Practice makes improvement : A contribution of the Normative Practice Approach to an ethics of international development cooperation in the agro-food domain

Summary

In 2010, the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy concluded that development cooperation lacks a development cooperation ethics. Ethical problems in development cooperation include the neglect of unintended and negative results of development programmes, the employment of methods that are disrespectful of human agency, motives that are publicly professed to be predominantly self-interested, and operative worldviews that are myopic in their focus on only specific development trajectories at the exclusion of others. This thesis responds to this challenge by offering a proposal for an ethical approach to development cooperation. Therefore, the main research question is: how should an encompassing development cooperation ethics look like?

The question is answered by deploying the Normative Practice Approach (NPA). The NPA is a conceptual and normative framework that enables professionals to deal with tensions within their practices. The NPA is normative in the sense that it articulates both the normative principles that hold for professional practices, and the way they cohere and interact.

It is argued in this thesis that development cooperation can be understood as a domain-relative normative practice. Professional development cooperation has its own normative structure; yet, development cooperation is simultaneously geared towards some domain, such as basic education, health care, or agriculture. This thesis focuses on development cooperation in the agro-food domain.

Development cooperation as practice has a structural, regulative, and contextual side. The structural side of development cooperation refers to the kind of practice it is. The structural side can be further differentiated into foundational, qualifying, and conditioning modal aspects. Modal aspects refer to ways of being of all entities, including practices. Some fifteen aspects can be distinguished. The formative aspect is foundational for development cooperation in the sense that technical knowledge first makes possible the performance of the practice. At the same time, development cooperation is characterized by facilitation and is therefore seen as qualified by the formative aspect as well, with its normative principle of meaning- oriented design. Facilitating the agency of farmers and other people involved with food production is constitutive for agricultural development cooperation as a practice. Practicing agricultural development cooperation means to build the capability of these actors to produce and trade on fair terms.

Conditioning modal aspects with their respective normative principles imply efficient and cost- effective programme planning (economic aspect), playful imagining of different agricultural development scenario’s (aesthetic aspect), and the inclusion of justified interests and the equal consideration of those interests in a development programme (jural aspect). For a meaningful performance of development cooperation, development professionals should simultaneously realize all those normative principles, under the lead of the qualifying normative principle of meaning-oriented shaping. For this, virtuous, development professionals and organizations are needed who give shape to those normative principles in their acting.

Because development cooperation is a domain-relative practice, its fruitful and meaningful performance requires that the respective normativity of the various practices in the facilitated agro-food domain will be respected. This thesis provides a detailed normative analysis of livestock development as one sub-cluster in the agro-food domain. Employing the NPA, again qualifying, foundational, and conditioning modal aspects are distinguished. The economic aspect is seen to qualify and the formative aspect to found the livestock farming practice. What this means is that livestock farming realizes its destination by particularly observing economic normativity. Examples of conditioning normativity include social normativity (reducing odour emissions) and jural normativity (fair trade with suppliers and buyers). It is argued that sustainable livestock farming – understood as livestock farming that can be maintained over time – is farming that takes into account this normativity that holds for the livestock farming practice.

Faith and religion are important within development cooperation. Religion and religious practices are omnipresent within development contexts, and faith-based organizations play a significant role within development cooperation. Within the NPA, the influence of faith convictions and religious ideas is conceptualized by distinguishing a regulative side next to the structural side of practices. Within agricultural development cooperation, it is helpful to distinguish between different kinds of practices involved, namely farming practice, scientific practice, and faith practice. Within each of these practices faith functions as a worldview. In the farming and scientific practices, however, faith is not qualifying for the practices. There, justice should primarily be done to, respectively, the economic and analytical aspects and their respective normativity. This conceptualization prevents dichotomous models of science-based versus faith-based approaches within agricultural research and development.

It is shown in this thesis that in evaluations of dairy development programmes in Kenya, a Cartesian worldview is operative. This appears from a strong emphasis on technology transfer and adoption (especially in bilateral and multilateral programmes), on individual women’s control of household resources, and on the neglect of religious understandings in relation to livestock. This Cartesian orientation puts development professionals and organizations for the dilemma of planned development. The problem is that the autonomy of intended beneficiaries and their organizations is implicitly thought to be opposed to that of development professionals and their organizations. It is argued that the dilemma of planned development can be dealt with by doing justice to the normative structure of the development cooperation practice, and conceiving of agency in a broader way than usual in development cooperation ethics.

The organizational embedding of professional development practitioners refers to the contextual side of the development cooperation practice. Organizations professionally involved with development cooperation include business, non-governmental, and governmental organizations. Each of these organizational contexts make different legitimate claims on the embedded development cooperation practitioners. On this organizational level, the respective qualifying aspects associated with the different types of organizations should be kept in sight for a meaningful and complementary collaboration among stakeholders in development cooperation.

To conclude, it is suggested that the NPA can address the problems in development cooperation through explicitly conceptualizing effectiveness as an appropriate normative principle (results), conceiving of development cooperation as facilitation (methods), recognizing the importance of an attitude of love (motives), and both acknowledging that worldviews play a role in development professionals’ everyday acting and being responsive to a given normativity as articulated in various worldviews (worldviews).