Globalisation and Pakistan’s Dilemma of Development

Pakistan’s development project that was initiated in the 1950s with a focus on creating a prosperous and equitable society, making the benefits of scientific advancement and progress available to all the people, got lost somewhere in the labyrinth of development fashions and econometric modelling learned in American universities and World Bank/IMF seminars. The latest of these fashions being eagerly followed by the economic managers of the state is the implementation of structural adjustments, termed “Washington Consensus” by some, flowing from the operative rules and ideological framework of neo-liberal globalisation. In practice these adjustments, euphemistically called reforms, have foreclosed the possibility of improving the condition of working masses, not only in Pakistan but globally, including the developed West. If Pakistan is to reclaim its original people-centred development project, it will have to set its own priorities of development in the context of indigenous realities shared in common with its South Asian neighbours. Following the globalisation agenda at the behest of the Washington-based IFIs will sink the country into ever greater debt and mass poverty.Globalisation, Pakistan

Globalisation and Pakistan’s Dilemma of Development (Distinguished Lecture)

I open Peter Singer’s One World: The Ethics of Globalization to a ‘local’ and a ‘global’ text, and am thereby led to argue that problems of poverty, inequality, governance, corruption, transparency, tolerance, growth and welfare, and more generally of justice and freedom, be they economic or political, are not the monopoly or ward of a particular region, packages to be pried open by the language of economic theory alone. They rather demand an acknowledgement that an economy is also a society, a polity, a community, a collectivity in short; and a conceptual recognition by agents, albeit embodied with their own needs and desires, that is correspondingly capacious. Thus, to move beyond conception to fruition, theory, of necessity, can hardly ignore values garnered from the past, ethics, and therefore texts, local to the collectivity, that make its past come alive