The Discourse of Prosperity and the Future of Lebanon’s Recovery
Mariam Daher and Nikolay Mintchev
We need to rethink what we mean by the concept of prosperity. In an age of unprecedented wealth, advanced technology and high productivity, the reality of ecological disaster, growing inequality and declining quality of life for so many people, suggests that something has gone astray in the way we envisage prosperity and progress. The dominant neo-liberal vision of prosperity as aggregate economic wealth must be critiqued for its shortcomings and failures. It must also be challenged by alternative and more imaginative frameworks that address structural challenges while delivering on better quality of life for the larger public. Posing such a challenge requires that we hold conversations on multiple levels and with a range of stakeholders – academics, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and members of the public, among others – about how prosperity can be rethought and what it takes to deliver positive change.
Such conversations, however, can be complex and challenging. They can generate productive tensions as new ideas about prosperity take time to circulate across communities and encounter different responses depending on the context. At the same time, however, conversations with multiple stakeholders must also be connected to one another because a diversity of voices is essential for developing rich and inclusive visions of prosperity for informing research, policy, and interventions for positive change. The redefining of prosperity, we argue, must be an iterative process that is based on collaborations of stakeholders that share knowledge with one another and ultimately create new interventions and forms of value.
What does this complexity of tensions and connections, as well as challenges and potentialities for rethinking prosperity, look like in the context of Lebanon? On one level, talking about prosperity directly is not always easy and this requires an adaptation of vocabulary. As we noticed in our research over the past four years, as the ongoing crises deepened, talking about prosperity and good quality of life began to feel increasingly more difficult, and at times even insensitive. How can one have such a conversation when people are losing their livelihoods and their savings? When basic necessities are becoming unaffordable? Or when the blast at the port of Beirut has devastated the entire city? Prosperity in such circumstances is often experienced as out of reach, as something that is too distant to be relevant to the current context of hardship, frustration and vulnerability. The language that we use to understand people’s experiences, needs, and visions of the future had to be adapted accordingly in order to fit the changing realities on the ground. This point became clear to us in early 2020 when the RELIEF team, in partnership with Catalytic Action, carried out a series of interviews with Mina residents on local meanings of good quality of life and the challenges that people face in the area. Some of the responses that interlocutors offered revealed a deep sense of despair and humiliation, resulting from the economic crisis which was beginning to take its tall: ‘Everything is going against people’s will to live and go on. Even the money we saved we lost’; ‘There has been no such thing as good life here since I was born. It’s full of politics and sectarianism. The country is looted. We don’t live in dignity’; ‘Living here is humiliating. It’s not good. If I have a chance, I would go abroad.’ As one of our colleagues observed, furthermore, interviewees sometimes recoiled when the concept of prosperity came up: ‘She [the interviewee] was cynical when I mentioned the word “prosperity” and told me to look for something else as I will not find it here’; ‘He [the interviewee] was extremely cynical and negative […] telling me that prosperity has left the country a long time ago.’
On another level, however, such cynicism made up only one part of people’s responses. While in some instances respondents revealed a deep sense of disillusionment, in many others they were eloquent and precise in articulating the key problems faced by people in their community – a dire economic situation with few opportunities for a decent livelihood, unaffordable utilities and public services, poor infrastructure, and an overarching sense that those in charge of governance at all levels are not only negligent but also unaccountable. As one young man explained, ‘there are no jobs in my neighbourhood, and no one is helping the residents. […] We help and care for each other’. Another interviewee pointed out that such difficult economic and political circumstances meant that basic utilities like electricity were becoming unaffordable: ‘I only get 15,000 to 20,000 Lebanese liras [per day]. Will they be enough to cover my electricity or water bills? […] I pay 100,000 Lebanese liras for generators.’ Such articulations of challenges were commonly voiced by interviewees as the reasons that made a decent quality of life increasingly more difficult to attain, as well as the reasons for which prosperity ‘has left the country’, as one person put it.
The central problems that people outlined – specifically with respect to livelihoods, infrastructures and utilities (electricity, water, and housing, among others) – comprise what we refer to as the ‘foundations of prosperity’. They are the basic provisions that need to be secured in order to think about prosperity as a viable future possibility. Prosperity is not only about livelihoods and basic services; it is about much more than that, including a subjective dimension of hope and optimism – however frail – that a good quality of life can be achieved in the foreseeable future. In the absence of ‘foundations’, the vision of future prosperity becomes out of reach to the point where even talking about it can become a challenge.
However, while talking about prosperity might be difficult in some contexts, it is necessary and extremely important in others. Over the past decade, academic discourses about prosperity have challenged the idea that economic growth must be at the centre of progress and post-crisis recovery, arguing that the needs of people and their environments ought to be prioritised over the need for economic growth. While it is true that economic growth can provide stability to some extent, and that big infrastructural projects such as luxury high-rises can generate nice investment opportunities for a small minority, this model of recovery frequently fails to improve the quality of life for the public at large. It generates wealth, but it does not create prosperity. In the case of Lebanon, this point has been extensively discussed in the rich literature on the country’s post-war recovery and urban regeneration. Prosperity as economic growth must thereby be redefined in a way that begins with the things that people and communities need in order to live the lives they hope to live; our notions of prosperity as wealth and opulence at an aggregate level must be challenged in favour of prosperity as decent and dignifying living conditions for the larger public.
Putting people at the centre of recovery efforts has implications for both outcomes (the delivery of more and better jobs, services, infrastructures and other public goods), as well as processes (ways of delivering such goods through practices that strengthen democratic participation and decision-making power). When a desired outcome of GDP growth is combined with a technocratic process in which a select group of people with expertise (technical, political, etc.) make key decisions on behalf of everyone else, the result is a culture in which being a valuable member of society is reduced to the capacity to generate wealth, either through specialist knowledge or through possession of social, political, and financial capital. A narrow definition of prosperity merges with an equally narrow conception of what it means to be good resident/citizen – a conception that eschews civic participation, commitment to others, and good moral judgement on the grounds that these qualities do not contribute to the creation of wealth. The moral philosopher Michael Sandel has made this point rather eloquently in his recent critique of modern meritocracy:
Our technocratic version of meritocracy severs the link between merit and moral judgement. In the domain of the economy, it simply assumes that the common good is defined by GDP, and that the value of people’s contributions consists in the market value of the goods and services they sell. In the domain of government, it assumes that merit means technocratic expertise. This can be seen in the growing role of policy advisors, the increasing reliance of market mechanisms to define and achieve the public good, and the failure of public discourse to address the large moral and civic questions that should be at the centre of political debate […] (Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit, p. 28)
Sandel’s point is about American capitalism, but it has wider resonances outside of the US, including in Lebanon where citizens have few, if any, opportunities to participate in key governance decisions related to economic and infrastructural recovery. In this Lebanese context, the conceptual lens of prosperity can be an effective tool for challenging top-down, GDP-centred forms of governance both at the level of outcome and at the level of process. An agenda for building pathways to prosperity needs to be grounded in the experiences and views of communities, as well as in existing local initiatives that are already working to achieve positive change. It must begin with a focus on the things that people prioritise for their quality of life (jobs, infrastructures and public services, among others), as well as on possibilities for involving citizens and communities in the process of developing solutions. This approach takes up the abstract critiques of GDP and technocracy, but also advances them by operationalising them in context and attempting to address them through research and action on the ground. The use of new conceptual language, operationalised in context and embedded through local dialogues, aims to inform action and open up spaces for positive transformation.
Co-designed initiatives that take a bottom-up approach have huge potential for transformative action, and there are many recent and ongoing projects that set in motion participatory solutions driven by the needs of local communities – the work of the AUB Neighbourhood Initiative and Catalytic Action, together with the RELIEF Centre’s Citizen Assembly on Electricity in Hamra, FastForward 2030 network of entrepreneurs, and Citizen Science-led urban interventions are just a few examples. Such examples are usually small-scale, and their ability to make a difference is limited to the neighbourhood level. Yet, at the same time, they are also responses to larger structural challenges that people are widely concerned about and want to participate in addressing. Possibilities are present: there is a significant interest among members of the public to participate in co-designed initiatives, and there are many academics, innovators, engineers and other practitioners who are willing to work on collaborative projects, as we know from existing initiatives. Collaborations between members of the public and stakeholders with specialised knowledge create new opportunities for democratic engagement by bridging the concepts, data, and public participation in an effort to generate positive outcomes for quality of life.
How, then, does the conceptual lens of prosperity make a difference in the way we discuss, theorize, or organize such initiatives? Whether we talk about existing possibilities in terms of pathways to prosperity or not does not change the fact that these possibilities are there: simply talking about prosperity does not bring it into existence, just as not talking about it does not undermine existing possibilities for positive change. Furthermore, ‘prosperity’ as a concept or a discursive category is not applicable in the same way in all situations and at all times. Just as the definition of prosperity is multi-faceted and context-specific (rather than fixed and universal), so the extent to which the concept or term resonates with certain experiences, contexts, and conversations depends on the circumstances at hand. As we saw in the responses of the interviewees quoted above, when prosperity (as a phenomenon) appears to be out of reach, then prosperity (as a concept) becomes difficult to evoke, even in a discussion about recovery strategies. Yet, at the same time, language and discourse matter, and concepts have impact on how we organize our research, thoughts and actions. A robust and integrated conceptual framework – with well-defined principles and methods, and an established track record of challenging GDP-centred approaches to progress and recovery – can become invaluable in supporting the change that needs to happen. A strong research programme on building pathways to prosperity can offer concepts, theories, methods, and data to those committed to making a change beyond the business-as-usual approach to recovery. At the same time, and in addition to this, a research programme on prosperity can also catalyse conversations that challenge those in positions of power to engage more directly with the needs of people and communities across Lebanon.
Photo Credit: Hanna Baumann