To rethink development is an essential task if the term is to have any meaning for us at all today. As an area of study and as a policy intervention in the Global South, it has taken on a somewhat absolutist, yet at the same time a rather vacuous, character.
While the modalities and theories of development proliferate, its overall benign and beneficial nature is simply taken for granted. What we need to consider is whether the modernist vision of development has been replaced by a postmodernist one.
Development – in its dominant forms – is, in reality, a Western or Northern discourse. It is a linear and teleological (heading towards a predefined end) perspective that has complete faith in the inexorability of human progress, so long as that prescriptive model is followed. It simply assumes the universal benefits of the model, in the form of secular utopianism as it were, and a self-conception that it is ultimately doing good in a general way. In the 1990s, this development paradigm reached its zenith with the advent of capitalist globalisation and the demise of state socialist and state capitalist alternative models. The project or utopia of globalisation did not, however, fully materialise despite its discursive hegemony on both the right and left for decades. We have clearly not witnessed the ‘great convergence’ of the Global North and South and the eradication of poverty that was promised. Rather, we have seen a greater degree of inequality between and within nations, but also a concerted resistance to the universal development model with a resurgence of alternative development visions.
Karl Marx shared much of the European concept of development and modernisation. This is nowhere more clearly seen than in the Communist Manifesto with its lyrical phrase ‘all that is solid melts into air’, echoing the famous Yeats phrase: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that ‘the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’. This was, for them, a truly revolutionary mode of production that would advance some version of ‘development’ by leaps and bounds. This revolutionary mode of production would create a situation where ‘all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away… All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’. Development was a one-way process, sweeping all traditional impediments aside. Capitalism was a dynamic mode of production such as had never been seen before and it would transform the rest of the world in its image, sweeping away tradition and superstition. It was seen in the Marxist tradition as revolutionary and a necessary stepping stone for socialism and communism that would inevitably follow it as the means of production entered into contradiction with the relations of production.
As the promise of development faded in the 1980s, an anti-development mood would inevitably set in. This was captured well by Gustavo Esteva who proclaimed that ‘you had to be very rich or very stupid to not understand that development stinks’. As with the original world view of ‘modernity’, there was always a counterview that we could call ‘romantic’, which was essentially anti-modernity and anti-development. The post-development discourse emerged in the 1980s as it became clear that modernisation theory did not, in reality, allow the majority of the world’s population to ‘catch up’ with the income and lifestyle of the originally industrialised countries. The post-development discourse was also critical of the ‘truth regime’ of the dominant development theory, how it defined poverty and sought to impose a universal blueprint for development worldwide. Post-development, in brief, was not just seeking to improve or reform the dominant development narrative but to subvert it.
Given that there is no clearer metanarrative than ‘development’, it was not surprising to see a ‘post-development’ approach emerging out of the ferment created by postmodernism in the 1990s. Arturo Escobar’s mid-1990s Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World was a landmark exposition of this critique: Post-development, as Escobar wrote, ‘was meant to convey the sense of an era in which development would no longer be a central organiser of social life’. Heavily influenced by Foucault’s method of discourse analysis, Escobar effectively dismantled the ethnocentric and managerial assumptions of the US-promoted development model. Attaining a middle class, ‘developed’ lifestyle was simply not possible or even desirable, some argued, for the majority of the world’s population. We needed to think ‘beyond’ development, given the way it was now being increasingly seen as a totally negative enterprise, at least in critical academic discourse; or put more succinctly, ‘development stinks’.
In the Global Discourse issue on New Perspectives on Development, Ronaldo Munck opens with a review of the complex history of Marxism’s engagement with development, starting with Marx’s own shift from a somewhat unilinear notion of development to one that was more open-ended. Adam Fishwick turns next to the global changes caused by globalisation in terms of value chains and changing labour processes that are central to this new understanding of development. Henry Veltmeyer examines the return of extractivism as a main plank of capital accumulation in the Global South. Mick Dunford uses the long-term development models in China as a way to illustrate how neoliberalism is not the only path to development.
Kalpana Wilson problematises the response of Global North non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to the Black Lives Matter movement. Sofia Zaragocin and colleagues emphasise the ways in which Black feminist scholarship and practice have been invisibilised in Ecuador. Two Convivial Thinkers explore the possibilities and limitations of decolonising development in the context of their own positioning within Global North academic institutions. Benita Siloko’s article, finally, argues for the importance of bringing the concept of human security into dialogue with sustainable livelihoods and environmental degradation.
As a whole, the collection offers both an overview of new perspectives on development and a series of diverse positions from which further critical work can emerge.
Ronaldo Munck is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Civic Engagement at Dublin City University. He is author of Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives and a contributing author of the International Panel on Social Progress Report on Rethinking Society for the 21st Century.
Matthew Johnson is Professor of Public Policy, Northumbria University, and editor of Global Discourse. He is Chair of the Common Sense Policy Group, whose Beveridge-style report, Act Now: A Vision for a Better Future and a New Social Contract, is released in July.
Katy Jenkins is Professor in International Development, Northumbria University. She is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar with specialisms in gender and development; women’s activism and volunteering; gender and large-scale resource extraction; NGOs, professionalisation and the changing nature of civil society.
New perspectives on development by Katy Jenkins, Matthew Thomas Johnson, and Ronaldo Munck is published in Global Discourse and is available on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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