Thirty years have passed since the publication of a slim volume of essays titled Small is Beautiful, which was a key text of the nascent environmental movement and helped shape modern environmentalism, development theory and the global justice movement.
The year 1973 was a timely one for radical environmental thinking. The first United Nations conference on sustainable development had been held the previous year and soon afterwards Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the United Kingdom Green Party were founded.
Small is Beautiful rapidly became a bestseller and its author EF Schumacher was fêted by international leaders and counterculture activists.
Equal parts economic analysis, spiritual tract and radical manifesto, the work was bound by a central belief that modern society had lost touch with basic human needs and values.
In the name of profit and technological progress, Schumacher argued, modern economic policies had created rampant inefficiency, environmental degradation and dehumanising labour conditions. ”Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom…”
The remedy he proposed — a holistic approach to human society that stressed small-scale, localised solutions — flew in the face of economic orthodoxies of the time. But Western campaigners and governments in the developing world took up his arguments.
Born in Bonn in 1911, Schumacher emigrated to England in 1936 and in 1950 became economic adviser to the UK National Coal Board. For the next 20 years he worked at the heart of the British economic establishment, but visits to India and Burma led him to doubt technocratic certainties. He concluded that the imposition of a Western model of development had created vast wealth for a few, but left the masses trapped in poverty.
Instead of mass production and mechanisation, industry in the developing world should be on a ”human scale”. Cheap, locally developed solutions would be more effective than imported technologies.
In 1966 Schumacher founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG).
Today the group supports hundreds of projects in developing countries, from donkey plough workshops to micro-hydroelectric schemes.
But Small is Beautiful has never been accepted by mainstream economists who see it as an impractical model for development. The Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman published a riposte to Schumacher titled Small is Stupid.
Local management of resources has become commonplace in mainstream economics, but localisation and self-sufficiency are not always efficient or even practical, says Julian Morris, director of the free-market think-tank the International Policy Network.
”Most of the people in the world who currently don’t have electricity would benefit from having it. The important thing is to get them electricity in the most efficient and cost-effective manner and avoid pollution. For that, we’re not talking about local solutions, but solutions that come from the economies of scale,” he says.
But science and technology have not improved basic living conditions for much of humanity, argues Cowan Coventry, chief executive of the ITDG.
”Given the dramatic [scientific] advances of the past 40 years, why is it that the number of people living in poverty continues to increase?”
Schumacher’s followers might have failed to take up the wider implications of Small is Beautiful, says Coventry. ”People saw the beauty of local endeavour, but they never really grappled with the bigger issues of how to change macro policies.”
Meanwhile, the march of trade liberalisation threatens small-scale manufacture in developing countries, while small-scale agriculture is swamped by subsidised imports.
Schumacher’s view of mechanisation finds its parallel in today’s debates over genetically modified crops and nanotechnology.
”Extravagant claims are often made about new technologies and their benefits for developing countries. We’re sceptical about those claims, especially when they’re made by corporate interests. The big question is, can new technology bridge the divide between the haves and the have-nots?” asks Coventry.
It is the same question Schum- acher put forward 30 years ago. — Â