Development as Discourse
‘The metaphor of development gave global hegemony to a purely Western
genealogy of history, robbing peoples of different cultures of the opportunity to
define the forms of their social life.’
Critics of ‘Development’, such as Esteva, see it as giving hegemony to a western
conception of history and society.
 What is the history of the term development?
o Historically, development until about 150 years ago described a
process through which the potentials of an organism are released
until it reaches its complete, full-fledged form.
o Between 1760 and 1850, the meaning changed from a concept of
change and transformation towards an appropriate form of
‘maturity’ to a meaning in which there emerged an ever more
perfect form.
o At the same time, it became connected to the concept of progress,
which was related to economic notions of what progress meant.
o Progress was linked to colonialism and to the justification for
European countries politically and economically controlling other
societies, or, in French terms, to ‘la mission civilatrice’.
o As colonialism waned through movements for political
independence from the 1940s to the 1960s, the term development
became key, while that of progress was discredited and became
secondary.
o 1948: Harry Truman defined the 20th century as the century of
‘development’.
50 Years of Development: Its Historical Context
 After World War II, the US emerged as the major centre of capital
accumulation.
 US needed to find markets for its goods, to invest surplus capital abroad,
to secure control over raw materials, e.g. oil, and to establish a network of
military power that would be predominant and ideally, unchallenged.
 This was the same period in which development discourse was put in
place, especially through the creation of international institutions that
regulated and defined ‘development’: These included not only various aid
agencies of the US and allied governments, but also international
financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund, created through the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944.
 Goal was rhetorically ‘the eradication of poverty’. 50 years later, poverty
has not been eradicated, but has proliferated and relative poverty has
increased massively. Obviously some disconnect between rhetoric and
reality here.
 Different explanations are given for this:
o Foucault: Development is a discourse, i.e. a combination of
knowledge and power, supported by influential and powerful
institutions that disseminate their worldviews.
o Marxian/Gramscian view: Development is rhetoric, ideology or
hegemony, an unconscious mask that its practitioners believe in,
but what development is really about the introduction and growth
of capitalism in regions of the world that had very different
societies, cultures and production systems. Cammock: World
Bank prescriptions for development mirror the early stages of
capitalism that England first went through in the late 18 th and early
19th centuries.
Development as Discourse
 Discourse: a combination of knowledge and power that presents
itself as pure, value-free and objective knowledge.
 Value-free and objective knowledge is a result of the emergence of
modernity, a world view emanating first from Europe in the 18 th and
19th centuries and which was seen as a continuous and neverfinished project, was inevitable and irreversible and which viewed
‘the traditional’ as stagnant, unchanging, almost devoid of history.
 Modernity and development are therefore very closely intertwined
concepts. Bauman: modernity was a world view articulated by and
reflecting the world view of educated elites of Europe during the
period in which it became commercialized and secularized. They
projected their own social, economic and cultural ideals as universal
ones towards which all societies should strive. Aimed first ‘against’
traditional ‘peasant’, ‘rural’ of ‘folk’ populations within Europe itself
and then against colonial societies which were different.
 Development, as a discourse centred mainly in the US, carried
forward this proselytizing mission after WWII.
 Unidirectional model of development: societies are divided into
traditional and modern, with the goal of social change being to
transform traditional into modern societies and cultures.
 Powerful educational institutions also disseminate the ideal of
development to elites from ‘developing’ countries.
 After WWII, the UN and World Bank defined 2/3 of the world as ‘poor’
and in need of development interventions.
 ‘Poverty’ also became pathologised, seen against the ‘norm’ of
‘developed’ countries: ‘illiterate,’ ‘underdeveloped,’ ‘malnourished,’
‘small farmers,’ or ‘landless peasants’.
 Set up various technologies and knowledge instruments through
which ‘development’ would be measured:
o Levels of poverty: this was defined through standards of
living: those countries and regions in which per capita income
was less than US $100 per year were defined as poor.
o Yet large regions of the globe only used limited money
exchange at this time; they were largely subsistence
economies who produced and exchanged goods locally or
even traded goods, but not with money.
 These populations often involved household units that
both cultivated and consumed the goods they produced.
They were automatically defined as poor.
 Hunters and gatherers, fishers and other subsistence
producers also became, through a stroke of the pen,
poverty-stricken.
 Perhaps then, the goal of ‘development’ discourse was
the destruction of subsistence economies and societies
and the introduction of market economies so that
American and other goods could then be sold
throughout the world?
 The antidote to ‘poverty’ was usually the same
prescription: increased commercialization, especially of
‘peasant’ and ‘tribal’ agriculture.
 But commercialization involved capital-intensive inputs
that many could not afford to purchase, e.g. Green
Revolution technology. Many lost their lands in the
process.
 Cash crops were substituted for subsistence crops.
Rural areas lost the capacity to feed themselves.
 Capital intensity and cash crop production introduced
new inequalities. They were capital and not labour
intensive and displaced people from the land.
 Led to a massive increase in ‘the unemployed’ and a
huge low-cost labour force.
 Subjectification of development discourse: villagers in
Nepal began to differentiate themselves in terms of
being ‘bikasi’ (developed) or ‘abikasi’ (underdeveloped).
“Countries that were self-sufficient in food crops at the end of World War
II—many of them even exported food to industrialized nations—became net food
importers throughout the development era. Hunger similarly grew as the capacity
of countries to produce the food necessary to feed themselves contracted under
the pressure to produce cash crops, accept cheap food from the West, and
conform to agricultural markets dominated by the multinational merchants of
grain” (Escobar 1996).