Development

Investment in ’development assistance’, now a major policy objective of wealthy nation states and supranational organisations alike, only really began to feature in international political discourse after the end of World War II. The need to assist “underdeveloped” countries – mostly newly- independent former Western colonies - to become more developed was rooted in a post-war economic need to build new global markets for developed-nation companies, and a cold-war political need to tie these developing countries into a Western or US sphere of influence and keep them out of communist hands. In the new discourse of development assistance these priorities sat alongside, mingled with, and were rationalised by themes of modernity, progress, economic development, international cooperation and human betterment.

Since the mid-20th century a complex superstructure of national and international institutions involved in development assistance has grown up, incorporating national Official Development Assistance agencies and programmes; the United Nations and a number of its agencies including

６６

UNESCO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF); other transnational agencies such as the OECD; and a bewildering array of specialised Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), research institutes and think tanks. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreement, establishing a global programme and set of targets for development agreed by every UN member, is one of the organisation’s proudest achievements.

But to analyse the discourse around development fully we need to pay attention to the interests and objectives of the policy makers and others who take part in it, and the actual power relations which it helps to bring into existence (Foucault, 1982a). According to Archard, 17 the problem of international development assistance was constructed in the historical context of the end of empires, de-colonialisation and the creation of new nation states, with “under-development” construed simply as a lack of progress toward the happy condition of the former imperial states (Williams, 1999:157). Importantly, Archard’s analysis of this discourse of development focuses on the ‘enunciation’ of values, and on the enonciateurs, that is the agents and actors who articulate these values of progress, modernisation and so on, and in so doing mobilise or transfer the power relations they uphold.

These enonciateurs are the professional experts - technologists, advisors and consultants - who take loaded political questions and recast them in the neutral language of technology or science, making the proferred solutions seem unquestionable. As Foucault and others have noted, the modernist state is characterised by the ever-growing role of such experts in all aspects of governance, with the effect of transmuting political problems into technical ones:

A technical matrix was established. By definition, there ought to be a way of solving any technical problem… We are promised normalisation and happiness through science and law. When [the

17 _{Original article is in French, ‘Sociologie du developpement’ ou sociologie du} ‘developpement’ cited in French Discourse Analysis by Glyn Williams in 1999.

６７

experts] fail, this only justifies the need for more of the same (Foucault, 1982b:196).

A good example of this technologisation of politics is the standardised macroeconomic prescription for speeding up poorer countries’ development known as The Washington Consensus. The consensus was first propounded in 1989 by an economist, John Williamson, at a conference in Washington hosted by the Institute for International Economics, and was offered as a statement of what was already common ground among key players in development such as the World Bank, the IMF and the US Treasury. It took the form of ten economic policy recommendations, including reduction of fiscal deficits, non-progressive tax reform, trade liberalisation, liberalisation of inward foreign investment, privatisation of state enterprises, deregulation of markets, and legal protection of property rights (Williamson, 2004). The consensus presents itself as uncontroversial, expert technocratic advice for governments seeking a model path to development.

In her account of the politics of development in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Hoogvelt describes the standard reaction of professional development advisors to the suggestion that there might be alternative, local paths to development:

When traditional institutions or values did not fit, they were considered ‘dysfunctional’ to the process of development and regarded as ‘problems’ which comprehensive socio-economic planning could be designed to correct. Progress became a matter of ordered social reform (Hoogvelt, 1997:35-36).

A number of ‘post-colonial’ researchers have critiqued this assumption that development knowledge and practice must be based on the western experience. Thus Mitchell (1991:33) has introduced the term ‘non-West’ to problematise the normalisation of development solutions based on the technologies, management skills and types of expertise that only exist in the West, and to accentuate the underlying question of inequality of power between West and non-West. While Edward Said, discussing the psycho- historical background to the West/East divide, describes the developed/developing division as an imperialist construct, a “binary social

６８

relation” which reduces the non-Western world to a homogenous and inferior entity (Said, 1978). Such post-colonial voices emphasise the social, cultural and psychological costs paid for development by the populations of developing countries, seeking to widen the idea of development to encompass more local and autonomous solutions to the problem of development (a theme I will return to in my interview data analysis.) (Said 1978, Escobar 1996, Hoogvelt, 1997)

Even mainstream economists disagree vociferously about both the

appropriateness and the effectiveness of current development assistance

policies and practices. Laissez faire economists like William Easterly (2010) and Dambisa Moyo (2009) would see growth in GDP, personal choice and economic freedom as the most important measures of development, and prioritise programmes to attract oversees corporate investment capital over everything else. Easterly (2010) further resists any constraints placed upon the operation of free markets in developing economies, and is critical of any development coordination or supervisory initiatives from the OECD or UN agencies which have any hint of central planning.

On the other hand, sustainability economists like Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz dissent from the so-called Washington Consensus of neo-liberal economic thinking and emphasise a more collectivist approach to economic development. Stiglitz (2001) argues that worthwhile development can never be achieved simply by growing the stock of capital and removing economic distortions, and that policy-makers should be much more sensitive to local sociocultural, political, economic and environmental factors. At his Nobel Prize lecture, Stiglitz (2001) points out that:

Development represents a far more fundamental transformation of society, including a change in “preference” and attitudes, an acceptance of damage and an abandonment of many traditional way of thinking (emphasis added).

In opposition to decentralised market orientation, Sachs, in his introduction to

６９

Although introductory economics textbooks preach individualism and decentralized markets, our safety and prosperity depend at least as much on collective decisions to fight disease, promote good science and widespread education, provide critical infrastructure, and act in unison to help the poorest the poor…Collective action, through effective government provision of health, education, infrastructure, as well as foreign assistance when needed, underpins economic success.

It’s worth noting in passing that it is just such an emphasis on collectivism and government action that has been most effective at driving both economic and social prosperity in the newly-developed countries of South East Asia such as Korea (Bruton, 1985; Hoogvelt, 1997; Stiglitz, 2007; Willis, 2007). The ethical question I want to canvass here is not whether we need development, but how we can provide basic needs in development with fewer shortcomings (Peet and Hartwick, 1999). Here the key issue is about responsibility and ethical coexistence, about ‘Being-with and being-towards- the-other’ (Venn, 2000:11).

My own preferred stance as a researcher is to resist the ‘one size fits all’ approach to development which I consider to be rooted in notions of modernity and the supposed universality of the Western experience, and to suggest that each country or region deserves to have its own developmental trajectory based on its particular economic, political, social and cultural circumstances. Such a stance should attempt to interrogate what Kothari (2005:83) calls the “hegemonic histories that often obscure the continuing effects of colonialism”.