There has been a secret treasure trove lurking in the basement of the Institute of Development Studies building, adjoining the University of Sussex Library – secret, until now. We are delighted to be launching publicly the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS) Legacy Collection, a fantastically rich collection of documents tracking the history of 20th century development, now accessible to researchers, students, practitioners and the public.
The Collection comprises more than a quarter of a million reports, policy documents, educational and political pamphlets assembled by IDS researchers and librarians since the 1950s, spanning key periods when many countries in Africa and Asia were embarking on post-independence trajectories and when countries in Latin America were articulating national programmes of development and ‘modernisation’. From the lead up to the United Nation’s launch of the ‘Development Decade’ in 1961, through the formation of a diverse landscape of national and international development organisations and emergence of key areas of focus, the Collection houses materials that will give new insights into ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom up’ processes of social, political and economic change.
The Collection reflects the broad span of activities that comprised development action in the second half of the 20th century– from Health and Welfare which includes topics such as wellbeing, nutrition and water and sanitation, Environment, and Agriculture and Rural Development, Economy and Trade and Industry, to Population and Government and Politics. From landmark global conferences and policy reports and statistical runs unavailable elsewhere, to the pamphlets of political parties and trade unions and educational and campaign posters, there are many gems revealing the preoccupations and discourses of their day in vivid ways. Some are currently showcased in an exhibition at IDS, with this and related events detailed further on the Collection project page.
Whilst the materials had been accumulating since IDS was founded in 1966, there had been limited opportunity to make the material accessible for research. Thanks however to a generous grant from the Wellcome Trust, a three year collaborative project and a dedicated team, this has now been made possible. University Library staff and IDS researchers have worked in partnership to rationalise, fully catalogue and preserve the collection to enable it to be fully searchable and accessible for generations of researchers. The Collection can now be searched via the University of Sussex Library catalogue which can be accessed here or alternatively via the BLDS Legacy Collection discovery pages. In addition, thanks to funding from the University of Sussex the BLDS Legacy Collection is now housed in a brand-new roller racking system by EcoSpace in a fully refurbished basement area in the Library.
Amidst current concerns to decolonise development and global health, challenging power relations and opening up to a greater diversity of knowledge and voices, these materials provide rich resources indeed. They help track the genealogies through which powerful agendas emerged – and were sometimes contested, casting vital light and offering different angles on today’s debates. Here are three (amongst many possible) examples – ones discussed further at a launch seminar on October 19th:
Population Policies, Family Planning and the ‘Modernisation’ of the ‘Third World’
As Erica Nelson writes, commonly in contemporary global health and development circles the beginning of the ‘story’ of sexual and reproductive health and rights starts with the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, in 1994. This event is still considered a milestone in the articulation of rights-based approaches to sexual and reproductive health and rights and the demand for bodily autonomy, though it remains an ‘unfinished agenda’ (Sen, 2014). Within the BLDS Legacy Collection we have examples of country-specific efforts and transnational feminist movements that speak to the cross-fertilisation of the ‘Gender and Development’ and ‘Women and Development’ movements of the 80s that influenced and contributed to this ICPD moment and beyond (Kabeer, 1994).
At the same time, the Collection also reflects the deeper, and more troubling history, of early family planning initiatives funded in many cases, and in others linked discursively and politically, to a modernisation agenda that linked economic development with fertility control (Gorsky and Nelson, 2022; Carter, 2018; Hartmann 1995). This can be seen in the many materials from the late 1960s and 70s that comprise the first post-independence national and sub-national population surveys in Africa and Asia, or in the case of Latin America, reflects the wave of population surveys carried out to generate the required data for new techniques of economic and health services planning.
Central to the expansion and application of demography expertise was the desire of philanthropic funders and international organisations, in concert with national governments, to enumerate levels of fertility and the extent to which women were aware of, or used, modern contraceptive methods. In the Collection we witness a repeated visual trope, in this late 60s to mid 80s period of the threat of a ‘population explosion’, that was perceived as a key factor that could hold countries back from achieving their development aims. In parallel, the Collection also contains runs of family planning materials stretching from the late 60s through to the 90s where the intertwining of the politics of race, sexuality and gender can be further uncovered.
Climate, environmental and controversies
As Jeremy Allouche has found, another key set of debates where the BLDS Legacy Collection provides vital opportunities for historical research concern climate and environmental change and political ecology. For instance the colonial idea of desertification was popularised again at the 1977 United Nations Conference on Desertification, held after a decade of severe drought in the Sahel, and became a persistent international policy and development narrative – despite research empirically challenging the idea that desertification is taking place at the scales and with the speed which have been assumed in the Sahel (eg. Batterbury & Warren, 2001; Helldén (1991) Swift, 1996).
The Legacy Collection holds key documents from the Institut du Sahel and the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS), which are valuable in understanding the political and scientific narratives around the desertification of the Sahel in relation to other development issues (including population growth). One document for instance is a warning speech by Colonel Moussa Traore, the former President of the Republic of Mali during a meeting in March 1974 at the CILSS, urging the fight against the effects of drought and desertification for a new ecological balance in the Sahel. There are also many documents published by the Institut de Sahel, on issues such as food security in Niger’s Dosso region and population and development programmes in N’Djamena, Chad.
The role of these regional international organisations is little discussed in debates around the reproduction of desertification; most of the emphasis is on donors or United Nations agencies. However, the role of these regional organisations in linking scientific research to policy should not be underestimated. Their documents provide a historical baseline to understand the persistence of neo-Malthusian ideas and ecological myths, and the ways these were challenged. They also provide insights into how these narratives are being replicated and reproduced today, as in the recent Great Green Wall Initiative (GGWI).
Seeking ‘Health for All’
As Hayley MacGregor highlights, the documents in the Legacy Collection also offer fascinating windows on the approaches adopted by Ministries of Health in newly independent African states towards improving the health of their populations. For instance, government documents highlight one of the pre-occupations of the first decades of the World Health Organisation, namely controlling infectious disease through preventative technologies such as vaccination. A booklet from the Ministry of Health of Ghana (Ghana – Ministry of Health, 1971) provides steps to ‘Keep cholera out of your town and village’ through improved water, sanitation and food hygiene, signs of ‘progress’ towards better standards of living and health.
Another document from the same ministry was prepared for a trade fair in 1967, with a preface from the Director of Health Services stating that ‘The aim is to assure investors – both foreign and local – that provision exists in Ghana for the protection and promotion of the people’s health…. As “Developing Africa” is the theme of the Ghana International Trade Fair it is hoped that this brochure will assure the visitor to Ghana that the health and medical services available in the country are receiving attention in the country’s development programme’.
The institutional and workforce infrastructures to ensure curative and preventative services included a Health Education division in the Ministry of Health, which put out a ‘Health in Ghana’ series. One of these, held in the Legacy Collection, was published to commemorate the 29th anniversary of the 1948 founding of the WHO. It chose the theme ‘Immunize and save your child’s life’, an exhortation to health workers to promote vaccination. This push was very much in keeping with the movement to promote comprehensive primary health care, in association with the famous Alma Ata Declaration of 1978.
Fascinating also in this pamphlet is the detail of the childhood vaccination regimen for Ghana, which included a prominent place for smallpox vaccination. Smallpox was the first disease in 1980 ever to be declared eradicated, hailed as a success of vaccination. The waning of protection from smallpox vaccination is now thought to be contributing to the upsurge of Monkeypox, the latest zoonotic disease of international concern.
Alma Ata famously aspired to ‘Health for All by 2000’, even at the time seen as overly aspirational. By the 1980s new concerns emerged with the HIV pandemic that hit the African subcontinent hard. It marked a shift to a paradigm of ‘global’ health and the era of epidemics that moved across national boundaries in an increasingly interconnected world, requiring institutions beyond those of the nation state. The Legacy Collection holds important documents from the harsh early days of HIV/AIDS on the African continent, when anti-retroviral therapy was not available – a sentinel surveillance report from the mid 1990s from Swaziland; a 1996 government plan for home-based care for the terminally ill in Botswana; a social welfare department report assessing orphan support in Malawi; and a 1990 manual for health care workers in Zimbabwe on AIDS counselling.
Documents from the 2000s mark the shifting landscape of global response: a 2008 progress report of the national response from Botswana to the commitments of the landmark UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS; a booklet put out in 2006 by the African Civil Society Coalition on HIV/AIDS, which points to the activism that drove the wider rights bases advocacy for treatment and services on the continent, which gradually turned HIV into a chronic disease.
In this moment of widespread reflection on Covid-19 and the devastating health, socio-economic and political implications of the first big pandemic of the twenty-first century, these documents in the Legacy Collection throw up many themes which have recurred in recent debates about infectious disease responses – the parallels between Covid vaccine supply inequity and the slow arrival of therapy for HIV in Africa come to mind, as well as echoes of the assumptions surrounding health communication in 1970s vaccination campaigns in the strategies adopted for combating vaccine ‘hesitancy’ for Covid-19. As such these documents are a prescient reminder of the need for a real shift in thinking and power in global health.
Reflecting on the past, looking ahead
As in these examples, historical sources help us reflect on how patterns and moments of disjuncture in the history of development and global health inform the challenges of the present, and might rework, or offer alternatives to contemporary narratives of progress. At a time of current global crisis, generating calls to recast development and global health, such critical reflection and debate is needed more than ever.
With this launch, an important milestone has been reached but there is a way to go. In the coming months and years we want to engage in further outreach and networking, fostering a wider community of researchers, students and practitioners across the world using and sharing what the BLDS Legacy Collection has to offer. Crucially, we want to enhance its accessibility through further digitising projects, retaining the Collection’s unique integrity and coherence by keeping it physically in one place but ensuring its availability to those unable to visit Sussex. This ongoing journey will require further partners and resources, which we are currently seeking. If you’d like to be part of the next stage of bringing these historical treasures into global health and development light, then please get in touch.
References
Institut du Sahel – BLDS Legacy – International Organisations – Box 347-348
Batterbury, S., & Warren, A. (2001). The African Sahel 25 years after the great drought: assessing progress and moving towards new agendas and approaches. Global environmental change, 11(1), 1-8.
Gorsky, M. and Nelson, E. (2022) “Historical perspectives on international policies to improve health” In, Guttman M. and Gorman M. (eds.) Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion. Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 83-123. ISBN: 9780192848758
Hartmann, B. (1995, 2016) Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, with new prologue by author. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Kabeer, N. (1994) Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. London: Verso.
The British Library for Development Studies Legacy Collection 