Tending to the soil

With over 200 million users, if MySpace.com were a country it would be the world’s fifth most populous. It took radio more than five decades to reach 58 million people, the same amount of people Facebook.com has reached in five years. On an average day over 6 billion text messages fill the cellular airwaves – that’s one text message for every living person on this planet, every day. India adds 9 million new cellular phone subscriptions per month. Networks are everywhere, and they are everywhere expanding across national boundaries, income disparities and social barriers. This has not been the reality of the 21st century; it has always been the reality.

That reality was the subject of a Ferbruary 10th event, Network-Centric Development: Leveraging Economic and Social Linkages for Growth, organized by DevEx and DAI.

Doctor Ulrich Ernst, senior advisor for Structural Reform Policy at DAI, opened this morning’s event at the National Press Club by stipulating that systems of exchange exist from the subatomic level to the chemical, biological, economic, political, and social levels.

Those systems, or networks, Ernst continued, provide a context for understanding that is underused in the latter three levels. The development process should be one of building networks to share knowledge and that can be activated around a common purpose, and be repositioned around different purposes as needed in the interest of the network, like the human body going from exercising to eating.

Or perhaps like a business association going from policy advocacy to encouraging better corporate governance.

Other panelists included Center for International Development Fellow Cesar Hidalgo, who spoke directly about bringing the network model into economic development discussions by using networks as a vehicle to map out economic options for countries or local communities.

CSIS International Security Fellow Guy Ben-Ari spoke about how military communities are using the network context to revise how they percieve themselves, as political and social agents in addition to military operatives; moving them from campaign-based warfare to ‘network-centric’ operations.

Kristi Ragan, Strategic Advisor at the USAID Global Development Alliance, repeatedly referenced her child’s own global network based on online video gaming to illustrate the reach and power of global networks. Through such technologies, many of which are spreading to even lower income levels, networks are forming complete with their own ethics and systems of trust based on impersonal exchange.

Ethics and trust in impersonal exchange are two vital elements of functioning market economies, and they are products of networks. From this perspective, building and supporting networks of private enterprises worldwide is not the seed from which development springs, but rather it is necessary for an institutional environment conducive to development. Networks are part of the soil that nourishes growth.

Published Date: February 10, 2009