks for envisioning and enacting the "development" process appears suspect. This appears most notably in the domination of economic models for engineering human and social well being and the preponderance in development agency staffs of economists and other "experts" trained in the modern social "sciences". It is also further manifested in the pervasive use of quantitative evaluation of human and social well being, such as infant mortality rates, life expectancy rates, literacy rates, consumption rates, poverty rates and so on. From a Buddhist point of view, such fragmentation and abstraction belittles the immense diversity and complexity of the human condition .

Such a framework presupposes the concepts of capital markets, nation state structures, the "free individual" (i.e. consumer), and the linear and unlimited procession of growth. These are the foundations of a world view for the vast majority of the West, large segments of Japan, and increasing numbers of southern elites who study abroad. However, for the larger percentage of the human race, these concepts are still alien. Barter and community economies still predominate. Feudal patronage systems are the common political means. The individual is subsumed within roles of duty and obligation. Growth is a cyclical movement of indulgence and renunciation.
In the past fifty years of the modern development era, we have seen the increasing clash of these world views. Although the modern structural approach has brought great promise with it in material prosperity, democratic government, and individual social mobility, the preponderance of a purely structural approach has been self defeating. This top down mechanism for enacting the abstract and structural upon the real and diverse has empowered still feudal-style elites to use the modern nation state to consolidate their power over clients now referred to as citizens. Further, the belittlement and replacement of indigenous values and systems by these "scientific" and modern values and structures has complemented this process of disempowerment by estranging the larger mass of citizens from their own cultural foundations.
What is taking place today in the "developing" world then is not the modern ideal of the free individual enjoying material prosperity amidst democratic government, but rather a tragic warping of this vision: material prosperity exists for a small group of patron elite in government and business circles; feudal cronyism is disguised as representative democracy; and a mass of disempowered citizens are increasingly cut off from their historical and cultural identities. These identities are replaced with modern consumer identities which they have few personal or communal resources for coming to grips with. A typical example of this process comes from the "development" of the Lake Songkhla region in Southern Thailand:

The rural, agricultural based culture and the values that are inseparable from it continue to lose ground in most places to the urban consumer non-culture and all that it breeds. This trend is exemplified by the automated harvester combines. It is extremely rare to find anyone in this region who does not hire a combine to harvest the rice. It's quicker, yes, but when the laborious hand harvesting is gone, so too are many rich traditions and customs which provided the bonding cement for village life, as each family was dependent on the others for their help in harvesting his rice. Vanishing are the songs, the dances, the communal meals, the cooperation, the sense of the whole village being one's home. Instead there is a quick swap of money to the stranger from up north who rents out the combine; the grinding, mechanical monsters lumbering over the lands; competitiveness; and feelings of isolation and separateness. Most villages are no longer self-sufficient and naturally cooperative institutions. For one thing, most working-age people go into factories around Songkhla and Had Yai each day, leaving only the very young and old in the villages. In many cases, whole families or villages have immigrated permanently to the urban areas for low paying jobs and often wind up living in the most unhealthy, dangerous places. We stopped in Songkhla and talked with the residents from one of the ten major slum areas -- yes, quaint, quiet little Songkhla is packed with slums! -- who have organized themselves to call on the government to provide various services (services which they used to take care of by themselves), and to provide support for each other.

B) The Moral Rot within Structures
The clash of modern and traditional has led to a lowest common denominator where non-egalitarian feudal values graft with modern competitive market ones. The result of such "development" is an increasing deterioration of moral and cultural values. The Asian economic crisis has highlighted this corruption in the government and business sectors. Feudalistic leaders (Thai politicians, the Suharto family) have used their patron status to take advantage of modern market and state systems to embezzle large amounts of development aid for themselves and to see that the aid that is implemented is used for their personal business interests. This has had a cascading effect on the societies at large as all sectors of society, especially government officials, seek to get their own slice of the pie at the expense of the public welfare.

When our monastery recently upgraded it's quarterly journal (the longest continuously running Buddhist periodical in Siam), our publisher offered it to schools along with other Buddhist books they carry. The librarians in many of these government schools demanded a "commission," 10 per cent of the sale to go into their own pockets. Everyone knows that the generals take their multi-million baht commissions from big weapons and plane purchases (as well as government officials from development aid allocations). Are we to be shocked when ordinary teachers also want a cut from religious books?

On the citizen level, this break down of cultural values and replacement by market ones has led to a gross and unbounded consumerism on display in largely unlivable cities like Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila. With economists calling for greater consumer demand to create domestic growth, urban citizens displaced from their cultural roots in the countryside embrace consumption as a new means of identity. Results have been intolerable environments from industrial waste and consumer pollution and an explosion of HIV/AIDS from booming sex industries. Crime and religious fundamentalism and violence (e.g. Indonesia) have been further responses to reassert the identity of those increasingly alienated in the development process.

C) The Role of Development Agencies
The essential difficulty in this "development" process appears to be that structural reform has come before the development of human capacity to deal with it. World Bank President James Wolfensohn on his recent visit to Thailand said,"We have the strong belief that people in this country don't want charity. They want to hope, work and do it themselves". However, recent Bank initiatives in "community development" to meet the Thai crisis such as irrigation projects and supporting development in food processing still disregard the need for individuals to make sense of the development process on their own terms.

The World Bank and IMF have properly attacked government corruption in "developing" countries, but they have yet to address the more fundamental dissonance with modern structural models and indigenous cultural systems. The moral and cultural corruption undercutting the "development" process will actually only increase with the IMF's "structural re-adjustment" packages. Dismantling government patronage systems (however flawed) and the unbridled plunging in of the world market and global consumerism will strip away any lingering vestiges of indigenous frameworks by which "developing" societies make sense of their world. Some see such "structural re-adjustment" as the freeing up of markets. Others might view it as a cultural "clear cut". Expecting foreign multi-nationals to have more concern than feudal bosses have for their own clients is a flawed perception brought to light by the tarnished record of northern corporations in the "developing" world (e.g. Nike in Indonesia and Vietnam, Union Carbide in India).

As the developing world is being constantly reminded to reevaluate its operating systems towards greater structural openness and freedom in markets and government, so too must development agencies reevaluate their openness to new ways of envisioning the development process. These agencies need to expand their perspectives for interacting with donor groups. Policy planning and evaluation based on purely quantitative analysis (e.g. GNP, doctors/square kilometer, etc.) does not address the full range of human concerns which create prosperity and happiness. Nor does it resolve, but rather entrenches, the power hierarchies in these societies. Further, in the process of such a perspective change, there will be a need to develop a common language between donor agencies and their recipients which gives account to human and social diversity and respects cultural self-determination.

A) "Human Resource Development" as Personal Transformation
As an indigenous perspective with over two and a half millennia of practice and application in Asia, Buddhism offers a complimentary perspective on human and social "development". In the early development years of post World War II Asia, Buddhism was stereotypically viewed as an anathema to "modern development". While Buddhism does indeed have reservations about the course of "modern development", its finely tuned practices of internal transformation as well as the recent emergence of "development monks" in countries like Thailand belie the notion that Buddhism is complacent either about individual or social transformation.
These finely tuned practices of internal transformation offer important resources in developing the internal capacity of individuals towards social transformation. They also present a culturally appropriate model for "human resource development" in Asia as opposed to the present model of education for industrial labor and consumption. In these practices, Buddhism has balanced the need for structural models to envision and guide growth and development and the need for the unfolding of diverse and unique characteristics in each situation. The Buddha's essential teaching of "middle way" points to such a balance between:

* Wisdom & Compassion - compassion is the vital "subjective" pair which guides technological wisdom towards the qualitative benefit of people.

* Personal Responsibility And Independence & Relationship With Teacher And Community - this emphasizes developing one's self to answer one's unique problems with support from others rather than becoming dependent on the technology and expertise of a teacher or group of already advanced students.

* Meaning And Form - this emphasizes the timing of instruction and passing on of technology. More skills are not helpful if the student is not ready to digest and use them.

From such a Buddhist standpoint, we might reconceptualize "development aid" in terms of the way the aspirant follows the spiritual path. Through balancing head and heart, independence and interdependence, quantity and quality, a teacher does not solve a student's problems but empowers him/her to answer his/her own. In the same way, "development aid" as loans to increase material prosperity en masse can never SOLVE the problems of a particular society. Rather such "aid" must be timely, aimed correctly and work dynamically with the unique subjective factors of a society.

As Buddhist practice begins to effect the inner core of the individual, transformation will manifest itself in the physical world. An initial level is that an individual's relationship to material goods and technology is radically altered, and they begin to relearn the meanings of simplicity and renunciation. Renunciation is not a shunning of the material but rather transforming our relationship with the material from the highly defined desires and "needs" of the market and state to requisites. Four such central requisites are food, clothing, shelter and medicine. Transforming these into requisites means that as these are basics for life, we should be simple, frugal and direct in our treatment of them. As others depend on these for their livelihood as well, they are things to be taken seriously and not to be wasted or treated selfishly. In consumer society, we waste much time indulging in cuisine, fashion, interior decorating, and intoxication in drugs and alcohol. As we begin to see the material as means to building a mental and spiritual ecology and not as ends for material growth, we begin to see the burden that they can create in our lives. Renunciation then becomes the practice of making our lives lighter and freer through material simplicity.

Beyond our relationship with the material, we obviously have emotional and spiritual requisites. These are the food, clothing, shelter and medicine for our spirits which give us sustenance towards reaching our higher goals. Humans have a fundamental requisite of connection, to feel comforted and nurtured by the world around them. The four material requisites provide this on a physical level. On the spiritual emotional level, we also require this comfort and nourishment. Life, Society and Nature become three fundamental requisites for the individual to experience their interconnection with reality. In modern culture, however, Life has become the "need" for personal indulgence in media, entertainment and technology; Society the "need" for sex and consumer experience; and Nature the "need" for environment as consumable experience. As requisites, Life becomes the process of self-discovery and self-knowledge through solitude, meditation or prayer, and art and learning. Society becomes the way people connect together and reaffirm their cooperative nature through proper partnership, family and community. Nature becomes the way all beings connect, and this is practiced through a constant immersion where "environment" no longer exists as an idea indicating the separation of man from nature. In this way, the spiritual requisites extend the process of inner transformation and "development" outwards to others and society.

B) Personal Transformation Extends to the Social and "Structural"
The social, "structural" form of Buddhist practice is called "sangha", the community of individuals following such a process of internal transformation together. Sangha incorporates the above individual practices on a larger scale to include:

* sociability, sense of fairness, sympathy and duty. Although two hundred years of history have done much to nurture institutions for freedom and equality, very little has been done for the fraternity and solidarity that hold societies together.

* a human-scale collective at which it is possible to encounter people face to face and within which people can feel at home.

* an assertion of ethics. Without a strong sense of personal ethics, societies require an unacceptable level of policing and contracts; and without a strong sense of personal responsibility it is inevitable that costs will be shunted out on to the natural environment and on to future generations.

From these fundamentals of individual and community transformation and "development", we can begin to envision a new mandate for "development" which involves individual and community capacity building as the foundation for "structural development".

1. Education (wisdom)
For any structural improvements to be made in society, there is the fundamental need to build the capacity of each individual and each community in a way which balances head and heart, independence and interdependence, and quantity and quality. The use of a "buddhist" style of "human resource development" which emphasizes communities and individuals coming to terms with their own needs and issues is an essential base for "structural development".

2. Culture (moral conduct)
For "development" to engender healthy societies, all facets of a society must be addressed, not simply the economic. Economic issues must be reprioritized within the overall structure of societies. This overall structure is what we can understand as "culture" which includes art, history, language, medicine and other aspects which combine to form healthy and self-sufficient societies

3. Dynamics of Interrelation or Politics (concentration)
For individuals and communities to create the space for their own "development", the dynamics for interaction must be clear and healthy. We have seen how structural reform has not changed the fundamental feudal nature of "developing" countries nor that democracy is a finished product in "developed" countries. More must be done to bring out cooperation and proper monitoring in political systems

In such a way, the NGO movement has been a positive development to community disempowerment in the "developing" world. NGOs have done well on the second level of culture by reaffirming community values and bringing in other "soft" or subjective factors into the "development process". Their failures, however, have been in the first and third areas of education and interrelation. Firstly, their own inability to practice personal transformation amidst their structural agenda for "alternative" development has created organizations imbued with the same feudal patronage structures and megalomaniac personalities as their government counterparts. Further, as they have struggled for social space amidst the patronage systems of government, they have been unable to create proper horizontal connections with other NGOs and vertical connections with government and business sectors. However, a system of networking which is developing among NGOs, citizens groups, development agencies and even government offices suggest one alternative model.

This model is the network, and one such example can be found in the Buddhist metaphor of Indra's Net. Indra's Net is a spider's web in which at each node appears a mirror which reflects all the other mirrors and vice versa infinitely. In this way, each infinitesimal part encodes all of the whole within it. From such a metaphor, we can envision a form of political organization which emphasizes:

a) inter & independence in which power is not centralized but exists equally in every node. This of course presupposes the capacity of each individual and community must be uniquely empowered by the practice of internal transformation.

b) While emphasizing individual integrity, the whole is not the simple amassing of the parts. Rather the interaction of the whole more strongly determines the nature of the parts. Relationship and connection between groups is thus vital, so there must be an emphasis cooperation and the procedures of communication.

This model of organization is being further explored in the work of quantum physics, particularly holographic models of the mind which posit a decentralized, multiply interactive model of the universe. Such a model puts a strong emphasis on the democratic and dynamic interplay of its parts and thus requires individuals to have their own critical perspectives. Individuals and communities must able to think for themselves, determine their own directions and development and then perhaps receive structural support in a timely manner. Such a model de-emphasizes the feudal patronage systems with which development agencies have become partners in state run development projects. This framework is one still in the making and not without its difficulties, principally clearer and efficient decision making methods among groups.

C) Incompleteness of the Buddhist Model
An essential aspect of the Buddhist (and quantum) critique of the modern structural model is the insufficiency of any one approach, model or framework to answer all questions. According to the pervasive dynamic of impermanence, we must continue to make adjustments to the models and frameworks we have developed according the flux of causes and conditions. In this way, Buddhism and other movements which seem to oppose large development agencies like the World Bank and IMF must also engage in their own internal critique.

One of the principal problems of Buddhist approaches to development has been precisely the inability to engage with development agencies and others involved in the important work of structural change in our societies. Typically, Buddhists have held up fuzzy models of utopic small community as an answer to all our social ills. Yet, especially in parts of the "developed" world like the U.S. and U.K., citizens groups have been fighting passionately AGAINST the small government agenda which seeks to leave communities to themselves while disregarding the large number of people yet unable to fend for themselves and still dependent on government social support. The call for "small community" then plays right into the conscious negligence by elites in "developed" countries to disregard the welfare of the whole. In such a way, Buddhists share the Bank's and other development agencies' responsibility to develop new perspectives and a mutual dialogue of depth and understanding.

The above obviously presents some distance between the Bank's and a Buddhist approach to development. Clearly each side has gaps in their approach which need to be filled in and perhaps supplemented by the other side. At the end of such an envisioning process, we must ask,"what can be done to enact change now?"

A) Policy Reform
The short term policy objectives for the Bank and other major donor agencies remain problematic. If the Bank and such agencies truly wish to expand the scope of their work, they will have to contemplate their present limitations. The Bank and such agencies have an expertise in hard infrastructural development, and as lending bodies, they function as banks. It is therefore unrealistic within their mandates to suddenly become immersed in human resource development as personal transformation. Furthermore, is it truly in anyone's interest to borrow money for such programs?

These questions return us to the need to develop the languages and dialogues with a wider variety of social sectors and to explore the possibility of new frameworks for connection and cooperation, for example, the system of networking outlined above. In this way, the Bank could play a role in fostering more just relations between the various sectors of the "developing" societies it touches, across governmental, business, NGO and community lines. It has been witnessed that the Bank is exploring such ideas, for example, its proposal for "Research Capacity Building Through North-South Cooperation." For the mandate of poverty reduction to be realized, space must be created in society for the silent poor to articulate their own vision.

B) Internal Reform
At the same time, the existing structures which dominate social space and exhibit such a deterioration of moral standards must be confronted. This includes governmental offices, corporations, and donor agencies such as the Bank itself. We have seen how modern structure building has neglected the transformation of individuals within these structures and how large structural bureaucracies inhibit the important communal factors for growth in personal connection and intimacy. Therefore, to begin the moral reform of corrupted structures we must shift our focus away from more structural reform towards the transformation of the individuals within them. Such practices have been outlined above and already exist in the some of the brightest and most compassionate companies which understand that healthy workers do good work and that a healthy working community makes a successful business.

In order to aid the process of enlarging perspectives and creating common languages, the notion of the "expert" must be expanded from those with abstract specialized knowledge to include those with an integrated knowledge of various fields and those with experiential knowledge from years immersed in the daily lives of donor communities. The "participatory development" trend is a timid step in this direction. Aid agencies must more aggressively develop staffs with a wide range of experiences and knowledge who are not only intelligent but compassionate. Like the environment, an organization needs a bio-diversity of thinking and experiences in order to function in a healthy way.

Such an integration of staff with its target communities can be an important step in creating an environment of mutual trust and respect. It can also be a critical step in redressing the one-way polemic of the "developed" helping the "underdeveloped" and in understanding what essential skills and knowledge the "underdeveloped" world offer the "developed". An "expertise" in "human resource development" skills such as renunciation, simplicity, and connection is probably one of them. Finally, in drawing on a last Buddhist metaphor, we might re-envision the Bank in the form of the traditional Buddhist "millionaire" (setthi) who is not known for how much she has but how much she gives (not lends) to the community. Practicing the parami (perfection) of dana (generosity) she becomes well loved rather than well endowed for her forgiveness of all outstanding debt and her loaning of capital with no collateral or interest.