Deconstructing Development

Deconstructing Development by Kevin Ross D. Nera Abstract: What is development? This question comes to the fore at the present age where continued calls for development and progress abound everywhere from the least developed countries to the more developed countries. However, the calls for development have been met with resistance as authors such as Escobar (1994) and Mehmet (1999) criticize the development apparatus as the harbinger of underdevelopment to the third world because of its status as a Western, Euro-American-centric, hegemonic construct that is dominating the third world. This article examines the notion of development as an ideology and the methods in which the development discourse has propagated itself to attain the hegemonic status that it now occupies in the social imaginary. This examination is part of the process of laying down the foundations of a philosophy of development akin to Schumacher’s (1975) meta-economics that seeks to purify development of its violent, ideological character in order to allow it to be the creative process that leads to true human flourishing. By starting from the premises of the development discourse itself and purifying it of its ideological character, this work hopes to lay out the possibility of re-encountering development in its true nature as a humanizing and creative process of society’s self-actualization. Key Words: Philosophy of Development, Discourse, Development “What is Development?” “What is development? Why should it be pursued? And how are we to achieve development?” These are some of the fundamental questions that a person interested with development comes to grapple with in his thinking about the subject. At the outset, everyone begins with a certain preconceived notion of the what or the content of development. When we say the word development, images of buildings or malls or expensive cars as concrete manifestations come to mind. For others, freedom from poverty and hunger, financial and social security, the absence of disease and warfare all lend a vision of what development consists of. For others, their visions of development are based on the lifestyles of the wealthier segments of society which entails owning the latest gadgets, cars, or other luxury items. In all these conceptions of the content of development, the imagination is at work. This imagination is in turn dependent on the lived-experience base of people which includes the experience of their contemporaries with whom they have a chance to compare their experiences with. Certain notions of development arise from such encounters with what their actual standards of living as well as the living standards of others in society. This notion of others refers not only to the better off but also to the poorer segments of society. As such, development consists of an array of states from the worst off to the best off in society and one’s conception of development is in turn dependent on where he finds himself within this spectrum. Furthermore, one’s conception of development changes with respect to the particular social group that one is talking about. For instance, one speaks of development as freedom from poverty and increased urbanization when one is talking about the rural poor whereas development for the well to do consists in maintaining or improving their social status and the continued accumulation of wealth and power. In all these, external influences as to what constitutes development play a big role in the conception of these images of development. What one sees in the numerous advertisements concretized in billboards, commercials, mass media, social media, and the like constitute our conception of development. In some cases, the absence of such external influences as is the case with tribal communities who are not as exposed to the effects of advertising as the city-dweller but who are nonetheless being increasingly drawn into the money economy would have alternative notions of development which would often be unintelligible or anachronistic for the ordinary city-dweller. The effects of social influences on our notions of development cannot be underestimated. These influences factor greatly into our conception of what development or more precisely, what the good life, consists of. Aside from these socially conditioned images of development, we also have another source of the content of development. This source is the more academic source where different schools of thought give notions of development that are based on their field expertise – mainly, but not limited to, development economics and/or political economy. This field is called the field of development studies which is the intersection of numerous other fields such as economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, geography, and the like. These notions of development have an air of expertise to them in the sense that they are notions of development that arise out of the work of intellectuals who have presumably spent much of their time in conceiving not only of the what of development but more importantly, the how or process of accomplishing the goals of development. This academic and often empirical treatment of development essentially contains a description of the current state of affairs and a prescription to arrive at a certain state of affairs that is conceived of as being better in the sense of being more conducive to maximizing human satisfaction and which satisfies the criteria of a society that is more humane or just. Conceptualization and the creation of frameworks with which to view social phenomenon in terms of the causes of development and underdevelopment are deployed by these schools of thought and these conceptual formulations are tested on whether or not they are able to more effectively reflect reality in terms of scope and depth and whether or not the prescriptions that they provide truly conduce to a better state of affairs. This realm of academic notions of development is properly called the field or discourse of development studies which is “a space in which only certain things could be said and imagined.” Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 39. This field is in fact a representation of the world according to certain conceptual lens which directs the movement of resources and manpower towards actual interventions that would hopefully bring about the desired changes in society. Development, in this sense, is thus an ideology that is being perpetuated on multiple levels through academic studies and practical interventions which mobilize resources towards a certain conceptualization of what development constitutes in. As such, development is a process of realizing a certain ideal or conceptualization of development by addressing the causes of underdevelopment through interventions of a mostly economic nature. These interventions are the result of prescriptions which are derived in turn from the descriptions that these development experts provide to key institutions such as the State and development organizations. Development as Ideology These academic forms or what we can call the discourse of development serves in fact as the principle or justification for certain development interventions that have tended to cause more harm than good as is the case with the USAID’s interventions in Egypt wherein USAID was part of the problem it wished to eradicate. Timothy Mitchell, “The Object of Development,” in The Power of Development (London, Routledge, 1995), 150. In fact, the main criticisms of the field of development studies have come from within precisely because of its failure to deliver on the promises that it purportedly was supposed to be the harbinger of. The failure of these schools of thought and their implementing bodies to produce development and their success at causing more underdevelopment or reproducing the Third World is the primary reason why authors such as Escobar (1994), Mitchell (1995), and Mehmet (1999) Mehmet, Ozay. Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of Economic Development Theories. 2nd edition. London, Routledge, 1999. among other authors wrote their criticisms of development. For these authors, development served as the flagship under which certain practices were put into place which led to more suffering in the lives of those that purportedly would have benefited from the implementation of these interventions. Under the guidance of these “development experts” who were mostly economists and technocrats of all sorts, the living conditions of the Third World (the developees) worsened while the living conditions of the First World (the benevolent developers) actually improved. With development being seen as such a violent instead of a benevolent ideology, calls against development or alternative frameworks for development are now being called into play as is the case with authors such as Schumacher (1975), Van-Arendonk-Marquez (1985), and Sen (1999). Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if people mattered. London: Harrow, 1975. Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Van Arendonk-Marquez, Asuncion. “Toward Love and Authenticity in Third World Development: A Sociological Critique of Development Models.” PhD diss., St. John’s University, New York, 1985. This work is an attempt to contribute to the formulation of more humane notions of development that would serve as a tool for criticizing the numerous interventions that are being proposed in the name of development as well as proposing new prescriptions to heal society’s many woes. But in order to achieve these alternative formulations, it is first necessary to explore the features of development as a discursive tool that seeks to perpetuate its hegemony in both the intellectual and practical fields by examining its assumptions, methodology, and tools of power. The Practice of Ideology When it comes to the methodology of the discourse of development, it is very important to first of all remember that prescription follows description. There is an assumed logical connection between the current state of affairs (underdevelopment) and the expected state of affairs (development) and this logical connection is one that should be addressed through the mediation of a particular development intervention. This development intervention begins with a diagnosis of the causes of underdevelopment and from it derives an appropriate intervention that would address the causes of underdevelopment in order to bring about development. As such, the job of the development expert can be likened to the job of the clinical physician who seeks to know the problem of his patient through a diagnosis in order to suggest a cure. This is in fact the procedure that the known macroeconomist Jeffrey Sachs tries to undertake in what he calls clinical economics which is another and hopefully better form of trying to solve the development problem. He describes his profession as follows, “My job as a macroeconomic adviser during the past quarter century has been to help national economies function properly by diagnosing economic crises and then correcting breakdowns in key sectors of the economy. … A macroeconomist faces the challenge of a clinical doctor who must help a patient with serious symptoms and an unknown underlying disease. An effective response involves making a correct diagnosis about the underlying problem and then designing a treatment regimen to correct it.” Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (New York: Random House, 2011), 6. Of course, the effectiveness of this set-up is heavily dependent on the correctness of the diagnosis or what we call the description of the state of affairs in a social context. Most often if not all the time, this is the problematic aspect underlying development interventions – the incorrectness of their description leads to prescriptions that not only fail to address the problem but in fact worsens it. This is the case with Mitchell where the problems of Egypt are seen as problems of geography instead of demography Timothy Mitchell, “The Object of Development,” 129. (p. 129) and technological and managerial solutions are prescribed Ibid., 139. instead of political solutions such as much needed land reform. This particular example of de-politicizing the problem is but one aspect of the complex process in which the development discourse flattens meanings by reducing complex reality into a set of simple and workable assumptions that compose an integrated unit. Part of this discourse is the use of images or the enframing of reality into easily identifiable and naturalized units such as an overpopulated region trying to fit themselves into 4% of available land near the Nile River which tends to block out all the numerous complexities that constitute the actual state of affairs. Ibid., 129. From here, we can glean the emergence of an important aspect of the development discourse. This is none other than that its description of the state of affairs is none other than an interpretation from a certain perspective of the state of affairs. This interpretation often assumes a very neutral and rational (scientific) position under the heading of development economics and works under the guise of being as natural as it can be such that it is often forgotten that the “objects of analysis do not occur as natural phenomena, but are partly constructed by the discourse that describes them ”. Ibid., 130. As Mitchell frankly concludes, “the more natural the object appears, the less obvious this discursive construction will be” Ibid. and hence, the more readily acceptable as natural, factual objects will the representations of reality through naturalised images become even when such images fail to accurately capture the situation. From here, we can discern one crucial feature of the discourse of development – the objectification or the enframing of the world into an object that is open to scrutiny from the outside. This object is an object of rational planning in which the object of rational planning must be grasped in its entirety. Ibid., 149. Thus, the object is gleaned from the outside, through the eyes of a detached and rational spectator who observes the object in its entirety from a distance. The world is thus conceived of as a picture composed of Western, that is, economic categories. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 7. The development expert assumes the role of a spectator that analyses this picture and from this analysis intervenes to bring about the necessary changes into the system. The features of this picture are necessarily simplified representations of complex reality, that is, highly abstract and reductionist in their representation. This implies that social realities are presented through certain specific conceptual categories where the limits of what can be said and thought about are clearly demarcated from the outset instead of arising naturally through a non-prejudiced observation. These conceptual categories are often detached from the actual lives of people and tend to downplay or altogether dismiss important qualitative aspects of the reality that they are describing in favour of more quantitative and readily comparable categorizations. Development as such becomes “a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of ‘progress.’” Ibid., 44. He adds, development is therefore seen “not as a cultural process but instead as a system of more or less universally applicable technical interventions intended to deliver some “badly needed” goods to a “target” population.” Ibid. The flattening of meaning brought about by the objectification of the world allows one to reduce the complex problems of society into economic problems (technological and managerial aspects) that are devoid of cultural, historical, and political processes of formation. This results to the formulation of development interventions that are believed to be universally applicable because the laws or the logic of development are believed to be universally valid truths because of their status as quasi-scientific, that is, abstract and logical truth. This reduction of the complexity of reality into economics is necessary in so far as the development discourse arose from Modernity’s tradition of analytic science where the object to be analysed is dissected into its minute parts in order to figure out which particular part of the object must be tweaked in order to solve the problems of the whole. Indeed, the privileged position of economics is a reflection of the quintessence of modernity which approaches reality, in theory and in practice, through an empirical and objectivist manner. Ibid., 8. Economics thus assumes the status of a detached and rational science that seeks to address the problems of society, in particular, that of the underdeveloped economies through the targeting of ready-made economic categories or labels such as “the underdeveloped”, “the poor”, “the peasant class”, “the agricultural women”, etc. It is only through the construction of these abnormalities through the use of the conceptual apparatus of economics that development interventions begin to arise. As was indicated earlier, the discursive practices of development have led to the naturalization of these economic categories such that it is often easy to forget the fact of their social construction and thus, of their anthropology. As a result, it is easy to forget that these economic concepts were formulated by people with vested national interests which is Mehmet’s thesis, that is, the Eurocentricity of mainstream economic development theory. Ozay Mehmet, Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of Economic Development Theories, 7. Development as such, is decidedly a product of Western Modernity and actions done in the name of development contribute, in one way or another, toward the perpetuation of the hegemony of the discourse of development and necessarily, of the West (Euro-American-centric). Thus, when “development had achieved the status of a certainty in the social imaginary” Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 5., this only means that social reality as such had now been necessarily conceptualized through the lens of development, that is, development as couched in the terms of impassionate and rational mainstream development economics. The categories that development economics provided became not only the privileged categories of viewing society in the sense of presenting itself as being a most natural representation of reality, but also in the sense of their having priority over other qualitative facets of reality. In fact, it can be said that the increasing quantification and abstraction of everything by economics through its reductionism to the profit motive through the processes of capitalization and monetization where everything can be figured into a cost-benefit analysis despite the inherent qualitative incommensurability between the goods of this world is the decisive effect of the discourse of development. It is precisely this discursive effect of development which silences the qualitative differences inherent in reality to their quantitative but shallower counterparts that has led to the failed interventions that have plagued the Third World. These failed interventions are in turn the reason for the on-going resistance to development that is occurring in most of these societies as development has continually failed to deliver on her promises. From the above said, we therefore see that the process of objectification or enframing leads toward the processes of the observer’s detachment, the naturalization of the image of development, and of the assumption of the neutral gaze of scientific interventionism. These processes, however, work on certain prejudiced assumptions that development theory has knowingly proliferated through its discourse and practices. These prejudices are the bias for Western standards and the homogenization of the West’s Other as necessarily backward and in need of salvation, the privilege of scientific and uniform thinking over locally operating discourses and conceptions of the self and society, and the bias towards the professionalization and institutionalization of development discourse and practice which affords their theoretical knowledge the status of truth that is rational and universally applicable. I will go through each of these one by one. First, the bias for Western standards and the bigotry against the non-west is best summarized by the White Man’s burden of bringing rationality and modernity to the backward and traditional peoples in the name of progress. Indeed, development has often been conceived as the magic formula of the third-world countries adopting the indubitable models of the industrialized nations of North America and Europe. Ibid., i. According to this theory, development consists in bringing about the necessary conditions to replicating all over the world the structure of advanced societies through capital, science and technology. Ibid., 4. This framework assumes that the West’s other is in need of help as they cannot help themselves because of endogenous negative characteristic traits such as laziness and their belief in irrational traditions. This view is expounded by the fact that not only is such a characterization made of these people but more importantly, this view is applicable to all of the West’s Other because they form a homogenous bloc of backwards people. Another consequence of this bias for the West is that the standards that are used as benchmarks in measuring the status of these peoples are necessarily those of the West as they are superior than those of the non-West. Ibid., 9. This often translates to the perpetuation of their status as inferior classes because there is a strict incompatibility between the peoples of the non-West with the designs of the West because of the reductionism that the West imposes on these peoples. What this means is that the models and standards espoused by the West cannot be met by these people because such reductionist modes of living are faced, from the outset, with resistance in the non-West who adhere to a different rationality. This difference in terms of rationalities puts into direct opposition the locally mediated and heterogenous cultures and identities of these peoples with the strict imposition of the western, economic model of thinking and behaving. Because it assumes the status of universality and impartiality, the scientific (nature-dominating) and economic (utility-maximizing) rationalities of the west become blind to the fact that there are alternative value systems and ways of conceiving and behaving in the world and it is precisely these modes of thinking and living that these people who resist such Western imperialism subscribe to. The blindness of the discipline of economics to its own assumptions leads to the numerous conflicts that forced imposition on these differently-rational people generates. More often than not, violence, both physical and cultural, is done to these peoples for the sake of universalizing the Western rational viewpoint and this effectively leads to the hegemony of Western ways of thinking to the marginalization and elimination of the diverse other modes of thinking, valuing, and living. Finally, the professionalization and institutionalization of knowledge in the hands of theoretical experts leads to the concentration in the hands of a few people, often economists, of the discourse of development. What this means is that a select group of people have exclusive knowledge and have the power to define what counts as truth and knowledge in the discursive space of development and what counts as mere opinion. Building upon the earlier violence between different rationalities, what this means is that only the knowledge generated by economic theorizing and its related fields counts as truth and all other indigenous forms of knowing are relegated to the status of mere (traditional and backward) opinion. As such, these forms of knowledge are never taken seriously and are often explicitly set aside in the implementation of development interventions. In fact, such forms of knowing or cultures are seen as obstacles that must be gotten rid of through the auspices of modernization and progress. As was stated earlier, this leads to cultural and physical violence in terms of what can be said and thought about and most especially, in how people ought to live their lives. Development as such becomes an ideology that dragoons people toward certain ways of living as is prescribed by these experts because such ways of living are supposedly modern, that is, better and more becoming of the cultured human being. Development as such becomes violence incarnate and is thereby met with resistance by those whom she displaces. The Tools of Ideology In expanding its hegemonic dominance on the cultural or discursive level, the development discourse employs a host of tools that effectively propagate the appropriation of economic categories and rationality as the primary way of thinking and dealing with the world. First among these tools or processes is that of monetization and capitalization where everything is attached a price tag and turned into a form of capital useful for making profits and where everything that cannot be converted to capital is simply dismissed as uneconomic and hence, altogether disregarded . Once everything is seen through the economic lens, the underlying logic that operates is necessarily that of economics which is none other the maximization of utility which is often measured by the amount of consumption that one undertakes. Other interpretations of utility such as satisfaction or creative work are set aside for this narrow conception of happiness as utility. It is by following this logic of, as Schumacher says, bargain-hunting, that development interventions are founded upon as these interventions must necessarily make bargain-hunting by individual buyers and sellers in the market place easier. Interventions in aspects of life such as health and hunger are all seen in light of their ultimate contribution to the functioning of economy and the profit motive and money is deified as a good unto itself. After the process of capitalization and monetization have taken place and the problem of society is now translated into the enabling of all to become better bargain-hunters in society, the next step entails the creation of new categories in which interventions ought to take place because such interventions would better enable people to have access to these goods and services (the bargain). This entails the problematization of social phenomenon that have hitherto been not considered as problems that can be treated through rational intervention as is the case with poverty and hunger. The problematization of poverty and hunger is, as Escobar argues, the beginnings of the history of development as a science that has attracted a host of people from all sorts of disciplines into its fold. Development begins by building upon the categories of political economy and from it formulating its underside – that is, the reverse of the categories that economics uses such as the underdeveloped peoples of the world which were arbitrarily constructed by setting up a certain level of per capita income as the standard measure for poverty. Hence, it is from the foundations of political economy where everything is conceptualized according to money terms that the categories of development arise, namely, the Third World. While this process has had its forerunners in the period prior to World War II, it was in the post-World War II era that the development of the discourse of development took place. This development entailed the systematization and the specification of the categories of underdevelopment through the formulation of labels or ready-made client categories that have more focused targets. The underlying reason behind this targeted focusing is for the compartmentalization of interventions and the increased specialization on the part of the development experts to intervene on specific facets of the client categories. This increased specialization and focused targeting are all part of the systematic interventionism in which development tries to accomplish its task by working on the parts on to the whole. The usage of labels or client categories make such systematic undertakings easier as analysis is more readily done as compared to targeting broader and more complex facets of reality. While these labels serve the function of making intervention more focused and strategic, it is important to remember, however, that these labels are part of the discursive tools of development in perpetuating their hegemony. As Escobar notes, “labels are by no means neutral; they embody concrete relationships of power and influence the categories with which we think and act.” Ibid., 109. What is meant by this is that labels are by no means natural conceptions of reality and therefore, value-less. Rather, they are value-laden in the sense that they represent the objective power of the ones governing the discourse over the ones whom the discourse is being said about. The categorization of Africa for example as the continent of the hungry is, as Escobar argues, one of the most prominent examples of the exercise of power of the West over the Third World. In the act of labelling, the subjected peoples are reduced to a singular facet of their reality and are given a homogenized characterization which is deterministic of their entire way of living. This is akin to what Sen notes as the assignation of singular, inferior, and often belligerent identities to a target people by those perpetuating the discourse in order to present themselves as vastly superior over those that they are labelling Sen Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2006.. Labelling as such is the discursive tool par excellance as it conditions all later treatments of the labelled by configuring the power relations between the labellers and those that are labelled. Aside from labelling, other tools are also put into motion such as documentary processes and planning models which represent certain social relations between the labelled and the labellers and which remove from the labellers the responsibility of intervening with the labelled. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 108. By proposing a planning model of intervention which takes the guise of rational and common-sense procedures that construct problems in ways that can be handled effectively, the labellers are absolved of their responsibility in the actual implementation of these seemingly teleological processes. Ibid., 111. This often translates to the blame being put on the labelled for not acting in accordance with the standards of the labellers such as poor people acting irrationally that leads to the failure of development interventions. What this one-sided representation of the state of affairs fails to capture is that the terms rational and common-sense may and are actually defined differently in the case of the labelled and as such must be treated on their own terms in order for such interventions to succeed. Without the sensitivity to the reality of these alternative rationalities, the bigotry of the labellers are only reinforced and the problems that were tried to be solved only end up being exacerbated. Conclusion In this section, I have attempted to lay the foundations of what can be called a philosophy of development or what Schumacher calls a meta-economics that serves as the basis of economic thinking by laying out the assumptions and methodology of the development discourse as it is dominantly practiced and perpetuated by both academicians and development experts the world over. By investigating the discursive functions of development, I have gone over its ideological character and shown the processes through which it perpetuates its hegemony over how we see and encounter social reality, which is none other than through the dominant conceptual categories of political economy. These categories in turn led to the creation of specialized client categories or labels through which development interventions are targeted and justified. The failure of these interventions are due, however, to the primary fact that the labelling or descriptive process of social reality is constituted by a power mechanism that marginalizes the objects of development from the get-go. By presenting the labelled as necessarily backward and eliminating all the other important qualitative aspects of their lives for the sake of simplification into quantitative data, the labelled are effectively suppressed and turned into mere abstract categories that one can merely play around with which will necessarily and logically lead to good results. Experience has clearly shown that this is not the case and the numerous calls for alternative ways of conceiving development, that is, the resistance to this domination, are indications that for development to truly happen, it must reconsider its presuppositions and methodology and be wary of the power mechanisms that it puts into motion. Development, as I see it, will always remain as an ideology in so far as it shapes the way in which we see and intervene in the world but this does not mean that it cannot be purified of its homogenizing tendencies. The hope that underlies this project is the possibility of re-encountering development by recovering what it is that development really seeks to address – its goal, in order to clarify the proper way with which to achieve it – its how, and in turn, to make apparent the reason why it ought to be pursued – its why. This process of answering the threefold question of development – its content, its manner, and its justification, must be found prior to its empirical content and be justified in a realm that is prior to and which is the basis of the development discourse itself. As such, it is only by re-examining the presuppositions of development and recasting its assumptions and methodology in the light of philosophical reflection – that is, in terms of a re-evaluation of the value that we attach to the objects of development and to the development process itself, that we can arrive at a renewed and hopefully more humane understanding of development and its processes. References: Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995). Mehmet, Ozay. Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of Economic Development Theories. 2nd edition (London, Routledge, 1999). Mitchell, Timothy. “The Object of Development,” in The Power of Development (London, Routledge, 1995). Sachs, Jeffrey. The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (New York: Random House, 2011). Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if people mattered (London: Harrow, 1975). Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). Sen Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2006). Van Arendonk-Marquez, Asuncion. “Toward Love and Authenticity in Third World Development: A Sociological Critique of Development Models.” PhD diss., (St. John’s University, New York, 1985).