Let’s Break Those Binaries: Enhancing the Fluidity of Development Practice
When doing school online and rarely leaving your house outside of essentials, you start looking for new ways to pass the time. For my roommates and I, a mix of activities have been added to our nightly repertoire, including board games, online trivia and most importantly… reality TV. After many nights of watching travel competition shows, my roommate, being from India herself, began to voice her frustrations. She started talking about how the places the contestants visited all had beautiful culture, architecture, and history, but the shows made them seem destitute and impoverished with over-exposure of slums and areas with lower infrastructure. All of this got me thinking about my degree in international development and everything that I had been shown over the past two years. I had been made to watch videos and read statistical analyses of ‘underdevelopment’ in South America, Asia, and Africa, but was rarely shown other defining characteristics of these countries outside of poverty levels and how they differ from the global north. Though numbers are necessary to understand some aspects of a country like population and economic growth, development strategies and research shouldn’t be based solely on statistics.
Development and global growth terminology, as it stands right now, exist within a very constricting binary. Through most measurements, nations are placed along a linear scale from developed to underdeveloped; First World to Third World; Global North to Global South. When we hear the term developed, we tend to assume the dominant Eurocentric worldview of life in North America and western Europe. The field of development studies is one that was founded by white scholars, social scientists, and economists, meaning that much of the pre-existing theory and terminology was created through a white gaze. This tends to fuel an unconscious bias, leading to developed countries becoming the perfect, untainted image of progress that every other nation should try to attain. The term ‘developed’ insinuates perfection, suggesting that places like Canada, the United States and western Europe have no need for further progress and are ideal models of how the entirety of the world should be. Single countries are more complex than that, though. They are more than economic statistics, or index ratings. By funnelling the history of an entire nation into statistics and then adding a minimal label of ‘developed’ or ‘underdeveloped’, many other factors are unfortunately eliminated. Social, political, and economic rifts, successes, blunders, and victories cannot fully be represented through single developmental terms. Nations are multilayered and should have each aspect of their society peeled back slowly in order to fully understand issues and achievements.
Canada has many complex social, political, and economic layers that become invisible when only the terms ‘first world’ and ‘developed’ are used. Canadian indigenous populations are living in what are considered ‘underdeveloped’ conditions in one of the most ‘developed’ nations in the world. What is seen as a highly developed, open-minded, and accepting nation for some is exactly the opposite for others. This is why there needs to be a wider vocabulary for development classification that breaks the juxtaposed duality created by current binary terminology. A country and its value and potential are more than a label assigned from another. If a more inclusive and open-minded vocabulary comes into development practice and study, then maybe we can finally see what countries are really like on our TVs.