THE POST-DEVELOPMENT READER

EDITED BY MAJID RAHNEMA WITH VICTORIA BAWTREE

ZED BOOKS             1997

PART 1

 

Back cover

With the collapse of colonialism, the millions who had joined the struggle accepted their leaders’ new call for ‘development’. Little today remains of that enthusiasm. The question they now ask is: can anything be done to stop the process and regenerate the forces needed to bring about change more in accordance with their own aspirations?

This Reader brings together an exceptionally gifted group of thinkers and activists – from South and North – who have long pondered these questions. Diverse in background and experience, they are all committed, however, to seeing through the rhetoric of development, free from the distorting lenses of ideology or habit. They are also interested in looking at ‘the other side of the story’, particularly from the perspective of the ‘losers’.

It is these orientations which make his Reader such an original compilation. The contributors illuminate the wisdom of vernacular society which modern development thinking and practice has done so much to denigrate and destroy. They deliver devastating critiques of the dominant development paradigm and what it has done to the peoples of the world and their richly diverse and sustainable ways of living. Most importantly, in terms of the future, they present some of the experiences and ideas out of which ordinary people are now trying to construct their own more humane and culturally and ecologically respectful alternatives to development which, in turn, may provide useful signposts for those concerned with the post-development era that is now at hand.

Introduction by Majid Rahnema

The disintegration of the colonial empires brought about a strange and incongruous convergence of aspirations. The leaders of the independence movements were eager to transform their devastated countries into modern nation-states, while the ‘masses’, who had often paid for their victories with their blood, were hoping to liberate themselves from both the old and the new forms of subjugation. As to the former colonial masters, they were seeking a new system of domination, in the hope that it would allow them to maintain their presence in the ex-colonies, in order to continue to exploit their natural resources, as well as to use them as markets for their expanding economies or as bases for their geopolitical ambitions. The myth of development emerged as an ideal construct to meet the hopes of the three categories of actors.

For quite a long time, this temporary meeting of otherwise highly divergent interests gave the development discourse a charismatic power of attraction. The different parties to the consensus it represented had indeed their own differences as to the ways development had to be implemented. For an important group, economic development was the key to any kind of development. For another, culture and the social conditions proper to each country had to prevail in any process of development. On another plane, an animated debate witnessed major differences between people who wanted an expert-based and professionally managed development and others who were for an ‘endogenous’, ‘human-centred’, ‘participatory’, ‘bottom-up’ or, later, ‘sustainable’ form of development. These ‘policy-oriented’ divergences seemed, however, too weak to question the ideology of development and its relevance to people’s deeper aspirations. In the 1960s, when an ‘outsider’ like Ivan Illich set out to challenge the very idea of development as a threat to people’s autonomy, his stand was perceived by many as sheer provocation. Development, even more than schooling, was then such a sacred cow that it appeared totally irresponsible to question its relevance.

This almost unanimous support for development was somehow significant of the very gap it had started to produce in societies in which it had been introduced. For now it appears clearly that such a unanimity was far from being shared at the grassroots level, where it was supposed to reach the suffering population. Only the ‘authorities’ who were speaking on behalf of their ‘target populations’ claimed that such was the case. The voices that, here and there, were heard across the barriers separating the rulers from the ruled, showed that the latter had never been seriously consulted.

It may well be said that when the ‘national’ leaders of various anti-colonial struggles took over the movements emerging from the grassroots, they succeeded in making them believe that development was the best answer to their demands. As such, for all the victims of colonial rule, it did appear for a while as a promising mirage: the long-awaited source of regeneration to which they had been looking for so long. But the mirage ultimately transformed into a recurring nightmare for millions. As a matter of fact, it soon appeared to them that development had been, from the beginning, nothing but a deceitful mirage. It had acted as a factor of division, of exclusion and of discrimination rather than of liberation of any kind. It had mainly served to strengthen the new alliances that were going to unite the interests of the post-colonial foreign expansionists with those of the local leaders in need of them for consolidation of their own positions. Thanks to these alliances, societies that had invented modernized poverty could now extend it to all ‘developing’ countries.

This is how, under the banner of development and progress, a tiny minority of local profiteers, supported by their foreign ‘patrons’, set out to devastate the very foundations of social life in these countries. A merciless war was waged against the age-old traditions of communal solidarity. The virtues of simplicity and conviviality, of noble forms of poverty, of the wisdom of relying on each other, and of the arts of suffering were derided as signs of ‘underdevelopment’. A culture of ‘individual’ success and of socially imputed ‘needs’ led younger men to depart their villages, leaving behind dislocated families of women, children and older men who had no one to rely on but the promises of often unattainable ‘goods’ and ‘services’. Millions of men and women were thus mortally wounded in their bodies and souls, falling en masse into a destitution for which they had never been culturally prepared.

For the development establishment and its beneficiaries, this unprecedented tragedy was interpreted only as the inevitable price to be paid for a good life for all. Even now, with a few localized exceptions, the famous economic gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ continues to reach ever more intolerable proportions, development ideologists attribute its failures only to political or other causes external to the development ideology. The very fact that, only recently, on the occasion of the United Nations’ fiftieth anniversary, delegates were unanimous in giving their full support shows that development, like the nation-state it serves and the educational systems it promotes, has become one of the founding pillars of the modern ‘global village’ programmed for the 21^st century. Similarly, the majority of books and articles published on development continue to talk about what it needs to grow rather than the threats it poses to its ‘target populations’. For a long time, even students trying to see ‘the other side of the moon’ had difficulty hearing the voices of the great losers and their friends.

• The idea of a collection of essays that would make it possible for students to hear those voices originally started some 12 years ago.
• I owe to Robert Molteno, the inspiring editor of Zed Books, the suggestion in 1991 that a Reader be published having a view of development from the perspective of the ‘losers’ and their friends.
• The first appearance of the word ‘Post-Development’ some 6 or 7 years ago made it necessary to take into account the practices and thoughts that were actually shaping the period following the demise of the development ideology.
• Victoria Bawtree, the former editor of Ideas and Action (a well-known FAO magazine which was doomed to disappear because of many of its ‘subversive’ grassroots positions) joined in the endeavour, bringing to the task her valuable knowledge and experience and the contagious energy of an old development insider.

The texts presented here have at least three qualities in common. They are subversive, not in the sense attributed to this adjective by modern inquisitors, but as Cardinal Arns, of São Paulo, defined it in his courageous statement before an annual meeting of the Society for International Development, in 1983: ‘Subvert’, he said, ‘means to turn a situation round and look at it from the other side’; that is, the side of ‘people who have to die so that the system can go on.’

Hence, the selections are also human-centred; that is they represent a perception of reality from the perspective of the human beings involved in the processes of change. As such, the concern of the contributors to this Reader is not for ‘progress’, ‘productivity’, or any other achievement per se in the scientific, technological or economic fields. It is rather to find out whom these serve or exclude, and how they affect the human condition and the relational fabric of the society into which they are introduced. If some spectacular technological advance delights a minority of individual ‘winners’ to the detriment of an increasing number of ‘losers’. The contributors to this anthology are eager to convey what these losers think about it, and how their lives are affected by it.

Finally, the ideas presented here are radical, not in the polemical sense often intended by the use of this adjective to discredit free thinking, but in the etymological sense of the word: that is, going to the roots (Latin radix) of the questions, ‘pertains to, or affects what is fundamental’.

• The contributors to this volume inhabit a vast spectrum of cultures with all their differences. They represent very different horizons of thought.
• They belong to a generation that went quite far to defend the great ideologies that marked the present century, most drawing their strength from the deeply humanistic traditions of all the world’s cultures.
• As a rule, the majority of the contributors to this Reader have, at some moment of their personal itinerary bitterly experienced the disillusions intrinsic to such ideologies.
• That does not seem to have driven them to discredit the virtues often associated with the birth of such ideologies, but to discover their extraordinary corrupting possibilities, particularly when they tend to colonize one’s autonomous capacity to search for the Truth.

 

The contributions to this Reader have been classified in five parts

Part One … (to be continued)