Rethinking Development
HELENA NORBERG-HODGE

Helena Norberg-Hodge has examined and critiqued conventional notions of development. A linguist by training, and a native of Sweden, she was educated in Europe and the United States. She first went to Ladakh in northwestern India in 1975. Three years later she founded the Ladakh Project, with the goal of providing Ladakhis with the means to make more informed choices about their own future. Her work has received wide support and recognition. She is Director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture in Berkeley, California. She is the author of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh.

You write, "Ladakh, or 'Little Tibet,' is a wildly beautiful desert land high up in the western Himalayas. It is a place of few resources and an extreme climate. Yet, for more than a thousand years, it has been home to a thriving culture. Traditions of frugality and cooperation, coupled with an intimate and location-specific knowledge of the environment, enabled the Ladakhis not only to survive, but to prosper. Everyone had enough to eat. Families and communities were strong. The status of women was high. Then came development." It sounds so evil. What's the problem?
The problem is that development has to be understood as a broad, systemic process whereby it is believed that we raise the standard of living and improve life on earth. In the West we have a view of development as being progress. Subconsciously it means that we're removing ourselves from nature. There's a linear path taking us to outer space. I've seen that development, as it is introduced into a nature based, ancient culture like this Tibetan culture, which is what Ladakh is, does literally tear people apart from their own ecosystem and their own resources. It lifts them up into an urban lifestyle far removed from their own resources. It could be a nice idea, if it worked. Perhaps people would prefer to live in an urban setting, completely removed from the natural world. But the fact is that it doesn't work. This model of development was rooted in the West. It's profoundly eurocentric. If we look at our historical development, when we started on this experiment of removing ourselves from our connection with the natural world, perpetually urbanizing ourselves, our populations exploded as a consequence. But we had the whole world to conquer. We sent our peoples out across the world, from Australia to South America as the populations exploded. At the same time we set in motion an economic system in which resources were coming our way and in which we were either forcing or educating people around the world to grow cash crops for us. This whole model is what is being exported in the name of development to the so-called Third World. They don't have any colonies, anywhere to spread themselves to when their populations explode. The whole process is directly responsible for both the exploding population as well as the perpetual urbanization, lifting people away from the land into ever larger urban centers. So that Mexico City, Jakarta, Calcutta are a direct consequence of policies of planned change. I think we'd better hurry up and change those plans if we want to survive.

Do you see urbanization and development ipso facto negative?
I don't see them in theory as negative. What I see is that the actual fact, what is actually happening, is absolutely destructive. It tears down communities and natural systems and robs people of self-esteem. I've seen the psychological as well as the social and environmental costs of this type of urbanization and development. I know that it cannot be sustained, neither can the biological systems. We need to understand that the process is reducing biological diversity as we speak. Inherent in this process is a destruction of biological diversity. Species are literally disappearing as we speak. We cannot live without that biodiversity. It's not so much a question of preference as of survival.

You focus extensively on Ladakh and your many years in residence there as a kind of paradigm. I'm wondering if it's not kind of artificial. Here's a very small, isolated land high up in the Himalayas, never colonized, a small population, 100,000 people, mostly Buddhist, fairly homogeneous. How can you extrapolate from that onto the rest of the world?
In my book and in my lectures I talk about Ladakh, and yet it really is about development. This development process is monocultural. It's inherently eurocentric. It is everywhere the same. What Ladakh provides is a baseline, something other, with which to compare the product of development. So in fact, what I'm writing about is the process of development which I have observed over eighteen years. I've seen the impact of development on male and female roles, on society and on human beings and also on natural systems. What Ladakh provides, because it's so remote and because it wasn't affected by colonialism, is a baseline, something that has not been affected by the process of development. It is very important that we realize that we have to go back to pre-colonialism to understand development. Colonialism is part and parcel of a process which then was later on called development. What it has been doing is pumping resources to the West, away from the so-called Third World.

There is a lot of discussion about human nature and what it is. You say that development is the root cause of environmental and social evils, not human nature. Who's ascribing the root cause of these problems to human nature?
I think that the vast majority of people today are doing that. It's coming from many different directions, even from many religions, even Buddhism, to some extent, although Christianity is more guilty of having perpetuated this sense of original sin. But even in Buddhism greed and ignorance are seen as part of the human condition. The majority of people on earth today tend, consciously or unconsciously, to blame innate human greed and even innate human aggression as they see violence around them and the growing consumerism. What I've seen in Ladakh has shown me very clearly that we cannot generalize in that way. I suppose I can't either generalize and claim that everybody was like the Ladakhis, but I do know that some people on this earth were not guilty of the same sort of greed and aggression that we find everywhere in the world where development has come. What I saw and lived for many years in Ladakh were the people. It was a fact that you had a majority of Buddhists living side by side with a minority of Muslims for five hundred years without ever engaging in any group conflict. Fifteen years after development arrived, they were literally ready to murder one another and engage in bloody conflict. I observed, year by year, the changes that led to that. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this broad process, which we must understand very broadly to see what's happening, and narrowly focused experts simply cannot make the sort of connections that I'm doing. I see the same thing in Bhutan, which is another little Himalayan kingdom where Hindus and Buddhists have lived peacefully for centuries. Again, after only a few decades of development, they're engaged in bloody conflict.

And you attribute that directly to development and consumerism?
Absolutely. But we should probably look more closely at what we, or I, mean by development. We have to realize that it's a fundamental change in world view away from one in which human life is seen as part of the natural world, part of a web of relationships, towards a world view which assumes that human life is separate from the natural world and also in a position to control and manipulate it to suit our own ends. On another level, it's a combination of science, technology and an economic paradigm which operate together to transform society. The assumption is that it's improving our quality of life and so-called "raising the standard of living."

That's the given.
Yes. And when one looks, as I do, at a society like the Ladakhi one--and I should add that it isn't just in Ladakh. I've lived in many different European cultures. I've seen Austria, for instance, where I studied twenty five years ago in a little town called Innsbruck, which at that time was a very lovely town or city in balance with its surrounding environment: human-scale architecture, the air was clean, the mountains around were beautiful. That town now has sprawling suburbs, concrete boxes spreading into the valley. It's completely covered by a cloud of pollution from the increasing traffic. The environmental and social problems there are dramatically greater than what they were twenty five years ago. In addition, at the same time, the local economy there, just as in Ladakh, has been destroyed by development. It's almost impossible to find locally produced goods of any kind. What you find instead is a sort of supermarket economy of goods from all over the world, mass produced. Because they have to come from very far away, you have everything with double and triple wrappings, which of course greatly increases the problem with waste and rubbish. I've seen this process at different levels in other cultures. I grew up in Sweden, which is the socialist variant of industrialization, and there, too, the problems are the same. And they're increasing very rapidly. Even the health care system is about to collapse in Sweden. The economy there, as everywhere else, is bankrupt. It is high time that we rethink, look at these unconscious assumptions that we're making about progress. It's a question of redefining progress.

How does the collapsing Swedish health care system connect with development?
Directly. I should add that when we call it development, we tend to be thinking about the Third World. We tend to be aware that it's a product of planned change. But what's very sad is that the same process is continuing in the North or the developed world, but there we call it progress. We treat it like some sort of evolutionary force beyond our control, that has nothing to do with us. We're not aware of the fact that our taxpayers' money is going towards developing us, and that development of us means forever more capital, energy intensive technologies, forever more and more specialization in terms of our educational system. That is supposed to be helping us to understand the world around us. But specialization has grown so narrow and so fragmented that no one is aware of the overall impact of what we're doing. In health care we're talking about the combination of specialization and ever more centralizing capital and energy intensive technologies. We're creating more and more high tech, centralized medical care. It's very complex. The centralization is both in terms of knowledge and power but also a physical centralization pulling people into ever larger urban centers. That means that the G.P. doctor who was in the small town or village is no longer there. More and more for your health care you have to go to a superspecialist in a large urban center, a very large hospital. The dehumanization and the loss of real knowledge of how the whole body operates, how the psyche, psychological influence cannot be separated from physical functions, all of that is lost. Human beings come to be seen as a machine. The quality of health care is going down, while our ability to manipulate particular organs and perform magic, high tech surgery is increasing. In terms of overall health the quality of care is going down. All the time it becomes more and more expensive and more and more difficult to provide health care to the vast majority of people.

You're very critical of modern education. You write that "it not only ignores local resources, but worse still, makes Ladakhi children think of themselves and their culture as inferior. They are robbed of their self-esteem." How does modern education rob Ladakhi children of their self-esteem?
On many different levels. We need to keep in mind that this is true everywhere, and it is a good example of why I'm saying that it is appropriate and relevant around the world. Just recently I overheard a Ladakhi teacher saying to her Ladakhi students, "Our best poet is Wordsworth. Now let's read some Somerset Maugham." The same thing is happening in Bali, Africa, South America. The fact is that Wordsworth is not their poet. The distance between this English poet and Ladakh or Bhutan or Bali buries their own history and heritage. It's become so shameful that it isn't even visible. It's making their heritage and their resources invisible. It also robs them of self-esteem. Everything that they represent--and this is particularly true of earth-based or indigenous culture--is seen as primitive and backward. It inevitably is within this spectrum that we have created of progress, meaning away from nature, away from spontaneity, away from the uniqueness of individuals, of a particular culture and place. All the time towards a type of monocultural standardization which is inherently eurocentric. Interestingly enough, it isn't just education itself, that is the schooling. At the same time the media operate to produce the same impact. Your sense of identity is being formed by stereotyped, very distant media images. All around the world they are literally Barbie doll and Rambo for little children. That Barbie doll bears no resemblance to who I am as a Ladakhi. Barbie doll is not who anybody is. So these distanced models are destructive for everybody, even in the West. No one can live up to those models. Anorexia and bulimia and a whole range of very serious disorders are directly related to this. So this alienation, trying to remove you into another culture that is completely alien to who you are, creates a deep sense of self rejection and loss of self-worth and self-esteem. It's just heartbreaking to watch it.

In addition, the way that Western education robs people of self esteem is that this whole process is so alien that most students fail. When I say most, I mean ninety-eight percent fail. That means that overnight, when you introduce this Western schooling, you're turning whole cultures, whole peoples, into failures. The sense is that you are stupid, inadequate, backward. I have people in the villages in Ladakh now saying that they're like "asses," a Ladakhi expression that says you're really stupid, because they don't speak English. The whole world is being made to feel inferior if they don't speak perfect English.

Let's talk further about the globalization of the world economy. You're a peasant in Sumatra. You have a large family. You're living on your land. You grow rice and you're relatively self-sufficient. Along comes a trader, a merchant of sorts, and says, Look, if you grow coffee, I will quadruple your income and you'll be able to buy VCRs and get that tractor you want and a car for the kids and a lot of other great material acquisitions. Would you be attracted to that?
I think anyone would, and they would be stupid not to be. Again, the need to broaden out and see things from a social point of view, from a global point of view, what will be the end result if everyone behaves in this way. From the point of view of the individual it would be literally stupid to say, No, I'm not going to have any of this. But from the point of view of policy choices, what we choose both out of concern for our children, but even in terms of what we choose for ourselves a decade or two down the line, that's a very different issue. There we will see that the present trends in industrial agriculture towards ever greater monoculture is going hand in hand with an increase in transport, so that the globalization of the economy now means that whereas, previously in Sumatra you would have had produce and agriculture producing everything you needed to survive so that all basic needs were being met, you find that industrial agriculture has shifted through all sorts of incentives, including an investment in transport infrastructure, including an investment in very specialized scientific knowledge going hand in hand with the media, which then also comes in with advertising to advertise the new products that you should be buying. The end result is that agriculture everywhere in the world is in crisis. In some cases the yields are significantly higher. But in fact they're also starting to drop. More significantly, the process of growing food is depleting soil and poisoning the drinking water, in many cases even poisoning the food. So that an understanding of what's happening in agriculture and how it relates to transport and trade are among the top issues that need to be widely discussed today.
When you see that, if you're in America, apples or lamb or whatever from New Zealand or Chile outcompete local produce, you really have to stop to think for a minute: How is this possible? How can something that has traveled thousands and thousands of miles be able to compete with local produce? If we were paying the full price for that transport, the full price of fossil fuels, we would have very different agriculture and very different economic interactions. What we would find is that we would be trying everywhere, whether in Colorado or in Sumatra or in Ladakh, to produce as much as we could locally, while importing things that could not be produced locally. So we would have some surplus in certain crops or products. That would make sense, to turn things around so that we produce what we could locally to reduce transport and trade for only those goods which cannot be produced locally. The problem is that as soon as you start talking about this many people think you're saying that there should be no trade at all, which has never existed. Even in Ladakh there was trade. It was part of human life on earth since the beginning.

To think in terms of balance between trade and local production is going to be the only way of real economic recovery, the only way of preventing an increasing unemployment like we've never seen before. If we continue on the present path, the path at the moment of all governments, who are panicking because they almost without exception are bankrupt, and they see globalization as the solution. What they're doing is sacrificing their own labor force, natural systems, culture, community in this gigantic leap. It's as though there's some giant pie floating in the ocean that is suddenly going to solve everybody's problems. It cannot and it will not. This super-globalization can only happen the way it's conceived now with a super increase in transport, which is going to mean more pollution along with all sorts of other problems. So that is, as far as I'm concerned, the number one issue of the day.

Let's say you are the CEO of a major multinational corporation. Your job is clearly to maximize profits for your stockholders. What can I tell you that would persuade you to change your economic practices, which are so obviously destructive? It's not in your interest, and if you pursue those new practices, you're out of a job.
I could argue that even the CEO might act in a more enlightened way. But I would say that he's going to be the last one to listen to what I'm saying. However, governments should be listening. It is not in governments' interest, not of the state nor the vast majority of the citizens. There I hope that one would have an audience. Globalization is already at a level that means that governments are losing power. You cannot centralize economic power without centralizing political power. What we're doing now is very frightening. We're handing power over to multinational corporations that are absolutely beyond democratic control. They're invisible amoeba. They're forming, in effect, a new type of world government.

What impact do World Bank and IMF policies have on the South?
If you look at where the vast amount of money goes, it goes into this infrastructure. I hate to use such a long, ugly word describing a big and ugly reality at the moment. The present infrastructure is based on ever larger-scale energy installations, a massive world network, Western-style schools, Western-style hospitals and media and mass communications. Those are the basic elements of an infrastructure which these large agencies fund as a priority. What they do with that infrastructure is to totally transform societies around the world in this Western, urban image. It all operates to lift people away from their own resources and from the land, whether they're local fishermen or nomads or farmers. Above all what we're talking about is the systematic destruction of the farmer. Remember that this is also being done while we're speaking. On the other hand, the same powers talk about the increase in population and the need for biotechnology to feed everybody. It's so frightening to me that so few people are talking about this and realizing what's going on. It's Orwellian, a terrible manipulation of what's actually happening. So systematically we destroy the small farmer and pull people into urban centers.

Something we haven't touched on enough with education was that we talked about how people's self-esteem is lost, but more important, perhaps, their self-reliance is also destroyed through education. So we put children in schools, whether in Ladakh or Sumatra, and give them a poor imitation of the same education that a child in New York gets. That means that first of all, during your entire schooling, you are robbed of the knowledge of how to survive with your own resources. You're not taught anything about how to grow barley in Ladakh at 12,000 feet, how to use yaks, how to make houses out of the mud that is available there. Not a word about any of the activities that you need to make yourselves self-reliant. Instead you're studying Wordsworth, mathematics and Western history. So when you finally graduate from that school you do not know how to survive in your own environment based on your own resources. You do know how to survive as a clerk or a specialist in an urban center, but those jobs are very few and far between. It's a prescription for unemployment, for larger and larger numbers. Also, interestingly enough, the more education you get, the further away it pulls you from your local resources and environment. So if you've just had some schooling, you might still stay on in your region. If you have more education, you've got to go to New Delhi. If you have even more education, it's off to the West. This is the brain drain, which again is a direct consequence of policy and planning.

Noam Chomsky describes these aid programs that are funneled through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and other agencies as a system in which the poor in the rich countries give money to the rich in the poor countries.
Exactly. And what we're doing is creating an elite in the poor countries which then supports the elite in our country. It's frightening to see how we're supporting the rich but we also have to remember that these development projects are actually creating ‘poverty’ and ‘wealth’, and widening the gap between rich and poor. To really understand that process it's very instructive to go all the way back to the beginning, the baseline, the one that I found in Ladakh. So many of those changes started with colonialism.

You've described a litany of problems plaguing Ladakh and the rest of the world. What can people do?
I think the number one thing we should do is to educate ourselves on these issues. We have an office in the U.S., and we're setting up study groups. If anyone wants to contact us, we will help to do that. "Study groups" is not the right word, they're more like communities of empowerment, people getting together in groups to look at these issues from the point of view not of themselves as individuals and, what can I do from today to tomorrow? but to look at these issues in a broader, more historical context. It is a different view on history, on progress, understanding progress in terms of our relationship to nature and to others. Once we understand how destructive the present economic paradigm has become and also the very narrow pursuits of an overly specialized science and the highly centralized large-scale technologies that they produce, once we understand these interactions better it's quite clear what we need to do. It includes things like the emerging links between producers and consumers that are starting to happen in many regions and communities in the world where, for instance, farmers' markets are being started. I know it sounds strange, but that's one of the most effective ways in which we can reverse the present trend towards a mass culture and a mass economy where people are so anonymous and also don't see the impact of their actions. We need to bring things home to a scale where we can see the impact of our actions. It's not some romantic idealism or unrealistic. In fact, another way to put what I'm saying is simply to lobby for fossil fuels costing the price that they should cost. That would immediately bring with it enormous benefits throughout the entire socioeconomic spectrum. But in order to understand that we have to do a bit of study first. At the moment, most people fear a rise in the price of fossil fuels because we as individuals are so dependent on them. I'm talking about policy changes that would be of benefit to all of us.

Note: Certain parts of this interview have not been included. Complete version is available at
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/barhodge.htm