‘Development’ in Question

Introduction

The 1980s and early 1990s were a turbulent period in the world of development. Gustavo Esteva's pithy declaration, You must be either very dumb or very rich if you fail to notice that development stinks’ (1987: 135), was a clarion call that drew many radical academics and activists into the charge against development. The Development Dictionary (1992), edited by Wolfgang Sachs, unleashed a powerful set of indictments that deconstructed the edifice of development and revealed its exercise of knowledge as power. Radical critics claimed that development was not simply an instrument of economic control over much of the non-Western world, but an invention and strategy produced by the First World’ about the underdevelopment’ of the Third World’. It needed to be abandoned altogether, and replaced by alternatives to’ development that would build on practices of new social movements that sought to create alternative visions of democracy, economy and society (Amin, 1990; Shiva, 1989; Trainer, 1989; Hettne, 1990; Parajuli, 1991; Escobar, 1992, 1995a, b).

At the opposite end of the political spectrum, the counter-revolutionaries’ of development (Toye, 1987) charged that development impeded economic growth due to policies that were protectionist, imposed excessive regulations on private industry (Balassa, 1982; Little, 1982; Lal, 1983), and encouraged ‘directly unproductive profit-seeking behaviour’ (Bhagwati, 1982). Sounding startlingly similar to Escobar, the economist P.T. Bauer went so far as to claim that ‘[T]he Third World is the creation of foreign aid: without foreign aid there is no Third World’ (1981: 87).

A decade later, and into the new millennium, development no longer seems under siege. The intervening years have seen radical critiques shift to targeting globalization and multilateral organizations. The counter-revolutionary’ critics of development also appear to be in retreat as more balanced perspectives on the role of development, states and markets emerge (Killick, 1989; Bowie, 1991; Krueger, 1993; Martinussen, 1997; Parfitt, 2002). International development agencies and NGOs are as busy as ever, engaged in poverty alleviation, micro-credit, community-based development and varied forms of sustainable development.

So, is development finally out of its ‘impasse’ and perennial ‘crises’? Has it realized what Michael Watts (1995) has called ‘a New Deal in emotions’? Is development no longer ‘in question’? Many will, I suspect, disagree, arguing that development still faces an enormous crisis in dealing with the uneven geographies and social inequalities generated by continued dominance of neoliberal ideology, globalization processes and the new imperialism (Peet and Watts, 1996; Routledge, 2002; Slater, 2002; Harvey, 2003). A few might actually agree, pointing out that development is no longer in question because the processes of globalization have created the possibility of ‘non-nationalist’ action for greater social justice across the world (Harris, 1986, 2005; Kitching, 2001).

My view is that development is both an ‘in’ and a ‘not in’ question for reasons very different from those just mentioned. Development, as it emerged in its post-Second World War form for implementation across the world, has always been in question’ because of what it sought to achieve: the creation of bounded and fixed national spaces for accumulation of wealth out of regions that, even under the strictest European colonial regimes, were never easily contained or controlled. Yet this very same development is also not in question’ [Page 564]because various identity groups — including those regarded as lower status or disadvantaged — in the post-colonies have deliberately used it to make claims on the state, and manipulated the process in order to achieve social and economic mobility. That this social and economic mobility has been uneven is incontrovertible. But precisely because of this unevenness, development has become the question’ that forms the battleground for politics and popular action in postcolonial countries. As I have mentioned elsewhere, social movements in post-colonial countries are neither for nor against development, they are part of it (Rangan, 1999, 2004).

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