43:4 "Past", "Post" and "Future" Development

Beyond the Search for a Paradigm? Post-Development and

beyond
ARTURO ESCOBAR

Arturo Escobar reviews the critiques around post modernist critiques of

development. He looks at the reading strategies employs and argues for a cultural
politics of difference.

Key words: modernization, livelihoods, locality, post-structuralism

Unsettling development
The status of development has become again difficult to ascertain. During the first decades of
the development era, and despite an array of positions, there seemed to be clear agreement
on the need for some sort of development.

Modernization and dependency theories were the paradigms of the day. Little by little this
consensus started to erode because of a number of factors, both social (the increasing
inability of development to fulfill its promises, the rise of movements that questioned the its
very rationality) and intellectual (the availability of new tools of analysis, chiefly post-
structuralism). In the 1990s, post-structuralist critiques succeeded in casting a serious doubt
not only on the feasibility but on the very desirability of development. Going beyond most
previous critiques, development was shown to be a pervasive cultural discourse with
profound consequences for the production of social reality in the so-called Third World.

The deconstruction of development by the post-structuralists resulted in the possibility of

imagining a post-development era, one in which the centrality of development as an
organizing principle of social life would no longer hold. In the second half of the 1990s, these
analyses became themselves the object of poignant criticisms and rebuttals. Many of these
works are directed against what is now described as ‘the post-development school’ or
position. I do not want to suggest that this new set of works constitutes a unified position or
even a trend.

However, in the limited space allowed, I want to treat them as a group by outlining what I
consider to be the main concerns expressed by them, on the one hand, and what I believe is at
the basis of these concerns, on the other. For the sake of brevity, I will also accept the
identification of the ‘post-development school’ with three visible works, The Development
Dictionary (Sachs ed, 1992), Encountering Development (Escobar, 1995), and The Post-
development Reader (Rahnema and Bawtree eds, 1997). These volumes are singled out in
several of the articles in question as the main texts on post-development, although there are
other authors added at times to this set (e.g, Rist, 1997; Vandana Shiva’s ‘ecofemism’, Cf.
Kiely, 1999) (1).

Defining the readings

I see three main claims in the anti-postdevelopment literature, if you allow me to use this
cumbersome label for brevity’s sake:
• Post-development critics presented an over-generalized and essentialized view of
development, while in reality there are vast differences within various development
strategies and institutions;
• They romanticized local traditions and local social movements, ignoring that the local
is also embedded in global power relations and that, indeed, many struggles today are
about access to development;
• They failed to notice the on-going contestation of development on the ground. Behind
these critiques, to be sure, are serious disagreements about the nature of social reality
(e.g, for the Marxist critics, discourse has little to do with reality, while for post-
strucuralist it is the main vehicle for the production of reality), and about the
character of political practice and the agent of social transformation. These
disagreements arise in great part out of contrasting paradigmatic orientations (liberal,
Marxist, or post-structuralist). I cannot address these differences here, but I would
like to highlight the importance of reflecting on these paradigmatic differences if we
are to construct a more meaningful dialogue about development, post-development,
or what you that is, if one is to go beyond ‘my paradigm or yours’, to borrow Pieterse’s
(1998) catchy title.

It seems to me that it is possible to distinguish three main reading strategies on the part of
the anti-postdevelopment writers. These reading strategies are conducted from, and in the
name of, a particular location. I should say that in most cases you find two or even the three
strategies at play, some times creating strange bedfellows brought together by their anti-post-
development position. These critiques of post-development, it seems to me, can be grouped
as taking place under three banners: the real, better theory, and the people.

Some critiques of post-development

In the name of the real
This strategy is practiced mostly by authors of Marxist orientation (e.g, Kiely 1999; Pieterse
1998; Peet and Hartwick, 1999; Babbington, 2000; Little and Painter, 1995; Berger, 1995). It
restates the primacy of the material over the discursive. For these authors, the problem is not
so much with development, even less so with modernity, than with capitalism. The critical
modernism (Peet and Hartwick, 1999) espoused by some of these writers is commendable in
many ways, yet it can be said that it arises out of their unwillingness to accept the post-
structuralist insight about the importance of language and meaning in the creation of reality.
This is a valid epistemological choice that has political consequences.

In the name of (better) theory

This strategy comes chiefly from fellow post-structuralist, which makes it the most puzzling
(e.g., Moore, 2000; to some extent Arce and Long, eds 2000; Crew and Harrison, 1998). It
says something like: ‘You represent development as homogenous while it is really diverse.
Development is heterogenous, contested, impure, hybrid; it is subverted at the local level’.
This assertion is undoubtedly true. However, these authors fail to acknowledge a) that their
own project of analyzing the contestation of development on the ground was in great part
made possible by the deconstruction of the development discourse (in the same way that this
latter was enabled by earlier critiques, from Illich, Nyrere, Cabral, Galtung, Freire and Fals
Borda to the dependentistas, and Foucault); b) that the post-structuralist project was a
different one that of ‘slaying the development monster’, to paraphrase Gibson-Graham’s
(1999) metaphor in their debunking of capitalocentrism in political economy. As Graham
says, ‘scratch a post-structuralist, and you will often find a realist’ (2). We did not try to
represent ‘the real’ (of the Third World). This was everybody else’s project, and part of the
problem from the post-development perspective.
In the name of the people
This is perhaps the most problematic strategy, and takes different forms. It might suggest
that post-development advocates do not understand power (power lies in the material and
with the people, not in discourse); that what is at stake is livelihood and people’s needs, not
theoretical analyses; that because of our romantic, neo-luddite and relativist stance we
patronize ‘the people’ and overlook their interests (e.g. Kiely, 1999; Pieterse, 1998; Storey,
2000; Little and Painter, 1995). I see this as a reflection of the chronic realism of many
scholars that invariably label as romantic any radical critique of the West or any defense of
‘the local’. At stake in this position is also a realist notion of social change that is problematic
because it does not unpack its view of ‘the material’, ‘livelihood’, ‘needs’, and the like. This
view also assumes that any contact with development and the commodity is a desire for
development and the commodity on the part of ‘the people’, not the enactment of a cultural
politics in which development and the commodity might mean very different things. Lastly,
this position is blind to the potential of social movements in mounting important challenges
to capitalism and development, as the growing transnational networks against globalization
are demonstrating in the most recent times. In this strategy, there is a triumph of the
realpolitik at the expense of other visions of the possible.

Finally, it is difficult not to raise the issue of the social basis of the anti-postdevelopment
critique. Without invoking a self-serving identity politics, it is puzzling that almost without
exception the anti-postdevelopment critics are white male academics in the North. The post-
development movement was at least more diverse at this level, including men and women
from both the North and the South, living and working in both the North and the South.
Besides our rejection of development, perhaps the most common denominator was that of
being middle class in our respective countries or countries of origin. But we came from many
places and experiences and had diverse intellectual and political interests and connections to
social movements. And if we refused to theorize about ‘how things must be instead’, it was not
because of a relativizing conceit (what Kiely labels the ‘Pontius Pilate attitude’), but precisely
because, in the spirit of post-structuralist genealogies, we see all too well how this normative
stance has always been present in all development discourses, even if naturalized and
normalized. For the post-development advocates, this naturalized morality domesticates our
ethical sensibilities, our thinking, and our actions in ways that can only serve the interests of
those in power.

Beyond paradigms?
As I mentioned, there are many valuable aspects of the criticisms I reviewed so hastily here. I
find great value, for instance, in Arce and Long’s (2000) project of reclaiming and pluralizing
modernity via strategies of development that run counter to the dominant model (yet one
might raise the question of the different genealogies of modernity, lest we continue to uphold
a European matrix at the root of all modernities); or in Babbington’s (2000) call for a notion
of development that is at once alternative and developmentalist, critical and practicable (yet
in this case we would need to unpack further his notion of livelihood; there is no livelihood
without culture); or in Fagan’s (1999) suggestion that the cultural politics of post-
development has to start with the everyday lives and struggles of concrete groups of people,
particularly women; or, finally, in Sylverster’s (1999) warning about being mindful of the
effect on our accounts of the world of our distance from those we write about. This means
that the dialogue goes on, and as the poet might have said, we should be thankful less about
arriving at the ‘right’ notion of development or post-development than at the fact that these
constructs gave us the opportunity to undertake the journey in the first place. For me, this is a
journey of the imagination, a dream about the utopian possibility of reconceiving and
reconstructing the world from the perspective of, and along with, those subaltern groups that
continue to enact a cultural politics of difference as they struggle to defend their places,
ecologies, and cultures.

Notes
(1) The main texts that to a greater of lesser extent adopt an explicit anti-postdevelopment”
position are: Babbington, 2000; Berger, 1995; Blaike, 1998; Crew and Harrison, 1998; Kiely,
1999; Lehmann, 1997; Peet and Hartwick, 1999; Pieterse, 1998; Storey (2000). I have not
included here those texts that, while critical of the poststructuralist analyes, take them
constructively as an element for redefining development theory and practice. See for instance
Gardner and Lewis, 1996; Grillo, and Stirrat, eds 1997; Fagan, 1999; Schech and Haggis,
2000. Finally, there are texts that do not fit easily into any of these two categories, such as
Arce and Long, eds 2000; Sylvester, 1999.
(2) Conversation during the meetings of Association of American Geographers, Pittsburgh,
April 1999.

Bibliography
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Routledge.

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Berger, M. (1995) ‘Post-Cold War Capitalism: Modernization and Modes of Resistance After
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Blaike, P. (1998) ‘Post-modernism and the Calling out of Development Geography’. Presented
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Crew, E. and E. Harrison (1998) Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid. London: Zed
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Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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