by Pamela Readhead
Violent clashes at the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) Summit in Uganda last week highlighted the fact that there is more to international development than money, commodities and economic growth. As fifty Commonwealth leaders gathered in a Kampala hotel, opposition-led demonstrators protested about alleged human rights abuses in Uganda and denounced Queen Elizabeth for meeting President Yoweri Museveni.
After the Summit, Douglas Alexander, UK Secretary of State for International Development, announced a new ten-year development partnership with Uganda worth at least £700 million in aid. The Development Partnership Arrangement (DPA) commits the UK to providing at least £70 million to Uganda each year for the next ten years. The DPA sets out a clear framework for UK support for Uganda’s continued development, incorporating both a respect for human rights and a commitment to tackling corruption.
In his plenary address at an international conference on Global Development: Science and Policies for the Future in Vienna earlier this month, Dr. Allister McGregor, Director of the ESRC-funded Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) Research Group at the University of Bath, warned that scientific and technological solutions to poverty and sustainability were only part of the answer. He explained that an understanding of the circumstances in which people live together was also an essential component of designing effective interventions.
A wellbeing approach provides a better means of understanding how people become and stay poor
Findings from the WeD research group suggest that in many developing countries, some people benefit greatly from development, but for many others poverty persists through their lifetime and across generations. The tendency to see poverty as a framework for understanding the poor and developing countries while wellbeing often is seen only in terms of the wealthy and developed countries is unhelpful both for research and for policy. A wellbeing approach provides a better means of understanding how people become and stay poor, Dr McGregor says. "For example, our Thailand project has shown how differences in what different people and different communities conceive of as wellbeing can lie at the heart of community tensions and eventual conflict."
The WeD research group is developing a framework for understanding the social and cultural construction of wellbeing in developing countries. The group is working with research partners in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand to carry out detailed empirical research in rural and urban communities in each country. Using the idea of wellbeing as a focus, the research reveals what the obstacles are to people finding ways of achieving wellbeing in each society and community context.
"This approach compels us to consider the whole social human being and the relationships that different human beings have to the organisation of societies," says Allister McGregor. "Wellbeing, we argue, is a positive state that arises from the material, relational and psychological conditions that people experience in society. The material benefits from economic growth matter, but so too does the type and quality of the relationships that people experience, alongside their subjective evaluations of how satisfied they are in achieving what they regard as important for wellbeing. All three of these dimensions work together in social processes to generate what we each experience as wellbeing or illbeing."