Michelle Groenewald reports from the frontline at APORDE.
Allow me to quote a fellow classmate from the African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics (APORDE) that I recently attended: “I never would have believed that in a single day you can have your whole world turned upside down”. This program reels you in with the promise of broadening your perspectives on Development Economics and a couple of months later, there lying in your inbox, is an all too innocent email congratulating you on your successful application. What follows is a 2 week course on not broadening, but blowing wide open, all that you had held to be ‘true’. You will be taught to stab and gut, jab and cut away at the Market you had been told was your greatest ally, only to leave it panting and exhausted in a misshapen form, more foe than friend. Here you will learn that ‘free trade’ as the battle tune to which all must march if they are to develop, could rather beat to perhaps the protectionist cadence of a more often untold success story. Few would have considered that perhaps ‘getting prices wrong’ is the way to actually get them right, when the world has undeniably told you otherwise. Could it be that to utter industrial policy, with the state as a key player, is not as blasphemous as had been drilled into the economic cavalry?
