An Introduction
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Land-locked country with
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Few significant resources and
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Hundreds of development projects from 26 countries.
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Yet development projects in Lesotho regularly ‘fail’ to reach their objectives.
An Introduction 2

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Reviews both modernization and dependency approaches.
Both, for Ferguson, assume that some change in economic relations, either for good or bad, are the reasons for development projects.
But many projects in Lesotho do not result in any significant changes at all.
They also both assume that the ideas of development planners and their critics can be related to some kind of unseen intentionality, e.g. the development of capitalism.
However, Ferguson argues that the development apparatus is far more complex than that.
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He prefers a decentred approach, using the concept of discourse.
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Plans and policies can have unintended effects.
Even if development plans can be shown to be ‘false consciousness’, they still exert a powerful influence on development planners.
 Takes the apparatus of development as its object of study.
 Unintended effects of the CIDA-sponsored project can reveal the hidden workings of power.
 Unintended effect of many development projects is to transform political questions into technical, managerial ones, the ‘anti-politics’ machine.
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‘ Few developing countries faced such bleak economic prospects and were so ill-prepared as Lesotho when it gained independence in 1966. In few countries of the world was economic independence ore remote from political independence than in
Lesotho. In spite of the fact that Lesotho is an enclave within highly industrialized South Africa,...it was then virtually untouched by modern economic development. It was and still is, basically, a traditional subsistence peasant society. But rapid population growth resulting in extreme pressure on land, deteriorating soil and declining agricultural yields led to a situation in which the country was no longer able to produce enough food for its people. (WB
Report, 1975)
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 Isolation and remoteness from markets.
 Subsistence orientation of peasant agriculture.
 Increasing population pressure.
 Insufficient production.
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 Increase commercialization and market access.
 Through road access to rural areas and commercialization schemes.
 Increased commercialization will lead to increasing production to meet food needs.
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Booming export agriculture in the late nineteenth century.
1913 Land Act expropriated much of the Basotho agricultural lands.
In-migration of Dutch settlers who took over much Basotho land.
Ecological degradation of the 10% of Lesotho’s land that was arable.
Import of Australian and American grain undercut Basotho producers.
Rise of diamond mining industry in South Africa.
Increase in the number of contract workers from Lesotho to the
South African diamond mines.
In the 1980s, ½ the adult male population was working in South
African diamond mines and their earnings accounted for 70% of rural income.
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Lesotho was not an isolated,
‘traditional’ society engaged mainly in subsistence agriculture.
Commodity and labour flows have characterized the region for more than a century at least.
Why, then, did the World Bank and many other ‘aid agencies’ characterize Lesotho in such a way?
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The characterization of underdevelopment as
‘isolated, subsistence-oriented societies’ justifies a certain type of development intervention.
It provides an ideal ‘object’, i.e. underdevelopment that becomes the raison d’etre for development discourse.
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It provides a continual justification for continual managerial/technical interventions.
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