Two weeks ago, I was in Sweden attending a conference on issues of Development worldwide over the next two decades. The conference reviewed the 1975 gathering that produced the Dag Hammarskjold Report to the Seventh Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly and had introduced the concept of 'Another Development'.

It was called the What Now project. This advocated a different content and direction for development from that of the industrialised world and from its colonizing and colonized mainstreams of that era. It proposed a set of principles for alternatives to the established order and for the reformation of international relations and the United Nations system. (Dag Hammarskold, a Swede after whom the Foundation is named, was UN Secretary General from 1953-1961 when he died in an air crash near the Congo that year).

The full title of the Report was What Now: Another Development. It would be: (i) geared to the satisfaction of needs, beginning with the eradication of poverty: (ii) self-reliant, that is, relying on the strength of the societies which undertake it: (iii) in harmony with the environment. The Report made clear, however, that Another Development requires structural transformations.

Basic needs are not satisfied in the greater part of the world, neither in the Third World nor in the pockets of poverty, which still exist in the affluent societies. It is estimated that close to a billion people suffer from hunger and malnutrition.

Whether in food, habitat, health or education, it is not the absolute scarcity of resources, which explains poverty in the Third World, but rather their distribution, traditional mechanisms fostering inequality having been aggravated by an indiscriminate imitation of the patterns of the industrialised societies.

At the technological and resource-use levels, traditional architecture, for instance, has been neglected in favour of so-called 'universal' constructions, which are by definition culturally, ecologically and economically un-adapted to individual societies. Agricultural research, instead of making use of the rich genetic stock of the different eco-regions or of people's experience, has been concentrated on the conditions for the re-production of species or techniques in the centre (the developed world). Priority has been given de facto to curative medicine over prevention, thus assuring to a small minority care similar to that afforded by affluent societies, but neglecting the health conditions of the masses.

Similar options have influenced industrial production, as well as energy policies. Goods were very often those required by the external market or local enclaves of affluence rather than for the consumption of the masses. Imported capital-intensive technologies took precedence over local labour-intensive technologies.

At the institutional level, the departmentalisation into ministries of health, education, agriculture, etc. was reproduced, instead of fashioning institutions, as was possible with the coming of independence in most Third World countries, to answer to the comprehensiveness of the development problematique.

At the human level, finally, education systems are more often than not replicas of those of the industrialized countries, which are themselves failing to meet contemporary needs of their own people. They produce streams of young people whose incomplete and ill-conceived education transforms them into strangers to their own people, and for whom an inadequate environment does not provide employment. Those who nevertheless succeed are often contributing to the brain drain which deprives the Third World of its very substance. Too many of those who stay at home are poorly prepared to tackle creatively the problems of their own societies.

These observations do not imply jettisoning all that has been achieved to date. But what has so far been done should have been incorporated into innovative solutions stemming from the rich cultural diversity of mankind. At the very least, what should have been avoided was the devotion of almost exclusive attention to imported solutions that respond to other problems and interests.

My own main contribution to the conceptual framework of Another Development was as coordinator of the group that worked on education. My task involved selecting members of the panel from Africa, Asia, Australasia, the Americas and Europe.

We saw the need for Education in a new conception to become the permanent duty and responsibility of the whole of society towards everyone in it, and the continuous function of the total social environment. It would be the means by which society advances itself, rather than a personal acquisition. Education would be broad cooperative effort by everyone in society, and it would not be divorced from work and production. Everyone would be a learner, a worker and a teacher.

Since 1966, I have been involved with the Hammarskjold Foundation in the fields of education and training, and have both organized (and attended other) seminars in these fields as well as in broader contexts, mainly but not only, in African countries, related to these fields of learning.

The Hammarskjold Foundation has itself organized over 200 seminars on a wide range of development issues since their What Now Report was published. The Foundation has consistently explored, and elaborated on, alternative development perspectives in a wide range of publications.

Drawing on its four decades of work in the field of development, a new Dag Hammarskjold Project called What Next has been embarked on to assess the likely trends of appropriate political action and development, taking stock of the past and looking ahead.