Whenever there is a debate about equality and equity in development field, there is also a conundrum. That conundrum is about determining where development agencies should set the boundaries of providing opportunities, who should receive them and to which extent such support should go. Unless people are capable of turning their choices into formal rights, the execution of equity and equality becomes unsolicited.
Development agendas and projects have long been the victim of top-down approach where development actions have been taken by outside experts without integrating local knowledge. Robert Chambers classified this as ‘Professional Bias’ in his famous book “Rural Development: Putting the Last First”.
“The poorer people are, the less contact they tend to have with those who are powerful, and the more powerful professionals become, the less contact they tend to have with poor people,” Chambers argued. And when we relate his view with the equality vs equity debate, we can see how development agendas, if taken out of context, can prove to be impractical at times.
Development agendas are mostly designed by the global north who follow a universal rulebook for development and growth. This creates an identity crisis among the people for whom these development projects are designed for. Because oftentimes their needs are overlooked by development agencies in order for them to meet their own project criteria.
A simple example can be the dispute between implementing green agenda and brown agenda in the global south. Green agendas focus on global environmental sustainability, while brown agendas address issues like pollution, sanitation and toxic waste which have direct impact on human health in developing nations.
When development projects pursue sustainability by only focusing on green priorities while ignoring brown concerns, local population’s demands become marginalized, particularly in countries like Bangladesh. This simple example now sheds a light to the debate of equality vs equity through the lens of professional bias.
Unless local knowledge and cultures are integrated into development projects, project designs will not be able generate tangible gain for the stakeholders. Because even in underdeveloped regions, every individual does not require the same opportunity as every individual has different set of skills and capability to utilise the same opportunities.
So, equipping them with similar opportunities will not be efficient for a collective result. Now comes the question of where do we draw the line between equality and equity. Is choosing one between equality or equity unilaterally a pragmatic approach for development projects? Or is there more to it than meets the eyes?
According to World Bank, Bangladesh’s poverty rate decreased from 43.5% in 1991 to under 19% by 2022. However, Gini coefficient indicates an increase from 0.45 in 2010 to 0.499 in 2022. This translates into growth being concentrated at the very top: growth is happening, but not equitably. This is where actors of development – INGOs, NGOs, the United Nations and the state – must tackle the equality-equity debate through an economic lens.
The implementation of Sustainable Development Goals requires a universal enforcement of equal targets across national and subnational contexts, which again addresses the dispute between green and brown agendas for the global south. If we take Bangladesh into consideration, UNDP and World Bank-financed projects in the haor basin have struggled in making economic outcomes tangible for the beneficiaries. This occurs due to the asymmetry between nationally aggregated indicators and locally differentiated capabilities in project designs.
NGO’s role in this asymmetry between equity and equality is not free from this institutional bias. Microcredit has proven to be a lifeline for young entrepreneurs and financially vulnerable economic agents in our country, with near universal rural access. But even then, female labor force participation remains at 36% against 80% for men. This sharp contrast shows that equality of financial access without equity-sensitive support structures can only yield a limited economic transformation at household level.
The state’s role becomes extremely complicated to address this debate of equity vs equality when all of these cases are taken into consideration all together. Bangladesh’s social protection programmes follow a one-size-fits-all approach that identifies the economic vulnerabilities of indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts as the same of climate-displaced people in coastal Sathkhira.
South-east regions of Bangladesh have faced land degradation and salinization due to excessive shrimp farming over the years. The shrimp industry which had been in a flourishing trend and used to bring in significant export earnings in the early 2010s, that earning began to diminish after world economic meltdown in 2008. The recession in Europe and United States due to that meltdown caused their trade policies to change, which had an excruciating impact on the shrimp farmers at that time.
There is also the aspect of farmers turning rice paddies into shrimp farms due to short-run demand for that particular commodity. This decision not only cost them in losing arable land, but also turned many into destitutes and displaced communities due to fickle international trade policies in which they had no control whatsoever.
This unequal power relation between policy makers, development project designers and local beneficiaries addresses the core debate of this article that reaches to the conclusion that the debate between equality and equity is not a binary choice but a diagnostic exercise. Bangladesh’s development discourse suggests that economic development can oftentimes hide the structural failures that lie within multiple systems. Policy makers need to understand that equal interventions applied to unequal realities will only end up producing just an appearance of ‘developmental progress’ instead of an actual manifestation.
Drawing from my argument above, Robert Chambers warned that professional bias keeps the marginalised voices of the rural regions unheard. Bangladesh’s development trajectory portrays this warning in an economic dimension, one borne disproportionately by women, indigenous communities, and climate-vulnerable populations. Without integrating local knowledge and providing the stakeholders a platform to inform their demands, development will not move beyond just administrative performance and will continue to perform ‘progress’ rather than produce it.
