The dependency school and the strategy of collective self-reliance: failed idea or still a valuable contribution worth considering?
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
(Conflicting) Political Ontologies and Implications for Transformative Action
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Collective self-reliance is a development strategy that was popular in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, particularly among the newly independent states of the ?Third World?. It is associated with the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1970s and with more radical approaches from development theorists associated with the ?dependency school?. It was also widely discussed among Yugoslav researchers. It was adopted by (African) liberation movements in liberated parts of the country, making virtue out of necessity with the result that practices of SR disappeared later.
Nowadays the concept seems almost forgotten. At the theoretical level and even more in practice the idea of self-reliance seems obsolete. Nevertheless, in our view it does not deserve to be forgotten. Scarcity of resources, crises and the persistence of uneven development, globally and in Europe, are at least three reasons to deal with it. The presentation wants to serve as a theoretical impulse to reintroduce the ideas of south-south cooperation to the integration discourse.
The paper examines the concept of collective self-reliance from a historical perspective on the basis of original writings and declarations from the time. It presents, firstly, the political, economic and spatial dimensions of the strategy and the means by which it aims to achieve its goals. Secondly, we discuss its practical relevance by investigating historical and contemporary case studies of SR. It concludes with a critical evaluation of the concept.
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