Culture and thought in the transformation of the world

There has been a gradual realisation over a period of time that the development efforts of the recent past have not enabled the masses of the people, particularly those who live in the Third World, either to raise their standard of living or to develop their own potentials. In these efforts the model of development was taken to be the Western world, and others, irrespective of their own peculiarities and the experience they gained in the course of history, were expected to follow the very same path that the West had taken. There was also a tendency to equate economic growth with improvement in the overall quality of human life. Both the assumptions have proved to be unfounded: the efforts have not yielded the expected results; on the contrary, the exercise has tended to perpetuate the dependence of the so-called underdeveloped areas on the developed areas. Within the national formations of the former, on the other hand, gains elsewhere have made the plight of the masses, the bulk of whom live in the rural areas, stand out more sharply than ever.

The Human and Social Development (HSD) Programme of the United Nations University (UNU), directed by Vice-rector Dr Kinhide Mushakoji, is, therefore, attempting to re-examine the conventional development wisdom. Those who are engaged in this Programme recognise that the solution of problems depends not only on technical knowledge, but also on a clear under standing of the causal relationship among the social, cultural, economic and political factors that determine the very nature of the problems. Accordingly, a project on 'Socio-cultural Development Alternatives in a Changing World' (SCA) was launched in mid-1978 by the HSD Programme of the UNU, with Professor Anouar Abdel-Malek of the Centre National de la Recherche Scien tifique, Paris, as its Co-ordinator, to bring out clearly the various and variant positions of the problem of human and social development that are rooted in different civilisations, cultures and nations and are determined by their objective conditions and historical specificity. Within a short time the Project has involved in its work people from various academic disciplines and also a variety of utions in twenty countries in Africa, the Arab World and Asia, Europe and institutions North and South America.