Developing Minds

Psychology, neoliberalism and power

Elise Klein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317226239
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Development policy makers and practitioners are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to target 'development' interventions and the psychological domain is now a specific frontier of their interventional focus. This landmark study considers the problematic relationship between development and psychology, tracing the deployment of psychological knowledge in the production/reproduction of power relations within the context of neoliberal development policy and intervention. It examines knowledge production and implementation by actors of development policy such as the World Bank and the neo-colonial state - and ends by examining the proposition of a critical psychology for more emancipatory forms of development.

The role of psychology in development studies remains a relatively unexplored area, with limited scholarship available. This important book aims to fill that gap by using critical psychology perspectives to explore the focus of the psychological domain of agency in development interventions. It will be essential reading for students, researchers, and policy makers from fields including critical psychology, social psychology, development studies and anthropology.

1
INTRODUCTION

On a dusty road that heads as far north as Timbuktu lies a village of around 400 people. Each person and family has their own story, their own beliefs, their own views and aspirations. On this particular day, however, all of this is forgotten. Burning down the dusty track are the four wheels carrying the development professional. They are coming to the village to talk about ‘development’ with the ‘community.’ This professional has travelled a long distance to be there in this village. They have left their own families and friends behind, donning the robe of the ‘professional’ with its flashy multilateral institutional logos, a passport that allows easy access to places across the world, as well as access to the funds and power to make or break the aspirations of those they come to assess.

Sitting under the old baobab tree, the ‘community’ meets as part of the professional’s mandate to undertake ‘participatory methods’ – a way to understand ‘the challenges faced by the community.’ Then what follows are more questions and conversation by men, as the women watch the ‘needs of the community’ articulated before them. The interpreter sitting nearby and listening intently simplifies the messages to ensure ease of the interpretation process. They know that the professional cannot comprehend the full meanings of the explanations received. The interpreter also knows what the development professional wants to hear. A blue ballpoint pen hurriedly meets paper as the professional jots down what they can. Occasionally, the professional will nod their head and smile sympathetically, especially when they hear words that are familiar and favoured – words like ‘collaboration,’ ‘community involvement’ and ‘empowering.’ Afterwards, and with more professionals and interpreters arriving at the village from down the dusty road, with ideas and ‘better ways,’ a new ‘project’ magically appears.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, in a remote region of the Kimberley in North West Australia, another development intervention is taking place. ‘We are re-engineering social norms,’ the manager says to the consultant. ‘Your job is to get the community onside with the program.’ The ‘community’ that is referred to has a long history with intervention. The first intervention was called ‘pacification’ by the colonial government, and the ‘killing time’ by locals. This was where pastoralists and the police force used any means necessary to remove Indigenous people from their homelands. Then came the gold rush, a time when murder and rape of Indigenous peoples by White miners was all too common. As the pastoralists and the settlers penetrated further across the Kimberley, acquiring land as they went, Indigenous people were forced into missions. The intervention site is a town now home to many of the families that endured these times, with the stories of horror fresh in their minds.

The manager reminds the consultant that the community is dysfunctional: ‘the stick approach is necessary to re-engineer these dysfunctional social norms. We need to help them get their lives back on track. You cannot have alcoholics bringing up children.’ The focus is to challenge the low unemployment and school attendance rates. But the professional misses the point that this is not for a lack of want; there are very few jobs available and the school is unfriendly to Indigenous kids who do not want to learn about Captain Cook anymore. Still, the development professional persists and, for those not obliging, disciplinary measures are used. These include compulsory income management and behavioural conditions on any state assistance, all so that the re-engineering can continue.

This is the development intervention.

What these two stories show, one from Mali and one from Australia, is the way such interventions unfold. Both stories have been collected through my time as a ‘development professional.’ I will draw on subsequent research undertaken in both Mali and Australia later in this book. However, to begin, it is important to highlight through both these stories how the development intervention is contested. For example, who decides that the norms of Indigenous people in a remote Kimberley town need to be re-engineered? Re-engineered to what? Why is the stick approach appropriate? Why is the manager’s view deemed hegemonic? Where are the voices of Indigenous people in their planning? Turning to the Malian example, how has it come to be that the professional decides which ideas will ‘work’ and which will not? How has it come to pass that the development professional is the holder of resources and opportunity? Who is the ‘community’ and what do they really think?

The development intervention

While the project of development maintains a positive view of itself, the development studies literature is full of analyses showing how the development intervention is a site of contestation, oppression and continued maintenance of ruling classes and structures (Mignolo 2011; Mosse 2005; Quijano 2000; Mbembe 1999; Ferguson 1994; Hayter 1971). From colonisation through to imperialism and on to contemporary modernisation theories, doing development has always been interlinked with relations of power and hegemony. The ‘intervention’ is a site where relations of power and knowledge intersect with the lived realities of those ‘being developed.’ In this sense, the development intervention is never neutral; rather, it is a tool that privileges particular meanings over others and reproduces embedded systems of power, which directly affects the lived reality and well-being of the ‘recipients of development assistance.’ Anthropologists of development have long held this view. Specifically, Olivier de Sardan (2005) argues that development policy and programmes support some groups’ meanings and logics while simultaneously reducing space for the expression of the logics and meanings of other groups. In the case of development policy, ‘progress,’ ‘development’ and ‘well-being’ are all contested terms especially because they are generally defined through a Western lens, often conflicting with other worldviews. Yet Western definitions of terms are hegemonic in development policy, and so Indigenous notions of development endure alterity. Whether disciplinary or supportive in intent, the process of development policy and related interventions involves control over the interpretation of events and providing opportunities for some aspirations while blocking others (Mosse 2004).

Development discourse underpinning development interventions sets out the rules of the game of ‘development.’ Development discourse concerns a particular set of relations,

established between institutions, socio-economic processes, forms of knowledge, technological factors and so on – [which] define the conditions under which objects, concepts, theories and strategies can be incorporated into the discourse.

(Escobar 1995: 87)

These discursive relations then inform who can speak, and from what position, according to what theory of change (Escobar 1995). To complicate matters more, development discourse does not necessarily translate directly and purely into interventions in a linear, managed fashion. This is because the intervention is not uniform, instead being a network of actors, including individuals, organisations and communities. Locating the intervention’s boundaries temporally and spatially is also a challenge. The development intervention framework is complex and can be contradictory in its aims and practice. The contrary nature of interventions is shown by David Mosse (2005) through the example of ‘good governance.’ As a current principle deployed within development discourse, good governance can be found to mean both ownership and conditionality, privatisation as well as democratisation, Western modernisation yet also post-development, decentralisation and centralisation (Mosse 2005). Not only do such contradictions cause one’s head to spin, a seemingly simple concept as ‘good governance’ shows that:

the practices of development actors are not governed by policy prescription, but generated by very different and diverse administrative, political or social-relational logics which are concealed by rationalising policy. Alternatively put, because the ordering principles of global policy have to be translated into the intentions, goals and ambitions of the diverse individual and institutional actors they bring together – whether these are national politicians, international experts, middle managers, bureaucrats, clinicians, technicians or NGO workers and field staff – they ‘cannot shape actual practice in the way that they claim.’

(Mosse 2005: 22–23, original emphasis included)

Despite the complexity of development, in the world of development interventions, there is a need for clarity and certainty (Mowles 2010; Mosse 2005). Projects and programmes require logic, a coherent story that will deliver results. Cause and effect must neatly compute into log frames, theories of change, monitoring and evaluation frameworks and risk management matrices. This can only be achieved in particular framing, and some narratives and discourses are simply easier to execute within this environment than others. Specifically, ‘methods are reductive and they tilt power relationships in favour of donors and managers who sit at a distance from the work, because they privilege generalised, non-contestable accounts of what is and is not happening’ (Mowles 2010: 767). Thus, there are some discourses, processes and structures that, while continuously changing and never static, always, at least in some latest iteration, prevail.

Tracing prevailing logics of development interventions show they do not always help those they intend. The Western discourse of progress and development endures because it is firmly situated in an unequal global structure of power and exploitation. Development has long been criticised as a project of Western hegemony that is intended to maintain the status quo of the global economy and political power (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994). Since colonisation, populations around the world have been impacted by the domination of Western global powers. Initially it was through the conquest of territory, followed by the exploitation of labour and resources that continue today. During this time there have been myriad interventions in which the subjects of these interventions have needed to contest and negotiate their encounter with the development project (Escobar 1995). This has been under the wider project of modernisation. Today, some argue that aid is used to appease the poor, while oppressive trade relations continue to exploit poor farmers, never offering them a real chance to get a level footing (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009; Maertens and Swinnen 2009). Furthermore, the maintenance of the global market economy, some argue, could never create equality or even a reduction in inequality. Instead, capitalism needs the global division of labour that underpins the race of capital accumulation through cheap labour and resources (Harvey 2005; Munck 2002).

It is a main argument of this book that the broad canon of Western psychological expertise as a product of Western modernity has been largely accepted into development practice without much hesitation or scrutiny. It is therefore the aim of this work to examine the use of Western psychological expertise as a technology of furthering hegemony and prevailing logics within development, where Western psychological expertise is a technology to reproduce particular processes of power and control. This book will do this by first examining the supposition that Western psychology is universal, overlooking and undervaluing the plurality of psychologies. Second, this book will examine the psychopolitics in which Western psychological expertise is deployed as a ‘technology’ within the development industries, in order to shape the subjectivities of the Global South towards neoliberal and racialised ends. Third, this book will explore possible avenues of how the ‘psychological’ could be relevant within development and beyond.

The changing focuses of development policy and interventions

Underpinning development interventions are systems of knowledge regarding what developme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Power and psychology
• 3 Genealogies of the psychologisation of development interventions
• 4 The psychologisation of contemporary development interventions
• 5 The State and implementing subjectivities
• 6 A place for psychology in development?
• 7 Conclusions
• Index