Technology Justice

Is Technology Justice a Useful Concept for a New Global Movement?

Anyone who is aware of the work of the INGO, Practical Action (formerly Intermediate Technology Development Group), will understand their emphasis on working towards overcoming what are considered technological injustices. Basing their approach to international development on the principles of E. F. Schumacher, they “find out what people are doing and help them do it better,” with a subsequent focus on low-tech, sustainable methods and local knowledge.

‘Technology justice’ is a phrase that is increasingly popping up on the organisation’s website at present. This is a new concept that Practical Action seems to want to develop into a global, revolutionary movement, akin to the fair trade movement. This sounds like a positive idea. The way that Practical Action uses technology is remarkable in its versatility, sustainability and efficiency, so to apply this to a global constitution for fairer production, distribution and application of technology is surely a great step forward.

The initial problem, however, is in defining the concept. An easier task may well be to highlight technological injustices, which will hopefully reveal a definition of technology justice. It is clear to many that it is a technological injustice that one billion people don’t have access to clean water, whilst people in the global north seldom have to worry about water running out or being dangerous. It is also clearly an injustice that more money is spent on researching a cure for male baldness than is invested in finding a vaccination for malaria. So, it is not necessarily the lack of a resource on its own that is the problem but the relatively unfair distribution of that resource.

This highlights how the work that Practical Action undertakes invariably promotes justice, in that it uses technology to support the human rights, especially, of those who were previously having those rights ignored. However, although justice or injustice can be promoted in different ways, it isn’t an easy concept to measure empirically. This is why other terms have been suggested on the Practical Action site, such as technology poverty. Poverty is arguably more easily measured than justice and it is equally relevant: Practical Action aims to reduce poverty through technology. However, using the term ‘technology poverty’ instead of ‘technology justice’ undoubtedly places the focus on what the movement is leaving behind, rather than what it is moving towards. Another term on the Practical Action website is technology democracy, which is a far more positive concept than poverty; the idea of control by the people also supports the essence of sustainability and independence that is entrenched in Practical Action’s work. Former Chief Executive of Practical Action, Cowan Coventry describes poor people participating “at the heart of the decision-making process” as integral to technology democracy. On the other hand, although the organisation undoubtedly works towards empowering people with regard to technology, is this the driving force behind the concept of technology justice?

In London in June 2011, Practical Action’s current Chief Executive, Simon Trace, spoke to the organisations supporters of technology justice. He explained that he sees it as a new movement based on old ideas: the same ideas that have driven the organisation since its birth, forty-five years ago. He also defined justice as relating to ethics, law, rationality, fairness and equity. Another natural place to look when considering this concept is Rawls’ Theory of Justice. His principles of justice are easily applicable to the international development world. Practical Action endorses the principles of liberty and fair opportunity, with a commitment to equal and extensive rights.

The principle of difference is the one that raises more questions. It states that inequality is only justified if it benefits the poorest as much as possible. It is clear that this is precisely what Practical Action strives for: helping the very worse off amongst a jungle of inequality. It also applies to a development organisation working in poor communities to justify the ethical problem of its employees from the developed world earning far more than the members of the communities that they work in, including, in all probability, its own locally recruited staff.

On The Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog, Mark Tran raised the issue of appropriateness of technology, citing the World Health Organisations (WHO) statistic that showed 75% of health devices dedicated to the poor to be unsuitable. This is a dangerous stumbling block for a movement towards technological justice, demonstrating that benevolent intentions are not enough. An effectively applied base of local knowledge is vital to prevent the injustice of poor people not benefitting as much as possible from the resources available. Tran bases his article on a specific example of appropriate medical technology: the donkey ambulance. This is sustainable, uses local knowledge and local resources and can save lives. So, it’s no surprise that Practical Action has developed this in Darfur and North Damazin.

A natural reaction from the general public would be that a technology justice movement is unrealistic, as the present situation is just a symptom of global economic systems. Is that a fair criticism if the aim of the movement is to completely reshape the technology industry? Without an economic revolution is there ever going to be a dramatic enough shift in the redistribution of wealth and the distribution of technology? Most likely not. However, as Simon Trace explains: a huge amount of what must be done revolves around raising awareness. Practical Action is not going to shy away from their commitment to project work but policy advocacy and campaigning will hopefully spread their concerns more widely. In 1990 it was estimated, for example, that only 5% of the world’s resources for health research were being applied to the health problems of low and middle income countries, where 93% of the world’s preventable deaths occurred. This needs to become common knowledge.

There is a model that David Grimshaw displays on the website, with a movement from “technology challenging poverty within the existing system” to technology justice based on a “major re-focus on technology.” So, Practical Action appears to be working towards an incredibly ambitious change but whether or not this is achievable is another matter. Trace set out the goal within a ten year timeframe to make technology justice as well known a term as Fair Trade is now. That’s a remarkable aim, considering the fair trade movement has been around for well over half a century.

The comparison with the Fair Trade movement is made by others on the website but it seems to be a false one. During Fair Trade’s first twenty years, it’s main activity was the novel selling of handicrafts at church sales, rather than the global revolution it has become. Practical Action might be able to skip this part of the process, due to their professionalism and decades of experience. However, it might suggest that Fair Trade isn’t a wise model to follow. Furthermore, Fair Trade was about building bridges in the market between the developing and developed world. The focus of Practical Action, however, is far more on helping developing world communities escape dependency cycles, by optimising local methods of technology.

There is, nevertheless, an important parallel between the two movements: Both strive for sustainability, reducing the need for aid. The Fair Trade movements’ famous slogan was ‘trade not aid,’ which encapsulated the idea that through fair trade links with the developed world, members of the developing world could build sustainable businesses funding a fair standard of living. Although this wasn’t necessarily achieved by church fairs, the move towards fair trade agriculture in the 1980s indisputably developed a genuine supply and demand situation which went some way towards reaching this aim. Practical Action also endeavours to help those in the developing world become self-sustaining but rather than doing this by facilitating links with the developed world, they encourage poorer community’s ability to develop without depending upon such links.

To gain the momentum and global recognition that the Fair Trade movement achieved is going to be largely down to raising awareness through campaigning. One aspect of this that Simon Trace drew on is breaking down the barrier between the circumstances of those in the south with those in the north. Many contemporary Brits, for example, lack understanding of their own history and therefore have little awareness of its parallels with the developing world. In the last hundred years, Britain, like many other developed countries, has overcome many of the issues that developing world countries still face, such as clean water, sanitation, preventative medical technology, building skills, access to energy and political representation. With this understanding of our own recent history, people will have a far greater comprehension of the need and genuine prospect of achieving technology justice (or at least reducing technological injustices).

One of the greatest barriers to justice for many industries in the developing world is Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), supported by international trade regulation, such as the TRIPS agreement. This allows patents to prevent low-cost production in poor countries, such as that of pharmaceutical companies. Corporations don’t allow the cheap production of their drugs in the developing world, causing 26 000 children under five to die every day from often treatable or preventable causes. It seems that to combat these international trade agreements would possibly be too much of a David versus Goliath situation but Thomas Pogge proved otherwise. He led a team of researchers to develop the Health Impact Fund (HIF), which requested pharmaceutical companies not to patent their drugs. Instead, they asked them to sell them globally at the lowest cost of production. Obviously, this needed some alternative incentive to that of a patent, so corporations are instead rewarded proportionally to the impact they have on global health. This is calculated in the widely-accepted quality adjusted life years (QALY) and funded by governments. The organisation managed to convince governments to sign a treaty that pledged enough financial commitment to this idea to allow them to develop at least two more drugs each year under the HIF, with the hope of gradually expanding. This movement hasn’t changed the system but it’s found a way to overcome the limitations of it.

One area where Practical Action has made dramatic steps within the current system is that of access to knowledge, which should be a free resource that can surmount many technological injustices. Practical Action has set up Practical Answers, an invaluable base of accumulated knowledge from forty-five years of experience, covering every area that they work in. Simon Trace was proud to report that it was accessed 1.5 million times last year, which is an impressive step forward towards equity through information and towards tackling the global digital divide. However, that divide still exists, so even with these efforts information is still far from universally available.

This resource of freely available knowledge combines with Practical Actions project work and campaigning to shape its on-going approach to combat technological injustices. A technology justice movement is a powerful potential tool in the struggle for global equity, moving towards a world in which wealth and resources are more evenly distributed. Despite the challenges of definition and strategy, Practical Action is well placed to spearhead this campaign, along with many potential partners and allies.