Networking Development: Sharing Small-Scale Technological Design Between North and South Before the Internet

• In Event: Technology, Inequality, and Social Justice - I

Abstract

In 1973, economist E.F. Schumacher published his oeuvre, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. It inspired a generation of development economists, environmentalists, and international health practitioners to address inequality around the world by promoting “appropriate” technology as a form of social justice. This paper aims to trace the historical meanings and interpretations of appropriate technology in the 1970s-80s, with a particular focus on the views of practitioners from the newly independent states of Africa and Asia. Debates over what was appropriate, and to whom, played out in a series of international conferences aimed at articulating the role of science and technology for development. Drawing on archives from the United Nations and USAID as well as conference proceedings, personal paper collections, newspapers, and technical manuals, this paper argues that pushing for more advanced, “high-tech” interpretations of the appropriate technology policy was a way that those in the global South challenged Northern hegemony over scientific knowledge and made claims to their own modernity. In examining the contingent processes of how technologies were selected as “appropriate” remedies to social inequality in different contexts, this paper shows that scientists and policymakers in the global South played a significant role in negotiating the definition of appropriate technology. This had important implications for how the concept, and the technologies themselves, were received in the local communities they were intended to benefit.

Author

• Heidi Morefield, Princeton University