As the vaccine response to the COVID-19 unfolded in profoundly unbalanced ways five years ago, I embraced and amplified the output of Philip Schellekens, a longtime World Bank development economist with a penchant for eye-grabbing graphics. (He’s now chief economist the United Nations Development Programme for Asia and the Pacific.)
He has since settled in on Substack and I encourage you to subscribe if you care about clarity in trying to improve the human journey everywhere. I particularly love “All Countries are Developing Countries” — a fresh post exploring how major news media operations are stuck on using the labels “developed” and “developing” for countries that are mostly different in their levels of wealth/poverty:
As he explains:
[D]evelopment is far more than just average per capita income and a more multidimensional lens would show many examples of countries below the threshold doing better on non-monetary aspects of development (health, inclusion, sustainability, …) than those further up.
The deeper problem is that “developed” implies “arrival” and the reality is that no country or economy has arrived.”
The piece examines media bad habits and proposes alternatives and is a perfect addition to my sporadic #Watchwords series, in which I try to foster discussion clarifying the many meanings of words in climate and sustainability debates as a step toward mutual understanding.
(In a separate Substack note, Schellekens reports that China is poised to become a “high-income country” later this year.)
It would be a fool’s errand ever to expect we’ll all have the same definition of keywords in these arenas, but it is a vital practice to know what’s in each other’s heads when a phrase like “climate crisis” or a word like “collapse” is tossed around.
I touched on the theme of Schellekens’ latest piece back in 2010 in a short Dot Earth post at The New York Times simply asking, “Do the top billion need new goals?” Back then, before the Sustainable Development Goals, the Millennium Development Goals were in the headlines. Here’s how I framed things:
Here’s a question to ponder over the weekend. There’s a set of Millennium Development Goals for the poorest of the poor — a cohort of humanity sometimes described as the “bottom billion.”
But, as yet, there’s no set of such goals for those who are already living lives that many analysts say are consuming resources at a pace well beyond the planet’s carrying capacity, particularly if the habits that attend affluence — from greatly increased meat consumption to unthinking energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions — are adopted by another few billion people.
There are plenty who contend that unrestrained pursuit of prosperity is a prerequisite for a mix of environmental care and technological advancement that will continue to improve the state of the planet. But there’s self interest in an examination of how much is enough. Some analysts have found, for example, that diseases accompanying affluence exact a toll in lost years of human lives that is not far behind the losses from diseases of poverty. And then there’s the issue of what’s being pursued — the good life as defined in Vegas or by Plato.
The question: Would the world benefit from a set of millennium development goals for the “top billion”?
Schellekens’s post also took me back to my first #WatchWords piece on these terms:
Sustainability Watchwords: "Developing, Developed, Undeveloped"
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June 5, 2022
As you may know, I’m developing a #Watchwords series building conversations around words that are contested or confusing more than illuminating in pursuit of a better planet and society. This post from pre-Substack days centers on the words Developed/Undeveloped
I focused on a fantastic moment in a podcast conversation I had at the 2018 C2 conference in Montreal with the great marine biologist and explorer Sylvia Earle. She sharply interrupted me as I used the word “undeveloped” to describe one end of the island Curaçao. She dug in: “Isn’t that a curious word - undeveloped?”
It took me a second to ponder her point. I realized, of course, that undeveloped is a word that implies the end state of a landscape is to be developed.
“It’s like it’s our job to fix it,” she mused. Yeah, that’s a very wild place. It’s undeveloped. We need to get in there and fix it.”
What other words should I add to my Watchwords lexicon?
Weigh in with suggestions!
There’s a development question I need to explore with Schellekens. Why focus on countries when so many countries have starkly different conditions within their borders. For example, back in 1989, when I was writing my book The Burning Season about the fate of Brazil’s Amazon rain forests, I cited an old description of Brazil as “Belindia” — a wealthy Belgium floating within a sprawling India of poverty. In a 2023 Sustain What conversation, I noted that India is now Belindia using that kind of analysis (the full conversation is here):
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