After the failure of development: Postdevelopment.
No matter the stance one has regarding world politics, it is an undeniable fact that the projects of the Bretton Woods institutions in the Global South carried out under the mantra of development have failed terribly. This part is not subject for contention—except probably for a handful of development-mongers in the World Bank and institutions of similar breed. The terrain of discussion then is why did development fail, and how are we to move beyond it. This article will argue that development was the way in which the global order of capital and the liberal vision of the world came to be imposed under a plethora of benevolent promises that only recently have come to be challenged seriously.
A great deal of the conceptual imaginary that we use at present has its origins in either liberalism or Marxism. Both of these trends of thought, even though they advocate for different models of society, share a series of ideas that drive through their theories significantly. Some of these ideas are the belief in unlimited progress, the inevitability of modernity, the superiority of Western civilization, technological determinism and so on. The imaginary constituted by Western thought stemming from the Enlightment has enjoyed up until recently a kind of sacred status that in the lay European intellectuality comes to occupy the space that was traditionally the space of religion. The hegemonic position of this imaginary throughout the twentieth century is what has pushed it to be considered as desirable for, and exportable to, the rest of the world. Consequently, any alternative interpretation to this hegemonic conception was met with great hostility, the characteristic one for a claim that is trying to revoke a truth, or system of truths that are held absolute. What the thinkers of the Global South are saying is that this way of conceiving the world is really just one way among many possible.
Development starts right after the Second World War—a time in which the hegemonic world order of the free market is being settled—with the deployment of expert knowledge largely owning to the Bretton Woods institutions. Development is constructed as the process of salvation, conceived as the only possible way, of the Third World—the new tag for the previous colonies—which is a kind of childish entity in need of the guidance of a mature adult. “The poor” are regarded as weak, ill and ignorant. Models of economic planning and projects of social engineering are thrust over them eroding their capacity to define and rule over their own lives. The creation of the Third World and the terminology of development defined the way in which the people of the Global South were to think and speak of themselves: as poor, as underdeveloped, as corrupt. This “mental colonization” had its corresponding materialization in that all non-European areas were organized and transformed systematically according to European social, economic, cultural and political ways. Development was the effort to transform the Global South in a mirroring of the West. And of course because the South was evaluated by European standards, it was deemed in terms of lack and backwardness. Europe was first, leading the South which was third. A politics of poverty was constructed, “the poor” were turned into objects of study and administration; the social turned into a technical problem with its own categories and specificities onto which intervene by appropriate social engineering.
Dipesh Chakrabarty has explained how historicism played a very important role in setting the image of Europe as the pioneers of modernity and the rest of the world as “not yet” ready, but getting there (Chakrabarty 2000). The role of development is then framed in a linear historicism that understands it is the natural course of humanity to achieve modernity, whatever the means necessary to do so.
Eurocentrism understands the history of Europe’s liberal/capitalist society to be what is ontologically normal, and so the values that define this ethos of society are the ones against which the rest of the world is evaluated. Material wealth is one of these, a clear example of something that is cultural rather than universal as early mainstream development theory would suggest. Only recently it has become common in the Western world to understand that liberal values are not necessarily universal. This is not to say they are evil either. Post-development, and post-capitalist critique more generally, are too easily attacked by those who condemn these trends of thought as being contrary to anything that liberalism holds dear, which is not the case. Of course many of the liberal values are nice and very useful, but the fact is that they stem from a particular historic/spatial situation that is that of the West, thus they are not readily exportable to the rest of the world, as the universal premise would argue.
Edgardo Lander makes use of WTO treaties’ literature to demonstrate how a particular cosmovision—the neoliberal mantra of “free market” and competition—is considered to be the only one possible, and the one to which the whole world needs to abide. It is a cosmovision in that it rules over every aspect of human activity. His most interesting point is in his revision of how the WTO’s ideology regards knowledge. Only knowledge that is produced in the corporate and academic realms achieves the status of intellectual property. Indigenous knowledge that is not registered in the official channels (e.g. patents) is considered a part of nature, and because of this it can be robbed; it is the same logic of the early north-American settlers: because no one has made the legal claim to property as is understood in the liberal vision, the land is up for grabs and we will legitimately claim property rights over it (Lander 2002).
It was only in the 80s/90s that the first strong critiques of development began to emerge. Making use of the post-structuralist critique which finds its principal figure in Michel Foucault, the authors of post-development attacked the whole discourse of development by showing how it worked towards a homogenization of the world, one that placed the North as the winners by virtue and the South as the losers by their own fault. Development is an apparatus, a dispositif of power in the foucaultian sense, that Arturo Escobar and others want to dismantle. The substitution of the formal European colonialism for the development project sponsored by the U.S. is nothing but the perfection of the hegemony of the West over the whole globe. By a foucaultian perspective, one can see how the colonial project is turned after the second world war into a subtler, less explicit system of power relations—and, precisely because it doesn’t need the explicit coercive violence of the former colonies (even though violence has been used and is being used where necessary), it is all the more powerful. Power is the most effective when it is the least evident.
Foucault’s (and the post-structural school) major input to the social sciences is this: that the technical-scientific language is a social construct, always impregnated by significants and symbols that are to be framed within the socio-historical context from which they emerged and also the configurations of power through which they are spread and to which they serve.
Escobar´s (and other authors in the same fashion) work has been occupied with explaining the gestation, mise en scéne, and colonizing activity of the apparatus of development. Such a delimitation of the apparatus of development was a necessary exercise to then be able to attack it, and try to move away from it. The experience of post-development theory for academic insight is quite interesting in that it recognizes the need to first struggle in the field of narrative and discourse (purely symbolic and abstract) to then dismantle the very real economic and political measures that stemmed from the tale of development. Post-development theorists understood that to begin to challenge the apparatus so successfully set by development—successful not in that its outcomes met its intentions but in that its discourse came to be dominant in the imaginary of everyone either enacting it or under its effect—the first thing to be done was to go back and re-think the whole discourse that had allowed for this idea to gain such power. The elements of that discourse are the following:
1. That the history of humanity after the discovery of the Americas is the history of Europe. All other histories are satellitar and complimentary to the core European one (Chakrabarty 2000).
2. That Europe (and its perfect product the U.S.) is at the avant-garde of history, and has reached modernity before the rest of the world.
3. That the rest of the world is undergoing the same process towards modernity, just slower.
4. That because Europe and the U.S. have championed modernity, it is for them to lead the way for the rest of the world by means of exporting expert knowledge.
Modernity—that ultimate condition of progress—as in Wolf Lepenies’ description is a fourfold process of secularization, scientization, industrialization and democratic participation and, as Mamadou Diawara argues, even Europe is starting to see that neither of these four characteristics are as solid pillars as they have come to be imagined (Diawara 2000),. However, because being modern is associated with being on the winning side, it is the history of those who have achieved it that counts, with little to no account on how this modernity was achieved in reality—the tales of those at the losing side needed to be silenced in order to establish the desirability of development.
Christine Sylvester notes how postcolonial studies generally and the subaltern studies group particularly have achieved at reclaiming the narrative of those at the losing end of colonialism as important to dismantle the Eurocentric historicism that defined the Third World as lacking and backwards. However, she goes on to show that the scope of these studies is limited to one colonial experience, that of southern Asia and the Anglo-west, while marginalizing other colonial experiences. Moreover, postcolonial studies have been too concerned, in Sylvester’s view, with achieving intellectual respectability in the West, while forgetting to engage with actual redemptory projects involving real people:
All of this spells academic respectability and distance from those everyday people that some alternative development agencies at least meet and engage with. Postcolonial studies may not be complicit in bringing structural adjustment and other troubling development projects to South Asia or other postcolonial locations. It does, however, often offer more in the way of new-fangled language than food. (Sylvester 1999:718)
In her paper she calls for the necessity of development studies to merge with postcolonial studies, because the former is too bound up with Western bureaucracy as to generate or pay attention to new or different ideas, and the latter must start to engage in actual projects that ameliorate the life of people in the postcolonial world.
Such refocusing does not necessarily spell a return to Marxist thinking, for example, in order to stand oppositionally to neoliberalism. It does not mean that the postcolonial intellectual cannot speak openly and differently. Imaginative literatures can be retained. In the spirit of hybridity, postcolonial studies can read itself into the in-betweens of established and new disciplinary thinking and places hyphenating itself and its knowledges, on its own many terms, with those it ostensibly despises, like neoliberalism and developmentalism. (Sylvester, 1999:720)
Post-development tries to pick up where the post-structuralist and post-colonial critique of Western ontology stopped. Post-structuralism successfully challenged the European systems of knowledge that stemmed from humanism and the Enlightment, but failed to provide with an analysis of how this knowledge was being played out upon the rest of the planet, erasing in its way any other forms of understanding the world. This is perhaps because the paradigm of development was taking place in the same historical moment in which the post-structuralist authors were writing, and it wasn’t until late 80s and early 90s that the neo-colonial apparatus began to be read in perspective. Therefore post-development tries to further the post-stucturalist deconstruction of liberalism by actually constructing, or setting the ground for, new ways of conceiving the world—not in a romantic way, but as actual alternatives of organizing societies.
This is precisely where post-development picks up. Its ambition goes further than that of postcolonial studies, it wants to create a theoretical-political frame for actually generating policy outside of the expert gaze of first-world advisors. Post-development theory is in this sense similar to the development apparatus in that its reach is larger than that of academic insight, it has very real consequences.
Because of the evidence that the development enterprise has failed to deliver on its promises, in the last couple of decades it has tried to adapt by assuming some of the critiques made to it, coining new terms such as “human development” or “alternative development”. Alternative development is basically the adaptation of mainstream development to what is the fierce reality: that the tale of expert knowledge that has the tools to modernize those that are backwards was never appropriate. It has adapted mainstream development in recognizing the need to do “development from below”. NGOs have replaced the IMF and the World Bank in channeling the funds of Western aid, and so occupying the role of intermediaries between first world institutions and local communities. But alternative development as post-development authors see it is just a make-up for what remains the same logic. Even though development theory has come to give a significant importance to local knowledge that was previously marginalized, it still doesn’t occupy the primary spot in the theory or the decision-making processes that would be necessary to consider that the hegemonic narrative has been completely altered (Escobar 2012). Equally other authors like Jan Nederveen point at the fact that development has been shifting away from its original perspective of focusing mainly in macroeconomic indicators such as GDP growth and inflation control and is now adapting and recognizing the need for integrating local knowledge and practices (Nederveen 1998). Because development is taking the blows of the critiques made against it and reforming itself, post-development theories incur in the risk of playing the role of ‘a neo-traditionalist reaction against modernity’ (Nederveen 1998:343)
“Alternative generally refers to three spheres: agents, methods and objectives or values of development” (Nederveen, 1998: 346). The first is NGOs replacing the experts in economic institutions and such, the second is a way of doing that is “participatory, endogenous [and] self-reliant”, and the third is “geared to basic needs”(ibid). All of these are problematic from the post-development standpoint; tags such as “small peasants” or “pregnant women” reduce the life of a person to a singular aspect and turn it into a “case” that must be treated or reformed (Escobar, 1995). They also produce a reality that is neither that of the peasant or of the woman, while their cultures and struggles become invisible. A very illustrative point in these is the so-called “basic needs”; what constitutes basic needs for a Western mindset might be very different to that of the indigenous cultures of the Andes or that of sub-Saharan tribes.
Other authors such as Diawara have attacked the post-development critique for being too harsh in their account of development and thus obliterating the actual needs of the poor. He contends that even though a post-structuralist critique of notions such as basic needs is elegant, it can be irresponsible: “because of sheer linguistic refinement or caution, they dare not suggest any solution to the crisis. Do they really want to challenge anything at all?”(Diawara, 2000:365). He goes on to accuse post-development authors of “retreating into an ivory tower”. Diawara then calls for an appropriate meeting point of universalistic developmental expertise and local knowledge to carry on projects of development. He defends that where expert knowledge can be transmitted to local knowledge in the language of the latter, and where local knowledge can give feedback to expert knowledge also in the appropriate language, success for development projects is possible.
Other critiques on the post-development strand of thought run along these lines: that while their critique has highlighted some important flaws in the paradigm of development, they have failed to account for particular contingencies of internal power-relations and hierarchies within the poor countries, as well as not recognizing any of the achievements that have been actually made. By over-simplifying their account they relegate themselves to a vision too grounded on abstractions that are not translatable into direct action, action that is needed urgently.
But the post-development school seeks precisely this: to discard the whole of the developmental logic; to discard all the terminology that comes with it; to provide with such a condemnation of development that will allow for radically different perspectives to become normative. It is only by overthrowing development as a whole that this can be achieved.
We can´t hope for the way out [of development] to come from the bureaucrats of international institutions nor from the new crusaders of “alternative development”, who derive their dignity and income from the promotion of development. The four decades of development were a gigantic, irresponsible experiment that, according to the experience of the majorities of the whole world, has failed miserably. The current crisis is the opportunity to dismantle the goals of development in all its forms. (Esteva, 2009:1)
A great deal of the suggestions of post-development consist in the advocacy for the recuperation of a series of indigenous cosmovisions, especially in what concerns the relationship with nature. Against the capitalist view of the environment as a potential source of profit, other visions consider land as the sacred home that requires respect and responsibility. Despite the new recognition on the part of international governmental organizations that ecology and the protection of biodiversity is a pressing matter that needs attention they followed a logic similar to that of early development: they sent experts educated in the West that were to scientifically analyze the situation and then determine how environmental protection was to be carried out. When a region of the tropical rainforest in the Colombian pacific was threatened by development projects in the 70s—such as mining and monoculture—a social movement came up with a formula that has since then been a staple of post-development resistance: no conservation of biodiversity without control of the territory by the communities that inhabit it; the project for conservation must come from the cosmovisions of the indigenous communities themselves (Escobar 2008). The Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN) is a Colombian conglomerate of small organizations that illustrates well this way of doing. They seek the strengthening of cultural identities, the defense of the territory and the defense of ethnic rights by encouraging self-organizational and autonomous processes.
The substitution of the liberal homo-centrism into a kind of bio-centrism allows for the transition towards a post-development made up of mixed economic models. It assumes and celebrates disparate historic legacies and gives rise to a new system of symbols, as is considering the Earth as a living and feeling thing (Galeano, 2007). Post-development calls for a renewed self-confidence of subaltern ways of generating knowledge outside the modern scientific rationale that can turn into new ways of making politics. Social movements have the potential to generate a kind of knowledge that is different to that of academic work, but also one that can be combined with the latter. One of the lessons of current social movements is the need for new alliances between academics and activists, and this is something the latin-American school of post-development has understood and is putting in practice. The political, anthropological and ecological critiques find their purpose in creating references that come from the realities of activist groups that move to redefine the epistemologies in given contexts of power. Local histories are being put in the spotlight to reclaim their voice against that of a Eurocentric academy that would pretend to have an absolute knowledge, or at least one deemed superior.
The hostility with which other cosmovisions is met is very evident: other cultural forms are presented as the archaic residues of a mythicized past that, even if splendorous, must now leave room for a modernization that will make us all inhabitants of the paramount of humanity that is civilization and culture in its homogenized version. There is however in the liberal ideology a notable hypocrisy that pretends to celebrate cultural diversity, when actually any significant plurality of ethnicities, if they try to redefine themselves apart from the hegemonic logic, is considered as an obstacle to economic growth and furthermore as conflictual positions that lead to violence.
The development project is the paramount of, but also maybe the last stage of, an era of Western domination that comprehends not only the material control of resources but more importantly the domination of the global collective imaginary. Globalization is then the effective expansion of a particular system of meanings that gives support to a particular hegemony in which the North always wins, and the South always loses.
Against the idea of globalization, the proponents of this other way of doing talk about a pluriverse, namely a universe that contains many universes, each of these universes being a unique and equally relevant way of seeing the world (Esteva 2009).
The only possible way of overcoming the current global social crisis is to start to not only respect but also celebrate cultural diversity, to the extent that different cultural realities can be translated into actual economies.
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