Development assistance: spiritual-and moral-dimensions.

• Author: Sfeir-Younis, Alfredo
• Position: Spiritual side of economic development

The World Bank's Special Representative to the United Nations

Understanding the role that spirituality plays in economic development is the most important challenge facing humanity today. This is because the language of development and its practice have centred mainly on the material aspects of individual well-being and societal welfare. Most people expect that material and non-material related problems, such as production, availability, consumption and disposal, can be solved in the material world. However, the persistence of fundamental problems - poverty, drug abuse, crime - facing countries around the world today would suggest just the opposite; i.e., the most effective and sustainable solutions, it seems, are embodied in the non-material realm of people's lives.

Development results from a process of complex and diverse choices, some made individually and others collectively, either within the confines of organized groups or entrusted to Governments - schools/health centres, national security. The quality of the development process and its results depend on those choices which, in turn, are directly rooted in the values and the belief system we identify with. In the social context, we often resort to political parties or trade unions to whom we entrust many collective choices based on these values. In many instances, however, we do not see the immediate results of our private or collective decisions. No matter how sophisticated the process is, we may not see its full impact on others, for example, air pollution that destroys the planet's ozone layer.

Given the billions of poor people and the major environmental destruction taking place in the world today, many of us are deeply disappointed by the legacy these choices are leaving behind - a legacy of both immediate and non-immediate outcomes, over space and time. Again, this legacy mirrors the values and beliefs that laid the ground for those choices.

It is clear that for too long we allowed economic and financial values to solve development problems. Certainly, these values have an important contribution to make, particularly in the efficient creation of material wealth, by making an economy materially better off. There is no doubt that this is something we know how to do well. However, we now know that making an economy better off is not a guarantee for making a community or a society better off, as society's well-being requires much more than the creation, consumption and distribution of material goods and services. This dichotomy between increasing material wealth and the ability to improve people's welfare - a much broader objective - has brought...