Visiting American scholar proposes alternative development model

“A flourishing community-centered economy would help remake the political landscape in many countries,” says Dr Webb.


Our Correspondent January 25, 2013
The model proposed by Dr Webb includes a strategy to enhance the economic capabilities of communities and to strengthen their cultural practices.

ISLAMABAD:


An American scholar has advocated alternative economic development based on traditional values and cooperative structures of village communities to bring prosperity to rural areas, according to an American professor.


This was stated by Dr Adam Webb, a political science professor at the John Hopkins University’s Hopkins Nanjing Centre in China, who was in town for delivering a lecture on Thursday. During the lecture, “Rural communities, modernity and space for an economy of value: A global perspective,” Dr Webb said major economic systems such as free market capitalism and communism have endangered community values in the process of economic development.

He suggested an alternative model of sustainable development that is based on “traditional rural values without alienating theprinciples of economic rationalism, an economic policy which suggests that markets always deliver better results than governments.



The model proposed by Dr Webb includes a strategy to enhance the economic capabilities of communities and to strengthen their cultural practices. He introduced an “Economy of Values” that builds upon communities’ existing strengths, values and cooperative structure.

Economic growth of the right kind will give their values political weight in the long run. That is where the idea of a ‘Traditionalist International’ comes in,” Dr Webb said. “A flourishing community-centered economy would help remake the political landscape in many countries.”

He commented that there was a natural political base for movements with a commitment to traditional values and social justice. “If they linked up across borders, the whole really would be greater than the sum of its parts.”

Dr Webb narrated the story of Pomatambo, a village in one of the poorest parts of Peru’s highlands, to illustrate his point.  The people of Pomatambo managed to sustain their economic, ecological and cultural integrity despite a Maoist insurgency, economic turbulence and poverty, Webb said. If a community-centered economy can work in places like Pomatambo, it can work elsewhere, he added.

The event was organised by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 25th, 2013.

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