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We must challenge the distorting North-South lens of development, and instead focus on our commonalities to build social justice
Jon Tinker

Way back in 1970, the UN adopted the development assistance target of 0.7 per cent of GNP. At the time, the OECD’s donor group was already spending 0.34 per cent.  Doubling it seemed a reasonable goal.

But we have failed, miserably. Overseas development assistance (ODA) peaked in 1982 – at only 0.38 per cent. For the next 15 years it fell, bottoming out in 1997 at 0.22 per cent. By 2005 it had recovered, marginally, to 0.25 per cent.
 
After 35 years of 'development education', ODA has fallen by a quarter.

Why be surprised? The rich-country development lobby still wears 50-year-old eyeglasses. We still talk about ‘the North’ and ‘the South’, concepts rooted in the Third World and non-aligned analyses of the 1950s. 

This ‘Us-Them' lens promotes alienation. It reinforces the stereotype that ‘the South’ is a different planet, where people are accustomed to poverty and disease, and incapable of organising themselves. It implies lower standards for misery and human rights in 'the South'.

And this archaic mindset also encourages lazy, self-serving thinking among rich-world NGOs. We preach partnership, but use our ‘partners’ mainly to raise our own credibility and funding. We still parachute our ‘experts’ into ‘the South’, although many, perhaps most, ‘Southern’ NGOs are now more professional than ourselves.

Can Canadian NGOs honestly do ‘capacity-building’ in India, or 'training' in Senegal? 

The ‘North-South’ mentality isn't solidarity. It's patronage, a 20th century version of noblesse oblige, a duty towards the less fortunate. Not wholly unworthy motives, but ones that are uncomfortably rooted in an illusion of superiority.  

Small wonder the 0.7 per cent goal is history. The Us-Them approach has hit the glass ceiling of donor fatigue. It's time for a less distorting lens.

Maybe development education needs to focus on commonalities instead of differences - including seeing the marginalised and deprived in all our societies.
 
Panos Canada started exploring this approach in early 2006, when we teamed up with Panos Caribbean to create AIDS in Two Cities, a photo-analysis of the human impacts of, and community responses to, HIV/AIDS in Port au Prince and Vancouver. In one of the richest and one of the poorest cities in the world, AIDS looks remarkably similar. 

Panos Canada is actively planning other such activities. Why? Because how we see determines how we feel – and how we act.

AIDS in Two Cities is, we hope, a modest first step towards seeing human societies more objectively, with all their diversity and defects, unfragmented and undistanced by archaic 'North-South' eyeglasses. 

Then, perhaps, humankind might develop a more genuine solidarity, rooted in equality and mutual respect, each learning from the other. Then, together, we could start to build social justice, both in our own societies and globally.

And then, perhaps, all states (and not just the 'donors') might put 0.7 per cent into a common pot, to tackle injustice and misery wherever they occur.

Jon Tinker founded Earthscan, which later became Panos, in 1974, and led it until 1992. He returned to create Panos Canada in 2003.

> Panos Canada website