43:4 "Past", "Post" and "Future" Development

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1 43:4 "Past", "Post" and "Future" Development Beyond the Search for a Paradigm? Post-Development and beyond ARTURO ESCOBAR Arturo Escobar reviews the critiques around post modernist critiques of development. He looks at the reading strategies employs and argues for a cultural politics of difference. Key words: modernization, livelihoods, locality, post-structuralism Unsettling development The status of development has become again difficult to ascertain. During the first decades of the development era, and despite an array of positions, there seemed to be clear agreement on the need for some sort of development. Modernization and dependency theories were the paradigms of the day. Little by little this consensus started to erode because of a number of factors, both social (the increasing inability of development to fulfill its promises, the rise of movements that questioned the its very rationality) and intellectual (the availability of new tools of analysis, chiefly poststructuralism). In the 1990s, post-structuralist critiques succeeded in casting a serious doubt not only on the feasibility but on the very desirability of development. Going beyond most previous critiques, development was shown to be a pervasive cultural discourse with profound consequences for the production of social reality in the so-called Third World. The deconstruction of development by the post-structuralists resulted in the possibility of imagining a post-development era, one in which the centrality of development as an organizing principle of social life would no longer hold. In the second half of the 1990s, these analyses became themselves the object of poignant criticisms and rebuttals. Many of these works are directed against what is now described as the post-development school or position. I do not want to suggest that this new set of works constitutes a unified position or even a trend. However, in the limited space allowed, I want to treat them as a group by outlining what I consider to be the main concerns expressed by them, on the one hand, and what I believe is at the basis of these concerns, on the other. For the sake of brevity, I will also accept the identification of the post-development school with three visible works, The Development Dictionary (Sachs ed, 1992), Encountering Development (Escobar, 1995), and The Postdevelopment Reader (Rahnema and Bawtree eds, 1997). These volumes are singled out in

2 several of the articles in question as the main texts on post-development, although there are other authors added at times to this set (e.g, Rist, 1997; Vandana Shiva s ecofemism, Cf. Kiely, 1999) (1). Defining the readings I see three main claims in the anti-postdevelopment literature, if you allow me to use this cumbersome label for brevity s sake: Post-development critics presented an over-generalized and essentialized view of development, while in reality there are vast differences within various development strategies and institutions; They romanticized local traditions and local social movements, ignoring that the local is also embedded in global power relations and that, indeed, many struggles today are about access to development; They failed to notice the on-going contestation of development on the ground. Behind these critiques, to be sure, are serious disagreements about the nature of social reality (e.g, for the Marxist critics, discourse has little to do with reality, while for poststrucuralist it is the main vehicle for the production of reality), and about the character of political practice and the agent of social transformation. These disagreements arise in great part out of contrasting paradigmatic orientations (liberal, Marxist, or post-structuralist). I cannot address these differences here, but I would like to highlight the importance of reflecting on these paradigmatic differences if we are to construct a more meaningful dialogue about development, post-development, or what you that is, if one is to go beyond my paradigm or yours, to borrow Pieterse s (1998) catchy title. It seems to me that it is possible to distinguish three main reading strategies on the part of the anti-postdevelopment writers. These reading strategies are conducted from, and in the name of, a particular location. I should say that in most cases you find two or even the three strategies at play, some times creating strange bedfellows brought together by their anti-postdevelopment position. These critiques of post-development, it seems to me, can be grouped as taking place under three banners: the real, better theory, and the people. Some critiques of post-development In the name of the real This strategy is practiced mostly by authors of Marxist orientation (e.g, Kiely 1999; Pieterse 1998; Peet and Hartwick, 1999; Babbington, 2000; Little and Painter, 1995; Berger, 1995). It restates the primacy of the material over the discursive. For these authors, the problem is not so much with development, even less so with modernity, than with capitalism. The critical modernism (Peet and Hartwick, 1999) espoused by some of these writers is commendable in many ways, yet it can be said that it arises out of their unwillingness to accept the poststructuralist insight about the importance of language and meaning in the creation of reality. This is a valid epistemological choice that has political consequences. In the name of (better) theory This strategy comes chiefly from fellow post-structuralist, which makes it the most puzzling (e.g., Moore, 2000; to some extent Arce and Long, eds 2000; Crew and Harrison, 1998). It says something like: You represent development as homogenous while it is really diverse. Development is heterogenous, contested, impure, hybrid; it is subverted at the local level. This assertion is undoubtedly true. However, these authors fail to acknowledge a) that their own project of analyzing the contestation of development on the ground was in great part made possible by the deconstruction of the development discourse (in the same way that this latter was enabled by earlier critiques, from Illich, Nyrere, Cabral, Galtung, Freire and Fals Borda to the dependentistas, and Foucault); b) that the post-structuralist project was a different one that of slaying the development monster, to paraphrase Gibson-Graham s (1999) metaphor in their debunking of capitalocentrism in political economy. As Graham says, scratch a post-structuralist, and you will often find a realist (2). We did not try to represent the real (of the Third World). This was everybody else s project, and part of the problem from the post-development perspective.

3 In the name of the people This is perhaps the most problematic strategy, and takes different forms. It might suggest that post-development advocates do not understand power (power lies in the material and with the people, not in discourse); that what is at stake is livelihood and people s needs, not theoretical analyses; that because of our romantic, neo-luddite and relativist stance we patronize the people and overlook their interests (e.g. Kiely, 1999; Pieterse, 1998; Storey, 2000; Little and Painter, 1995). I see this as a reflection of the chronic realism of many scholars that invariably label as romantic any radical critique of the West or any defense of the local. At stake in this position is also a realist notion of social change that is problematic because it does not unpack its view of the material, livelihood, needs, and the like. This view also assumes that any contact with development and the commodity is a desire for development and the commodity on the part of the people, not the enactment of a cultural politics in which development and the commodity might mean very different things. Lastly, this position is blind to the potential of social movements in mounting important challenges to capitalism and development, as the growing transnational networks against globalization are demonstrating in the most recent times. In this strategy, there is a triumph of the realpolitik at the expense of other visions of the possible. Finally, it is difficult not to raise the issue of the social basis of the anti-postdevelopment critique. Without invoking a self-serving identity politics, it is puzzling that almost without exception the anti-postdevelopment critics are white male academics in the North. The postdevelopment movement was at least more diverse at this level, including men and women from both the North and the South, living and working in both the North and the South. Besides our rejection of development, perhaps the most common denominator was that of being middle class in our respective countries or countries of origin. But we came from many places and experiences and had diverse intellectual and political interests and connections to social movements. And if we refused to theorize about how things must be instead, it was not because of a relativizing conceit (what Kiely labels the Pontius Pilate attitude ), but precisely because, in the spirit of post-structuralist genealogies, we see all too well how this normative stance has always been present in all development discourses, even if naturalized and normalized. For the post-development advocates, this naturalized morality domesticates our ethical sensibilities, our thinking, and our actions in ways that can only serve the interests of those in power. Beyond paradigms? As I mentioned, there are many valuable aspects of the criticisms I reviewed so hastily here. I find great value, for instance, in Arce and Long s (2000) project of reclaiming and pluralizing modernity via strategies of development that run counter to the dominant model (yet one might raise the question of the different genealogies of modernity, lest we continue to uphold a European matrix at the root of all modernities); or in Babbington s (2000) call for a notion of development that is at once alternative and developmentalist, critical and practicable (yet in this case we would need to unpack further his notion of livelihood; there is no livelihood without culture); or in Fagan s (1999) suggestion that the cultural politics of postdevelopment has to start with the everyday lives and struggles of concrete groups of people, particularly women; or, finally, in Sylverster s (1999) warning about being mindful of the effect on our accounts of the world of our distance from those we write about. This means that the dialogue goes on, and as the poet might have said, we should be thankful less about arriving at the right notion of development or post-development than at the fact that these constructs gave us the opportunity to undertake the journey in the first place. For me, this is a journey of the imagination, a dream about the utopian possibility of reconceiving and reconstructing the world from the perspective of, and along with, those subaltern groups that continue to enact a cultural politics of difference as they struggle to defend their places, ecologies, and cultures. Notes (1) The main texts that to a greater of lesser extent adopt an explicit anti-postdevelopment position are: Babbington, 2000; Berger, 1995; Blaike, 1998; Crew and Harrison, 1998; Kiely,

4 1999; Lehmann, 1997; Peet and Hartwick, 1999; Pieterse, 1998; Storey (2000). I have not included here those texts that, while critical of the poststructuralist analyes, take them constructively as an element for redefining development theory and practice. See for instance Gardner and Lewis, 1996; Grillo, and Stirrat, eds 1997; Fagan, 1999; Schech and Haggis, Finally, there are texts that do not fit easily into any of these two categories, such as Arce and Long, eds 2000; Sylvester, (2) Conversation during the meetings of Association of American Geographers, Pittsburgh, April Bibliography Arce, A. and N. Long (2000) Anthropology, Development and Modernities. London: Routledge. Babbington, A. (2000) Re-encountering Development: Livelihood Transitions and Place Transformations in the Andes, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 90 No.3 pp Berger, M. (1995) Post-Cold War Capitalism: Modernization and Modes of Resistance After the Fall. Third World Quarterly 1995: Blaike, P. (1998) Post-modernism and the Calling out of Development Geography. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Boston, April. Crew, E. and E. Harrison (1998) Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid. London: Zed Books. Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fagan, G.H. (1999) Cultural Politics and (post) Development Paradigms, in Munck, R.. and D. O Hearn (eds) Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm, pp Gardner, K. and D. Lewis (1996) Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge. London: Pluto Press. Grillo, R.D. and R.L. Stirrat, (eds) (1997) Discourses of Development. Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford: Berg. Kiely, R. (1999) The Last Refuge of the Noble savage? A Critical Assessment of Post- Development Theory, The European Journal of Development Research 11(1): Lehmann, D. (1997) An Opportunity Lost: Escobar s Deconstruction of Development, Journal of Development Studies 33(4): Little, P. and M. Painter (1995) Discourse, Politics, and the Development Process: Reflections on Escobar s Anthropology and the Development Encounter, American Ethnologist 22(3): Moore, D. (2000) The Crucible of Cultural Politics: Reworking Development in Zimbabwe s Eastern Highlands, American Ethnologist 26(3): Peet, R. and E. Hartwick (1999) Theories of Developemnt. New York: Guilford Press. Schech, S. and J. Haggis (2000) Culture and Development. A critical introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Pieterse, J.N. (1998) My Paradigm of Yours? Alternative Development, Post-Development, and Reflexive Development, Development and Change 29:

5 Rahnema, M. and V. Bawtree (eds) (1997) The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed Books. Rist, G. (1997) The History of Development. London: Zed Books. Sachs, W. (ed) (1992) The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Storey, A. (2000) Post-Development Theory: Romanticism and Pontius Pilate politics, Development Sylvester, Ch. (1999) Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Disparate Tales of the Third World, Third World Quarterly 20(4):

Verity Harte Plato on Parts and Wholes Clarendon Press, Oxford 2002

Commentary Verity Harte Plato on Parts and Wholes Clarendon Press, Oxford 2002 Laura M. Castelli laura.castelli@exeter.ox.ac.uk Verity Harte s book 1 proposes a reading of a series of interesting passages