Post-development theory and the question of alternatives: a view from Africa

Post-development theorists have declared development obsolete and bankrupt and have called for ‘alternatives to development’. What do they mean by such calls and what should be the African response to such calls? In this paper I will attempt to address three important questions: first, what is meant by post-development theory's call for ‘alternatives to development’? Second, why consider post-development theory from an African perspective? Third, what contributions can a consideration of African difference and diversity make towards debate on ‘alternatives to development’? I conclude by arguing that increased consideration of the African experience would be valuable for all who are seeking alternative ways of dealing with the problems that development purports to address.     

The seductions of determinism in development theory: Foucault's functionalism

Abstract

In 1985 David Booth wrote a seminal article in which he argued that development theory, mostly Marxist but also modernisation theory, was out of touch with reality, incapable of generating viable policy, and riven with meta-theoretical errors. He recommended a return to empirical case studies, the comparative method, and an awareness of the problems of functionalist and essentialist argument. In the ensuing decade a further range of solutions was offered to bail development theory out of trouble: micro-theory, participatory action research, postmodernism, post-development theory, postcolonialism. Twenty years later the dominance of Marxist and neo-Marxist theories has been replaced by an equally pervasive hegemony of Foucauldian discourse. In signaling the presence of a new impasse, there is much talk of ‘the poverty of post-development’. The intriguing question to ask is: what can development theorists and Third World intellectuals learn about themselves in this constant refrain?     

Post-development and Poverty: an assessment

This article presents a critical assessment of the post-development critique of poverty, distinguishing between claims made about how poverty is represented in ‘modern’ poverty analysis (the ‘representations critique’) and claims about trends in, and causal analysis of, consumption poverty (the ‘marginalisation thesis’). In general empirical evidence does not support ‘headline’ claims concerning the lack of correspondence of consumption poverty to local needs and the worsening of consumption poverty. There is support for other positions concerning the relativity of nutritional adequacy norms and the limits of ‘standard’ causal analysis of poverty. These latter elements, however, add little to existing critiques which are well known in the poverty literature.     

The ontological politics of (in-)equality: a new research approach for post-development

This article aims to add a new line of research to the post-development school of thought. Drawing on the many evident yet rarely noticed parallels between post-development and (post-)anarchism, I develop an understanding of ‘anarchistic post-development’ as a politics based on what French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls ‘the presupposition of equality’. I further connect this with Arturo Escobar and Marisol De la Cadena’s concept of political ontology, suggesting that we can make sense of and analyse both contemporary ‘Development’ projects as well as anarchistic post-developmental ‘alternatives to Development’ through the lens of what I call ‘the ontological politics of (in-)equality’. To substantiate my points, I will draw on the recent case of a Mâori tribe who won a historical legal battle to declare the Whanganui River a living entity.     

Development,foreign aid and post-development in Timor-Leste

Post-development theories have successfully challenged many of the ways in which we think about development but have yet to substantially influence development practice. In this paper I explore what opportunities exist for applying post-development ideas within the current development apparatus of Timor-Leste. Four types of community-focused programmes are analysed: sectoral project-based initiatives, institutional capacity-building programmes, community partnerships and small grants programmes. While alternative opportunities are clearly shown to be present, it is argued that they are rarely realised because of the overwhelming priority to produce better agents of development, rather than those able to pursue ‘alternatives-to-development’. The paper concludes by suggesting that the development apparatus itself may not be inherently faulted; instead this apparatus could be usefully utilised by those inspired by alternative imaginaries to pursue post-development goals.     

The Syrian wars of words: international and local instrumentalisations of the war on terror

Abstract

This article presents a study of the ‘wars of words’ among selected parties involved in the Syrian conflict. Based on a combination of content analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA), it examines actors’ discourses within the United Nations Security Council (2011–2015), the global arena of confrontation and international legitimisation of armed actions. Here, it investigates their instrumentalisation of the word ‘terrorism’ and the war on terror narrative, and it explores the dynamics of discursive (de)legitimisation of the use of violence in Syria. The article shows how parties instrumentalised this narrative to criminalise their enemies while legitimising their own violent actions. By doing this, the paper also offers a broader reflection on the global narrative on terrorism, and its different reception and instrumentalisation by core and peripheral actors.     

Orientalism and African Development Studies: the ‘reductive repetition’ motif in theories of African underdevelopment

Contemporary Africa is generally depicted as a ‘failure’. ‘Progress' has eluded the continent throughout the 20th century, and despite new ways of thinking about the reasons for failure and possibilities for success, allusions to the ‘natural weakness and incapacity’ of Africans and their social realities remain evident in theoretical, policy and political discourse on development in Africa. The practice of ‘reductive repetition’, as identified by Abdallah Laroui and Edward Said, has been imported into African development studies from Orientalist scholarship. Reductive repetition reduces the diversity of African historical experiences and trajectories, sociocultural contexts and political situations into a set of core deficiencies for which externally generated ‘solutions’ must be devised. In the field of development studies, the notion of development is introduced to Africa as a deus ex machina. In this article modern conceptualisations of development are challenged in three steps. First, it traces the history of development discourse over the post-Berlin Conference colonial and post-WWII development eras, suggesting that, while rhetoric of racial and cultural inferiority has been transformed, the notion of African deficiency remains at the conceptual and discursive levels. Second, the primarily liberal idea that ‘development for all’ is possible is challenged as being an ecological and economic, and therefore also social, impossibility. Third, given the problems of growth-based development, the article suggests that modern development theory ought to give way to post-developmental thinking which challenges standard a priori assumptions regarding rationality, linearity and modernity, thus offering some modest hope for a move ‘beyond’ the current development impasse.     

Post-development,Foucault and the colonisation metaphor

Post-development, the most recent radical reaction to the problems of postwar development efforts, has been the focus of both strident criticism and restrained defence in Third World Quarterly . This article shows that addressing post-development's shortcomings is more useful than dismissing or limiting its potential. By using the work of Foucault, one of post-development's theoretical departure points, a clear distinction is drawn between the operation of power in colonial and development eras. This requires a shift away from repressive views of power, ideas that a singular force directs development, and the colonisation metaphor used by some post-development writers. This article then shows that combining Foucault's notion of dispositif with his concept of normalisation is useful for understanding the operation of power in the postwar development project, and for comprehending how power operates through the World Bank. In this way a critical engagement with post-development can improve our understanding and analysis of development.     

The queer Third World

This article attempts to align ‘queer’ and ‘Third World’ – grouping them in their common inheritance of subjugation and disparagement and their shared allegiance to non-alignment and a politics aimed at disrupting domination and the status quo. In assembling both terms one is struck by how, in the mainstream discourse of international development, the Third World comes off looking remarkably queer: under Western eyes it has often been constructed as perverse, abnormal and passive. Its sociocultural values and institutions are seen as deviantly strange – backward, effete, even effeminate. Its economic development is depicted as abnormal, always needing to emulate the West, yet never living up to the mark (‘emerging’ perhaps, but never quite arriving). For their part, postcolonial Third World nation-states have tended to disown and purge such queering – by denying their queerness; indeed often characterising it as a ‘Western import’ – yet at the same time imitating the West and pursuing neoliberal capitalist growth. I want not only to make the claim that the Western and Third World stances are two sides of the same discourse but, drawing on Lacanian queer theory, also to suggest that a ‘queer Third World’ would better transgress this discourse by embracing queerness as the site of structural negativity and destabilising politics.     

Partnership for governance reform in Indonesia

This article responds to a critical examination by Gordon Crawford of the concept of ‘partnership’ in contemporary development aid discourse, using the Partnership for Governance Reform in Indonesia (the Partnership) as an example. The article contends that Crawford's deconstruction of the Partnership is highly questionable, as it is based on a selective inclusion of information which challenges many of his observations, up to a point where his conclusions become untenable. Power relationships and processes of opinion making and decision making are increasingly located in complex and transnational settings, characterised by shifting alliances among international as well as domestic stakeholders. Crawford approaches the power relationship between donors and Indonesians as if it were locked up in the Partnership, which makes a mockery of his case study. There is no empirical evidence suggesting that Indonesians are easily ‘mystified’ by their donors. Instead, the short three‐year history of the Partnership shows a process in which Indonesians have increasingly taken control of both day‐to‐day leadership as well as the development of longer‐term strategy. It is suggested that, instead of a focus on structure and agency, a more promising approach to grasping shifts in power between donors and local stakeholders would be to analyse the discourse in a partnership following a concept of organisational culture.     

The ‘Anti-politics machine’ in India: Depoliticisation through local institution building for participatory watershed development

This article investigates the rationale and implications of creating non-elected community-based bodies for India's national watershed development programme in 1994. A discourse of depoliticisation is in use to justify the creation of ‘apolitical’ watershed committees in contrast to ‘political’ panchayats, ostensibly unsuitable for participatory development for their embodiment of political contestation and vested interests. The discourse masks conflicts between key actors in India's development process and is highly malleable, acquiring pertinent meanings in specific contexts. Case-study evidence from two project villages in a south Indian district shows that the attempt to depoliticise this programme of panchayat politics fails, but sets up the ground for depoliticisation of another sort, by distancing watershed project spaces from pro-poor progressive politics.     

A genealogy of EU discourses and practices of deliberative governance: Beyond states and markets?

The article offers a genealogy of ‘deliberative governance’ in the EU—an important contemporary discourse and practice of ‘throughput legitimacy’ within that setting. It focuses on three key episodes: the late 1990s ‘Governance’ reports of the European Commission's in‐house think‐tank, the Forward Studies Unit (FSU); the Commission's 2001 White Paper on Governance; and the EU's ‘Open Method of Coordination’, which emerged in the 1990s and was widely studied in the early and mid‐2000s. The genealogy serves to highlight the particular intellectual lineages and political contingencies associated with such a discourse and in so doing points to its exclusive potential in both theory and practice. In particular, the article argues that it excludes, on the one hand, those championing the enduring sociological and normative importance of the nation state and an associated representative majoritarianism and, on the other hand, those (excessively) critical of a functionalist, neoliberal, market‐making status quo.     

Civil war and the coalition government of democratic Kampuchea

This article explores the relationship between the politics of international development and the reproduction of global inequality. I argue that contemporary discourses about— and the practices of—‘development for developing countries’ represent an attempt to reconstitute the political utility of the ‘Third World’. In an era of globalisation the deployment of the notion of a Third World of ‘developing countries’ which require immediate, systemic attention through the discourse and practice of international development continues to provide a way of both disciplining and displacing the global dimension of social and political struggle. I refer to this dynamic in terms of the political utility of the Third World, which, I argue, has been conducive to the organisation of global capitalism and the management of social and political contradictions of inequality and poverty. I develop this argument by drawing on the historical implications and legacy of ‘international development’ as practised in and on the Third World and through a critical analysis of the methodological premises that constitute international development. I illustrate this by drawing on a key strategy aimed ostensibly at development: the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsp) approach, promulgated by the World Bank and the imf, which I discuss in relation to the ‘development agenda’ inaugurated during the 1999 wto meeting in Doha (Qatar). I argue that the ideology and practice of the global politics of international development reinforce the conditions of global inequality, and must be transcended as both an analytical framework and an organising principle of world politics. While the prsp and related approaches are currently presented as key elements in the building of the ‘architecture for (international) development’, what is emerging is a form of governance that attempts to foreclose social and political alternatives.     

Constituting 'the public' in public participation

The emphasis on public participation in contemporary policy discourse has prompted the development of a wide range of forums within which dialogue takes place between citizens and officials. Often such initiatives are intended to contribute to objectives relating to social exclusion and democratic renewal. The question of ‘who takes part’ within such forums is, then, critical to an understanding of how far new types of forums can contribute to the delivery of such objectives. This article draws on early findings of research conducted as part of the ESRC Democracy and Participation Programme. It addresses three questions: ‘How do public bodies define or constitute the public that they wish to engage in dialogue?’; ‘What notions of representation or representativeness do participants and public officials bring to the idea of legitimate membership of such forums?’; and ‘How do deliberative forums contribute to, or help ameliorate, processes of social inclusion and exclusion?’     

The ‘girl effect’: liberalism,empowerment and the contradictions of development

The ‘girl effect’ – the idea that investment in the skills and labour of young women is the key to stimulating economic growth and reducing poverty in the global South – has recently become a key development strategy of the World Bank, the imf, usaid and dfid, in partnership with corporations such as Nike and Goldman Sachs. This paper examines the logic of this discourse and its stance towards kinship in the global South, situating it within the broader rise of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ as development objectives over the past two decades. Empowerment discourse, and the ‘capability’ approach on which it is based, has become popular because it taps into ideals of individual freedom that are central to the Western liberal tradition. But this project shifts attention away from more substantive drivers of poverty – structural adjustment, debt, tax evasion, labour exploitation, financial crisis, etc – as it casts blame for underdevelopment on local forms of personhood and kinship. As a result, women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for bootstrapping themselves out of poverty that is caused by external institutions – and often the very ones that purport to save them.     

Entrepreneurs,investors and the state: the public and the private in sub-Saharan African irrigation development

This article draws on ethnographic research in Tanzania to interrogate the discourse of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in sub-Saharan irrigation development. It contrasts the complexity of social and political relations with narratives suggesting that ‘private’ is necessarily opposed and superior to ‘public’. We argue that support for models of private-sector development obscures access to and control over resources and can result in the dispossession of those least able to resist this. Different interests of ‘entrepreneurial’ individuals and corporate investors and the ways in which these relate to the state are also glossed over. Conversely, the failure of the ‘public’ cannot simply be read from the chequered histories of irrigation schemes within which public and private interests intersect in complex ways.     

The Social Construction of Slovakia as a Donor and its Power Effects

This article shows the power effects of Slovak development cooperation discourses. It focuses on how the Slovak population is constructed as ‘willing to help’, and the effects of this construction on the legitimation of the current regime and on the construction of the Slovak identity as developed. The article further shows the unequal relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ donors, how transition experience enables this relationship, and the power effects of the discourse of donor effectiveness in Slovakia.     

Otherising Iran in American political discourse: case study of a post-JCPOA senate hearing on Iran sanctions

Using van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis, this paper attempts to analyse the ways in which the Islamic Republic of Iran is constructed as a security threat in US congressional hearings. The article is based on the case of the two-day congressional hearing on post-JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) held by the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, on 24–25 May 2016. The session was presumably held to examine ‘sanctions relief’ provided to Iran; however, the study reveals that through the use of discursive tools such as lexical style and argumentation, Iran is framed and evaluated as a security threat to (1) the US; (2) US allies, specifically Israel; and (3) the international community. This construction reflects the established political and ideological stereotypes and also orientalist clichés which have led to Otherisation and vilification of Iran. Therefore, by representing Iran as an ‘irrational’, ‘radical’ and ‘barbaric’ entity, the US discrimination against Iran through sanctions and other unilateral political decisions is legitimised and justified.