‘Development’ - Changing

discourses and paradigms

Locating the emergence of the
livelihoods approach
Session objectives
 To explore how ‘development
discourses’ and ‘paradigms’ have
changed over the last 50 years
 To compare neo marxist, historical,
structuralist paradigms with
neoclassical, neo liberal paradigms
 To examine emerging
environmental and sustainability
narratives
Session objectives

 To locate the emergence of the

‘new’ poverty agenda and the
sustainable livelihoods approach
 To examine how development is
being redefined in the context of
globalisation and the widening
gap between rich and poor
What is meant by
‘development discourse’?
 Grillo explains that:
 “A discourse of development identifies
appropriate and legitimate ways of
practicing development as well as
speaking and thinking about it”
 “Discourse is a site of struggle… in
which social meanings are produced or
challenged”
 Discourse in some ways resembles
the concept of paradigm
Coexistant discourses
 There are several coexistant discourses
of ‘development’ – which reflect the
contexts in which they originate
 Consider the different discourses around
‘poverty’ and ‘sustainable development’
 Dominant discourses are often all
pervasive
 Leach and Mearns identify “off the shelf
development narratives” or “received
wisdom” which come to define development
problems and justify interventions
What is a paradigm?

 “An outstandingly clear or typical

example or archetype” (Webster’s
Dictionary)
 “The total pattern of perceiving,
conceptualising, acting, validating
and valuing associated with a
particular image of reality” (Kuhn)
 “A theoretical model to explain a type
of social behaviour” (Dictionary of
Anthropology)
Competing development
paradigms
 For much of the past 50 years
development paradigms can be located
in two broad camps each characterised
by significant internal differences:
 Neo Marxist, historical-structuralist paradigms
 Emphasis on social relations and political economy
 Class, power, inequality, the state,
 Neo classical, neoliberal paradigms
 Emphasise ‘rational’ choices based on cost benefit
analysis of possible alternatives
 Faith in the market
 Both made historical and ideological
claims to ‘correctness’
So what is development?
 Development remains a slippery
concept
 Mainstream discourse has long
identified development as growth in
economic output and income per head
 Both the neo marxist and neo classical
paradigms rest on the premise of
(limitless) economic growth
 Economic growth - the unifying
development priority
So what is development?

 McNeill argues that “Economic growth

became the indispensable ideology of
the state nearly everywhere.”
 Sachs observes that the very
“metaphor of development implies
predominance”
 The distinction between the developed
and the ‘underdeveloped’ – term given
currency by US President Truman in
1949
Questioning growth
 During the 1970s new discourses
emerged which appeared to
challenge the dominant paradigm
 ‘Limits to growth’
 ‘Sustainable development’
 Initially this challenge very narrowly
defined - strong emphasis on
conservation
 McNeill observes that “just as
economists ignored nature,
ecologists pretended humankind did
not exist”
The new faultlines
 Kothari et al argue that with the collapse
of socialism the neoliberal development
project has expanded beyond the
‘developing world’ into a much larger
domain – former socialist countries now
termed ‘transitional economies’ – the
globalisation of capitalism
 Sachs argues that it was politically
expedient for everybody not to question
the ‘development as growth philosophy’
at Rio as small elites in North and South
reap the benefits
The new faultlines
 Post Seattle a growing and more coherent
challenge to globalisation that advocates
livelihood rights, fair wealth and
governance for ecology and equity
 WSSD in Joburg sees convergences
between environmentalists and activists for
social and economic rights
 Oxfam described official outcome as “a
triumph for greed and self interest – a
tragedy for poor people and the
environment”
 In search of
explanations…
How did we get here – a quick
tour
Post war modernisation
 Post-war modernisation was full of
confidence and optimism
 Post war Keynsian economic policy
 Prominent role of the state in the
management of the economy –
supremacy of the market rejected
 Predicated on reflating economies and
achieving the ‘fetish of economic growth’
(McNeill)
 Development was done by the state
for the people
Postwar modernisation
 A great deal of emphasis on national
development plans and growth targets
 Sachs argues that development was the
“mobilising narrative” for the building of new
nation states in decolonisation process
 Stimulates professionalises and entrenches
concept of development planning
 The whole concept of development planning
entrenched in this era
 Much of this planning was of the ‘blueprint
variety’.
 Growing influence of the Bretton Woods
institutions – World Bank and IMF
1960’s
 The first ‘development decade’
 Emphasis on sectoral and regional
planning
 Large projects – dams, irrigation,
input intensive cash crops
 ‘Green revolution’ – emphasis on
technological solutions, hybrid seeds,
monocropping
 Social consequences of stratification,
elite capture, gender inequality,
landlessness and environmental damage
1970’s
 The simple formula that economic
growth would lead to development
began to be questioned in
mainstream institutions
 Some attention shifts to the poor
and the social content of
development
 Who benefits from development? –
the “benchmark question”
1970’s
 Emergence of environmental and
sustainability narratives
 Limits to growth debate
 Launch of UNEP
 Initial biocentric focus characterised by
‘catastrophist forecasts’ and ‘disaster narratives’
 The fuel wood ‘crisis’
 Emergence of gender as a development
issue
 Women in development (WID) approach
 Approach: Integrate women into the
development process
 Goal: More efficient development
Integrated rural development
 New emphasis on integration within
large projects
 Emergence of Integrated Rural
Development
 Expert led development approach
 Kothari identifies masculinist discourse
–economic activity a male province
 Increasing emphasis on development
management
Integrated rural development
 While the concepts of integration and
linkages were important
implementation problematic
 Integrated rural development
planning often paternalistic.
 It largely revolved around what
professionals and governments
thought rural people wanted.
 Limited space for participation, and
where ‘participation’ did take place it
was often with the wrong people
 IRD emphasised the importance of
working with local leaders who often
represented local elites.
Integrated rural development
 Projects were too big and over complex.
 IRD phase created large government
bureaucracies which were increasingly
unable to manage the complexity of
development on the ground.
 Problems of coordination and institutional
arrangements for implementation
 Experience with integrated rural
development leads to arguments for
decentralisation to regional and local levels
Socialist experiments in Africa

 Decolonisation in Africa –
revolutionary struggles
 Ujamaa Vijini
 Mozambican socialism (among
others)
 The backdrop of the cold war –
contesting ideologies of
socialism and capitalism
Neo marxist social theory
 Highly generalised and economistic
explanatory frameworks of marxist
and neo marxist origin dominate
social development theory in 1970s
 Dependency theory, combined and
uneven development,
underdevelopment
 Commentators critique these theories
for ‘aspiring to excessive explanatory
power’
Ujamaa Vijijini
 Tanzania’s African socialism
 Top down planning – pushing and pulling
 Villagisation initially voluntary then forced
(5 million people moved)
 Abolition of traditional leaders
 Co-operative farming promoted but fails
 Parastatal marketing and input distribution
 Growth of bureaucracy
 Initiative collapses
Mozambican socialism

 Frelimo 2nd Conference 1968

 People must co-operate in collective
production
 Chiefs must be replaced by elected
representatives
 Commerce and industry must be
controlled by the State
 Emphasis on mechanised large state
farms - neglect of peasant sector
 Destabilisation and civil war
1980’s
 A decade of counter currents
 Increasing recognition of diversity and
heterogeneity of the real world of
development
 A revitalised interest in real world problems
of development policy and practice
 1987 Brundtland report foregrounds
environmental and sustainability issues –
emerging biophysical limits to economic
growth
 Sustainability remains fundamentally ambiguous
 Obscures the point that there can be no
sustainability without restraint on wealth
1980’s
 People first
 Emphasis on participation and gender
and development frameworks
 New planning and development
approaches
 Rapid Rural Appraisal
 Participatory Rural Appraisal
 Learning process approaches
 Distinction between participation in
projects and participatory development
1980’s
 Emphasis on changing attitudes and
values of professionals
 Recognition of indigenous
knowledge
 1980s sees a shift to smaller locality
centred development initiatives
 ‘Human scale’ development
 Increasing influence of bilateral
donors and international and local
NGOs
1980’s – Structural adjustment
 1986 Washington Consensus uses
SAPs to kickstart globalisation
 The focus was on countries where
state led development policies had
contributed to large public services
and parastatals
 Often accompanied by high levels of
foreign debt
 However these policies often
provided benefits to the poor and
protected local industry through
policies of import substitution
1980’s – Structural adjustment
 IMF imposes a standard recipe
 Reduced public spending, removal of subsidies
on food, health and education, higher interest
rates, currency devaluation, lower real wages,
reduced tariffs, privatisation of services.
 Throughout this period there was a
pretence that development was somehow
apolitical in character and that market was
neutral
 This begins the process of globalisation –
increased opening to international trade
and financial flows - which gathers
momentum during the 90’s
New Public Management
 In parallel to SAPs private sector
management processes introduced
into the public service
 Business plans, performance targets,
sources of revenue, service delivery
partnerships
 Associated with neo liberal reform
introduced by Thatcher into UK in 1979
 But involves diverse and contradictory
alliances
Contesting managerialism
 Grillo identifies a counter emphasis on
social and cultural components of
change
 Contesting dominance of economistic
and technical discourses that made
issues of social agency and cultural
identity incidental to development
policy and practice
 Emphasis on people’s local knowledge
and use of their environment
1980s

 Development reaches an impasse in

the 1980’s – the “lost decade”
 A worldwide trend of increasing poverty,
exclusion and inequality
 A crisis in development thinking linked
to the removal of socialist development
trajectories from academic and political
agendas
 Yet at the same time opportunities for
new thinking opened up
1990’s
 Booth highlights the new buzzwords
‘empowerment’, ‘enabling environment’,
‘choice’, ‘sustainability’ and the new
poverty agenda
 Francis highlights new discourses
around civil society, social exclusion and
social capital
 The concept of social capital most
commonly attributed to Putnam
 A much debated and contested concept
 (examined in more depth in a subsequent
session)
1990’s
 The Earth Summit and the parallel Global
Forum in Rio 1992 puts the spotlight on
‘sustainable development’ and boosted
environmental politics
 Outputs include the Rio Declaration on
Environment and Development, Agenda 21
and conventions on biodiversity and climate
change
 Creates the Commission on Sustainable
Development
 Also in the early 1990s Chambers and
Conway building on earlier work developed
the concept of a livelihood and identified
factors which made livelihoods sustainable
Rhetoric and reality
 The Joburg memo prepared by the
Heinrich Boll Foundation notes that
 UNCED estimated $600 billion would be
required each year between 1993 and
2000 to implement Agenda 21 in low
income countries of which 125 billion
was to come from official development
assistance
 ODA itself fell from $69 billion in 1992 to
53 billion in 2000
 Only tangible financial outcome of Rio 5
billion – mostly to the GEF
Establishment of WTO - 1995

 Further weakens regulatory

power of States with respect to
trade and financial flows
 Aims to create a borderless
market where capital and goods
(but not people) could move
freely about
The failure of development

 “The idea of development

stands like a ruin in the
development landscape.” Sachs
(1992)
 “For 2/3 of the people on earth
development is a reminder of…
what they are not.” Esteva
(1992)
The failure of development
 Wiesbrot et al compared key
indicators for the period 1960-1980
with 1980-2000 and found that
 Countries at every level of per capita
GDP performed worse in the period of
globalisation
 Poorest countries suffered a substantial
decline in the rate of increase of life
expectancy and education outcomes
 Conclude that globalisation associated
with diminished progress and increasing
poverty
Modernisation – a metatheory of
contemporary development?
 Kothari and Minogue argue that
neoliberalism is a reformulation of
modernisation theory but with
different roles assigned to the state
and the market
 Shrinking state
 Privatisation of services formerly
provided by the state
 Globalising markets and dominance of
corporations
Assimilation of alternatives

 They observe that there are no

simple dichotomies between
mainstream and alternative
development paths
 Alternative discourses of popular,
people centred, participatory, gender
and sustainable development
quickly incorporated/co-opted by the
mainstream
The new security agenda

 Impoverished South seen as a risk to

the affluent North
 Sachs argues that new development
policy has adopted a security agenda
”where prevention replaces progress
as the objective of development”
 “Catching up is out of the question –
assistance now aims at preventing
the worst scenario from happening”
Rethinking ‘development’
 Clearly there is a need to rethink
‘development’
 Growth led development does not
offset rising poverty
 Poverty is multidimensional – its not
a simple economic measure
 Sachs characterises the majority of
the world’s people as “living in a no
man’s land, exiled from tradition and
excluded from modernity”
Rethinking ‘development’

 Globalisation removes barriers

between nations but erects
barriers within nations
 Unravelling of the social contract
which lies at the core of the
redistributive state
 Reemergence of the ‘surplus
people’
Going for growth in Africa?
 Critiques of NEPAD argue that it is
underpinned by neoliberal
development policies and
programmes
 Making spaces for multinational
investment
 Protecting property rights of foreign
capital
 Privatising and patenting local knowledge
through TRIPs
 Penetration of GM – undermining food
security
Redefining ‘development’
 Enlarging people’s choices and
capabilities
 Reducing vulnerability
 Securing rights to land and resources
 Amartya Sen’s five freedoms
 Political freedom
 Economic facilities
 Social opportunities
 Transparency guarantees
 Protective security
Sustainable livelihoods
 Wealth alleviation<>poverty alleviation
 Requires policies which put democracy,
equity and environmental care above
economic growth
 Will the SL approach simply contribute to
enforcing the new security agenda?
 Will the emphasis focus on reducing risk and
vulnerability
 What potential does it have to be
transformatory?
References
Booth, D (Ed) (1994) Rethinking social development, theory, research and
practice. Longman
Danreuther, C. and Dolfsma, W. (2002) Globalisation, social capital and
inequality: an introduction. Paper presented at 5th annual conference of the
Centre for the study of globalisation and regionalisation – Globalisation,
growth and inequality
Escobar, A (1992) Planning. In Sachs, W. (Ed) The Development Dictionary –
A guide to knowledge as power. Wits University Press and Zed Books
Esteva, G (1992) Development. In Sachs, W. (Ed) The Development
Dictionary – A guide to knowledge as power. Wits University Press and
Zed Books
Grillo, R. and Stirrat (Eds) (1997) Discourses of development –
Anthropological perspectives. Berg. Oxford
IISD. Earth negotiations bulletin http://iisd.ca/linkages/2002/wssd/ WSSD final
bulleting 6 Sept 2002
Kothari, U. and Minogue (Eds) (2002) Development theory and practice –
critical perspectives Palgrave
Lechte, J. (1994) Fifty contemporary thinkers – from structuralism to post
modernity. Routledge
McNeill, J. (2000) Something new under the sun – An environmental history of
the 20th century. Penguin.
References
Sachs, W. (Ed) 2002 The Joburg memo – Fairness in a
fragile world. Memorandum for the World Summit on
Sustainable Development
Sachs, W. (2000) Development – The rise and decline of an
ideal. Wuuperthal papers No 108. Wupperthal Institute for
Climate, Environment and Energy
Wiesbrot, M. Baker, D. Kraev, E. and Chen, J. (2001) The
scorecard on globalisation 1980 – 2000 – Twenty years of
diminished progress. Briefing paper. Center for Economic
and Policy Research. Washington.
Thanks:

 www.devserve.co.za