In the wake of COVID-19 vaccine mandates (in which governments require citizens to be vaccinated regardless of their preferences), moral issues need to take centre stage. This is because we human beings are not simply matter, but also rational consciousness – we think and feel, and so it matters how we treat other people, and also how they treat us. Morality is the judging of human action in terms of rightness and wrongness, and human traits of character in terms of virtue (desirable quality) and vice (undesirable quality). While in everyday usage “morality” and “ethics” are considered to mean one and the same thing, we also use the term “ethics” to refer to philosophical reflections on morality, and this latter sense is my focus here.

Countries usually have various public health authorities that issue directives that should ideally enhance the overall well-being of their citizens. In Kenya, for example, the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS), the Pharmacy and Poisons Board (PPB), and the Ministry of Health are among such bodies. Thus, the various COVID-19 protocols from the Ministry of Health are public health measures rather than medical care ones. At the global level, public health measures are currently mostly formulated and implemented under the auspices of the World Health Organisation (WHO).

As Hirschberg, Littmann and Strech explain in the edited volume Ethics in Public Health and Health Policy, central to both medical care (for ill individuals in health facilities) and public health measures (instituted by governmental authorities for the overall welfare of society) is the notion of the right to healthcare, which encompasses multiple dimensions, and ranges from concern for individual access to healthcare to the provision of a social structure conducive to healthy living. Yet the ultimate aim of public health measures is the overall well-being of the individuals who necessarily constitute the public — there can never be a public without the individuals who constitute it. Besides, both medical care policies and public health measures ought to be formulated and implemented with a deep commitment to respecting the dictates of morality, giving rise to medical ethics and public health ethics.

The ethical implications of COVID-19 vaccine mandates

As Hirschberg, Littmann and Strech explain, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, efforts aimed at improving and sustaining public health were primarily directed towards combating the spread of infectious diseases and plagues. However, as they further explain, the number of those falling ill and/or dying from infectious diseases was already on the decline before the discovery of the responsible pathogens (viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, etc.), and the development of effective treatments and/or vaccines. Hirschberg, Littmann and Strech further observe that this marked improvement in the quality of health can be explained by improvements in socioeconomic, environmental and living conditions, greater awareness of personal hygiene, and better nutrition. They point out that the nineteenth century thus saw the emergence of the sub-discipline of social medicine that focused on the effect that conditions such as poverty and relative social status had on the public’s health. Scholars of social medicine advocated for the establishment of a healthcare system that would not only attend to those who were already sick, but also promote health for the population.

Thus, public health policies are usually designed to address prevention and health promotion. Regarding this Hirschberg, Littmann and Strech write:

[P]ublic health measures can either target behaviour and lifestyle choices of the individual, or society more generally. The former applies to Public Health programmes such as the promotion of healthy diets, abstinence from tobacco or alcohol, and participation in medical screening programmes. Examples of the latter include immunisation programmes that achieve herd immunity and projects to eradicate certain pathogens regionally, nationally, or globally, e.g. by defining targets for lowering incidence of measles or polio.

Among the many ethical issues that arise from public health measures with regard to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, I highlight five below.

Individual liberty and well-being versus the public good

There are measures that might promote the well-being of a few individuals but hurt the public, and vice versa. While, in the name of public health, many would quickly resort to the principle that the majority ought to have their way, that principle disregards the dignity (infinite intrinsic worth), agency (capacity to act) and human rights (entitlements) of the minority by treating them as though they were of relatively little significance by virtue of their numbers.

In his On Liberty, John Stuart Mill, one of the greatest champions of liberal democracy, observed that the individual ought to be protected against the tyranny of the majority in the same way as he or she ought to be protected against political despotism. In fact, while many now think democracy is rule by the majority, in Considerations on Representative Government, Mill distinguished between true democracy in which all are represented, and false democracy in which only the majority is represented. Thus, COVID-19 vaccination ought not to be a requirement on the basis of the preferences or benefit of the majority, but ought rather to be made available to all those members of the public who choose to have it without the fear of losing their jobs or their access to public spaces and services.

Freedom to accept or decline a medical procedure

The notions of human dignity (infinite intrinsic worth), human agency (capacity to act) and human rights (entitlements) have usually been acknowledged in medical care through the principle of informed consent — that the doctor is morally obligated to explain in detail the implications of any medical procedure, and to let the patient decide whether or not to receive it. Anything less than this is paternalism, that is, the treating of adults as though they were children. Since public health measures, by promoting the health of a population ought to ultimately promote the overall well-being of the individuals that constitute that population, the principle of informed consent ought not to be violated in the name of public health.

In Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a type of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in his or her capacity as a knower (“epistemic injustice”). She distinguishes two forms of epistemic injustice — testimonial injustice (the injustice that a speaker suffers in receiving deflated credibility from the hearer owing to identity prejudice on the hearer’s part), and hermeneutical injustice (suffered by people who participate unequally in the practices through which social meanings are generated). In the era of COVID-19, humanity is suffering both types of epistemic injustice, as the principle of informed consent is blatantly violated through manipulative social and traditional media, and through intimidation by public authorities issuing vaccine mandates. Indeed, populations are now regularly treated as though they are devoid of knowledge, and must therefore rely solely on instructions from political authorities purportedly to control the spread of the virus and to take care of those who fall ill from it. This approach challenges our belief in human dignity, human agency and human rights, as it reduces us to helpless, ignorant beings who must wait for government to tell us what to do, not only about our conduct in public, but also what to expose our bodies to (read “vaccine mandates”).

The individual ought to be protected against the tyranny of the majority in the same way as he or she ought to be protected against political despotism.

Currently, the narrative in social and traditional media is that the vaccine is a must, and any information about its adverse effects is quickly suppressed or explained away. This manipulative approach is evident in the talk about “vaccine hesitancy”, as though all who have so far refrained from taking the “vaccine” will eventually “come round”. A more honest discourse would have acknowledged vaccine enthusiasm, vaccine hesitancy, and vaccine rejection. Besides, the individual’s freedom is often infringed on the grounds that members of the public are not adequately equipped to make informed decisions about their own health. This amounts to treating adults as though they were children (“paternalism”). The Ottawa Charter, which focuses on patient empowerment and the strengthening of health literacy, is relevant in this regard, as is health communication, encompassing multiple levels, from the formulation of written information on specific diseases to educational campaigns aimed at the general public.

Inadequate public health communication was evident when a Kenyan citizen filed a Constitutional Petition against the vaccine mandate issued by the Kenyan government on 21st November 2021. Mutahi Kagwe, Cabinet Secretary for Health, announced that there was no vaccine mandate, and that therefore no one needed to have gone to court. At the same time, he reiterated that the unvaccinated would be denied in-person access to government services from 21st December 2021. The import of that announcement was that “There is a vaccine mandate and there is no vaccine mandate”. Furthermore, on 22nd December 2021, Health Chief Administrative Secretary Mercy Mwangangi announced that one would have to show proof of vaccination to enter public spaces such as buses, grocery stores, restaurants and game reserves. This set of statements must surely be categorised as bad public health communication.

Besides, Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe had sought to justify the vaccine mandate on the basis of the Public Health Act. However, Section 36 (d) of the Act addresses situations in which Kenya appears to be existentially threatened by any formidable epidemic, endemic or infectious disease. Yet the public health data shows that COVID-19 is not leading to massive deaths that would warrant invoking these provisions. The Public Health Act is also subordinate to the Constitution of Kenya in which the Bill of Rights is enshrined. As such, it cannot legitimately serve as a basis for COVID-19 vaccine mandates, but only for vaccine programmes. Furthermore, the dominant COVID-19 narrative emphasizes that the vaccines do not rule out one getting infected, but rather reduce the chances of hospitalization and death. Thus, vaccine-free shoppers or travellers in public transport risk their own lives, not those of fellow shoppers or fellow travellers. As such, forcing them to be vaccinated is a violation of their personal freedoms entrenched in the Constitution of Kenya 2010.

In sum, public health authorities are violating the ethical principle of informed consent by compelling members of the public to take COVID-19 vaccines. Furthermore, by making online databases accessible to a large number of people to verify the vaccination status of individuals, health authorities are also violating the principle of patient confidentiality.

Responsibility for adverse effects of vaccines

It is common knowledge that each and every vaccine has adverse effects. As such, the individual has a right to accept or decline a vaccine because it is he or she who bears any adverse effects that it may produce. Yet by enforcing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, health authorities are blatantly disregarding this important consideration. As David Ngira and John Harrington explain, a system of quality control before the deployment and use of medicines in Kenya is set out in the Pharmacy and Poisons Act, the Standards Act, the Food, Drugs and Chemical Substances Act, and the Consumer Protection Act. They however point out that none of these Acts provides for comprehensive compensation after deployment and use of vaccines. Yet any monetary disbursements that citizens might receive for adverse effects of vaccines cannot possibly restore them to their previous state of health, and must therefore be viewed more as tokens than as adequate compensation.

A more honest discourse would have acknowledged vaccine enthusiasm, vaccine hesitancy, and vaccine rejection.

What is more, observe Ngira and Harrington, to minimise liability and incentivise research and development, pharmaceutical companies require states to undertake to meet any costs arising from successful suits against the pharmaceuticals for any harm caused by vaccines. Put simply, the victims would be awarded for damages through their own taxes rather than through the profits of the vaccine manufacturers. Besides, as Ngira and Harrington also explain, in Kenya’s legal environment, victims of adverse effects from vaccines would have to demonstrate that the vaccine maker or distributor fell below widely accepted best practice, and yet acquiring the evidence to prove this and finding experts in the sector willing to testify against the manufacturer can be very difficult.

Ngira and Harrington further note that while the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) have undertaken to honour a one-year compensation (“indemnity”) for adverse effects of AstraZeneca vaccines distributed in Kenya which allows victims to be compensated without litigation up to a maximum of US$40,000 (approx. KSh4 million), COVAX has indicated that the scheme will end once the allocated resources have been exhausted. This is a matter of concern, because there is no evidence that side effects of the vaccine fully manifest within a year. Besides, one wonders how the allocated resources for compensation were arrived at, bearing in mind that no one would have had information on how much resources would actually be needed for this purpose. Furthermore, according to Ngira and Harrington, beneficiaries of the COVAX compensation scheme are barred from pursuing compensation claims in court. COVAX also requires that before governments receive its vaccines, they undertake to pay any damages awarded to victims of adverse vaccine effects against manufacturers in any lawsuits.

The foregoing considerations lead to the conclusion that the individual, as the one who bears the full brunt of any adverse effects from COVID-19 vaccines, ought to be free to accept or decline them.

Debatable use of some primary prevention programmes

According to Hirschberg, Littmann and Strech, there is the question of the use of some primary preventive programmes such as vaccination campaigns, cancer screening, and assessment of psychological malfunctions. They further observe that problems that arise in this context include, but are not limited to, unnecessary treatment, financial interests of actors, and the role of pharmaceutical companies. For example, in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, Peter Gotzsche shows that drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer, and illustrates how pharmaceutical companies have developed toxic drugs that have caused untold suffering to many, and how law courts have awarded damages to the injured. Similarly, Neil Z. Miller discusses 400 scientific papers that show how vaccines have caused injuries, and how policy-makers ignore this information.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, the public was told that once the vaccines are developed and procured, those who receive them would be safe from the virus; then more recently it has been announced that those who are fully vaccinated will need a “booster shot” after six months. The question arises as to whether the “booster shots” are really necessary, or simply the innovation of the big pharmaceutical companies to make more profits, which would be a case of conflict of interest. Besides, it is not clear if humanity will ever be free from the vaccines if people will be required to take boosters every time a new variant emerges. What is more, while there is wide consensus among virologists on the effectiveness of natural immunity, very little is being said about this, giving the false impression that humanity’s hope only lies in the vaccines, as though humanity has not weathered numerous viruses without vaccines for millennia.

Monitoring and evaluation of public health measures

According to Hirschberg, Littmann and Strech, public health measures ought to be analysed within a framework that takes into consideration how decisions to implement the measures were reached, and how the expected impact can be evaluated and regulated effectively. As such, write Hirschberg and her colleagues, all phases of planning, implementation and evaluation of a public health measure should take into account the available scientific evidence.

In the edited volume Ethics in Public Health and Health Policy, Marckmann and his colleagues address the question of what strategies are ethically appropriate to achieve sufficiently high rates of influenza vaccination among healthcare personnel in long-term care facilities for the protection of the elderly care home residents under their charge. They contend that mandatory influenza vaccination for healthcare personnel can only be justified if the available empirical evidence on the effectiveness of the vaccine is more conclusive, and if all other less restrictive measures have failed to achieve a sufficiently high vaccination rate.

Beneficiaries of the COVAX compensation scheme are barred from pursuing compensation claims in court.

In view of the foregoing considerations, monitoring and evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine mandates ought to address the following four questions: To what extent were decisions to implement COVID-19 vaccine mandates transparent and participatory? How effective have the COVID-19 vaccines been in limiting the spread of the virus? In the light of a holistic conception of health as entailing physical, social and mental well-being, are vaccine mandates the most effective way to deal with the spread and impact of COVID-19? What is the impact of COVID-19 vaccine mandates on the overall physical, social and mental well-being of citizens?

Which way forward?

In view of the foregoing considerations, it is high time we insisted on respect for the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of Kenya 2010 that upholds the autonomy of the person and proscribes discrimination. It is high time we upheld the national principle of public participation in the formulation of public health policies. It is high time we insisted on the right to information, which implies the right to uncensored information, including free access to all shades of opinion regarding the safety or danger of taking the COVID-19 vaccines, and personal testimonies of those who have taken them, as well as reasons advanced by those who have refrained from taking them. In the end, what we are dealing with here is not simply the right to accept or decline the COVID-19 vaccines, but rather the whole range of individual freedoms, which implies the limits of state action. In sum, it is squarely within the mandate of the state to institute vaccine programmes, in which it makes vaccines available and seeks to convince citizens to receive them. However, vaccine mandates are instances of state overreach, as they violate human dignity, human agency and human rights, thereby eroding the very foundation of democratic society. If government can determine what goes into my body, what remains of my personal liberty?

My book Developmentalism starts with speculation. It imagines Tanzania in 2090 as a middle-income country. Average incomes are an adjusted $12,000; wage labour has expanded and become more regulated; the fiscal effort of the state has improved; large-scale infrastructural investments have increased and generated a more densely connected national market; production has diversified; rates of saving have increased; technological innovations have taken place and been embedded in local production chains.

One might respond to this futurology by arguing that it is a fantasy that ignores well-known diagnostics of Tanzania’s—and more generally Africa’s—development problems and failures. The dependency-minded thinker might refute the optimistic 2090 prospective by arguing that Tanzania is locked into an exploitative global capitalism that makes this kind of transformation impossible. The outcome: Tanzania—and again by extrapolation many other African countries as well—cannot develop because of some combination of its own properties and its location in a global economy.

The book argues that these responses are misguided. There is nothing in Tanzania’s current condition that looks exceptional or categorically different to any other country. There is no need to foreclose the possibility that Tanzania will be a middle-income country in 2090. Yes: Tanzania is unique; it has its own troubled historical and geographical inheritance; and it faces very significant challenges. But, so does everywhere else.

Capitalist development

One of the most powerful bourgeois ideological sleights of hand has been the naming of capitalist development as simply development. ‘Development’ discursively serves to naturalise what is a profoundly disruptive and political transformation, a transformation based in an imposed reallocation of property and wealth that relies on an invigorated and restless putting to work of people, requiring sustained and muscular state action. A transformation, above all, that is extremely risky and unlikely to succeed.

Development is capitalist development. This means not only that it is very risky and likely to fail but also that it is very unpleasant. The bourgeois coinage of development is that it is stable, incremental, and positive sum. In a word: liberal. Liberal development strategies—operationalised through a massive institutionalisation of international aid from the late 1950s—is in essence a theatre of global fantasy, a fantasy in which capitalist development is reimagined as a planned, inclusive, and socially just modernisation. The ideological erasure of enclosure, corporal punishment in law, forced labour, slavery, genocidal frontier expansion, theft and fraud, and war from the concrete manifestations of capitalist development has been sustained through the rolling out of a multi-trillion-dollar aid industry underpinned by an international elite institutionalism.

The fact is that capitalist development is fundamentally Hobbesian: nasty and brutish; destructive of existing community and extremely exploitative. It is in the DNA of capital’s ascendance that it remakes societies for its own purpose and the foundation of that purpose is not ‘making money’ or ‘earning income’ (the liberal vocabulary) but maximising profit, and extracting surplus labour: again and again, maximally and forever.

This brings me to two cardinal points that address our focus back to Tanzania or many other African countries. Firstly, that capitalist development requires the emergence of strong, purposeful, and well-resourced capitals. Secondly, that the conditions under which these emerge are, vitally, politically secured. Let me comment briefly on each.

In relation to the first point, we should note that much of the more progressive mainstream development discourse revolves around capabilities, microfinance, poverty reduction strategies, participatory development, empowerment, and resilience. All of these aid-driven devices are variations on a theme which the book describes as strategies to allow mass populations to ‘enjoy poverty’. That is, to live in an enduring and untransformed condition of material scarcity in meagre relative comfort. This discourse is at heart—and despite the often pleasing imagery it purveys—neoliberal. The story goes something like this: the enhanced capabilities of an individual lead them to secure a loan that allows them to earn a little more money that brings them to purchase a second-hand motorbike, a solar panel, a corrugated roof or a three-month class at a night school to learn accounting methods. Often told in vignette, these narratives bear slender connection to the major engines of poverty reduction which reside in those zones of capitalist industrialisation in northeast Asia and elsewhere in which tens of millions of people have experienced increases in income. All of the evidence indicates that capitalist industrialisation generates poverty reduction not through individual or community vignettes but through the structural changes wrought by capitalist industrialisation.

So, capitalist development is nasty, brutish, and impoverishing and also the world’s most tenacious engine of poverty reduction. It might seem that there is a contradiction here, but it is only apparent, not substantive. Capitalist development is the rolling out of what Anwar Shaikh calls turbulent trends: a collision of disorders set in unstable social relations that in their own dynamics generate the conditions of possibility for a generalised improvement in mass material well-being. Conditions of possibility, no more than this. There is no modernisation-style certainty of mass consumption; there is, paceThe Economist, no inexorable rise of a global middle class. But, in a way that is historically unprecedented, capitalism presents the possibility that a level and breadth of shared wealth can be achieved. This possibility depends on levels of economic growth and productivity and the strength of social mobilisation to makes claims on the commonwealth that capitalism generates and alienates.

The second point indicates what is, intellectually, a considerable lacuna in studies of capitalist development: its normative foundations. The major attraction of liberal visions of (capitalist) development resides in its ability to suture over the violence. The liberal vision is, to twist Rousseau, all freedom, and no force. This is a seductive fiction. It evades what is the most important political question facing any state that aspires to achieve capitalist development: how to engineer the social transformation within which capital can ascend into a dominant position within a national political economy. But this question is unavoidable. The book goes through variants of an answer to this question: England, America, Japan, Taiwan, Israel, China. All different; all the same. All extreme, not exceptional. All coercive, all risky. Only enjoying success after generations of uncertainty, chaos, and violence, and even then, success is not permanent. Developmentalism argues that, in radically different geographical and historical circumstances, all of these states only succeeded in forging capitalist transformation when this transformation was seen as inextricably integrated into a major-order or existential threat to sovereignty. Forging a nation, securing a border, or consolidating a besieged elite’s rule… in these circumstances in which states are seen as inextricably part of a project to promote the ascendance of capital one can identify the emergence of ideologies where capitalist development is not desirable but necessary. This ideological family is developmentalism.

So, the core question for African states that wish to pursue capitalist development is political-strategic. It is not about ‘getting the institutions right’ or good governance. It is broader and more ambitious than that and set in a temporality that is generational, not what economists call medium-term. It requires authoritarian state action—as it did in almost all other cases.

The book’s argument here is unlikeable: that there is no implicit commensurability between capitalist development and rights. If a ruling elite wishes to promote capitalist development it will only succeed if it deploys top-down and coercive state action—through law, programmes of social engineering, and also police action—to reallocate property, discipline workforces, secure exploitation, and push money into ascending capitals. One of the most unhelpful conflations in development studies in Amartya Sen’s development as freedom. To see development as an expanding freedom is to define away the central feature of capitalist development.

This is, of course, normatively very troubling. Does this perspective serve as an apology for forced resettlement, the detention of labour leaders, the top-down enclosure of land and resources for capital? No, it does not. There are three co-ordinates here.

In the first place, a theoretical orientation towards political realism. Realism is not amoral—this is a caricature that cannot really be found centrally in major Realist texts. Realism simply argues that normative politics is contextual: the modes of address to justice and right are not ideally-derived but produced in specific circumstances. So: the normativity of development does not disappear, it simply relocates into the processes of struggle themselves. This orientation leads to a better awareness of the political norms and normative contestation that accompany capitalist development. This is because the focus on rights is enriched through a recognition that socially-embedded political normativity is only in part about rights. It is also about a stability that allows people to see a better future, a sense of value in community and/or nationhood, religious cosmologies, economic growth, and other situated values which can only be understood through actual research. From a Realist point of view, these other value-clusters enjoy equal status with equally contextualised manifestations of rights norms and their significance and value are empirical matters. As a result, normative investigations from a Realist perspective do not insist on an a priori and idealised derivation from universal and absolute rights. And, they are all the richer for that.

Secondly, analytically, the book insists that there must be a separation of rights and development. They are not commensurable. They are antagonistic, or perhaps in the midst of capitalist transformation, highly strained: constantly requiring non-ideal play-offs. Capitalist development requires active deception from states; force strategically deployed; heavy ideological underlabour; secrecy and cronyism. In other words: politics… politics in the sense of making least-worst decisions in the midst of incomplete information and risk. Human rights scholars and activists work within a very well-specified moral universe that is founded on a meta-norm of justice. But this is not the province of the development scholar.

Thirdly, the political agencies that drive justice claims and indeed underpin the sustained demands for generalised material improvement emerge from concrete situations, not idealised norms. Consequently, we need to situate them in the very turbulence of capitalist transformation itself. As political economies change, so do the possibilities for political mobilisation. Normative agency itself develops within organisation, mobilisation, debate, and public action. This is, historically, a story of the changing organisation of labourers, but also of middle-class organisations, and mobilisations that intersect across poverty, race, gender, and other identities. None of these mobilisations exist because they are intrinsically or ideally right; they exist because they are produced within the transformations themselves.

In summary, the normativity of capitalist development is a non-ideal pluralised normativity that is composed within transition itself. It does not accept rights as its master norm because to do so would be to relinquish the necessary acceptance that capitalist development is not rights compatible.

All of which takes us to Rwanda, the African country that ends the case studies in the book. The Rwandan government is clearly not a ‘rights state’. What kind of a state it is, is still intensely contested. Rwanda does illustrate what a contemporary developmentalism might look like. Its future is very uncertain, but the government constantly and heavily claims otherwise, and portrays the government’s strategy as one of national revitalisation and esteem. It has used covert and extra-legal devices to allocate property and wealth in ways that have, arguably and in some instances, been based in securing expanded circuits of accumulation rather than simply graft. It has achieved a high degree of re-engineering of its rural areas through diktats on habitation, cropping, water usage, the formation of co-operatives, agrarian-ecological zoning, village governance, and performance management. It has invested in the infrastructure of an upgraded service economy: IT, hospitality, air freight, and national highways. It has done all of this whilst consistently reiterating a discourse of national economic transformation. The Rwandan government, in the midst of its authoritarianism and security obsessions, pins its legitimacy on its ability to generate development through an ascendance of capital. Its chances of success are slender; its record on human rights is poor; the challenges it faces are major-order or even existential. In short, it is, for now, developing.

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This article was published in the Review of African political Economy (ROAPE).

Graham Harrison’s book Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism is published by Oxford University Press.

The mission of D-Econ (Diversifying and Decolonising Economics) is to promote inclusivity within the content and institutions of the economics discipline due to the dominance of Eurocentric thinking. This situation has occurred because of the longstanding exclusion of alternate views — based on identity (gender, race, geography), and theoretical-methodological discrimination — from the teaching of economics in higher education institutions. Thus, D-Econ argues, the knowledge base and debate of issues to be relevant to the world’s majority needs to include non-white and non-male voices as well as heterodox approaches.

D-Econ’s mission is framed at countering mainstream (conventional) economics. I think this ambition needs to be bolder. It needs to extend beyond the mainstream to explicitly encompass the entire social science discipline of economics.

The mainstream is ‘guilty as charged’. I think many within our heterodox community can be similarly charged.

Many sites that determine ‘legitimate heterodox knowledge’ cannot be characterised as always displaying tolerance and respect for difference. Contributions to heterodox conferences, workshops, journals, teachings, and more, are marred — not just on the odd occasion — by one perspective asserted as the ‘truth’, or reluctance (sometimes even open hostility) for constructive dialogue about the contributions of alternative perspectives. These practices replicate orthodoxy’s ills.

Heterodox economic scholars also have an ethical and moral obligation — thus responsibility — to ‘diversify and decolonise’ their teaching, research, and other practices given our own experiences of marginalisation, exclusion, and disregard by the mainstream. To not do so is tantamount to condoning the discriminatory practices that have buttressed the mainstream’s hegemony.

Diversification and decolonisation will not be — but should be — innate to all members of the heterodox economics community. Deliberative actions are required that require more than — as needed with the mainstream — ‘changing the narrative’.

The praxis of many heterodox economists needs to change. By praxis, I mean the activity of human beings (in this case, heterodox economists) that directly shapes both aspects of social reality (in this case, the teaching of economics and its application to explaining social reality) and themselves as producers of knowledge.

Decolonialisation is not about rewriting or erasing history. Nor can it be achieved by academics and students completing an anti-slavery awareness training module. Decolonisation is also more than the revision of curriculum content, assessment tasks, and reading lists to include scholarly works by women and persons of colour.

Decolonisation requires collective critical critique of knowledge creation through an historical lens — by whom, where, why, and how — to illuminate the embedded colonial practices that are the foundations of existing gender, racial, ethnicity, disability, class, sexuality, geographic, and other divisions.

Decolonisation also requires the ‘practice’ of an ongoing reflexive process given the institutionalised nature, and reproduction, of inequalities in the higher education sector, the primary site of knowledge production.

Decolonisation should not be conflated with diversification. Diversification is more than moving beyond the dominance of white heterosexual Eurocentric male voices in the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Diversification is also much more deliberative than job advertisements stating that ‘women and minorities are encouraged to apply’, much more than an institution providing training in ‘conscious bias’, and much more than special journal issues, editorial boards, conference panels and workshops including women, persons of colour, or scholars from the Global South. These actions are mere tokenism, as is the advocacy and not the overt practice of theoretical-methodological pluralism in knowledge production and pluralism in the topics investigated.

To achieve and maintain substantive and authentic diversification and decolonisation of economics, the praxis of all heterodox economists needs to embrace a conjunction of interrelated actions. A single action is inadequate for the task. Moreover, unending vigilance is required to embed the ‘gains’ so that these become conceived as ‘norms’.

There are, I contend, four key interrelated actions for heterodoxy to ‘detoxify’ and lead the way on diversifying and decolonising the social science discipline of economics.

One key action is transparency about one’s ‘positionality’.  I am referring to a scholar’s social ontology — her ‘world view’ of the nature, character, basic features, structures, and constituents of social reality — and her epistemological views (how knowledge is created by, for example, observation and induction or model building and deduction). Analytical constructs reflect a chosen research methodology which, in turn, reflects ontological and epistemological beliefs. These should be rendered explicit.

The purpose of social inquiry, and the practice of economics as a social science, should be to explain an ever-changing and increasingly complex social reality. The knowledge produced needs to accord with social reality to be relevant to the many and be able to address persistent issues and crises such as the climate emergency, inequality, and global pandemics. The analytical approach of the mainstream denotes reality as a closed system devoid of social, political, and historical contexts. Thus, issues are falsely framed, and the approach is the antithesis of the research task at hand. Positional transparency evokes openness about the ‘methodological position’ the researcher has taken to the problem under investigation and thus, appropriateness to explain social reality.

Positionality reflects a scholar’s gender, race, ethnicity, history, nationality, geographic location, political views and more. Thus, positional transparency is interrelated with a second action — acknowledgement of the social construction of knowledge, and the exclusionary role that language can play.

Knowledge is situated. Any knowledge created is inevitably framed by the lives and experiences of the knowledge producers (and reflected through their positionality). The language of mainstream scholarship presents it as ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’, and thus authoritative, not influenced by the positions and lives of its creators. This is inherently dishonest and should be always called out.

Explicit acknowledgment that knowledge creation is situated in lived experiences — and thus, are arguments/analyses — recognises that a plurality of explanations is possible. As Sheila Dow wrote 25 years ago, ‘no one knowledge system can capture totality because each is partial, reflecting a vision of reality’.  Visibility of the positioned nature of knowledge will mean greater integrity in scholarship.

Further, the rhetoric deployed by knowledge producers plays a significant role in silencing underrepresented voices, and the reproduction of insular communities. Rhetoric can act as a social control mechanism by dismissing the scholarship of others as ‘biased’ or ‘unscientific’. This should not only be revealed but heterodox economists should consciously seek not to replicate. This, in turn, means clear recognition that the English language actively creates, not just conveys, the message.

Acknowledgment of the social construction of knowledge and language use leads to a third action—a transformative approach to knowledge building and learning. With the inclusion of new information and different perspectives, frank, open conversations can expose the realities of marginalisation, discrimination, and power relations, and societal privilege (not necessarily intellectual superiority) resulting in the ubiquity of white, male, Eurocentric voices.  Knowledge creation and learning then become transformative processes of mutual critique and discovery.

Transparency about positionality, meaningful recognition of the social construction of knowledge and language, and transformative processes for knowledge production and learning are the foundations to enable achievement of a fourth critical action — a decolonised economic pedagogy.

As posited by Kvangraven and Kesar, a decolonised economic pedagogy is effectively structured around at least the following: the economy is consistently treated as embedded within the social sphere; explicit acknowledgement of the bias and values inherent to different perspectives, and the repression of some epistemologies by others; not relying on one perspective or approach nor advocating universality of explanation; exposing students to the Eurocentric underpinnings of different theoretical perspectives; the presentation of knowledge within its colonial and post-colonial contexts; exposing the spectrum of power inequalities within communities; and, taking a student-centred approach to pedagogy requiring teacher-student co-responsibility to create a common co-operative learning space and to create knowledge.

Ongoing attention and effort focused on these four interrelated actions as a conjunction — by all heterodox economists, not a few — will drive meaningful change to the practice and teaching of economics through authentic diversification and decolonisation. If not, the praxis of heterodoxy will remain as susceptible to charges of insularity, bias, and discrimination as the mainstream.

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This is article was first published by D-Econ.