Interdependence and development

8 Interdependence and development

Geography in schools has a long history. The first textbooks for primary schools were published in the early nineteenth century and by the beginning of the twentieth century geography was one of the listed subjects recommended for the secondary school curriculum. Throughout this history geography in school has had a significant role in shaping what we might now call the geographical imagination of young people in schools. Interdependence has been an enduring theme – at earlier times this was skewed to an imperialistic or colonial narrative, while more recently notions of global citizenship are more to the fore. Similarly, geography has not had an innocent or neutral role in shaping our ideas of development, whether encouraging ideas of ‘darkest Africa’ or dividing the globe into ‘north’ and ‘south’. This chapter is not an historical overview of geography’s ‘sins’ however! In the chapter we discuss the nature of the challenge that lies before geography teachers concerning how to represent the world, a challenge that has become increasingly urgent, and is set to become ever more so. We show that geo- graphical perspectives are potentially extremely valuable in this regard.

Introduction

Achieving a good life for more than 6 billion people, without further threatening the ecological systems on which we all depend, is the greatest challenge of our age.

(Smith and Simms 2008: 242) In this chapter we are going to survey an idea that seems to have ‘come of age’ in the last

years of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first century. Interdependence is in this sense a relatively new concept. For some it has become one of the defining ideas of geography. Like so many of the concepts that are valued in geography, the discipline would be narrow-minded indeed to suggest that it had sole proprietor rights to the idea. For example, where would ecology be without the notion of interdependence, or history or physics, or hairdressing for that matter? What we wish to discuss therefore is not how interdependence ‘defines’ geography, but how geography has used and developed the idea in certain powerful ways. Interdependence, for example, is key to the kinds of relational understanding that underpin what Jackson (2006) has called ‘thinking geo- graphically’. Furthermore, the idea has begun to enter a wider public domain, partly through the efforts of those like Joe Smith working in the geography discipline at the Open University.

Thus, Joe Smith and his co-author Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation (nef) have promoted the idea of ‘Interdependence Day’ (www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/ interdependenceday), strongly invoking and establishing a very different meaning from ‘Independence Day’ introduced over two centuries ago to mark the birth of a nation

108 RECONSTRUCTING CONCEPTS (USA). Subtitled Making new maps for an island planet, the interdependence day (ID)

project has the ambition to ‘refresh jaded debates about sustainable development’ (which we tackle ourselves in Chapter 10 in the context of ‘environment’ as a key concept), by reframing debates about environment, globalization and development. For the purposes of this chapter, we take the ID approach as a way in to explore interdependence, with a particular focus on development and the global dimension – themes that have been prominent in school geography for at least three decades, but which are given new purchase with the concept of interdependence.

There is a final introductory point to make. Writing this book in early 2009 provides an inescapably poignant context. The USA has just inaugurated President Obama who seems intent on offering a new global presence and an international leadership role. He does so at a time of possibly unprecedented levels of uncertainty concerning environ- mental and economic futures. With regard to the latter, and the related developmental issues such as poverty and its eradication, there are journalists, politicians and others asking questions about what precisely the collapse of the global banking system and trade signifies. Is it the ‘end’ of globalization (as some have said) or the beginning of the next phase of globalization? We can watch, perhaps slightly anxiously, as President Obama takes the reins of the world’s most powerful nation on which so much depends.

The authors of this book are not in a position to predict the nature of the inter- dependencies playing out over the next decade. But we are clear that a geographical lens helps us to think about these matters and helps us to form judgements in the continuing debates. It does so through (among other things) extending and ‘disciplining’ our ideas of interdependence and development. Thus, for example, while recognizing in the opening quotation that our times are challenging, Smith and Simms are determined to see the challenges as opportunities and deepen the message of global environmental risk: ‘Facing up to current global challenges could, in fact, propel us towards much better ways of living. The message is that good lives don’t have to cost the Earth’ (Simms and Smith 2008: 1).

This is an optimistic message, and arguably one that can only be grasped in terms of how we imagine people and the planet are interrelated, and what we imagine ‘devel- opment’ to mean. Interdependence is an idea that broadens traditional and sometimes tired notions of ‘development’ in the geography curriculum.