Scholarly Contributions | Human Rights and Development

COOPERATIVE DEVELOPMENT

In contrast to traditional approaches to development that treat economic growth as the main goal, Professor Said outlined a cooperative perspective on development that recognizes that individual and community growth are connected. His open-ended framework centered human dignity and redefined freedom to focus on collective creativity, rejecting Western-imposed and formulaic development in favor of community-centered approaches. In articulating his cooperative perspective, he also called for redefining education toward more dialogical approaches that promote a world humanist culture. Said’s vision for cooperative development continues to provide us with critical guidance toward a new era of a truly global civilization.

Rejecting the dominant, Western-based approaches to human rights and development, Said defines cooperative development as “a self-conscious, participatory, self-managed and cooperative enterprise, seeking the full humanization of the person, of all persons, of the community, and of the world system.”¹ Instead of the nation state as the entity of reference with which to measure development goals, he explains in a 1982 paper that each person must be a “conscious and critical part” of the development process.² Indeed, he asserts, “individual human and societal growth are one and the process is open-ended.”³ In particular, he lists three areas on which cooperative development focuses, underscoring its inextricable links with universal basic human rights: 1) “the diminution of impediments to human self-realization (hunger, disease, war, externally-produced anxiety, etc.)”; 2) “the provision of the skills necessary for self- and community expression and realization (communication and organization skills)”; and 3) “the support and stimulation of human realization by positive action, through cultural creation.”⁴ Ultimately, Said explains that cooperative development is “a quest for added dimensions of being human.” He continues,

It is a quest directed to the potential for humanity of all human beings, and it demands the participation of all human beings to achieve it for all. Human solidarity is a positive virtue, to be cultivated and expected, for only through it can any of us realize our own full potential, and only through solidarity can we hope to achieve it for all human beings.⁵

Said recognizes freedom as a central aim of development but rejects the liberal, individualistic perspective that defines the goal of freedom as merely the ability to do one’s own thing. Rather, he defines freedom’s goal as “universal human creativity, not just material security.”⁶ For Professor Said, freedom is the “ability, skills and security (both inward and outward) to express oneself (individual and group) affirmatively and creatively.” Put another way, “the goal of development is to liberate the artist in every person;” therefore, freedom “implies community, because to create is to communicate and every artist … must have respectful and understanding coparticipants in his or her creation.”⁷

Understanding development as a cooperative, conscious, open-ended process toward creative freedom is drastically different from approaches that simply focus on stimulating economic growth or promoting particular forms of government. As such, Said acknowledges that a cooperative perspective alters the way in which development should be planned and administered compared to conventional approaches.⁸ He is particularly concerned with redefining development away from extrapolating from industrial society experiences and telling communities in the Global South what to do. Such approaches reinforce the idea that Western society is superior and Western science holds all the answers. Rather, Said argues, development should be characterized by local participation, social control over resources, economic and cultural decolonization, and cooperation from interpersonal and global levels.⁹ In a 1983 article titled “All Nations are Developing Nations,” he writes “there are no ‘more developed’ and ‘less developed’ human beings or states – only individuals and ‘societies in development.’” Development is thus a “permanent quest of every person; of all societies.”¹⁰

Dr. Said asserts that redefining development toward cooperative approaches requires a similar redefinition of education. Just as he outlined the peace education approaches needed for global citizenship, Said understands education as the critical “guidance mechanism” in the ongoing process of development. Indeed, “guidance of society will come more from the cultural consensus-making process we call education than from government institutions or an ideologically-oriented political party.”¹¹ In a late 1990s paper written with Dr. Brady Tyson titled “Making the World Safe for Diversity,” Said argues that education must move away from the traditional approach of transmitting information to one that is “more dialogical and open ended, and less paternalistic and past-oriented.”¹² For Said, both development and education must be increasingly understood as “conscious, participatory, self-managed and cooperative enterprises, seeking the full humanization of the person, of all persons, of the community and of the world system.”¹³ Therefore, just as development is seen as a human right – reflecting the civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights addressed within UN instruments – so too is education a basic human right.¹⁴

Implicit in Professor Said’s approach to dialogical education is the belief “that all persons are inherently teachers as well as learners.”¹⁵ When it comes to development, “it is really impossible, either politically or intellectually, to continue to think of ‘education’ as something in which the Western world is the ‘donor’ and the ‘Third World’ is the ‘recipient.’”¹⁶ Still, he maintains that certain Western humanist values can and should be maintained “for the good of the West and of the world.”¹⁷ The key is to separate the notion that the West embodies development from the idea that the West has some knowledge that is valuable about development.¹⁸ As he explains in a 2004 paper with Professor Nathan Funk, we can “acknowledge Western science as a remarkably dynamic source of inspiration for development,” but we must understand that it exists “within a wider context that includes diverse cultural systems of social values.”¹⁹ Education that is aligned with cooperative development “must become a dialectical process in which the whole world becomes a permanent university, with every person and every community both a teacher and a student.”²⁰ Cultural diversity and global citizenship are thus important values of Said’s cooperative perspective of development. He asserts that both education and development “can only flourish if they are based upon the active promotion of a world humanist culture,” one that is necessarily pluralist in that it recognizes there are “many roads to humanism.”²¹

For Said, the growing inequality within contemporary societies, coupled with increasing cultural diversity, underscores the importance of participatory, humanist, justice-oriented, cooperative development processes that preserve dignity. Indeed, “the dialogue about development that is necessary within societies is also increasingly needed on a transnational basis as the world economy becomes more tightly integrated in the absence of participatory processes of global governance.”²² Yet Said cautions that “none of us need wait until the whole system is transformed to begin to put into practice, at least on an experimental basis,” the ideas toward cooperative development. Instead, we can all participate now: “the world deserves some common sense of values and purpose, some common bonding culture that will enhance the possibilities of maintaining the creative cultural pluralism we already have, and this can only be achieved by a broader synthesis and greater participation.”²³

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