Post-Development

Post-Development
 The idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual
landscape.
 Delusion and disappointment, failures and crime have been the
steady companions of development and they tell a common
story: it did not work. Development has become outdated
(Sachs, 1992: 1).
 Also referred to as `anti-development‘, `beyond development‘
and ‘alternative-to-development’ this is a radical reaction to the
impasse (no progress can be made due to disagreement) of
development theory and policy.
 Perplexity and extreme dissatisfaction with business-as-usual
and standard development rhetoric and practice, and
disillusionment with alternative development, are keynotes of
this position.
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 Post-Development
 Development theory and practice are rejected
 because it is the `new religion of the West' (Rist,
1990),
 because it is the imposition of science as power
(Nandy, 1988), giving rise to `laboratory states'
(Vishvanathan, 1988),
 because it does not work (Kothari, 1988),
 because it means cultural westernization and
homogenization (Constantino, 1985), because it
brings environmental destruction.

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 Post-Development
 `Post-development' starts out from a simple realization: that
attaining a middle-class life style for the majority of the world
population is impossible (Dasgupta, 1985).
• PD is a tradition of thinking and political action that refuses to
accept that development is somehow natural or innocent.
• Its proponents also dispute the suggestion that ‘developing
countries’ can or should follow in the footsteps of the
west/north.
• Some postdevelopmentalists go further and argue that the
discourse of development has done immense damage in the
global South.
• Arturo Escobar (1995) has famously maintained that
development produced only famine, debt and increased poverty
for the majority world.
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 Post-Development
• Post-1950 development had failed, he said,
• In this vein, postdevelopment refers to that set of
ecological, economic and cultural experiments that will
produce new and presumably better ways of being human.
• Post-development thought is really a spectrum of
oppositional thinking that mixes old and new insights in
roughly equal measure.
• At one end of the spectrum is a tradition of anti-
development thought that is frankly dismissive of
development.
• Anti-development activists reach back to Mahatma
Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy and Ruskin when they contend that
development is violent and dehumanizing.
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 Post-Development
• As early as 1908, Gandhi raged against the introduction of
manufacturing into India in his essay Hind Swaraj.
• Modern anti-developmentalism continues to draw on
Gandhi, but it also draws on more contemporary critiques
by Schumacher, Illich, Berry and others.
• For the Indian public intellectual Ashis Nandy (2003),
developmentalism is a violent set of social practices that
denies space to other accounts of being human.
• The violence that Nandy refers to is an originary violence
that resides in the will to power that development must
embody.

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 Post-Development
• By this yardstick, efforts to promote human development or
sustainable development are oxymoronic.
• Development is opposed to humanity and to forms of life
lived in harmony with other beings, and hence the call for its
negation.
• Other versions of anti-development strike a more populist
note. Development is condemned less for its intrinsic
violence – for
• creating what Esteva and Prakash (1998) call the ‘cold
calling-card mentality of the modern West’ – than for its self-
satisfied service on behalf of the global rich.
• In the words of Gustavo Esteva, ‘If you live in Rio or Mexico
City, you need to be very rich or very stupid not to notice that
development stinks.’ 7
 Post-Development
• It has taken the form of a position of total rejection of
development, crystallizing in the 1980s around the
journal Development: Seeds for Change
• and among intellectuals in Latin America (Esteva,
Escobar), India (Nandy, Vishvanathan, Rahnema,
Shiva, Alvares), Malaysia,France (Latouche, Vachon),
Switzerland (Rist), Germany (Sachs), England
(Seabrook; for example, Seabrook, 1994).
• It has become prominent since it coalesces with
ecological critiques, in books such as Sachs'
Development Dictionary, and has since become a
postmodern development genre (Crush, 1995).
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 Post-Development
• Post-development is by no means a homogeneous current. It
shows many affinities and overlaps with western critiques of
modernity, the Enlightenment and techno-scientific progress,
such as critical theory, post structuralism, ecological
movements.
• It stands to development as `deep ecology' does to
environmentalism.
• It overlaps with cultural critiques of development and with
alternative development.
• To post-development there are romantic and nostalgic strands:
reverence for community, the traditional.
• There is an element of neo-Luddism(anti-technology) in the
attitudes toward science and technology (Alvares, 1992).
• There is a strand of equating the indigenous and local with the
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original and authentic.
 Post-Development
• It shows affinity with the lineage of the Franciscans (adhere to
the teachings and spiritual disciplines of Saint Francis of
Assisi), liberation theology and Gandhian politics, but the
methodology, theoretical framework and politics of post-
development are Foucauldian.
• Its methodological premise is discourse analysis of
development (focusing on power relationships in society as
expressed through language and practices) .
• Post-development's programme is one of resistance rather than
emancipation.
• Its horizon is made up of local resistance, local struggles a la
Foucault, disavowing a universal agenda.
• Post-development generally belongs to the era of the `post‘-
poststructuralism, postmodernism. It is premised on an
10
awareness of endings, on `the end of modernity'.
 Post-Development
 Escober, Arturo (1995), ‘Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of
the Third World’
 Rahman, Anisur (1993), ‘People’s Self-development: Perspective on Participatory
Action Research’
 Rahnema, Majid (1993), ‘The Post-Development Reader’
 Latouche, Serge (1993), In the Wake of Affluent Society: An Explanation of Post-
Development’
 Sachs, Wolfgang (1992), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge and
Power’
 Gandhi,Mohandas: Hind Swaraj (1909)
 Rist, Gilbert (2003), ’The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global
Faith’
 Illich, Ivan (1973), ‘Tools for Conviviality’
 Esteva, Gustavo (1998), Beware of Participation’ Development: Seeds of Change
3:77
 Ferguson, James (1994), 1994, The Anti-Politics Machine : Development,
Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho’
 Seabrooks, Jerremy (1994), ‘Victims of Development Resistance and Alternatives’
 Asish Nandy, Madhu Suri Prakash 11
 PD-Proponents-Escober
• Escobar concurs that development is a `Frankenstein-type
dream', an `alien model of exploitation‘ and reflects urban bias
(Escobar, 1992: 419).
• `The dream of Development is over' and what is needed is `Not
more Development but a different regime of truth and
perception' .
• Escobar is `not interested in ‘Development alternatives’, but
rather in ‘alternatives to Development'.
• Basic to Escobar's approach is the `nexus with grassroots
movements'. He evokes a `we' which comprises `peasants,
urban marginals, deprofessionalized intellectuals'.
• The grassroots orientation disrupts the link between
development, capital and science and thus destabilizes the
`grid of the Development apparatus' (ibid: 424).
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 PD-Proponents-Escober
• The problem with `Development', is that it is external, based on
the model of the industrialized world.
• What is needed instead are `more endogenous discourses'.
• As nodal points he mentions three major discourses
-democratization, difference and anti-Development-which can
serve as the `basis for radical anti-capitalist struggles'.
• What is `needed is the expansion and articulation of anti-
imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-productivist, anti-market
struggles' (ibid: 431).
• Again this is the aspiration toward the construction of a grand
coalition of opposition forces, combined with a Foucauldian
search `toward new power-knowledge regimes‘ (ibid: 432).

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 PD-Proponents-Escober
• Escobar also draws on work produced by dependency theorists
in the 1960s, including Frank. Like many others, he maintains
that the dominant model of economic modernization in the North
cannot be exported to the global south.
• The core countries use their power to prevent balanced
development.
• It would also be unwise, and probably impossible, for the
majority world to copy the ecologically exploitative model of
development pursued in the North.
• He perceives development as a form of Governmentality.
• Escobar argued that the third world had been invented by
American aid programmes as the residual in a cold war struggle
between the 1st and 2nd Worlds.
• Colonialism produced this diverse mix of countries as a singular
space that henceforth would be defined by its ‘mass poverty’14
and pathological lack of development.
 PD-Proponents-Escober
• Escobar argued that an imagined geography of
underdevelopment was constructed by a discourse of
development that infantilized the majority world in relation to a
mythical view of a perfect and benevolent West.
• Under the sign of development, Western experts (aid workers,
technicians, military personnel) were then set free in the Third
World ostensibly to secure its own dissolution.
• Escobar’s work has been important in forcing a re-evaluation of
the (un)productive work performed by developmentalism.
• By linking the study of development to geopolitics, Escobar was
able to raise important questions about the meanings of
colonialism.
• Was development not simply the continuation of colonialism by
another name? Did it not turn Third World men and women into
a set of experimental subjects, to be dissected later in a 15
museum or university?
 PD-Proponents-Latouche
• Serge Latouche’s In the Wake of the Affluent Society
(1993)
• argued that the Western dream of la grande société (the
great society, the open society, the affluent society)
promised affluence and liberty for all. Yet, these
possibilities were, like film star status, achievable only for
a few.
• For Latouche, the West had become an impersonal
machine—devoid of spirit and therefore of a master—that
put humanity at its service.
• To ensure their own survival, Third World societies needed
to subvert this homogenizing movement by changing their
terms of reference to escape the disempowerment
inherent in development. 16
 PD-Proponents-Latouche
• Underdevelopment is primarily a cultural form of domination.
• Latouche saw the West coming apart and the development
myth collapsing.
• His main theme was the “post-Western world,” an imagined
future that could be explored via its early beginnings in the
informal sectors of economies.
• The informal sector, for Latouche, was part of a whole social
context involving neotribal people with residual or newly
reinvented cultural identities, people with oddball metaphysical
or religious beliefs, people whose pattern of daily rituals or
practices defied reason or even belief—
• all of which he interpreted as signs of resistance indicating that
people in the informal sector preferred another form of
community.
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 PD-Proponents-Ferguson
• In The Anti-Politics Machine Ferguson describes the failure of
the development project to properly understand the cultural and
economic values of the people of Lesotho.
• This misunderstanding led to misappropriation of resources by
the international community and myriad negative consequences
for Basotho.
• While individual development projects fail on a regular basis,
they combine to produce an anti-politics machine that
substitutes the technical jargon of development for concerted
public discussion of gender relations, land rights, the nature of
the state and so on.
• Development has NOT failed. Rather, it is that a reasonably
diverse range of development interventions has failed to end
rural poverty in Lesotho, but has succeeded, sometimes
unwittingly, in extending bureaucratic state power in the
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countryside and creating unintended consequences.
 PD-Proponents-Majid Rehnema
• Majid Rahnema addresses the question of which path to take
directly in his conclusion to the Post-Development Reader.
• Rahnema admits that it may be true that a large majority of
people, whose lives are in fact difficult, do want change.
• But the answer he suggests is not development but the "end of
development".
• He says that the end of development is not "An end to the
search for new possibilities of change, for a relational world of
friendship, or for genuine processes of regeneration able to
give birth to new forms of solidarity".
• Rather, Rahnema argues, the "inhumane and the ultimately
destructive approach to change is over. It should resemble a
call to the 'good people' everywhere to think and work
together."
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 Post-Development-Propositions
• Radical Pluralism
• Drawing on the ideas of Wendell Berry, Mahatma Gandhi, Ivan
Ilich, Leopold Kohr, Fritz Schumacher and others (The
Ecologist), post-developmentalists believe that the true problem
of the modern age lies in the inhuman scale of contemporary
institutions and technologies.
• When people become enmeshed in global structures, they lack
the centralized power necessary for global action.
• To make a difference, actions should not be grandiosely global
but rather humbly local.
• Thus, Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash (1997)
amended René Dubos’s slogan “Think globally, act locally” to
simply “Think and act locally”—
• that is, in their view people could think wisely only about things
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they actually knew well.
 Post-Development-Propositions
• Radical Pluralism
• They also urged support of local initiatives by small
grassroots groups—growing food, for example, in
villages where collective or communal rights had
priority over personal or individual rights.
• While local people might need outside allies to form a
critical mass of political opposition, more often the
opposite was true.
• People thinking and acting locally could usually find
others to share their opposition to the global forces
threatening local spaces.
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 Post-Development-Propositions
 Simple Living.
 “Simple living” appeared in two related versions, one
ecological, and the other spiritual.
 In the ecological argument, demands made on nature by
the industrial countries (20% of the world’s people
consuming 80% of the energy and raw materials) had to
be reduced substantially in a half-century.
 Achieving this goal would necessitate more than just
efficient resource management—
 it would require a “sufficiency revolution”! A society in
balance with nature presupposed both intelligent
rationalization of means but more importantly prudent
selection of ends (Sachs 1997). 22
 Post-Development-Propositions
 Degrowth
 The idea of “degrowth” refers to intentional downscaling of
economic production and consumption to assure that society’s
resource use and waste disposal stay within safe ecological
bounds.
 Efficiency and technological improvements by themselves
cannot entirely reverse climate change, the destruction of the
ecosystem, or resource depletion—hence, the scale of the
economy inevitably has to shrink as well.
 Because negative economic returns are inherently socially
unstable, degrowth proponents argue for a “prosperous way
down” or for “socially sustainable economic degrowth”
(Martinez-Alier 2009).

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 Post-Development-Propositions
 Reappraising noncapitalist societies. Here the basic idea was
that life in the previous nondeveloped world had not been so
bad after all:
 They had no cars, no Internet and none of the consumer goods
to which modern men and women are now addicted.
 They had no laws and no social security to protect them, no
“free press,” no “opposition party,” no “elected leaders.”
 But they had no less time for leisure, or, paradoxically were no
less economically “productive” for the things they needed.
 And, contrary to the racist cliches in vogue, they were not
always governed by cannibals and tyrants. Effective personal
and collective moral obligations often took the place of legal
provisions. (Rahnema 1997: 379–381)
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 Post-Development-Propositions
 Rejection of Alternative Development
• PD is not interested in alternative development but rather in
alternative to development.
• alternative development occupies an in-between position: it
shares the radical critiques of mainstream development while
retaining belief in development and redefining it.
• Alternative development is rejected because `most of the efforts
are also products of the same world view which has produced
the mainstream concept of science, liberation and development'
(Nandy, 1989: 270).
• The fact that it presents a friendly exterior makes ``alternative''
development all the more dangerous'. This echoes Esteva's
fulminating against those who `want to cover the stench of
``Development'' with ``Alternative Development'' as a
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deodorant‘.
 Post-Development-Propositions
 Rejection of Alternative Development
• Alternative development primarily looks at development from
the point of view of the local and grassroots; its looks at
development along a vertical axis, from a bottom-up point of
view.
• On the whole, post-development adopts a wider angle in
looking at development through the lens of the broad
problematic of modernity.
• `The debate over the word ``development'' ', according to
Latouche (ibid: 160), `is not merely a question of words.
Whether one likes it or not, one can't make development
different from what it has been.
• Development has been and still is the Westernisation of the
world'.
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 Post-Development-Propositions
 Into such societies a misguided version of development can
introduce a high-octane consumerist society run amok which
can deprive people of those things that had given meaning and
mental comfort to their lives.
 Development projects sometimes communicate that traditional
modes of thinking and practice doom people to a subhuman
condition from which nothing short of fundamental change can
elicit respect from the civilized world.
 The main argument in favor of development was that it was a
generous response to millions who asked for help.
 But development had little to do with the desires of the “target”
populations.

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 Post-Development-Propositions
 The hidden agenda involved geopolitical objectives. Requests
for aid came from unrepresentative governments rather than
the people.
 Far from marking the end of the search for a new, more
humane development, postdevelopmentalism, instead, signified
that the old self-destructive, inhumane approach was over
(Rahnema 1997).
• In general, postdevelopmentalism rejects the way of thinking
and the mode of living produced by modern development in
favor of revitalized versions of non-modern, usually non-
Western, philosophies and cultures.
• Thus modern Western development is destructive rather than
generative, a force to be resisted rather than welcomed. In a
phrase, development is precisely the problem, not the solution.
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• Can development be both—problem and a solution?.
 Post-Development-Critique
 There is a large body of works which are critical of post-
development theory and its proponents.
• Post-Development/`Alternatives to development' is a misnomer
because no alternatives to development are offered. What is
the point of declaring development a `hoax' (Norberg-Hodge,
1995) without proposing an alternative?
• There is no positive programme; there is critique but no
construction. `Post-development' is misconceived because in
the prefix it reinstates the linear concept of time, which is being
rejected in `development'.
• It attributes to `development' a single and narrow meaning, a
consistency which does not match either theory or policy, and
thus replicates the rhetoric of developmentalism, rather than
penetrating and exposing its polysemic realities.
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 Post-Development-Critique
• While the shift toward cultural sensibilities that accompanies this
perspective is a welcome move, the plea for `people's culture',
indigenous culture, local knowledge and culture, can lead, if not
to ethnochauvinism.
 It has been noted that post-development theory sees all
development as imposed upon the developing world by the
West. Marc Edelman notes that a large proportion of
development has risen from, ( not imposed upon), the
developing world.
 There are a number of more fundamental objections to the PD
school. The first is that it overstates its case.
 A rejection of all development is a rejection of the possibility for
material advancement and transformation. It ignores the tangible
transformations in life opportunities and health and material well-
being that has been evident in parts of the 3rd world. 30
 Post-Development-Critique
 Moreover, development itself is so varied and carries so
many meanings that critiques need to be specific about
their intention when they claim to be "post- development".
 By damning development all together, post-development
theorists fail to notice the heterogeneity within
development discourse.
 They categorize all development under the umbrella of
Western hegemony, contradictively applying the same sort
of essentialist generalization post-development theorists
reject.
 Critics also argue that post-development perpetuates
cultural relativism: the idea that cultural beliefs and
practices can be judged only by those who practice them.
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 Post-Development-Critique
 By accepting all cultural behaviors and beliefs as valid and
rejecting a universal standard for living and understanding life,
critics of post-development argue, post-development represents
the opposite extreme of universalism, extreme relativism.
 Such a relativist extreme, rather than besting extreme
universalism, has equally dangerous implications.
 John Rapley points out that "rejection of essentialism rests itself
on an essentialist claim – namely, that all truth is constructed
and arbitrary.
 Kiely also argues that by rejecting a top-down, centralized
approach to development and promoting development through
local means, post-development thought perpetuates neo-liberal
ideals.

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 Post-Development-Critique
 Kiely remarks that "The argument - upheld by dependency and
post-development theory - that the First World needs the Third
World, and vice versa, rehearses neo-liberal assumptions that
the world is an equal playing field in which all nation states have
the capacity to compete equally.
 In other words, making locals responsible for their own
predicament, post-development unintentionally agrees with
neo-liberalist ideology that favors decentralized projects and
ignores the possibility of assisting impoverished demographics,
instead making the fallacious assumption that such
demographics must succeed on their own initiative alone.
 Kiely notes that not all grassroots movements are progressive.
Post-development is seen to empower anti-modern
fundamentalists and traditionalists, who may hold non-
progressive and oppressive values.[ 33
 Post-Development-Conclusion
 Post-development is undergoing a metamorphosis. From its
early beginnings as an angry collection of critiques that saw
only oppression and injustice within development industries it is
broadening to incorporate a research programme that seeks
out opportunities and possibilities in a range of contemporary
social and economic processes.
 While the project of defining and critiquing development
continues researchers are now experimenting with what post-
development practices might look like, not in terms of
opposition to development, but in its own terms and derived
from its own theoretical principles.
 This reconfiguration owes much to Marxist and practitioner
critiques of the usefulness and consequences of a development
theory based on abstract post-structural principles in the
context of severe and very real global inequality and injustice..
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 Post-Development-Conclusion
 Attempts to make post-development practical are still in their
infancy and a source of scepticism and debate yet reverberations
can be seen in global civil society events, in development
geography textbooks (e.g. Power 2003), in development industry
reports (e.g. UNDP 2007), and some counterculture magazines,
suggesting a growing interest in such ideas.
 At the very least post-development has destabilised the self-
evident norms, truths and languages of development by directing
attention to how development discourses are produced and reified
and initiated discussions about alternatives.
 Its future will depend on how well researchers can seize on the
opportunities that are enabled through this deconstruction and
contribute usefully to people’s struggles to improve their lives. This
latter project has only just begun and needs to be couched in a
culture of possibility and experimentation rather than negativities,
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if it is to flourish.