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The international context for development efforts has undergone fundamental transformations during the last two decades. As a consequence, it is necessary to renew the repertoire of concepts to apprehend the realities of development finance and international cooperation. This essay aims at contributing some ideas to the debate on the future of development assistance. It traces the evolution of the institutional arrangements for development cooperation during the last five decades, examines the emergence of a fractured global order during the 1980s and 1990s, analyzes the frameworks that have been proposed to interpret these changes, and explores their implications for development finance and international cooperation.

Two rather different but complementary activities converged in the preparation of this work. In 1993, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, I embarked on a major intellectual exercise to reinterpret the concepts of development and progress from the perspective of knowledge generation and use. Although the final report is still in preparation, the material gathered in this project provided most of the background information for Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book. At the same time, I was asked by the President of the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to help in the design of strategies to cope with the changing context for development cooperation. Our interactions provided much of the material for Chapters 5 and 6. To complement these international engagements, my work as Director of the AGENDA: Perú program on development strategies and democratic governance provided a firm developing-country anchor for my international flights of fancy.

Along the way, I had the opportunity to prepare reports at the request of the Administrator, the Director of Policy and Planning, and the Head of Strategic Planning of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Chair of the United Nations Committee on Science and Technology for Development, the Secretary of the Development Committee of the World Bank, IDRC, and the Director the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. This allowed me to test some of my ideas and to learn from the experiences of these organizations. In addition, my participation in events organized by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, IDRC, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Carter Center, UNDP, the International University Menéndez Pelayo and the Pablo Iglesias Foundation in Spain, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Latin American Economic System, the South American Peace Commission, and the Peruvian Diplomatic Academy, among other institutions, exposed me to the views of many experts on international development issues.

I would like to thank Patricia Rosenfield and Akin Adubifa from the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their continuous support and Pierre Beemans from IDRC for his encouragement and wise counsel. I also benefited greatly from many discussions and conversations with Silvia Charpentier, Geoffrey Oldham, John Hardy, David Hopper, Ruth Zagorin, James Gustav Speth, Elena Martínez, Sharon Capeling-Alakija, Carlos Lopes, Janet Donnelly, Uner Kirdar, Gus Edgren, Anders Vijkman, Felipe Gómez-Pallete, Pilar Cuevas, Alexander Shakow, Carl Dahlman, John Stremlau, Esther Brimmer, Colin Bradford, Michael Colby, Louis Emmerij, Manuel Castells, Carlos Contreras, Claudio Herzka, Allan Wagner, Jorge Valdez, Fernando Guillén, Max Hernández, Pepi Patrón, Helan Jaworski, Antonio Gonzáles Norris, and Mariano Valderrama. Eliana Chrem and Patricia Alcocer provided research assistance and administrative support, and Gonzalo Alcalde worked closely with me in the preparation of this essay and made many significant contributions to it.

Last, but not least, I want to express my appreciation and recognition to Keith Bezanson and David Hamburg for their unwavering support, encouragement, and friendship. Keith and David not only know about the fractures in the global order but are also doing something to bridge them. I dedicate this book to both of them.

Francisco Sagasti
Lima, Peru
April 1999

Document(s) 1 de 11