Economic Dimensions of Autonomy and the Right to Development in Tibet

The Right to Development is a notion that has been supported by both China and Canada. In the 1986 Declaration, this is generally defined as "an inalienable human right, by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized." (2)

In economic terms, the articulation of this right evolved in the post-war period as a means to assert the principle that developing countries should be able to pursue nationally tailored policies that would enhance balanced and sustainable development, defined as either industrialization or human development, just as all of the rich industrialized countries of the world have done and effectively continue to do. Essentially, it comes down to allowing developing countries the domestic space to innovate policies, institutions, and development strategies, and providing a conducive and supportive international framework to support these goals. Examples would include the provisioning of soft loans for infrastructure development without having attached conditionalities that simultaneously undermine ongoing development objectives, or else the regulation of capital flows and foreign exchange markets in a manner that promotes long-term development planning over short-term speculative bubbles and financial instability in the more peripheral countries of the international financial system.

This approach was opposed to pressures in the post-war international economic order for universalistic applications of economic policies bent on the integration of poorer countries into an asymmetrical system that favours the richer countries. It is this perspective that underlies current efforts by many developing countries and international organizations to negotiate a more equitable international economic order, i.e. one that enhances human development in the poorer countries (3). A recent example is the negotiating position taken by the G21 countries, led by Brazil, China, India and South Africa, at the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in September 2003.

In recent years, these principles have come to be described as ownership, albeit this is a term that means different things to different people. Within the hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism in the 1990s, often described as the Washington Consensus, many scholars and policy makers have formulated ownership in terms of a participatory principle in project management, or else as a technique to create more responsibility among domestic actors in the dissemination of policies, such as by devising ways to increase fiscal responsibility among recipients. Sometimes, "ownership" has even been used as a rhetorical means to justify policies such as privatizing education, or else as a participatory guise to soften the fact that, after two decades of debt crises and financial instability in most of the developing world, effective policy space has been increasingly constrained by the dictates of international financial institutions.

Nonetheless, within the broader framework of the right to development, the concept of ownership should become a potent tool for augmenting the policy space. For instance, in order for governments to fulfill their various human rights obligations, particularly in the realm of economic, social and cultural rights, more space rather than less should be given to face the various constraints to development faced by each country, which differ in each case. The term ownership should actually represent the appropriation or re-appropriation of: direct ownership of development; of control over policy-making, meaning that governments can decide policies rather than simply deciding how to deliver them, and; of control over foreign involvement, such as decisions regarding who invests in what sectors and where, according to the needs and priorities determined by domestic constituencies rather than foreign non-elected technocrats.