development supplement

GDI Scholars 1Development K

Development supplement

Development supplement...................................................................................................................................................... 1***NEG................................................................................................................................................................................. 2Govt to govt links.................................................................................................................................................................. 3Aid Links ............................................................................................................................................................................... 4Listening links ....................................................................................................................................................................... 5Poverty links.......................................................................................................................................................................... 6Poverty links.......................................................................................................................................................................... 7Civil society aid links............................................................................................................................................................ 8Civil society aid links............................................................................................................................................................ 9Civil society aid links.......................................................................................................................................................... 10Population Links ................................................................................................................................................................. 11Environment Links.............................................................................................................................................................. 12Technology Links................................................................................................................................................................ 13Disaster Porn links .............................................................................................................................................................. 14Crisis rhetoric links ............................................................................................................................................................. 15“Third World” links ............................................................................................................................................................ 16Participatory Development Bad.......................................................................................................................................... 17Participatory Development Bad.......................................................................................................................................... 18Participatory Development Bad.......................................................................................................................................... 19Development ‡ extermination............................................................................................................................................. 20Turns the case...................................................................................................................................................................... 21Alternative: criticism........................................................................................................................................................... 22Alternative: deconstruction................................................................................................................................................. 23A2: Agency.......................................................................................................................................................................... 24A2: Agency.......................................................................................................................................................................... 25A2: Development Inevitable............................................................................................................................................... 26A2: Masking ........................................................................................................................................................................ 27A2: Perm.............................................................................................................................................................................. 28A2: Re-appropriation .......................................................................................................................................................... 29A2: Re-appropriation .......................................................................................................................................................... 30***AFF ANSWERS ........................................................................................................................................................... 31Development 2AC............................................................................................................................................................... 32Development 2AC............................................................................................................................................................... 33Agency................................................................................................................................................................................. 34Homogenization / agency ................................................................................................................................................... 35Re-appropriation.................................................................................................................................................................. 36Crack to development ......................................................................................................................................................... 37Work within the system ...................................................................................................................................................... 38Work within the system ...................................................................................................................................................... 39Monolithic ........................................................................................................................................................................... 40No Alternative ..................................................................................................................................................................... 41No Alternative ..................................................................................................................................................................... 42A2: Crisis rhetoric / demonization link .............................................................................................................................. 43A2: Speaking for others ...................................................................................................................................................... 44A2: “Third World” link....................................................................................................................................................... 45A2: “poverty” link.............................................................................................................................................................. 46A2: “poverty” link.............................................................................................................................................................. 47A2: Escobar ......................................................................................................................................................................... 48A2: Latouche ....................................................................................................................................................................... 49A2: Rahnema....................................................................................................................................................................... 50Development has good aspects........................................................................................................................................... 51


***NEG


Govt to govt links

Development is a top-down approach to Western notions of progressArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making andUnmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.44

The most important exclusion, however, was and continues to be what development was supposed to be allabout: people. Development was- and continues to be for the most part- a top-down, ethnocentric, andtechnocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved upand down in the charts of “progress.” Development was conceived not as a cultural process (culture was aresidual variable, to disappear with the advance of modernization) but instead as a system of more or lessuniversally applicable technical interventions intended to deliver some “badly needed” goods to a “target”population. It comes as no surprise that development became a force so destructive to Third World cultures,ironically in the name of people’s interests.


Aid Links

Aid is Western management of the otherGraham Hancock, Lords of Poverty, 1989, p.22-3

But other difficulties persist which defy simple managerial solutions. At the root of these is the humanitarianethic itself in which aid becomes something that the rich compassionately bestow upon the poor to save themfrom themselves. Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher best summed up this patronising attitude when shesaid of Ethiopian peasant farmers: `We have to try to teach them the basics of long-term husbandry. The truth isthat there is very little we can teach these tenacious and courageous people about the basics of their trade thatthey do not already know far better than we do; they have been extracting a living-and often a surplus from theharsh eroded mountainsides of their homeland for millennia. What they do need, if they need anything, is themeans to maintain their productivity in the face of escalating ecological disaster. Mrs Thatcher's thinking on thesubject, however, is indicative of the manner in which aid becomes transformed by the strange alchemy of mercyfrom mere neutral material help into something that `we', the rich, do to `them', the poor. Between the rich andpoor constituencies are òur' representatives in the field, the middle-men - the voluntary, governmental andmultilateral organisations that mobilise and deliver the aid. These organisations are riddled through and throughwith notions of compassion that are, as one observer has put it, ìnherently ethnocentric, paternalistic andnon-professional'. Their stag' are outsiders in the unindustrialised countries in which they work. They hail fromsocieties which believe themselves to be more highly evolved than others (that is, from developed as opposed tounderdeveloped societies) and which are deeply convinced of the superiority of their own values and of thesupremacy of their technical knowledge. Precisely because of such attitudes, a medical programme for Ugandanrefugees in southern Sudan was run during 1984 by a European nurse while a fully qualified Ugandan doctor(himself a refugee) was given only minor responsibilities. A former principal of a Ugandan agricultural collegewas also among the refugees. He was unemployed, according to Oxford anthropologist Barbara Harrell-Bondwho was then conducting research is the camps. However: The agencies drafted in a number of inexperiencedand less qualified personnel from the US and Europe to run the agricultural programme for refugees. Theadvertisement for one position of agricultural adviser illustrates the point. The advertisement asked for applicants who would be able to teachUgandan farmers how to grow sorghum, sweet potatoes, and cassava, whereas the most serious problem the refugees faced was lack of hoesand seeds. In one African country I met an anthropologist from Manchester University who had been contracted by Britain's OverseasDevelopment Administration to do a survey amongst settled farmers in a tropical area that was about to be extensively sprayed to eradicatetsetse fly (and in which limited spraying had already begun). What he discovered, after conducting detailed interviews, was that the localpeople were bitterly opposed to the project. Many of their chickens, which contributed an important part of their diet, had been killed by theinitial spraying and they did not want to lose any more. In addition, they were apprehensive that once the tsetse flies were gone nomadicherdsmen would move livestock in and destroy their crops (cattle cannot graze in areas of tsetse infestation because of trypanosomiasis). Theanthropologist's findings were ignored by ODA, which went ahead with the spraying anyway (indeed, it is difficult to see why the surveywas commissioned in the first place; the decision to bombard the area with insecticide had been made sometime before and was, according tothe anthropologist, irrevocable). This is, unfortunately, typical of the way in which àid' decisions are made without reference tothose whom they will most immediately affect. Only a very few researchers from the industrialised countries(they are predominantly anthropologists or ecologists, who have no influence upon what happens) listen to theopinions of the supposed `beneficiaries' of the processes of development and have any degree of access to whatone observer has called `the rich and detailed system of knowledge of the poor'. Aid workers, on the other hand,who are directly engaged in development, àre ignorant of and conditioned to despise that knowledge'. In generalthe bigger, the more prestigious and the more bureaucratised the agency the more inclined it will be to despiseand thus ignore the wishes and opinions of its clients. Once again, the negative and often murderousconsequences of the wide prevalence of this state of mind amongst expatriates who administer aid programmesbecome most tragically apparent in the delayed, inadequate and inapposite responses that they make tocatastrophes. Their responses to other kinds of aid challenge - those concerned with long-term developmentrather than with short-term emergencies - are conditioned by the same attitudes of cultural and technicalsuperiority and are thus equally wrong-headed, as other parts of this book will show. But disasters, by their verynature, tend to bring things out into the open with the result that the failures of the aid agencies in this particularsetting are more conspicuous than elsewhere - and thus are more frequently exposed by the mass media.


Listening links

Listening in the context of development reinforces Western dominationLarry Lohmann, The Ecologist, Jan-Feb, 1993

Even the “sharing” and “exchange” between Southern and Northern cultures which is proposed by the mostprogressive development thinkers as a response to decades of imposed development models can do littlemore than reinforce a unitary system of Western domination. It is the dominant, after all, who are usuallymost eager to make themselves understood, “celebrate diversity”, or “make the people visible”; the oppressedoften have good reason to remain silent in the presence of a superior power which could use their knowledgeagainst them.


Poverty links

Poverty is a loaded word. It implies material goods are all that is relevantMd Anisur Rahman, People’s Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research, economist whoheaded the ILO’s Programme on Participatory Organizations for the Rural Poor, 1993, p. 136

One might even say that the very notion of 'poverty', conventionally conceived in consumeristic terms,distracts from the human need to be fulfilled by creative acts. The first man, or woman, or the first humancommunity, was not 'poor' for not having any clothes to put on or shelter to house the body: it was thebeginning of life, to move forward from there, by creating and constructing with one's own priorities, i.e.with self- determination. People become poor when their resources are appropriated by others, therebydenying them not only the basic material means of survival but more fundamentally, through dependence onothers for survival, their self-determination. The communities whose efforts at authentic development arereported in this chapter may be 'poor' by the material standards of the so-called 'rich', but are immensely richthemselves in the culture and values they are showing in the way they are moving forward as part of a self-determined collective endeavour.

They deny agency by appropriating the word poverty to imply a lack. That masksliberatory visions of doing withoutJan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000

Poverty is in the eye of the beholder. Sachs (1989) distinguishes between frugality, as in subsistenceeconomies; destitution, which can arise when subsistence economies are weakened through the interferenceof growth strategies; and scarcity, which arises when the logic of growth and accumulation has taken overand commodity-based need becomes the overriding logic. In this early work, Sachs's policy recommendationis to implement growth strategies with caution and to build on frugal life styles. This matches therecommendations made all along by `ecological developers' such as the agronomist Rene Dumont (1965,1974), to follow growth strategies in parallel with appropriate technology and maximum use of localresources. But the rejection of either growth or development does not follow. `Poverty' is not simply adeficit, for that would assume simply adopting the commodity-based perspective of the North; `poverty' canalso be a resource. Attributing agency to the poor is a common principle in alternative approaches such as`conscientisation' a la Paulo Freire, human-scale development (Max-Neef, 1982, 1991; Chambers, 1983),participatory action research and the actor-orientated approach. According to Rahnema, while poverty is realenough, it is also a culturally and historically variable notion. `The way planners, development actomaniacsand politicians living off global poverty alleviation campaigns are presenting their case, gives the uninformedpublic a distorted impression of how the world's impoverished are living their deprivations. Not only arethese people presented as incapable of doing anything intelligent by themselves, but also as preventing themodern do-gooders from helping them.' (1992: 169) This is a different issue: it concerns the representation ofpoverty. By way of counterpoint, Rahnema draws attention to `vernacular universes' that provide hope andstrength; to the spiritual dimension (`Most contemporary grassroots movements have a strong spiritualdimension', p 171); and to `convivial poverty', `that is, voluntary or moral poverty' (p 171). This suggestsaffinity with the lineage of the Franciscans, liberation theology and Gandhian politics. In this view, it is theeconomics of development that is truly pauperising.


Poverty links

Their focus on needs unmet treats the South as dependent, rather than people to cooperatewithMd Anisur Rahman, People’s Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research, economist who

headed the ILO’s Programme on Participatory Organizations for the Rural Poor, 1993, p. 185-6I suggest that a focus on economic needs and economic 'poverty', a culture of development discourse thatbecomes preoccupied with what the people do not have, gets trapped in the negative thinking and dependenceorientation that this generates, rather than motivating the society to become constructively engaged inmoving forward. With a constructive engagement, the people show imaginative ways of progressivelyfulfilling their needs and urges. This includes, naturally, their need and urge for economic betterment.However, in view of what has been said above, it is the constructive engagement, rather than economicachievement per se, which is the more universal aspect of popular initiatives - the fact that the people aremobilised, engaged in tasks set by themselves and going about them together, pooling resources and energywhereby they can do better than walking alone, drawing strength and sustaining power from a shared life andeffort. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail (in their own terms); but through all this they moveforward in the evolution of (search for) their lives. It is such a positive evolution that is possible, and this isimportant in its own right, both for the people involved and for the future generations to whom they can passon the heritage of constructive social engagement to move through life with all its odds, showing theircreativity and a spirit of tackling challenges, developing thereby as a human personality.


Civil society aid links

Turn: Neocolonialism - Aid dependence reproduces oppression and povertyFrantz Fanon, 1964, postcolonial psychologist, Toward the African Revolution, p.120In the course of the struggle for liberation, things are not clear in the consciousness of the fighting people. Since it isa refusal, at one and the same time, of political non-existence, of wretchedness, of illiteracy, of the inferioritycomplex so subtly instilled by oppression, its battle is for a long time undifferentiated. Neo-colonialism takesadvantage of this indetermination. Armed with a revolutionary and spectacular good will, it grants the former colonyeverything. But in so doing, it wrings from it an economic dependence which becomes an aid and assistanceprogram. We have seen that this operation usually triumphs. The novelty of this phase is that it is necessarily brief.This is because it takes the people little time to realize that nothing fundamental has changed. Once the hours ofeffusion and enthusiasm before the spectacle of the national flag floating in the wind are past, the people rediscoversthe first dimension of its requirement: bread, clothing, shelter.

Turn: scarcity - short term improvements are overwhelmed by economic modernization’senslavement and cultural destructionMajid Rahnema, guest prof at University of California Berkeley and former member of UNDP ,The Development

Dictionary, 1993, p.168-9Certainly, the economic approach to life may well lead for a time to a massive or more efficient production of goodsand commodities, that is, a development of things. Yet both the resources and the needs it creates inevitably lead toa situation of permanent scarcity where not only the poor and the destitute, but even the rich, have always less thanthey desire. Moreoever, regardless of the level of wealth reached by a society, it is a fact that the poor are alwaysthe ones who suffer the most from the gap generated between their needs and the economically produced scarceresources. This is particularly so as the same economy increasingly imputes to them new needs of its own, evermore difficult to meet. Thus, it is becoming clearer to many that, however their needs may be defined, it is not onlyan illusion, but a contradiction in terms, to expect that economy could ever satisfy their needs. Economy can indeedproduce a lot of commodities and services to relieve a particular set of needs. But as it disvalues and often destroysa whole range of other human activities which, for the majority of people, continue to be vital for meeting theirneeds, the disabling effects of those relief operations are indeed highly negative in the long run. The overwhelmingmajority in the world still shape and satisfy their needs thanks to the network of human relationships they preservewithin their vernacular spaces, and thanks to the many forms of solidarity, co-operation and reciprocity they developwithin their communities. Their activities are generally concrete responses to concrete and immediate problems,enabling the people involved to produce both the changes and the things they need. The modern economy disvaluesthese activities and presses, or forces, people to abandon them. It seeks to reduce everyone into becoming the agentof an invisible national or world economy, geared only to producing things for whoever can pay for them. In otherwords, in the name of poverty alleviation, it only forces the poor to work for others rather than for themselves.



Pressure for development success transforms into harsher management and tyrannyAlan Rew, U of Wales, Discourses of Development, 1997, p.101While there have been significant changes in official social development knowledge, and amendments to currentdevelopment discourse as a consequence, the reforms in favour of social action and 'participation' should not beoverstated. The recent emphasis has been more on the development and use of a suite of techniques and methodsand less on the critical appraisal of the methods and their use. The selection of techniques is not especially importantwhen compared to the need to vest planning responsibilities in common-purpose groups that are appropriate to thetask and aim at issue and to a prior understanding of the social and cultural conditions governing effectiveparticipation in planning. Social development specialists working in the aid agencies have argued strongly for grantsor donations of aid with which their agencies could lever agreement on social goals (such as poverty reduction) andensure that there was room within which to manoeuvre the enhancement of basic and technical human skills andallow the expression of cultural meanings to 'development'. Their efforts have been rewarded with some recentsuccess. At the same time, however, there is increasing pressure on aid budgets and the growth of various critiques,and also fatalism, about the aim of global poverty reduction through aid. Aid administrators are required todemonstrate that the money they are allocated has actually been spent and that it has been spent wisely. They areincreasingly subject to indicators of effectiveness, accountability, disbursement and visible impact. These pressuresare transmitted into increasing demands for rationality and clarity in the definition of project aims and aid-use.Although the aid project planners always state that aims and means may need to change in response to wider socialand economic events, the current emphasis is on the effective supply of aid rather than the donation of enablinggrants which are tolerant of long periods of social experimentation and capacity building. The danger is that thepressures on development aid will be turned into pressures on social development specialists for methods which givemore and more control over aid supply and over the management of ‘popular consultation’ by government and otheraid agencies.

Large scale projects trample the poorRobert McCorquodale, Associate Professor in International and Public Law in the Faculty of Law, TheAustralian National University. Richard Fairbrother former research assistant to Robert McCorquodale,

Human Rights Quarterly 21.3 1999 pg. 735-764.For most developing states, particularly those in Africa, economic growth is often fostered through large-scaleexternal investment. This investment comes from globalized economic institutions, such as inter-governmentalinstitutions, including the World Bank and the IMF, or transnational corporations. 38 This argument, therefore,concludes that economic growth through globalization leads to the protection of economic rights such as the right toan adequate standard of living and the right to development. However, the reality is somewhat different in mostinstances. There are at least three reasons for this: the type of investment, the basis for investment decisions, and thetype of economic growth. First, a great deal of the investment arising from globalized economic sources for thepurposes of "development" is allocated only to certain types of projects, such as the building of dams, roads, andrunways, and the creation of large-scale commercial farms. There is little or no investment in primary health care,safe drinking water, and basic education. Furthermore, these globalized investment-based projects "create some risksof (legally cognizable) harm to some categories of project-affected people, and some projects generate many risks ofvery serious harms to many people." The World Bank itself has recognized the risks involved. With regard to large-scale irrigation projects, the World Bank has recognized that: [s]ocial disruption is inevitable in large-scaleirrigation projects. . . . Local people often find that they have less access to water, land and vegetation resources as aresult of the project. Conflicting demands on water resources and inequalities in distribution can easily occur both inthe project area and downstream . . . altering the distribution of wealth.



Development trades off with women’s equalityJane Welna, WEDO Press Releases, http://www.wedo.org/monitor/mapping.htm, March 1998A report to be released March 1 by the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) findsprogress on promises made by governments at the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.However, women's organizations from a majority of reporting countries say economic restructuring is severelyaffecting the realization of the Beijing commitments and reducing women's access to jobs, rights to health care andequal opportunity. In light of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, WEDO's report,Mapping Progress: Assessing Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action, spotlights the ways in whicheconomic globalization is undermining women's rights and equality in key areas. On the positive side, over 70% of theworld's 187 countries have drawn up national action plans or drafts as required by the Beijing Platform. WEDO's in-depth report covers 90 ofthese 187 countries. Governments in 61 countries acknowledged the expertise and experience of women's NGOs by involving them informulating these plans. Further, governments are strengthening mechanisms to implement the plans; 66 have already set up national offices forwomen's affairs, 34 of them with the power to initiate legislation. "In countries around the world, women's groups have pushed theirgovernments for specific actions to live up to the promises they made at Beijing," observed Bella Abzug, WEDO President and former U.S.Congresswoman. "In a growing number of countries, governments are being challenged to act on their commitments by women's caucuses,formed along the lines of WEDO's Women's Caucus that mobilized thousands of women during the UN conferences." Since the Beijingconference, 58 countries have adopted legislation or policies to address women's rights. For example, 26 countries, a number of them in LatinAmerica and the Caribbean, China and New Zealand have passed laws to curb domestic violence. In Egypt, the Supreme Court has issued alandmark ruling prohibiting the practice of female genital mutilation in state-supported and private facilities. In Thailand, a new law stiffenspenalties and speeds trials to prevent and suppress the trafficking of women and children. Due to gender segregation policies in Iran and theintroduction of co-education in Pakistan, girls' school enrollment has increased. In Zimbabwe, a new inheritance law has been drafted to favorneither sons nor daughters. But, women's groups report, fiscal austerity measures in industrialized as well as developing countries and the currenteconomic turmoil in Asia have had a crippling effect on many positive legislative efforts. "On balance, women are still the shockabsorbers for structural change," noted Susan Davis, WEDO Executive Director. Women in economies in transition,whether in Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, Africa or Latin America, pay a disproportionate share of the costs ofeconomic globalization while being excluded from its benefits. An abhorrent aspect of the global economy is theprostitution of women in a sex industry that spans the world.


Population Links

Population discourse link to developmentArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making andUnmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.35

The war on poverty was justified on additional rounds, particularly the urgency believed to characterize the"population problem." Statements and positions regarding population began to proliferate. In many instances, acrude form of empiricism was followed, making Malthusian views and prescriptions inevitable, althougheconomists and demographers made serious attempts to conceptualize the effect of demographic factors ondevelopment. Models and theories were formulated seeking to relate the various variables and to provide a basisfor policy and program formulation. As the experience of the West suggested, it was hoped that growth rateswould begin to fall as the countries developed; but as many warned, countries could not wait for this process tooccur and should speed up the reduction of fertility by more direct means. To be sure, this preoccupation withpopulation had existed for several decades, especially in relation to Asia. It was a central topic in discussions onrace and racism. But the scale and form that the discussion took were new. As one author stated "It is probablethat in the last five years more copies have been published of discussions related to population than in all theprevious centuries" (Pendell 1951, 377). The discussions held in academic circles or in the ambit of the nascentinternational organizations also had a new tone: they focused on topics such as the relationship betweeneconomic growth and population growth; between population, resources, and output; between cultural factorsand birth control. They also took topics such as the demographic experience of the rich countries and its pos-sible extrapolation to the poor ones; the factors affecting human fertility and mortality; population trends andprojections for the future; the conditions necessary for successful population control programs; and so on. Inother words, in much the same way that was happening with race and racism during the same period- and in spiteof the persistence of blatant racist views-the discourses on population were being redeployed within the "sci-entific" realm provided by demography, public health, and population biology. A new view of population, and ofscientific and technological instruments to manage it, was taking shape.


Environment Links

Turn: environmentalism is only a new excuse for intervention and domination throughdevelopmentWolfgang Sachs, fellow at Institute for Cultural Studies Essen, Germany, The Development Dictionary, 1993,p.29

But with spreading deforestation and desertification all over the world, the poor were quickly identified as agentsof destruction and became the targets of campaigns to promote `environmental consciousness'. Once blaming thevictim had entered the professional consensus, the old recipe could also be offered for meeting the new disaster:since growth was supposed to remove poverty, the environment could only be protected through a new era ofgrowth. As the Brundtland Report puts it: `Poverty reduces people's capacity to use resources in a sustainablemanner; it intensifies pressure on the environment .... A necessary but not sufficient condition for the eliminationof absolute poverty is a relatively rapid rise in per capita incomes in the Third World'.' The way was thus clearedfor the marriage between `environment' and `development': the newcomer could be welcomed to theold-established family. ‘No development without sustainability; no sustainability without development’ is theformula which establishes the newly formed bond. 'Development' emerges rejuvenated from this liaison, theailing concept gaining another lease on life. This is nothing less than the repeat of a proven ruse: every time inthe last 30 years when the destructive effects of development were recognized, the concept was stretched in sucha way as to include both injury and therapy. For example, when it became obvious, around 1970, that the pursuitof development actually intensified poverty, the notion of 'equitable development' was invented so as toreconcile the irreconcilable: the creation of poverty with the abolition of poverty. In the same vein, theBrundtland Report incorporated concern for the environment into the concept of development by erecting`sustainable development' as the conceptual roof for both violating and healing the environment. Certainly, thenew era requires development experts to widen their attention span and to monitor water and soils, air andenergy utilization. But development remains what it always comes down to, an array of interventions forboosting the GNP: 'given expected population growth a five- to ten-fold increase in world industrial output canbe anticipated by the time world population stabilizes sometime in the next century'.' Brundtland thus ends upsuggesting further growth, but not any longer, as in the old days of development, in order to achieve thehappiness of the greatest number, but to contain the environmental disaster for the generations to come. Thethreat to the planet's survival looms large. Has there ever been a better pretence for intrusion? New areas ofintervention open up, nature becomes a domain of politics, and a new breed of technocrats feels the vocation tosteer growth along the edge of the abyss.

Environmentalism inspires an Orwellian system of managementWolfgang Sachs, fellow at Institute for Cultural Studies Essen, Germany, The Development Dictionary, 1993,p.35

Capital-, bureaucracy-, and science-intensive solutions to environmental decline, in addition, are not withoutsocial costs. The Promethean task of keeping the global industrial machine running at ever increasing speed, andsafeguarding at the same time the bisophere of the planet, will require a quantum leap in surveillance andregulation. How else should the myriads of decisions, from the individual to the national and the global levels, bebrought into line? It is of secondary importance whether the streamlining of industrialism will be achieved, if atall, through market incentives, strict legislation, remedial programmes, sophisticated spying or outrightprohibitions. What matters is that all these strategies call for more centralism, in particular for a stronger state.Since eco-crats rarely call in question the industrial model of living in order to reduce the burden on nature, theyare left with the necessity of synchronizing the innumerable activities of society with all the skill, foresight andtools of advancing technology they can muster - a prospect which could have inspired Orwell to another novel.The real historical challenge, therefore, must be addressed in something other than eco-cratic terms: how is itpossible to build ecological societies with less government and less professional dominance?


Technology Links

Technology is the hegemonic tool of developmentOtto Ullrich, engineer and sociologist with Green Party, The Development Dictionary, p. 275, 1993

With the age of development, science and technology took over the leading role altogether. They were regardedas the reason for the superiority of the North and the guarantee of the promise of development. As the `key toprosperity' they were to open up the realm of material surplus and, as the `tools of progress', to lead the countriesof the world toward the sunny uplands of the future. No wonder that for decades numerous conferences all overthe world and particularly in the United Nations, focused, in a spirit of near religious hopefulness, on the `mightyforces of science and technology'.

Development technologies pillage the environment, including agricultural technologyOtto Ullrich, engineer and sociologist with Green Party, The Development Dictionary, p. 275, 1993

But if one takes a look at one after the other of the technologies and technologically created ‘essential goods’that appear so alluring, it becomes clear that they overwhelmingly take the form of techniques that plunder theearth’s resources and externalize their costs. This is true of the massive fossil fuel and nuclear power plants,airplanes and automobiles, washing machines and dishwashers, factories for the production of plastics and thecountless plastic products, industrialized and chemicalized agriculture, the industry for the ‘improvement’ offoodstuffs, the packaging industry, buildings made of concrete, steel and chemicals, paper production, etc., etc.None of these brilliant accomplishments of industrial technology function without the massive consumption of‘free’ natural resources and without the expulsion of waste, poisons, noise and stench.

Western technologies crush cultural self-definition and tolerate no alternativesOtto Ullrich, engineer and sociologist with Green Party, The Development Dictionary, p. 275, 1993

Aside from its environmental and physical costs, the social and cultural costs of the introduction of Westerntechnologies also remained largely hidden during the technological enthusiasm of the 1950s and '60s. Even'clean' technologies force their laws upon society in such a way that cultural self-definition and autonomy cannotbe maintained for long. That the import of Western industrial technologies combines a creeping culturalimperialism with the destruction of native culture is related to a little noted characteristic of these technologies.This characteristic is another dimension of their mystification, with its separation of phenomenal form andreality, immediate impact and later effects. The alleged tools of progress are not tools at all, but technicalsystems that worm their way into every aspect of life and tolerate no alternatives.

Technological solvency is linked to universalistic notions of market truthsGerald Berthoud, prof at U of Lausanne in Paris, The Development Dictionary, 1992, p.71

This normative representation of social regulation is increasingly reinforced by technological innovations in keysectors like information, telecommunications and biogenetics. The clearest result of this process is marketdynamism, giving the impression that commoditization has no limits whatsoever. `Can everything be bought andsold?' is a moral question which has been progressively emptied of all meaning. Faith in unlimited expansionfollows from the close connection made between technoscience and the market. The former, with its conquest ofnew social spaces unthinkable not long ago, is seen as irresistible. Under pressure from the ideological success oftechnology, there is little chance of any effective general acceptance of ethical limits to market expansion. Weare all subject to the compelling idea that everything that can be made must be made, and then sold. Our universeappears unshakeably structured by the omnipotence of tech truth and the laws of the market. The middle-classideal of our time is to establish a fully competitive society, composed of individuals for whom freedom of choiceis the only way to express independence from their natural and social environment. But one unavoidablequestion remains: is not our reductive view - of supposedly independent individuals as the universal future formankind - ultimately self-deceptive; and are we not thereby misleading the entire world as well as ourselves?


Disaster Porn links

Disaster porn is symbolic of First World domination over the Third; we distance ourselvesfrom the violence we cause with calculationArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and

Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.85To be blunt, one could say that the body of the malnourished- the starving “African” portrayed on so manycovers of Western magazines, or the lethargic South American child to be “adopted” for $16 a monthportrayed in the advertisements of the same magazines- is the most striking symbol of the power of the FirstWorld over the Third. A whole economy of discourse and unequal power relations is encoded in that body.We may say, following Teresa de Lauretis (1987), that there is a violence of representation at play here. Thisviolence, moreover, is extreme; scientific representations of hunger and “overpopulation” (they often gotogether) are most dehumanizing and objectifying. After all, what we are talking about when we refer tohunger or overpopulation is people, human life itself; but it all becomes, for Western science and media,helpless and formless (dark) masses, items to be counted and measured by demographers and nutritionists, orsystems with feedback mechanisms in the model of the body espoused by physiologists and biochemists.The language of hunger and the hunger of language join forces not only to maintain a certain social order butto exert a kind of symbolic violence that sanitizes the discussion of the hungry and the malnourished. It isthus that we come to consume hunger in the West; in the process our sensitivity to suffering and painbecomes numbed by the distancing effect that the language of academics and experts achieved. To restorevividness and political efficacy to the language becomes almost an impossible task (Scheper-Hughes 1992).


Crisis rhetoric links

Their crisis narrative describes Africa in need of Western intervention. It only furthers theproblemEmery Roe, Except Africa, 1999, p. 5-6

Two crisis narratives about Africa cry out for challenging. First, there is the crisis narrative about Except-Africa. A major financial weekly tells us investment to developing countries continues to increase, "exceptin Africa." A report of an overseas think-tank concludes "Africa is the exception" when it comes todevelopment. A well-known historian notes that by the end of the twentieth century the world is likely toexperience a decline in poverty "except Africa, where things will only get worse" (his italics).3 The secondcrisis narrative is the Doomsday Scenario for any country in Except-Africa: the birth rate of [fill in name ofcountry] is rising; human and other animal populations increase daily; overutilization of the country's scarceresources accelerates; the government tries to create jobs but is less and less able to do so; rural people pourinto the cities and the government's rural development policies are helpless in stemming the flow; politicalunrest becomes explosive, while politicians and civil servants grow ever more venal; and unless something isdone to reverse this process, before you know it the fill-in-name-of-country is another basket case of Except-Africa. The two crisis scenarios have stabilized policymaking for donors, agencies, and others; neither hasany enduring policy relevance. In part, their problem is empirical. Except-Africa?—the average annualgrowth rate in gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP per capita has been worse for Eastern Europe and theformer Soviet Union than for Africa, according to some figures' The Doomsday Scenario for every Africancountry?—but African governments budget and perform very differently, and such differences must matter ifyou believe that governments can and do have an impact (chapter 5). Africa, the basket case?—better to say,Africa the twenty-first century's reservoir of new democracies' Still, the real reason why the two crisisnarratives have little policy relevance is that they do such a poor job in stabilizing the assumptions fordecision making in the face of manifest African heterogeneity. Sometimes the absence of policy relevance ispatent. Have you ever noticed how Except-Africa is always overcrowded when it is not underpopulated?(What expert has ever said of any African community, "You know, here there are just the right number ofpeople, livestock, and wildlife!") As for the Doomsday Scenario, its neo-Malthusianism appears compelling,but the scenario has zero—repeat, zero—policy relevance in the absence of its providing estimates on whathuman and animal populations should be in place so that Africans can have markets, participate in theireconomic growth, and sustain their own resources . These estimates are simply not known (more in chapter1). What is needed, and what the multinational donors and their critics have so far not provided, are thecounternarratives that stabilize policymaking so that these estimates or their alternatives can be sup- plied atthe level(s) where they are the most meaningful, realistic, and helpful. The recent literature goes aconsiderable way in criticizing the many pernicious development narratives dominating rural development inAfrica today (one thinks again of those myriad critiques of structural adjustment). Rather than critiquing theempirical merits of these and other crisis scenarios, we—you, me, everyone—will have to focus more on theequally policy relevant meta-question. What is going on when experts put forward these crisis narratives?What is the role of these expert narratives in decision making based on them? The answer can be putsuccinctly: crisis narratives are the primary means whereby development experts, and the institutions forwhich they work, claim rights to stewardship over land and resources they do not own. By generating andappealing to crisis narratives, technical experts and managers assert rights as "stakeholders" in the land andresources they say are under crisis. Working on the principle that those who sustain resources are the beststewards of those resources, the crisis scenarios serve to make a twofold claim, namely, not only are insiders,specifically local residents, not stewarding their resources, but those who really know how to sustain thoseresources are outsiders, specifically technical assistance personnel and professionally trained, in-countryresource managers. Accordingly, so this argument goes, local people must be guided by the stewardship oftechno-managerial elites, be they experts in host-country governments, international donor agencies, ortransnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).


“Third World” links

“Third world” is a loaded termThierry Verhelst, senior project officer with the Belgian development agency, No Life Without Roots: Culture andDevelopment, 1990, p.

In these pages, the reader will come upon the expression 'Third World'. The term has, justifiably, beenfrequently criticized. In the first place, one ought to speak of 'Third Worlds', so diverse are the countries ofthe southern hemisphere in terms of geographic location, economic conditions and specific socio-culturalcharacters. To this diversity between countries must be added the fundamental difference that exists betweentheir citizens. Depending on their social class, they find themselves very differently affected by problems,from which some benefit rather than suffer. In actual fact, lumping together everything that is different fromourselves is a particularly Eurocentric trait. (Moreover, the term 'Third World' refers not only to the threegreat continents of Africa. America and Asia, but also to a fourth area whose economic and strategicimportance is enormous, namely Australasia, which is frequently overlooked.) The term Third World' mustalso be questioned on the grounds that it will soon be three quarters of humanity whom we continue todiminish by means of this misleading mathematical term.


Participatory Development Bad

Turn – masking: Alternative development is more insidiousSerge Latouche, University Of Paris XI Professor of Economics, In The Wake of the Affluent Society: Anexploration of post development, 1993, p. 149

The most dangerous solicitations, the sirens with the most insidious song, are not those of ‘true blue’ and‘hard’ development, but rather those of what is called ‘alternative’ development. This term can in effectencompass any hope or ideal that one might wish to project into the harsh realities of existence. The fact thatit presents a friendly exterior makes ‘alternative’ development all the more dangerous. It hides fatal traps andambushes which are made even harder to sniff out and bring to light by the fact that those involved in‘alternative’ development happily adopt all the criticisms made about non-alternative development, so-called‘mal-development.’ So the analyst has to be very much on guard to avoid all the booby traps; good intentionsare, unfortunately, not enough. As Ivan Illich notes, redefining development serves only to ‘reinforce theWestern economic domination of the shape of formal economics by the professional colonization of theinformal sector, domestic and foreign’.

Turn – participatory empowerment re-creates colonialismLarry Lohmann, The Ecologist, Jan-Feb, 1993

Similarly, as Marianne Gronemeyer points out, whereas “help” used to signify (among other things) aspontaneous response to a cry of pain, it is now something the need for which is determined by “aid”institutions over people’s heads – giving those institutions an excuse for taking over more and more ofpeople’s lives, with deadly results. “Participation”, too, as Majid Rahnema observes, becomes in the handsof developers little more than a tool for “involving the patients in their own care” – care which can only beprovided by the self-application of a global model of progress. And “empowerment” perhaps predictably, isused: to disempower ordinary people. By suggesting that those to be “empowered” have no power and mustrely on others who have a secret formula for initiating them into it, it lays the ground for a reprise ofcolonialism.

Turn – alternative development is doomed. Only alternatives to development workSerge Latouche, Professor of Economics at University of Paris XI, In the Wake of the Affluent Society: Anexploration of Post-Development, 1993, p.158-161

Whether one likes it or not, one can't make development different from what it has been. Development has beenand still is the Westernisation of the world. Words are rooted in history; they are linked to ways of seeing andentire cosmologies which very often escape the speaker's consciousness, but which have a hold over our feelings.There are gentle words, words which act as balm to the heart and soul, and words which hurt. There are wordswhich move a whole people and turn everything upside down. Words like liberty and democracy have been such,and still are. And then there are poisonous words which infiltrate into the blood like a drug, perverting desire andblurring judgement. Development is one of these toxic words. One can of course proclaim that from now on,development means the opposite of what it used to. The papal encyclical Populorum Progressio tried to do justthis, by appropriating development into a theology which was traditionally hostile to the ideology ofEnlightenment and progress. Similarly, if one proclaims that 'good development is primarily putting value onwhat one's forebears did and being rooted in a culture','8 it amounts to defining a word by its opposite.Development has been and still is primarily an uprooting. One might, similarly, decree that the bloodiestdictatorship be called a democracy, even a popular democracy. This wouldn't prevent the people fromclamouring for the reality of a democracy. By the same token, enunciating 'good development' will unfortunatelynot prevent the techno-economic dynamism relayed by the national authorities and by most NGOs fromuprooting people and plunging them into the dereliction of shantytowns. The authentic alternative tounderdevelopment is, possibly, in the process of being invented by Third World civil societies, but it certainly isnot initiated by development ministries even if the latter, like the road to hell, are paved with good intentions. Byplacing itself under the banner of development, the alternative movement dons the opposition's colours, hopingperhaps to seduce rather than combat it - but more likely to fall into the abyss itself. In order to avoidmisunderstandings and show the oppositions between 'alternative development' and alternatives to developmentat the level of concrete practice, it is necessary to deal one by one with the main issues and highlight theirambiguities.



Their approach is on-balance more likely to entrench traditional developmentStacy Leigh Pigg, Simon Fraser University Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Ecologist, May-June, 1996

The language of development planning marks the first step toward establishing a certain set of relations ofdomination through development implementation.Economic inequality, Escobar insists, works in tandem with imbalances in who controls the very depiction ofa cultural reality. Which story about peasant ways of life and their relation to market economies will be told,the local people's or the World Bank's? Escobar suggests that economic struggles are also cultural ones. Heinsists, therefore, that local experiences of development should not be translated into explanations that take auniversalizing model of economic "facts" as a common denominator.Thus two themes run through Encountering Development. One analyses the unfolding of established thinkingabout development; the other suggests how such thinking might be undone. It is common, of course, to aimcriticisms of development at the big players (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the UnitedNations agencies), while holding out the hope that more flexible non-governmental organizations will offerthe necessary alternatives.But Escobar's analysis of development as a discourse suggests that development thinking is notfundamentally transformed by such alternative proposals. They simply extend what is included as a problemamenable to development management without disrupting the expansion of these management techniques. Ina chapter examining three attempts to reform past development mistakes - integrated rural developmentprograms for small farmers; women in development initiatives; and ecologically-minded calls for sustainabledevelopment - Escobar cautions that such attempts are more likely to strengthen the overall machinery ofdevelopment than to undermine it. The problem with the development vision is not what it has left out, butwhat it accomplishes whenever it includes something as a "problem" for which it is the solution.

Our alternative is best: participation in the context of development reinforces Eurocentricsolutions. Only escaping that context avoids repeating the pastGiles Mohan, Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth, and Kristian Stokke, Department of

Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Third World Quarterly, v21, issue2, 2000This paper has argued that the paradoxical consensus over the role of `local participation' in a globalisingworld is fraught with dangers. Local participation can be used for different purposes by very differentideological stakeholders. It can underplay the role of the state and transnational power holders and can,overtly or inadvertently, cement Eurocentric solutions to Third World development. There is a need forcritical analyses of the political use of `the local', but also a need to develop a political imaginary that doesnot repeat these weaknesses.



Turn -- Participative development is even more coercive and oppressiveMajid Rahnema, Prof at U of California, Berkeley, The Development Dictionary, 1992, p.116

Modern jargon uses stereotype words like children use Lego toy pieces. Like Lego pieces, the words fitarbitrarily together and support the most fanciful constructions. They have no content, but do serve afunction. As these words are separate from any context, they are ideal for manipulative purposes.‘Participation’ belongs to this category of words. For the Oxford English Dictionary, participation is `theaction or fact of partaking, having or forming a part of. In that sense, participation could be either transitiveor intransitive; either moral, amoral or immoral; either forced or free; either manipulative or spontaneous.Transitive forms of participation are, by definition, oriented towards a specific goal or target. By contrast, inits intransitive forms, the subject lives the partaking process without any predefined purpose. While one islistening, loving, creating, or fully living one’s life, on partakes without necessarily seeking to achieve aparticular objective. Participation acquires a moral aspect, according to the ethically defined nature of thegoals it pursues. It is generally associated with moral or desirable goals and, as such, given a positiveconnotation. It seldom comes to mind that the act of partaking may apply to evil or malicious purposes. Froma third perspective, and perhaps with the same positive connotations generally associated with the word,participation tends to be perceived as a free exercise. This perception neither conforms to the meaning of theword, nor the way in which it is translated into practice. For, more often than not, people are asked ordragged into partaking in operations of no interest to them, in the very name of participation. Neither thepyramids, nor the many contemporary mass demonstrations in favour of repressive regimes, have representedfree acts of participation. This leads us, finally, to distinguish between manipulated, or teleguided, forms ofparticipation, and spontaneous ones. In the former, the participants do not feel they are being forced intodoing something, but are actually led to take actions which are inspired or directed by centres outside theircontrol. Considering these various forms of participation, it is almost a tautology to state that all societies, inparticular vernacular or traditional ones, are participant. This is, however, questioned by many a developerand modern thinker. Amongst them, Daniel Lerner, a prominent spokesman of the development ideology,emphatically states that ‘traditional society is non-participant’, while modern society is. In order to betterunderstand the basic changes which have occurred in our perception of the concept during the presenteconomic age, that statement should be coupled with the following, belonging to the same current of thought:‘A nation’s level of political participation co-varies with its level of economic development.’


Development ‡ extermination

Development pillages its victims with a discourse of Western superiority. Temporary gainsare doomed to be turned back by greater poverty and cultural destruction. The focus onprogress is the cause of wars and tyrannies.Zygmunt Bauman, University Of Leeds Professor Emeritus Of Sociology, Life In Fragments: Essays InPostmodern Morality, 95, p. 29-33

To quote Lyotard again: humanity is divided into two parts. One confronts the challenge of complexity, theother confronts the ancient, terrible challenge of survival. This is perhaps the principal aspect of the failure ofthe modern project . . .It is not the absence of progress, but on the contrary the development-techno-scientific, artistic, economic, political - which made possible the total wars, totalitarianisms, thewidening gap between the riches of the North and poverty of the South, unemployment and the `new poor' . ..Lyotard's conclusion is blunt and damning: ìt has become impossible to legitimize development by thepromise of the emancipation of humanity in its totality.''' Yet it was exactly that èmancipation' - from want,`low standards of life', paucity of needs, doing what the community has done rather than `being able' to dowhatever one may still wish in the future (àble' in excess of present wishes) - that loomed vaguely behindHarry Truman's 1947 declaration of war on ùnderdevelopment'. Since then, unspeakable sufferings havebeen visited upon the extant èarth economies' of the world in the name of happiness, identified now with the`developed', that is modern, way of life. Their delicately balanced livelihood which could not survive thecondemnation of simplicity, frugality, acceptance of human limits and respect for non-human forms of life,now lies in ruin, yet no viable, locally realistic alternative is in sight. The victims of `development' - the trueGiddensian juggernaut which crushes everything and everybody that happens to stand in its way - `shunnedby the advanced sector and cut off from the old ways . . . are expatriates in their own countries.'" Whereverthe juggernaut has passed, know-how vanishes, to be replaced by a dearth of skills; commodified labourappears where men and women once lived; tradition becomes an awkward ballast and a costly burden;common utilities turn into underused resources, wisdom into prejudice, wise men into bearers ofsuperstitions.


Turns the case

David Gow, George Washington University, Anthropological Quarterly, July 1996These ideas are further developed by Escobar in Encountering development: The making and unmaking ofthe Third World, an ambitious, intellectually challenging, sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustrating,sometimes perverse, but always provocative project in which he directly addresses one of the majorparadoxes of our times: the relationship between the discourse of development and the practice ofdevelopment. Instead of reducing the incidence of underdevelopment, there has been an increase. Is this justmere coincidence, or is there a direct relationship between the two--increasing resources for development onthe one hand, and continuing, perhaps perpetuating underdevelopment on the other?To answer this question, Escobar, like Ferguson, adopts a Foucauldian perspective in which he proposes toexamine development as a discursive formation that systematically relates forms of knowledge andtechniques of power. To understand development discourse, we must examine the relations among thevarious elements that constitute the discourse, rather than the elements per se, since it is this system thatdetermines what can be thought and what can be said:In sum, the system of relations establishes a discursive practice that sets the rules of the game: who canspeak, from what points of view, with what authority, and according to what criteria of expertise; it sets therules that must be followed for this or that problem, theory or object to emerge and be named, analyzed, andeventually transformed into a policy or plan (p. 41).To answer his basic question, Escobar spins a series of tales, drawing upon a variety of disciplines andsources, as well as his own ethnographic experience working in development bureaucracies in his owncountry, Colombia, all viewed through the filter of an educated Latin American who, although he has chosento make his home in the United States, still identifies very strongly with those in the Third World who havebeen classified as "underdeveloped." While the tales themselves deal with both theory and practice, they aregenerally highly critical of the ways in which the developed world, often in collaboration with national elites,has created the world of "underdevelopment" and devised self-serving solutions to address the problemsidentified.The first tale deals with the problematization of poverty: the equation of poverty with underdevelopment, inwhich the poor are associated with a whole series of undesirable characteristics, ranging from laziness topromiscuity, and which can only be addressed through direct intervention by the state. Since the basicproblem is viewed as social rather than political, it is amenable to a technical solution. Inspired by theexample of the New Deal and the case for public intervention in the economy, the years following the SecondWorld War saw not only the emergence of theories of development and the creation of developmentinstitutions, both national and international, but also the emergence of the "development business." One ofthe basic objectives of these institutions has been the production of knowledge about various aspects of theThird World. But knowledge for whom and for what? While Escobar agrees that such institutions may havecontributed to human betterment, their efforts have not been completely selfless. The justification for thisknowledge generation, echoing both Foucault and Ferguson, is the need to control, to create a type ofunderdevelopment that is politically and technically manageable.


Alternative: criticism

Criticism of development discourse free us from the colonization of realityArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making andUnmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.5

Above all, however, it is about how the “Third World” has been produced by the discourses and practices ofdevelopment since their inception in the early post-World War II period. Until the late 1970s, the central stakein discussions on Asia, Africa, and Latin America was the nature of development. As we will see, from theeconomic development theories of the 1950s to the “basic human needs approach” of the 1970s- whichemphasized not only economic growth per se as in earlier decades but also the distribution of the benefits ofgrowth- the main preoccupation of theorists and politicians was the kinds of development that needed to bepursued to solve the social and economic problems of these parts of the world. Even those who opposed theprevailing capitalist strategies were obliged to couch their critique in terms of the need for development, throughconcepts such as “another development,” “participatory development,” “socialist development,” and the like. Inshort, one could criticize a given approach and propose modifications or improvements accordingly, but the factof development itself, and the need for it, could not be doubted. Development had achieved the status of acertainty in the social imaginary. Indeed, it seemed impossible to conceptualize social reality in other terms.Wherever one looked, one found the repetitive and omnipresent reality of development: governments designingand implementing ambitious development plans, institutions carrying out development programs in city andcountryside alike, experts of all kinds studying underdevelopment and producing theories ad nauseam. The factthat most people’s conditions not only did not improve but deteriorated with the passing of time did not seem tobother most experts. Reality, in sum, had been colonized by the development discourse, and those who weredissatisfied with this state of affairs had to struggle for bits and pieces of freedom within it, in the hope that inthe process a different reality could be constructed. More recently, however, the development of new tools ofanalysis, in gestation since the late 1960s but the application of which became widespread only during the 1980s,has made possible analyses of this type of “colonization of reality” which seek to account for this very fact: howcertain representations become dominant and shape indelibly the ways in which reality is imagined and actedupon. Foucault’s work on the dynamics of discourse and power in the representation of social reality, inparticular, has been instrumental in unveiling the mechanisms by which a certain order of discourse producespermissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible. Extensions ofFoucault’s insights to colonial and postcolonial situations by authors such as Edward Said, V.Y. Mudimbe,Chandra Mohanty, and Homi Bhabha, among others, have opened up new ways of thinking aboutrepresentations of the Third World. Anthropology’s self-critique and renewal during the 1980s have also beenimportant in this regard. Thinking of development in terms of discourse makes it possible to maintain the focuson domination- as earlier Marxist analyses, for instance, did- and at the same time to explore more fruitfully theconditions of possibility and the most pervasive effects of development. Discourse analysis creates thepossibility of “stand[ing] detached from [the development discourse], bracketing its familiarity, in order toanalyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated” (Foucault 1986, 3). It gives usthe possibility of singling out “development” as an encompassing cultural space and at the same time ofseparating ourselves from it by perceiving it in a totally new from. This is the task the present book sets out toaccomplish.


Alternative: deconstruction

The critique’s alternative is a social practice challenging developmentArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making andUnmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.14

As this short review shows, there are already a small but relatively coherent number of works that contribute toarticulating a discursive critique of development. The present work makes the most general case in this regard; itseeks to provide a general view of the historical construction of development and the Third World as a wholeand exemplifies the way the discourse functions in one particular case. The goal of the analysis is to contributeto the liberation of the discursive field so that the task of imagining alternatives can be commenced (or perceivedby researchers in a new light) in those spaces where the production of scholarly and expert knowledge fordevelopment purposes continues to take place. The local-level ethnographies of development mentioned earlierprovide useful elements toward this end. In the conclusion, I extend the insights these works afford and attemptto elaborate a view of “the alternative” as a research question and a social practice.

The critique is the alternative; deconstructing development’s discourse opens space forcultural differenceArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making andUnmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.223

Said differently, the nature of alternatives as a research question and a social practice can be most fruitfullygleaned from the specific manifestations of such alternatives in concrete local settings. The alternative is, in asense, always there. From this perspective, there is not surplus of meaning at the local level but meanings thathave to be read with new senses, tools, and theories. The deconstruction of development, coupled with the localethnographies just mentioned, can be important elements for a new type of visibility and audibility of forms ofcultural difference and hybridization that researchers have generally glossed over until now. The subaltern do infact speak, even if the audibility of their voices in the circles where "the West" is reflected upon and theorized istenuous at best. There is also the question of the translatability into theoretical and practical terms of what mightbe read, heard, smelled, felt, or intuited in Third World settings. This process of translation has to move back andforth between concrete proposals based on existing cultural differences-with the goal of strengthening thosedifferences by inserting them into political strategies and self-defined and self directed socioeconomicexperiments-and the opening of spaces for destabilizing dominant modes of knowing, so that the need for themost violent forms of translation is diminished. In other words, the process must embrace the challenge ofsimultaneously seeing theory as a set of contested forms of knowledge-originating in many cultural matrices-andhave that theory foster concrete interventions by the groups in question.The crisis in the regimes ofrepresentation of the Third World thus calls for new theories and research strategies; the crisis is a realconjunctional moment in the reconstruction of the connection between truth and reality, between words andthings, one that demands new practices of seeing, knowing, and being. Ethnography is by no means the solemethod of pursuing this goal; but given the need to unmake and unlearn development, and if one recognizes thatthe crucial insights for the pursuit of alternatives will be ' found not in academic circles-critical orconventional-or in the offices of institutions such as the World Bank but in a new reading of popular practicesand of the reappropriation by popular actors of the space of hegemonic sociocultural production, then one mustat least concede that the task of conceptualizing alternatives must include a significant contact with those whose"alternatives" research is supposed to illuminate. This is a conjunctural possibility that ethnography-orientedresearch might be able to fulfill, regardless of the discipline.


A2: Agency

No link – their ev says we shouldn’t deny the plan to the South, which isn’t competitivewith our criticism. We just say you shouldn’t frame it as development. We don’t deny thepotential for people to rebel against imperialism, we just say they shouldn’t have to.

Turn - we say that we think their framing is oppressive, but their claim that “Africans wantthe plan” is an attempt to speak for those othersArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and

Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.153As Michael Taussig (1987, 135) said, “From the represented shall come that which overturns therepresentation.” He continues, commenting on the absence of the narratives of South American indigenouspeoples from most representations about them, “It is the ultimate anthropological conceit, anthropology in itshighest, indeed redemptive, moment, rescuing the ‘voice’ of the Indian from the obscurity of pain and time”(135). This is to say that as much as the plain exclusion of the peasant’s voice in rural developmentdiscourse, this conceit to “speak for the others,” perhaps even to rescue their voice, as Taussig says, must beavoided. The fact that violence is a cultural manifestation of hunger applies not only to hunger’s physicalaspects but to the violence of representation. The development discourse has turned its representations ofhunger into an act of consumption of images and feelings by the well nourished, an act of cannibalism, asCinema Novo artists would have it. This consumption is a feature of modernity, we are reminded byFoucault (1975, 84) (“It is just that the illness of some should be transformed into the experience of others”).But the regimes of representation that produce this violence are not easily neutralized, as the next chapterwill show.

Development kills imagining of alternatives and enslaves people; it reduces people intonumbers in an equation and destroys their agencyArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and

Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.44The most important exclusion, however, was and continues to be what development was supposed to be allabout: people. Development was- and continues to be for the most part- a top-down, ethnocentric, andtechnocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be movedup and down in the charts of “progress.” Development was conceived not as a cultural process (culture was aresidual variable, to disappear with the advance of modernization) but instead as a system of more or lessuniversally applicable technical interventions intended to deliver some “badly needed” goods to a “target”population. It comes as no surprise that development became a force so destructive to Third World cultures,ironically in the name of people’s interests.


A2: Agency

Development can never allow agency: the discourse chooses who can speak and what canbe said before the conversation startsArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and

Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.40-1Development was not merely the result of the combination, study, or gradual elaboration of these elements(some of these topics had existed for some time); nor the product of the introduction of new ideas (some ofwhich were already appearing or perhaps were bound to appear); nor the effect of the new internationalorganizations or financial institutions (which had some predecessors, such as the League of Nations). It wasrather the result of the establishment of a set of relations among these elements, institutions, and practicesand of the systematization of these relations to form a whole. The development discourse was constituted notby the array of possible objects under its domain but by the way in which, thanks to this set of relations, itwas able to form systematically the objects of which it spoke, to group them and arrange them in certainways, and to give them a unity of their own. To understand development as a discourse, one must look not atthe elements themselves but at the system of relations established among them. It is this system that allowsthe systematic creation of objects, concepts, and strategies it determines what can be thought and said. Theserelations established between institutions, socioeconomic processes, forms of knowledge, technologicalfactors, and so on- define the conditions under which objects, concepts, theories, and strategies can beincorporated into the discourse. In sum, the system of relations establishes a discursive practice that sets therules of the game: who can speak, from what points of view, with what authority, and according to whatcriteria of expertise; it sets the rules that must be followed for this or that problem, theory or object to emergeand be named, analyzed, and eventually transformed into a policy or a plan.

We don’t deny agency, the discourse is too fluidJonathan Crush, Professor of Geography at Queens University, The Power of Development, 1995, p. 8

Development, for all its power to speak and to control the terms of speaking, has never been impervious tochallenge and resistance, nor, in response, to reformulation and change. In a startling reversal, Fanon (1968)once argued that 'Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.' There is a great deal about the form andcontent of development that suggests that it is reactive as well as formative. As a set of ideas about the waythe world works and should be ordered, understood and governed, development should also be glimpsed ifnot as 'the creation of the Third World,' then certainly as reflecting the responses, reactions and resistance ofthe people who are its object. Without the possibility of reaction and resistance, there is no place for theagents and victims of development to exert their explicit and implicit influence on the ways in which it isconstructed, thought, planned and implemented. Put simply, we simply do not yet know enough about theglobal, regional and especially local historical geographies of development - as an idea, discipline, strategy orsite of resistance - to say much with any certainty about its complex past.


A2: Development Inevitable

Saying development is inevitable feeds our link: that is how development discourse keepsalive its discrimination and reproduces the separation between the West and the otherArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and

Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.53Development assumes a teleology to the extent that it proposes that the “natives” will sooner or later bereformed; at the same time, however, it reproduces endlessly the separation between reformers and those to bereformed by keeping alive the premise of the Third World as different and inferior, as having a limited humanityin relation to the accomplished European. Development relies on this perpetual recognition and disavowal ofdifference, a feature identified by Bhabha (1990) as inherent to discrimination. The signifiers of “poverty”,“illiteracy,” “hunger,” and so forth have already achieved a fixity as signifieds of “underdevelopment” whichseems impossible to sunder. Perhaps no other factor has contributed to cementing the association of “poverty”with “underdevelopment” as the discourse of economists. To them I dedicate the coming chapter.

Development horrors are self-fulfilling prophecies: its supposed inevitability is the source of its powerZygmunt Bauman, University Of Leeds Professor Emeritus Of Sociology, Life In Fragments: Essays In

Postmodern Morality, 95, p. 29-33Not that the juggernaut moves of its own accord only, aided and abetted by the crowds of its future victims eagerto be crushed (though this is also the case; on many occasions one would be tempted to speak of a Moloch,rather than a juggernaut - that stone deity with a pyre in its belly, into which the self-selected victims jumpedwith joy, singing and dancing); it is also, once started, pushed from behind, surreptitiously yet relentlessly, byuncounted multitudes of experts, engineers, contractors, merchants of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, tools andmotors, scientists of research institutes and native as well as cosmopolitan politicians in search of prestige andglory. Thus, the juggernaut seems unstoppable, and the impression of unstoppability makes it yet moreunstoppable. From this `development', `naturalized' into something very close to a `law of nature' by the modernpart of the globe desperately searching for new supplies of virgin blood it needs in order to stay alive and fit,there seems to be no escape.


A2: Masking

Turn – they put a smiley face on development, allowing perpetual maskingSerge Latouche, University Of Paris XI Professor of Economics, In The Wake of the Affluent Society: Anexploration of post development, 1993, p. 149

The most dangerous solicitations, the sirens with the most insidious song, are not those of ‘true blue’ and‘hard’ development, but rather those of what is called ‘alternative’ development. This term can in effectencompass any hope or ideal that one might wish to project into the harsh realities of existence. The fact thatit presents a friendly exterior makes ‘alternative’ development all the more dangerous. It hides fatal traps andambushes which are made even harder to sniff out and bring to light by the fact that those involved in‘alternative’ development happily adopt all the criticisms made about non-alternative development, so-called‘mal-development.’ So the analyst has to be very much on guard to avoid all the booby traps; good intentionsare, unfortunately, not enough. As Ivan Illich notes, redefining development serves only to ‘reinforce theWestern economic domination of the shape of formal economics by the professional colonization of theinformal sector, domestic and foreign’.

Refusing the term leaves no room for the development enterprise to hideNew Internationalist, issue 232, June, 1992http://www.oneworld.org/ni/issue232/action.htm

Whenever you encounter the word ‘development’ try and substitute another word or phrase that makes itclearer what is meant. ‘Development’ can mean anything to anybody, with the result that people with verydifferent agendas (the IMF and the NI, for example) can feel safe under its banner. As an example we lookedat the line ‘The people, the ideas, the action in the fight for world development’ which has appeared on themagazine’s front cover since its early years. We concluded that the best substitute word in this case would be‘justice’ (the IMF would be unlikely to choose the same translation).


A2: Perm

The perm can't cleanse development's evils: it makes domination more efficientSachs, 95 (Wolfgang Sachs, Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen, Germany, Deep Ecology for the21st Century, 1995)

“Development” is, above all, a way of thinking. It cannot, therefore, be easily identified with a particularstrategy or program, but ties many different practices and aspirations to a common set of assumptions… Despitealarming signs of failure throughout its history, the development syndrome has survived until today, but at theprice of increasing senility. When it became clear in the 1950s that investments were not enough, “man-powerdevelopment” was added to the aid package; as it became obvious in the 1960s that hardship continued, “socialdevelopment” was discovered; and in the 1990s, as the impoverishment of peasants could no longer beoverlooked, “rural development” was included in the arsenal of development strategies. And so it went on, withfurther creations like “equitable development” and the “basic needs approach.” Again and again, the sameconceptual operation was repeated: degradation in the wake of development was redefined as a lack which calledfor yet another strategy of development. All along, the efficacy of “development” remained impervious to anycounterevidence, but showed remarkable staying power; the concept was repeatedly stretched until it includedboth the strategy which inflicted the injury and the strategy designed for therapy. This strength of the concept,however, is also the reason for its galloping exhastion; it no longer manifests any reactions to changing historicalconditions. The tragic greatness of “development” consists in the monumental emptiness.

Nothing positive can be salvaged form the 1AC. Even positive speech is framed by theirability to choose who speaks and who is not heardArturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making andUnmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.40-1

Development was not merely the result of the combination, study, or gradual elaboration of these elements(some of these topics had existed for some time); nor the product of the introduction of new ideas (some ofwhich were already appearing or perhaps were bound to appear); nor the effect of the new internationalorganizations or financial institutions (which had some predecessors, such as the League of Nations). It wasrather the result of the establishment of a set of relations among these elements, institutions, and practices and ofthe systematization of these relations to form a whole. The development discourse was constituted not by thearray of possible objects under its domain but by the way in which, thanks to this set of relations, it was able toform systematically the objects of which it spoke, to group them and arrange them in certain ways, and to givethem a unity of their own. To understand development as a discourse, one must look not at the elementsthemselves but at the system of relations established among them. It is this system that allows the systematiccreation of objects, concepts, and strategies it determines what can be thought and said. These relationsestablished between institutions, socioeconomic processes, forms of knowledge, technological factors, and soon- define the conditions under which objects, concepts, theories, and strategies can be incorporated into thediscourse. In sum, the system of relations establishes a discursive practice that sets the rules of the game: whocan speak, from what points of view, with what authority, and according to what criteria of expertise; it sets therules that must be followed for this or that problem, theory or object to emerge and be named, analyzed, andeventually transformed into a policy or a plan.


A2: Re-appropriation

‘Development’ is a loaded word which is inseparable from the web of meaning it imparts.Incanting the term enslaves two thirds of the earth’s inhabitants by implying favorablechange.Gustavo Esteva, former chair of ANADEGES, The Development Dictionary, p.9, 1993

Development cannot delink itself from the words with which it was formed – growth, evolution, maturation.Just the same, those who now use the word cannot free themselves from a web of meanings that impart aspecific blindness to their language, thought and action. No matter the context in which it is used, or theprecise connotation that the person using it wants to give it, the expression becomes qualified and colouredby meanings perhaps unwanted. The word always implies a favourable change, a step from the simple to thecomplex, from the inferior to the superior, from the worse to the better. The word indicates that one is doingwell because one is advancing in the sense of a necessary, ineluctable, universal law and toward a desirablegoal. The word retains to this day the meaning given to it a century ago by the creator of ecology, Haeckel:`Development is, from this moment on, the magic word with which we will solve all the mysteries thatsurround us or, at least, that which will guide us toward their solution. But for two-thirds of the people onearth, this positive meaning of the word `development' - profoundly rooted after two centuries of its socialconstruction - is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an undesirable, undignified condition. Toescape from it, they need to be enslaved to others' experiences and dreams.

“Re-appropriation” is just another way to re-enforce the dominant notions of development.The word itself in any form is incompatible with the kritikSerge Latouche, University Of Paris XI Professor of Economics, In The Wake of the Affluent Society: Anexploration of post development, 1993, p. 149The most dangerous solicitations, the sirens with the most insidious song, are not those of ‘true blue’ and ‘hard’development, but rather those of what is called ‘alternative’ development. This term can in effect encompass anyhope or ideal that one might wish to project into the harsh realities of existence. The fact that it presents a friendlyexterior makes ‘alternative’ development all the more dangerous. It hides fatal traps and ambushes which are madeeven harder to sniff out and bring to light by the fact that those involved in ‘alternative’ development happily adoptall the criticisms made about non-alternative development, so-called ‘mal-development.’ So the analyst has to bevery much on guard to avoid all the booby traps; good intentions are, unfortunately, not enough. As Ivan Illichnotes, redefining development serves only to ‘reinforce the Western economic domination of the shape of formaleconomics by the professional colonization of the informal sector, domestic and foreign’.


A2: Re-appropriation

Development can’t be re-appropriated. Scrapping the old conceptual framework is alwaysbetterHarry M. Cleaver, Jr., professor of economics at UT-Austin, May 3, 1995http://www.cs.unb.ca/~alopez-o/politics/NAFTAmail/msg00023.htmlI agree that, at least at level of the choice of language, there is a real problem with using the word "development".The problem is above all its heavy, historically accumulated, load of ambiguity. The word has meant so many thingsto so many different people, that when we use the word we wind up talking about the word instead of what we wantto be talking about, namely how peoples lives can be made better, or what is preventing them from achieving suchimprovement (however defined). There is a very nice essay by Gustavo Esteva on the problems associated with thisword "development" in a book I have refered to before: Wolfgang Sachs (ed) THE DEVELOPMENTDICTIONARY, London:Zed, 1992. Among other points, Gustavo make one which you do: that the conceptdevelopment has increasinly been associated with movement toward some ideal model. He traces the evolution fromits biological origins through its application to the social sphere in the 18th Century to the present. His primaryconcern, however, is the use of the term in the Post WWII era as "development" became the goal and"underdevelopment" the scourge of humankind. In a paper I wrote for a conference in Mexico some years back(1985, just after the earthquake), I discussed another of your points, namely that part of the Cold War involved astruggle between "two models of development", i.e., capitalist and socialist, but argued, as I have been doing in thisthread, that the two models were really only variations on a common core and neither led anywhere beyond thecurrent morass of exploitation, brutality and suffering with which we are all too familiar. You ask "Can we escapefrom this logic?" I think the answer is yes, we can, that increasing numbers of people are finding/creating paths outof the morass that open into other kinds of relationships. If we take seriously the idea that concepts not only do, butmust, evolve with the evolution (and revolutions) of history, then we should also see that WE can be involved inengineering that conceptual evolution. And the best way to do that is often not to look for some new adjective tohang onto an old concept (e.g., nowadays people want to hang "sustainable" rather than "capitalist" or "socialist"onto "development") but to scrap the old concept and look for new ones. Forget the jargon and return to thevernacular and find new ways of expressing new desires. This is less likely to be a good idea when you areanalysing new variations of old processes and relationships than it is when you are striking out for something new.For example "neoliberal capitalism" is not a bad name for contemporary capitalist policy because it still IScapitalism, just with a new twist. But when we want to think about avoiding being twisted, we often do well to scrapjetison the old jargon and start fresh.


***AFF ANSWERS


Development 2AC

Turn: the critique is insufficient, but we re-appropriate capitalism to work for theoppressedArun Agrawal, assistant professor of political science at Yale University, Peace & Change, Oct 96, Vol. 21 Issue4, p464, 14p.

The stance of this reviewer may be summarized as "I will engage, I must critique"--in contrast to thepoststructuralist position of "I will critique, I will reject." Throughout this essay, I have tried to highlight the twodilemmas inherent in adopting a poststructuralist stance. One is led either to a position that repeats one's initialassumptions, or one is forced into contradictions that result from questioning metanarratives. In response, Isuggest two small strategic shifts for poststructuralist scholars, the first of which can already be witnessed in thework of Stacy Leigh Pigg.[9] Instead of avowing an explicit commitment to poststructuralism and calling for arepudiation of "development," it might be far more fruitful to examine the ways in which attempts by the state tofoster development are often used as instruments of legitimation and extension of political control, yet also oftenengender resistance and protest. It was Foucault, after all, who pointed to the positive as well as the negativeaspects of power.[10] A second productive move might be to accept the impossibility of questioning allmetanarratives and instead to rethink how development can be profitably contested from within as well as fromoutside. Persistent criticisms of "development" are indispensable; calls to go beyond it make sense primarily assignifiers of romantic utopian thinking. In posing the dualisms of local and global, indigenous and Western,traditional and scientific, society and state--and locating the possibility of change only in one of these opposedpairs--one is forced to draw lines that are potentially ridiculous, and ultimately indefensible.[11] Development,like progress, rationality, or modernity, may be impossible to give up. Harboring the seeds of its owntransformation, it may be far more suited to co-optation than disavowal. Rather than fearing the co-optation by"development" of each new strategy of change, it may be time to think about how to co-opt "development.""[R]eversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding"[12] is not just the task of the postcolonialposition; it is the impossible task of all critical positions.

No alternative. The attempt to invent one does worse violence by obscuring history. Theterm can only be criticized from withinJonathan Crush, Professor of Geography at Queens University, The Power of Development, 1995, p. 19-20

Deploying Derrida's concept of logocentrism, Manzo proceeds to argue that romantic images of indigenoussocieties and their authentic knowledges do not push beyond modern relations of domination and threaten toreinscribe them in their most violent form. Hence, 'efforts in the post-colonial world to reinvent a pre-colonial Eden that never existed in fact, have been no less violent in their scripting of identity than those thatpractise domination in the name of development.' This trap - the reinscription of modernist dualisms - is alsoinherent in any claim that there can be pristine counter- hegemonic discourses of anti-development which areimplacably opposed and totally untainted by the language of development itself. Here Foucault's notion orthe 'tactical polyvalence of discourses' seems particularly useful. He argues (Foucault 1990: 100-1) that weshould not imagine a world of dominant and dominated, or accepted and excluded, discourses. We shouldthink instead of a 'complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effectof power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling- block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposingstrategy.'


Development 2AC

Their alternative replicates domination. Posting a new framing only asserts their status asall-knowing creators of truth and justiceJonathan Crush, Professor of Geography at Queens University, The Power of Development, 1995, p. 18-19

Is there a way of writing (speaking or thinking) beyond the language of development? Can its hold on theimagination of both the powerful and the powerless be transcended? Can we get round, what Watts calls, the'development gridlock'? Can, as Escobar puts it, the idea of 'catching up' with the West be drained of itsappeal? Any contemporary volume of development- related essays can no longer afford to ignore thesequestions. One of the most damaging criticisms levelled against Said's (1978) notion of Orientalism is that itprovides no basis for understanding how that discourse can be overcome. This book also, by definition,cannot stand outside the phenomenon being analysed. The text itself is made possible by the languages ofdevelopment and, in a sense, it contributes to their perpetuation. To imagine that the Western scholar cangaze on development from above as a distanced and impartial observer, and formulate alternative ways ofthinking and writing, is simply a conceit. To claim or adopt such a position is simply to replicate a basicrhetorical strategy of development itself. What we can do, as a first step, is to examine critically the rivalclaims of those who say that the language of development can, or is, being transcended. To assert, like Esteva(1987: 135), that 'development stinks' is all very well, but it is not that helpful if we have no idea about howthe odour will be erased.


Agency

They deny the agency of the South. To them, those outside of the West could neverconceive of the planNederveen Pieterse, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Jan 21, Third World Quarterly, 2 p. 175

According to Escobar (1992), the problem with ‘development’ is that it is external, based on the model of theindustrialized world, and what is needed instead are ‘more endogenous discourses.’ The assertion of‘endogenous development’ calls to mind dependency theory and the ‘foreign bad, local good’ position(Kiely, 1999). According to Rajni Kothari, ‘where colonialism left off, development took over’ (1988: 143).This view is as old as the critique of modernisation theory. It calls to mind the momentum and pathos ofdecolonisation and the familiar cultural homogenisation thesis, according to which Western media,advertising and consumerism induce cultural uniformity. All this may be satisfying as the sound of a familiartune, but it is also one-sided and old-hat. In effect, it denies the agency of the Third World. It denies theextent to which the South also owns development. Several recent development perspectives—such asdependency theory, alternative development and human development—have originated to a considerableextent in the South. Furthermore, what about ‘Easternisation,’ as in the East Asian model, touted by theWorld Bank as a development miracle? What about Japanisation, as in the ‘Japanese challenge,’ theinfluence of Japanese management technique and Toyotism (Kaplinsky, 1994)? At any rate,‘Westernisation’ is a catch all concept that ignores diverse historical currents. Latouche and others use thebulky category ‘the West’ which, given the sharp historical differences between Europe and North Americais not really meaningful. This argument also overlooks more complex assessments of globalisation (egNederveen Pieterse, 1995). A more appropriate analytics is polycentrism. Here the rejoinder toEurocentrism is not Third Worldism but a recognition that multiple centres, also in the South, now shapedevelopment discourse (e.g. Amin, 1989; Nederveen Pieterse 1991).

Their criticism patronizes and denies agencyP.T. Bauer (Lord Bauer) is professor emeritus, London School of Economics, Fellow of Caius College,Cambridge, Fellow of the British Academy, From Subsistence to Exchange and other essays, 2000, p. 71-72.

The allegations that external contacts damage the Third World are plainly condescending. They clearly implythat Third World people do not know what is good for them nor even what they want. The image of the ThirdWorld as a uniform stagnant mass devoid of distinctive character is another aspect of this condescension. Itreflects a stereotype which denies identity, character, personality, and responsibility to the individuals andsocieties of the Third World. Because the Third World is defined as the whole world with the exception ofthe West and a handful of Westernised societies (such as Japan and South Africa) it is regarded as if it wereall much of a muchness. Time and again the guilt merchants envisage the Third World as an undifferentiated,passive entity, helplessly at the mercy of its environment and of the powerful West. The exponents ofWestern guilt further patronize the Third World by suggesting that its economic fortunes past, present, andprospective, are determined by the West; that past exploitation by the West explains Third Worldbackwardness; that manipulation of international trade by the West and other forms of Western misconductaccount for persistent poverty; that the economic future of the Third World depends largely on Westerndonadons. According to this set of ideas, whatever happens to the Third World is largely our doing. Suchideas make us feel superior even while we beat our breasts.


Homogenization / agency

Turn: Their essentialization of the plan as more of the same replicates Eurocentrism: Tothem, no local knowledge could ever conceive of debt reliefMark T. Berger, The University of New South Wales, Third World Quarterly, Dec 95, Vol. 16 Issue 4, p717, 12p

Escobar's failure to ground his analysis of the vicissitudes of the dominant development discourse in the historyof the Cold War is a major shortcoming of his overall attempt to map the rise of an increasingly global discourseon development. In a broader sense his minimalist approach to the changing contours of the internationalpolitical economy gives the dominant discourse on development an overly homogenous and autonomous quality.This is further exacerbated by a lack of analysis of the various institutions which provide the main nexus for thedevelopment discourse. For example, his discussion of the World Bank, which looms large in his study, makesonly the most limited attempt to locate it in relation to changing post-1945 international power relations. There isalso, somewhat surprisingly, a complete absence of any discussion of the significance of the end of the ColdWar. Furthermore, the industrial rise of East Asia, the shift in the global politico-economic balance which itembodies, and the discursive significance of the East Asian Miracle in relation to the dominant discourse ondevelopment is also ignored.[8] Despite the emergence of a dynamic 'new' East Asian capitalist model, Escobar'sanalysis continues to hold up Western ideas and power as the main problem and his whole project is framedaround a distinction between the global power of the Western model vis-a-vis local Third World efforts atresistance. Even though he introduces the concept of hybridity at the end of his book, and also acknowledges theimprecision of the term the West, Escobar repeatedly invokes the West and Western in a fashion whichreinforces a relatively fixed conception of international power relations (p 224). Ironically, this reflects a form ofthe very eurocentrism his wider project seeks to overturn. Given Escobar's apparent privileging of internationalpower relations (which will be discussed in more detail below) his neglect of the rise of East Asia and the end ofthe Cold War is particularly surprising.

They deny many indigenous movements which challenge traditional development bymaking it their ownMd Anisur Rahman, People’s Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research, economist who

headed the ILO’s Programme on Participatory Organizations for the Rural Poor, 1993, p. 213-4I had no problem in agreeing with this critique of 'development'. But I was struck by the intensity with whichthe very notion of 'development' was attacked. It was asserted that the notion of development is an 'opium forthe people' which legitimises the exercise of power by dominating structures and creates dependence ofpeople and societies upon them, and which destroys the vernacular domain in which the people could evolveauthentically. (The term 'people' is used to refer to those sections of the population who have no economic orsocial status in society by the standards of the dominating structures - those whom Adam Smith referred to asworkers and 'other inferior ranks of people'.) Granting this, I argued that we should have the right to give andassert our own conception of the term 'development'. I submitted that I found the word 'development' to be avery powerful means of expressing the conception of societal progress as the flowering of people's creativity.Must we abandon valuable words because they are abused? What do we do then with words like democracy,cooperation, socialism, all of which are being abused? The debate was inconclusive. But it was a revealingindication to me that at least in some societies pro-people forces do not assess that they have the power to usethe word 'development' to their advantage even by redefining it. This is perhaps not yet a universalphenomenon, and we know of authentic popular movements which are using the notion of 'development'as they conceive it, as a motive force in their initiatives and struggle. This throws us, social scientists, thechallenge to understand and articulate what development might mean to people who have not lost their senseof identity and are expressing themselves through authentic collective endeavours, and also to understandhow such a sense of identity and collective self- expression could be restored to others who may have lostthem: in other words, to articulate an alternative development paradigm in which the evolution of popular lifeis not to be distorted and abused by paternalistic 'development' endeavours with alien conceptions but may bestimulated and assisted to find its highest self-expression which alone can make a society proud of itself.


Re-appropriation

Turn. We re-appropriate “development.” The kritik is myopicJan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000

Post-development thinking is fundamentally uneven. For all the concern with discourse analysis, the actualuse of language is sloppy and indulgent. Escobar plays games of rhetoric: in referring to development as`Development' and thus suggesting its homogeneity and consistency, he essentialises `development'. Thesame applies to Sachs and his call to do away with development: `in the very call for banishment, Sachsimplicitly suggests that it is possible to arrive at an unequivocal definition' (Crush, 1996: 3). Apparently thiskind of essentialising of `development' is necessary in order to arrive at the radical repudiation ofdevelopment, and without this anti-development pathos, the post-development perspective loses itsfoundation. At times one has the impression that post-development turns on a language game rather than ananalysis. Attending a conference entitled `Towards a post-development age', Anisur Rahman reacted asfollows: `I was struck by the intensity with which the very notion of "development" was attacked . . . Isubmitted that I found the word "development" to be a very powerful means of expressing the conception ofsocietal progress as the flowering of people's creativity. Must we abandon valuable words because they areabused? What to do then with words like democracy, cooperation, socialism, all of which are abused?' (1993:213-214)

We give people the opportunity to own development. Indigenous people don’t reject theconcept – they demand freedom to pursue it on their ownKathy Seton, graduate of Queensland University in Brisbane, Center for World Indigenous Studies, 1999, “FourthWorld Nations in the Era of Globalisation An Introduction to Contemporary theorizing Posed by IndigenousNations,” Fourth World Journal, http://www.cwis.org/fwj/41/fworld.html

Much of the political activism of indigenous nations is directed towards the rhetorical issues that underpintheir on-going marginalisation. Their demand for inclusion in "global civic discourse" (Wilmer 1993:36)directly challenges and deconstructs the meaning of normative international assumptions and valuessurrounding the concepts of modernisation, progress and development advanced by the imperialist culture ofStates: In confronting and challenging the legitimacy of policies resulting in forced assimilation, relocation,the introduction of deadly alien epidemics, and the sanctioning of private violence by settlers, indigenouspeoples have targeted the source - the meaning of development itself. For instance, representatives of theindigenous Yanomamo people in Brazil travelled to the World Bank in the 1980s and argued before Bankofficials that "development can have many meanings. Your interpretation of development is material. Ours isspiritual. Spiritual development is as legitimate as material development." (Wilmer 1993:37; see also Dallam1991). Indigenous nations do not simply oppose modernization or progress. Instead, they assert the right todefine and pursue development and progress in a manner compatible with their own cultural contexts. Theychampion the right to choose the scale and terms of their interaction with other cultures. In order to achieveand secure cultural, political and economic rights, sovereignty and self-determination have become some ofthe most important values sought by the international movement of indigenous nations. The rise of FourthWorld theory offers one of the greatest challenges theorist will have to contend with this century.


Crack to development

Our notion of “development” weakens traditional developmentMarc DuBois, adaptation of a master’s thesis presented to the Institute of Social Studies, Alternatives, 16, 1991, p.2

A minority within this broad alternative movement, however, has gone further than the rest—defying theeconomistic essentialism of development thinking and, perhaps most importantly, challenging thepreeminence of the development expert. The core of arguments in this vein is that the theoretical modelsunderlying development efforts stray dramatically far from being as value-free as they are presented. Criticalof a development based upon Western experience, this sort of alternative program emphasizes self-reliance,local participation, endogenous patterns of development, and satisfying basic needs. These features outline aninteresting approach to development, but their most important contribution lies elsewhere—in theestablishment of opposition to the venerated external aid/technical transfer approach to problems ofunderdevelopment. In other words, this alternative program gives birth to a competing paradigm of policyformulation, which in turn weakens the authority of the prevailing paradigm.


Work within the system

“Development” must be used to extract its positive connotations while deconstructing itsnegative onesHoward Richards, University of Baroda, Gujarat State, Education for Constructive Development, Summer, 1995http://www.earlham.edu/~pags/faculty/hr/Lec1.htmlDenis Goulet has written an extensive series of books and articles in which he holds that the word "development"should be used, but only as a "hinge" to promote an "authentic development" based on normative values. In a sensethese lectures are a contribution to Goulet's philosophy, because they are about how to make operational a "creativeincrementalism" that builds steps toward structural change and a culture of solidarity into every developmentproject. In another sense these lectures try to cope with economic issues I find that Goulet and many liberationtheologians cannot cope with effectively, because they are too grounded in a liberal ethics that shares too manypremises with liberal economics. See e.g. Denis Goulet, Mexico: Development Strategies for the Future. NotreDame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983; "`Development' ...or Liberation?" International Development Reviewvol. 13, no. 3 (September, 1971). For a critical review of attempts to rescue the word "development" by qualifying itas "sustainable development," see S. Lele, "Sustainable Development: A Critical Review," World Development,volume 19 (1991), pp. 607-621. See generally the International Journal of Sustainable Development. On the otherhand, the term "development" is often given a positive and constructive meaning. For example, "`Development' istaken here to mean the general improvement in human living conditions, including access to more consumptiongoods, better health care, greater job security, and better working hours and conditions." Clive Hamilton, "Can theRest of Asia Emulate the NICs?" The Third World Quarterly, volume 87 (1987), pp. 1225-1256. "Development" hasgenerally been associated with finding ways to mobilize and put to use the energies of the unemployed andunderemployed. See Amartya Sen, "Development: Which Way Now?," Economic Journal. vol. 93 (December1983), pp. 745-62. "Development" has as a connotation creating "linkages" and "complementarities" so that a majorsocial investment is not just an isolated event, but part of a related series which opens up new possibilities andopportunities. See A. O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven: Yale University Press,1958. "Development" has been associated with policies that make efforts to redistribute wealth in order to increasethe purchasing power of consumers. See Lance Taylor, Varieties of Stabilization Experience. Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1988. A wise development policy has been said to include the principle of "shared growth," so that whateverbenefits accrue to a nation are shared even with the poorest of its people. See John Page et al, The East AsianMiracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Part of the purpose of thegrassroots empowerment of the poor that I am advocating is to create a cultural and political environment favorablefor "sharing" (and for "growth" too if "growth" is defined as Joan Robinson proposed to define it, i.e. in such a waythat nothing undesirable counts as "growth"). The widespread use of the term "development" today stems from JosefSchumpeter's use of it to distinguish structural economic change, which was "development," and which requireddeliberate collective action, from the normal successful operation of a market economy, which leads merely to"growth." See Josef Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1934. Similarly Hirschman wrote of "development" as "punctuated disequilibria," i.e. as transitions from onestructure to another.


Work within the system

Only the aff can solve. Post-development is too oppositionalStuart Corbridge, University of Miami School of International Studies, Journal of Development Studies, August,1998

In addition, and not disregarding the close links between knowledge, power and desire in the constitution ofdevelopment studies, most of us would think twice before concluding that because the discourse ofdevelopment originated in the first flush of the cold war, and because the age of development has beenassociated with famine, debt and the ravages of structural adjustment, so we must abandon Development toutcourt. There are many ways that power can be resisted or reshaped or even used to advantage. Opting out isnot the only option, even assuming it is a plausible option. For its part Development doesn’t only come inone size or shape, or with an overbearing capital D. The tricks and turns and dilemmas of development, anddevelopment thinking, are more complicated than post-development allows.

Turn: Development Has To Be Critiqued From WithinKaty Gardner, University Of Sussex, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute v. 2 (Mar. '96) p. 171

In this book Arturo Escobar reformulates the 'development as neo-colonialism stance in terms of discoursetheory. This, he argues: 'gives us the possibility of singling out "development" as an encompassing social spaceand at the same time of separating ourselves from it by perceiving it in a totally new form (p. 6). Drawing uponFoucault's work on representation, knowledge and power, Escobar argues that development should beunderstood as a historically specific representation of social reality which permits particular modes of thinkingand doing, whilst disqualifying others. This involves specific forms of knowledge, systems of power whichregulate practice, and subjectivities by which people recognize themselves as developed or undeveloped. It alsoconsists of particular perceptual domains of inquiry, registration of problems and forms of intervention. A keyexample is the 'discovery of poverty after the second world war. The management of this required interventionsin the newly labelled 'developing countries in health, employment, morality and so forth, as well as new fields ofempirical study and theory (for example development economics). Such is the hegemonic power of developmentdiscourse that it can only ever be criticized from within; those opposed to it can only propose modifications orimprovements, for 'development (has) achieved the status of a certainty in the social imaginary (p.5).Encountering development is an important contribution to the anthropology of development. Whilst Escobaris not alone in deconstructing development discourse (e.g. Ferguson 1990; Esteva 1992) this book, whichsummarizes and builds upon articles published over the last decade, is likely to become a definitive statement.Escobar makes his case bodly: he is not afraid of sweeping claims, nor of vivid -- and sometimes polemical --prose. Whilst his argument is largely convincing, this, plus his tendency to generalize, at times undermines it.Throughout the text 'development is largely spoken of as if it were a homogeneous, unitary set of representationsand practices, epitomized and led by the World Bank. Whilst undoubtedly extremely powerful, the World Bankhowever only represents a certain type of developmental institution; many northern and southern non-governmental organizations utilize significantly different knowledges and practices. Groups and individualswithin institutions are also rarely in agreement over what 'development should involve. Thus whilst at one levelreports can be read as discursive representations which organize their subjects in certain ways, at another theycan be analysed in terms of the internal dynamics of agencies, the results of complex processes and negotiations.This more subtle and nuanced understanding of how power works within the aid industry, and how the discourseis contested from within is largely ignored. Escobar's view of hegemony is also somewhat slippery. At one levelhe argues that whilst new objects of development such as 'women and 'the environment may have beenintroduced in recent years, or particular projects modified, the system of relations remains essentially the same,allowing the discourse to adapt to new conditions without being fundamentally challenged. Yet later in the text(for example in a rather disappointing discussion of 'Women in development ) he [Escobar]acknowledges thatchanges from within might be possible, that relations of power can shift. Indeed, to maintain that nothing hasever changed is to remain blinkered to the highly complex ways in which meanings and practices are negotiatedwithin development: the growth in power of social advisors, who challenge the discourses of economists withinBritain's Overseas Development Administration is just one small example.


Monolithic

Their construction of development as monolithic destroys agency. Development meansdifferent things to different peopleR.D. Grillo, School of African and Asian Studies, University of Sussex, 1997, Discourses of Development, p. 20-22

While not denying the validity of the idea of a 'development gaze', we should note its limits. Mosse (thisvolume, p. 280) says, I am not suggesting that development institutions (irrigation bureaucracies or donoragencies) are the creators of social theory, merely that they constrain and select theory [and] nudge thethinking of their members in particular directions -...' There is a tendency - illustrated, for example, byHobart, Escobar and to a lesser degree Ferguson - to see development as a monolithic enterprise, heavilycontrolled from the top, convinced of the superiority of its own wisdom and impervious to local knowledge,or indeed common-sense experience, a single gaze or voice which is all-powerful and beyond influence. Thisunderpins what I would call the 'myth of development' which pervades much critical writing in this field. Itmight also be called the Development Dictionary perspective, as echoed throughout the book of that name(Sachs ed. 1992). The perspective is shared by Escobar, and to a lesser extent Ferguson and in a differentway Hobart. Like most myths it is based on poor or partial history, betraying a lack of knowledge of bothcolonialism and decolonization, and throughout it reflects a surprising ethnocentrism: it is very much theview from North America. Ill-informed about the history of government, it has a Jacobinist conviction of thestate's power to achieve miraculous things: the title of Ferguson's book. The Anti- Politics Machine, is aneloquent expression of this. It is also grounded in the 'victim culture'. Rather as those engaged in anti- racisttraining sometimes argued that there are 'racists' and there are 'victims of racism' (Donald and Rattansi eds1992; Gilroy 1993), the development myth proposes that there are 'developers' and 'victims of development'(see the unfortunate souls portrayed on the dust-cover of Crush's edited collection, 1995). Escobar adds'resisters of development', but there is no other way. Thus the myth would, for example, have great difficultyin encompassing the wide range of responses and agendas found among Indian women working in and fordevelopment whose work is documented in this volume in the paper by Unnithan and Srivastava. Drinkwater(1992: 169) points to the 'danger of oversimplifying and setting up a dominant position as an easy target'.Although development is sometimes guided by authoritative, monocular visions, Unnithan and Srivastava'spaper (this volume), along with Gardner's discussion of a major project in a country in South Asia, underlinethe point that development knowledge is not usually a single set of ideas and assumptions. Gardner observescorrectly (this volume, p. 134) that while our understanding of 'indigenous knowledge' is growingincreasingly sophisticated, that of developmental knowledge often remains frustratingly simplistic. This isgenerally presented as homogeneous and rooted in 'scientific rationalism' . . . [but there is a] need tounderstand how development knowledge is not one single set of ideas and assumptions. While . . . it mayfunction hegemonically, it is also created and recreated by multiple agents, who often have very differentunderstandings of their work. To think of the discourse of development is far too limiting. To that extent,Hobart is correct to refer to 'several co-existent discourses of development' (1993: 12). But there is as muchdiversity within the community of 'professional developers' (one of the parties identified by Hobart), asbetween them and other stakeholders or 'players' (in Hobart's account, local people' and 'nationalgovernment'). Within development there is and has always been a multiplicity of voices, 'a multiplicity of"knowledges"' (Cohen 1993: 32), even if some are more powerful than others: as Pettier, this volume, pointsout, 'a simple recording of the plurality of voices' is never enough. Preston, who has written extensively ondevelopment, provides an interesting way into this subject. Discourses of Development: State, Market andPolity in the Analysis of Complex Change (1994) is an exercise in political theory written largely fromoutside anthropology which places the study of discourse less in the work of Foucault than in a widerhermeneutic-critical tradition. However, in broader agreement with Foucauldian perspectives than he mightallow, Preston argues that development discourse is both 'institutionally extensive [and] comprises a stock ofideas that informs the praxis of many groups' (ibid.: 4). It is not, however, singular. He identifies threediscourses of development, each located in the changing political economy of the second half of the twentiethcentury. Each 'find their vehicles in particular institutional locations, and of course are disposed to particularpolitical projects' (ibid.: 222).


No Alternative

Voting negative endorses the status quoJan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000

If we strip away the exaggerated claims, the anti-positioning, what remains is an uneven landscape.Eventually the question must be asked: what about the politics of post-development? Fine points of theoryaside, what is to be done? Post-development does make positive claims and is associated with affirmativecounterpoints such as indigenous knowledge and cultural diversity. It opts for Gandhian frugality, notconsumerism; for conviviality, a la Ivan Illich, for grassroots movements and local struggles. But none ofthese is specific to post-development nor do they necessarily add up to the conclusion of rejectingdevelopment. Forming a position in relation to post-development might proceed as follows. Let's not quibbleabout details but take your points on board and work with them. What do you have to offer? This variesconsiderably: Sachs (1992) is a reasonable refresher course in critiques of development. Latouche'sarguments are often perceptive and useful, though they can also be found in alternative development sources(such as Rahman, 1993; Pradervand, 1989) and are mostly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. A common-sensereaction may be: your points are well taken, now what do we do? The response of Gilbert Rist is thatalternatives are not his affair.(n6) The general trend in several sources is to stop at critique. What this meansis an endorsement of the status quo and, in effect, more of the same. This is the core weakness of post-development (cf. Cowen & Shenton, 1996).

The kritik is just whistling in the darkJan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000

Post-development is caught in rhetorical gridlock. Using discourse analysis as an ideological platform invitespolitical impasse and quietism. In the end post-development offers no politics besides the self-organisingcapacity of the poor, which actually lets the development responsibility of states and international institutionsoff the hook. Post-development arrives at development agnosticism by a different route but shares theabdication of development with neoliberalism. Since most insights in post-development sources are notspecific to post-development (and are often confused with alternative development), what makes post-development distinctive is the rejection of development. Yet the rejection of development does not arise frompost-development insights as a necessary conclusion. In other words, one can share post-development'sobservations without arriving at this conclusion: put another way, there is no compelling logic to post-development arguments. Commonly distinguished reactions to modernity are neo-traditionalism,modernisation and postmodernism (e.g. McEvilley, 1995). Post-development belongs to the era of the `post'--post-structuralism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism. It is premised on an awareness ofendings, on `the end of modernity' and, in Vattimo's (1988) words, the `crisis of the future'. Post-development parallels postmodernism both in its acute intuitions and in being directionless in the end, as aconsequence of its refusal to, or lack of interest in, translating critique into construction. At the same time italso fits the profile of the neo-traditionalist reaction to modernity. There are romantic and nostalgic strands topost-development and its reverence for community, Gemeinschaft and the traditional, and there is an elementof neo-Luddism in the attitude towards science and technology. The overall programme is one of resistancerather than transformation or emancipation. Post-development is based on a paradox. While it is clearly partof the broad critical stream in development, it shows no regard for the progressive potential and dialectics ofmodernity--for democratisation, soft-power technologies, reflexivity. Thus, it is not difficult to see that thethree nodal discourses identified by Escobar--democratisation, difference and anti-development--themselvesarise out of modernisation. Democratisation continues the democratic impetus of the Enlightenment;difference is a function of the transport and communication revolutions, the world becoming `smaller' andsocieties multicultural; and anti-development elaborates the dialectics of the Enlightenment set forth by theFrankfurt School. Generally, the rise of social movements and civil society activism, North and South, is alsoan expression of the richness of overall development, and cannot simply be captured under the label `anti'.Post-development's source of strength is a hermeneutics of suspicion, an anti-authoritarian sensibility, andhence a suspicion of alternative development as an `alternative managerialism'. But since it fails to translatethis sensibility into a constructive position, what remains is whistling in the dark. What is the point ofdeclaring development a `hoax' (Norberg-Hodge, 1995) without proposing an alternative?


No Alternative

Their alternative is nonsense. Doing the same action with a different name means thesystem is as strong as everJonathan Crush, Professor of Geography at Queens University, The Power of Development, 1995, p. 18-19

Is there a way of writing (speaking or thinking) beyond the language of development? Can its hold on theimagination of both the powerful and the powerless be transcended? Can we get round, what Watts calls, the'development gridlock'? Can, as Escobar puts it, the idea of 'catching up' with the West be drained of itsappeal? Any contemporary volume of development- related essays can no longer afford to ignore thesequestions. One of the most damaging criticisms levelled against Said's (1978) notion of Orientalism is that itprovides no basis for understanding how that discourse can be overcome. This book also, by definition,cannot stand outside the phenomenon being analysed. The text itself is made possible by the languages ofdevelopment and, in a sense, it contributes to their perpetuation. To imagine that the Western scholar cangaze on development from above as a distanced and impartial observer, and formulate alternative ways ofthinking and writing, is simply a conceit. To claim or adopt such a position is simply to replicate a basicrhetorical strategy of development itself. What we can do, as a first step, is to examine critically the rivalclaims of those who say that the language of development can, or is, being transcended. To assert, like Esteva(1987: 135), that 'development stinks' is all very well, but it is not that helpful if we have no idea about howthe odour will be erased.


A2: Crisis rhetoric / demonization link

Their evidence doesn’t deny the possibility of crises. The fact that the developmententerprise hypes up some situations doesn’t mean genocide and starvation don’t occur

There is a risk of another genocide. This is a harms takeout without any evidence tosupport it. 800,000 people did die in 1994. Similar conditions exist now. The specificity ofour harms evidence trumps theirs

Ignoring the possibility of problems is a racist excuse for complacency. Newbury, Masire,and Depelchin explain that this was the thinking in 1994

It’s not racist to say a bad person is bad. We don’t have to answer for racist reasons whyother people conflate all Africans with bad peopleGeorge Ayittey, Africa in Chaos, 1998http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/ayittey-africa.html

Long-term, durable solutions to Africa's innumerable problems require an understanding of their root causes.That, in turn, requires making two fundamental distinctions: first, between African leaders and the Africanpeople, and second, between traditional Africa and modern Africa. Western administrators often use thegeneric term "Africans" to refer to African leaders, as in the expression, "Africans are reforming theireconomies." But this usage is misleading. It carries the implication that all Africans are involved in thisprocess when in actual fact it is the leaders who claim to be "reforming their economies." Furthermore,lumping the leaders and the people together prevents many from criticizing the policies of African leaders forfear of being labeled "racist" if one were white or "traitor" if one were black. Most African leaders aredespots and failures. But leadership failure is not synonymous with failure of Africans as a people. Andcriticizing African leaders does not mean one hates black people.


A2: Speaking for others

They speak for others by endorsing the status quoJan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000

However, as Corbridge (1994: 103) argues, `an unwillingness to speak for others is every bit as foundationala claim as the suggestion that we can speak for others in an unproblematic manner' (quoted in Kiely, 1999:23). Doing `nothing' comes down to an endorsement of the status quo (a question that reverts to the politicsof post-development below). Gilbert Rist in Geneva would argue: I have no business telling people inSenegal what do, but people in Switzerland, yes.(n5) This kind of thinking implies a compartmentalisedworld, presumably split up along the lines of the Westphalian state system. This is deeply conventional,ignores transnational collective action, the relationship between social movements and international relations,the trend of post-nationalism and the ramifications of globalisation. It completely goes against the idea ofglobal citizenship and `global civil society'. Had this been a general view, the apartheid regime in SouthAfrica would have lasted even longer. Under the heading of `post' thinking, this is actually profoundlyconservative.


A2: “Third World” link

Calling it third world is essential to making it a political issueJacques Gelinas, Canadian University Service Overseas Quebec Board Chair, Freedom From Debt: TheReappropriation of Development Through Financial Self-Reliance, 1998 p 18-19.

A geopolitical concept: the Third WorldThe expression `Third World' is a useful geopolitical term, hitherto the only one suitable for designating aheterogeneous group of underdeveloped, misdeveloped and developing countries, regardless of theirsocio-political system and their degree of socio-economic progress. It was coined by Alfred Sauvy, a renownedFrench demographer, in an article entitled `Trois mondes, une planete' (`Three Worlds, One Earth'), published on14 August 1952 in L'Observateur.We readily speak of the two worlds, the possible war between them, their coexistence, and so on, all too oftenforgetting that a third world also exists, the most important one and, after all, the first to appear. It consists of allthose countries that, in United Nations style, are called underdeveloped. [...]And should it cast its bright glow over the first world, perhaps the latter, apart from any human solidarity, wouldnot remain insensitive to its slow and irresistible, humble and fierce thrust towards life. After all, ignored,exploited and despised, just as the Third Estate was, this Third World also wants to become something.This ingenious play on words, likening the situation of the underdeveloped countries to the condition of theexcluded classes of France's ancien regime, has the merit of putting the underdevelopment problem in the rightcontext: the political field. It positions the underdeveloped countries geopolitically in relation to the twohegemonic camps that emerged from the Second World War: the club of industrialized capitalist countries andthe bloc of Central and Eastern European socialist regimes. On the fringes of these two worlds is the ThirdWorld which, it is true, has never succeeded in forming a bloc.Despite the collapse of communism, the term is still valid. First of all, its main connotations remain: exclusion,dependence, exploitation. The term's inherent meaning still fits the reality of underdeveloped countries. Second,most of the Eastern European countries, formerly grouped under the socialist banner, continue to form a separatecategory in the official nomenclatures of the United Nations and international financial institutions. They stillconstitute a Second World between the First, which refuses to integrate them on an equal footing, and the Third,whose stigmata they refuse.


A2: “poverty” link

They provide cover for the West to allow further destruction. Only calling it povertyreveals the failure of the Western modelBjørn Hvinden, Poverty, Exclusion and Agency, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian

University of Science and Technology, Research in Community Sociology, vol 5, 1995http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/Bjorn.Hvinden/Simmel_om_marginalitet_og_fattigdom.htm

Moreover, the word 'poverty' does not only have a literal meaning, a denotation, but also strong emotionaland symbolic overtones, 'connotations'. This can be seen most clearly in countries like the Scandinavianwhich have officially been defined as egalitarian and solidaristic. In the official political discourse to adoptthe word 'poverty' have almost been a taboo, as the mere use of the word to describe existing socialconditions imply that consensual efforts over a long period have been a failure. Given these strongconnotative elements it makes a major difference whether one says that many people have low incomes andthat the distribution of benefits is still unequitable, or one maintains that a substantial minority still lives inpoverty. The larger this minority is claimed to be, the stronger interest representatives of the dominating elitewill have in denying the validity of the claim.

Their evidence just says communities without money can be rich. We certainly don’t denythat, but we think that when people are starving and dying, it is bad enough to justify beingreferred to as poverty

“Poverty” is bad when framed in terms of consumption. We enable Rwanda to choosewhat and how much it will produceMd Anisur Rahman, People’s Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research, economist who

headed the ILO’s Programme on Participatory Organizations for the Rural Poor, 1993, p. 186The notion of 'poverty' follows the same viewpoint. The concern here is whether a person has the necessaryincome or access or 'entitlement' to the bundle of goods and services postulated to be the needs of humanbeings as consumers. 'Poverty' in terms of lack of an 'entitlement' to develop as a creative being is, again, notexpressed as a concern .The problem of 'poverty' in this sense is a consumer's rather than a creator's problem,focused on the 'poor' not being able to consume the things desired (or biologically needed) rather than nothaving the opportunity to produce (or command) them through their creative acts.


A2: “poverty” link

The word isn’t necessarily bad – it’s a matter of presentation. Rejecting the term in everyinstance obscures attempts to relieve sufferingJan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000

Poverty is in the eye of the beholder. Sachs (1989) distinguishes between frugality, as in subsistenceeconomies; destitution, which can arise when subsistence economies are weakened through the interferenceof growth strategies; and scarcity, which arises when the logic of growth and accumulation has taken overand commodity-based need becomes the overriding logic. In this early work, Sachs's policy recommendationis to implement growth strategies with caution and to build on frugal life styles. This matches therecommendations made all along by `ecological developers' such as the agronomist Rene Dumont (1965,1974), to follow growth strategies in parallel with appropriate technology and maximum use of localresources. But the rejection of either growth or development does not follow. `Poverty' is not simply adeficit, for that would assume simply adopting the commodity-based perspective of the North; `poverty' canalso be a resource. Attributing agency to the poor is a common principle in alternative approaches such as`conscientisation' a la Paulo Freire, human-scale development (Max-Neef, 1982, 1991; Chambers, 1983),participatory action research and the actor-orientated approach. According to Rahnema, while poverty is realenough, it is also a culturally and historically variable notion. `The way planners, development actomaniacsand politicians living off global poverty alleviation campaigns are presenting their case, gives the uninformedpublic a distorted impression of how the world's impoverished are living their deprivations. Not only arethese people presented as incapable of doing anything intelligent by themselves, but also as preventing themodern do-gooders from helping them.' (1992: 169) This is a different issue: it concerns the representation ofpoverty. By way of counterpoint, Rahnema draws attention to `vernacular universes' that provide hope andstrength; to the spiritual dimension (`Most contemporary grassroots movements have a strong spiritualdimension', p 171); and to `convivial poverty', `that is, voluntary or moral poverty' (p 171). This suggestsaffinity with the lineage of the Franciscans, liberation theology and Gandhian politics. In this view, it is theeconomics of development that is truly pauperising. While these considerations may be valid up to a point, aconsequence is that poverty alleviation and elimination--for what these efforts are worth--slip off the map.Another problem is that less market participation does not necessarily imply more social participation--lestwe homogenise and romanticise poverty, and equate it with purity (and the indigenous and local with theoriginal and authentic). The step from a statistical universe to a moral universe is worth taking, but a moraluniverse also involves action, and which action follows?


A2: Escobar

Escobar is badR.D. Grillo, School of African and Asian Studies, University of Sussex, 1997, Discourses of Development, p. 14-15

If Hobart tackles the question of discourse (and discursive gaps: 'separate and incommensurable') from thepoint of view of philosophy, the second study, Escobar's Encountering Development: The Making andUnmaking of the Third World (1995), treats discourse from an avowedly political stance. Although squarelyconcerned with discourse and development, the book is something of a disappointment when compared withhis 1991 paper which anticipated it. It is rambling, often overheated in its language, and sometimes plainwrong in its interpretation of world historical events, for example, his discussion of post-war US policytowards the colonial powers (ibid.: 31), or his account of the development of ideas about economic and socialplanning (ibid.: 85). He betrays a lack of understanding of the nature of the environmentalist movement andof the concept of sustainable development (portrayed as 'the last attempt to articulate modernity andcapitalism before the advent of cyberculture'; ibid.: 202), and considers that the 'Bruntland report' (sic)'inaugurated a period of unprecedented gluttony in the history of vision and knowledge with the concomitantrise of a global "ecocracy"'. Generally, this is a badly written, curiously ethnocentric book. Nonetheless thereis more than a grain of truth in much of what Escobar writes, and his views on development and discourse areimportant, not least because they are likely to be widely shared by anthropologists.


A2: Latouche

Latouche’s answer to those who attempt to re-appropriate development is that calling adictatorship a democracy doesn’t change people’s desire for a “real” democracy. That justmeans development is bad if it’s a bad kind of development. There’s no warrant why theword itself is bad

Latouche is a fool. Development is only toxic in the context of market economicsTakis Fotopoulos, Editor, Democracy and Nature, THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INCLUSIVE

DEMOCRACY, Volume 5 Number 1, March 1999http://www.geocities.com/democracy_nature/vol5/editorial_3.htm

Serge Latouche argues a strong case against sustainable development and the entire economic literature (aswell as the politicians’ rhetoric) built around this concept. He persuasively shows that sustainabledevelopment is a contradiction in terms—in fact, a fraud. As the author stresses, ‘by adding the adjective‘sustainable’ to the ‘development’ term, one does not mean to bring up for discussion again the term‘development’ but only to superficially add an ecological component to it’. However, to Latouche’sconclusion that ‘it is not possible to show that development can be different from how it was in the past’ onehas to add the important proviso, ‘within the market economy framework’. In other words, it is notdevelopment as such which is wrong but the specific type of development implied by the logic and thedynamics of the market economy—a fact which means that within a different institutional framework, whichsecures the equal distribution of economic power between and within the peoples of the world, it is perfectlypossible to show that development can be different ‘from how it was in the past’.


A2: Rahnema

Rahnema is too simplisticJan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000

Ray Kiely adds another note: 'When Rahnema (1997: 391) argues that the end of development "represents acall to the `good people' everywhere to think and work together", we are left with the vacuous politics ofUSA for Africa's "We are the World". Instead of a politics which critically engages with materialinequalities, we have a post-development era where "people should be nicer to each other" `. (1999: 24)


Development has good aspects

Development ethics are essential to over-coming the mistakes which development itself hascreatedDenis Goulet, O'Neill Professor in Education for Justice and Department of Economics Faculty at Notre Dame,Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, “Development Ethics: A New Discipline,” InternationalJournal of Social Economics, v24 n11, Nov 1997, p. 1160-71

More fundamentally, however, the primary mission of development ethics is to keep hope alive[7], for byany purely rational calculus of future probabilities, the development enterprise of most countries is doomedto fail. The probable future scenario is that technological and resource gaps will continue to widen, and thatvast resources will continue to be devoted to destructive armaments and wasteful consumption. By anyreasonable projection over the next 50 years, development will remain the privilege of a relative few, whileunderdevelopment will continue to be the lot of the vast majority. Only some trans-rational calculus of hope,situated beyond apparent realms of possibility, can elicit the creative energies and vision which authenticdevelopment for all requires. This calculus of hope must be ratified by development ethics, which summonshuman persons and societies to become their best selves, to create structures of justice to replace exploitationand aggressive competition. A basis for hope is suggested by Dubos and other sociobiologists, who remindus that only a tiny fragment of human brain-power has been utilized up till the present (Dubos, 1978). Thismeans that Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans can invent new, more authentic models of development. InThe Coming Dark Age Vacca (1973) gloomily forecasts a world with no future. Development ethics correctsthis view by reminding us that futures are not foreordained. Indeed the most important banner developmentethics must raise high is that of hope, hope in the possibility of creating new possibilities.Development ethics pleads normatively for a certain reading of history, one in which human agents aremakers of history even as they bear witness to values of transcendence (Goulet, 1974b).

development supplement

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