Communicating Development with Communities

Linje Manyozo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138746046
• eBook ISBN: 9781351719582
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Development theory and practice are often taught in a manner that strips them of their historical context and obscures alternative intellectual assumptions and critical frameworks. This prevents students from acquiring a holistic understanding of the world and consequently, when it comes to development practice, most lack the skills to live and engage with people. It has become crucial to properly consider what it means to conceive and implement participatory development out in the field and not just in the boardroom.

Building on the work of Robert Chambers and Arturo Escobar, Communicating Development with Communities is an empirically grounded critical reflection on how the development industry defines, imagines and constructs development at the implementation level. Unpacking the dominant syntax in the theory and practice of development, the book advocates a move towards relational and indigenous models of living that celebrate local ontologies, spirituality, economies of solidarity and community-ness. It investigates how subaltern voices are produced and appropriated, and how well-meaning experts can easily become oppressors. The book propounds a pedagogy of listening as a pathway that offers a space for interest groups to collaboratively curate meaningful development with and alongside communities.

This is a valuable resource for academics and practitioners in the fields of Development Studies, Communication for Development, Communication for Social Change, Social Anthropology, Economic Development and Public Policy.

Foreword by Robin Mansell.

Part I
Deconstruction

On 25 June 1832, Delacroix disembarks in Algiers for a short stopover. … This Orient, so near and of his own time, offers itself to him as a total and excessive novelty. … Delacroix spends only three days in Algiers. … For the first time, he penetrates into a world that is off-limits: that of the Algerian women … What his eyes saw was the permanent spectacle of an exteriority made up entirely of pomp, noise, cavalcades, and rapid motion.

Assia Djebar 1992, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 133

1
Spectacle of Development

Setting the context

The primary aim of this book is to examine the challenges and opportunities of curating and experimenting with more cooperative, horizontal and participatory forms of deliberative development in and with communities. It does this, first and foremost, in the first two chapters, by unmasking and unpacking what Robin Mansell (1982) depicted as the dominant paradigm of development which this book defines as the spectacle of development. Second, the book argues that despite the pervasiveness of problematic approaches and methodologies, especially in donor-driven models of development, there are liminal spaces that celebrate the agency of oppressed groups and thus allow for genuine exploration of, and experimentation with, deliberative development alongside communities. The third aim is to emphasize that the role of humanist educators—who exercise what the pioneer of liberation theology Gustavo Gutiérrez (1988) defines as the “preferential option for the poor”—is significant. These educators exercise solidarity with marginalized groups by carving out spaces within spectacles of development, within which they lay solid foundations for sustainable development interventions.

It is significant that this chapter, and indeed the book, opens with an observation by Assia Djebar (1992) regarding the 1832 arrival of the French orientalist painter, Eugene Delacroix, in Algeria. This is critical for the analysis that is undertaken in this book. The famous painting by Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, can be considered the beginning of organized forms of orientalism in the south (Said 1978). This painting constructed a very orientalist, flat, static and problematic representation of the ‘four’ women Delacroix encountered in an Algiers harem that had nothing to do with historical realities (Djebar 1992). Much scholarship seems to observe or suggest that there are three women in the painting. Yet one notices that, apart from the three light-skinned women sitting down, there is also a black female servant standing and showing her backside. Over the years analytical focus has been on ‘three women.’ By editing out a female black servant from discussions of representations in this photo, it could be argued that class and race are critical considerations when it comes to representation of otherness and difference. In this book I will insist on counting the servant in, because she is a woman too and she is still in that painting.

Years after his painting, Delacroix would keep ‘remembering again’ and changing the angling and colouring in the original painting. Problematic representation is an understatement, considering he did not talk to the women; rather, he just observed them for a few hours and three days later he left the country to work on the painting back home in France. In effect, this famous painting actually launched the spectacle of development in practice in which exogenous development institutions’ concern was not with how ‘the others’ experienced reality, but rather with the way these external agents imagined and conceived what would become dehistoricized and fictionalized events.

This book comprises two parts. The first part exposes the spectacle of development and the institutions that govern its systems and language of oppression. This part is itself a continuation of a conversation with Mansell (1982, 42) who, in response to claims of a new development paradigm in the late 1970s, argued that the dominant paradigm of development had not passed away but had just undergone a “superficial revisionism.” While Mansell had exposed the similarities between the modernist development paradigm and the ‘new’ participatory paradigms to support her claim, this part of the book, comprising two chapters, seeks to profile the network of actors and discourses that oil the engine of that dominant paradigm. The second part of the book examines the opportunities that, despite the financial, logistical and technical challenges, still offer spaces for negotiation between outsiders and insiders to co-curate and experiment with deliberative development in the community.

The first part comprises two chapters and is itself a deconstructionist project that aims to discursively undermine the machinery of the development industry, which engages in what Escobar (1995) defines as the construction of the ‘politics of the truth,’ or a spectacle of development, to borrow from Stuart Hall’s (1997) and Assia Djebar’s (1992) notions of a spectacle of representation. Whereas Hall, Djebar and Said were concerned specifically with interrogating the politics of constructing and exchanging orientalist, colonial and stereotypical representations of other people, places and issues, in this book ‘spectacle’ refers to a regime and repertoire of attitudes and behaviours by the key actors in the development industry. These actors comprise donor agencies, corporate institutions, governments and even civil society organizations. The root causes of their behaviour span total ignorance, misinformation and outright arrogance as well as a frequent disregard for the real interests of beneficiary groups and their representatives and institutional structures.

Having undermined the dominant syntax and approaches to the development spectacles, what does the future hold for development? Do we abandon everything? Is there anything we can do to recover the praxis of deliberative development? To answer these questions, the second part is a reconstructionist or recovery project, comprising four chapters. It is primarily about the four points of negotiation that shape the theory and practice of deliberative development. This kind of development is cooperative, participatory, horizontal but also conflictual, yet one that emphasizes the collaboration of various stakeholders, notwithstanding the diversity in their classes, identities and interests.

This second part aims to achieve three things. First, it demonstrates the contradictions and difficulties of working with and alongside communities to conceive deliberative development. Even though as a black person I have emotional and social capital in Southern Africa, there were moments when I behaved as and was treated as an outsider in some of the places I worked. This shows that the politics of class and belonging is very complex and goes beyond identity, education and place of origin. Second, it explains that liberatory educators who are westerners, outsiders, and who are not from oppressed groups, can very much offer critical opportunities that enable communities to speak and unspeak realistic development interventions, so long as they acquire the subaltern perspective. In this case, a westerner or an outsider does not have to become an oppressed person in order to appreciate alternative development discourses. Through research, education and living with marginalized groups, they can acquire subaltern perspectives that allow them to rethink dominant development syntax with and alongside oppressed classes. Third, the aim in this part is to show that in development theory and practice, two contending elements are increasingly becoming antagonistic against each other. On one hand, there is the need to generate evidence and use that as a platform for development programming—known as investment thinking (UNAIDS 2012). On the other hand, there is this demand for more participatory, action-oriented and more democratic forms of learning and experimenting with deliberative development. In this book, all these positions come together in the pedagogy of listening.

This book is therefore an interrogation of the culture, the traditions, and practices of speaking development with and alongside communities. It is significant that the book’s title is Communicating Development with Communities, since this is intended to signpost that my discussion is about the sharing of power and speaking development with local people. Not making. Not planning. Just speaking and, as will become clear, listening as well. This choice is deliberate. Speaking is a critical concept that implies a number of reflexive actions and behaviours that amount to a praxis. This speaking combines elements of becoming as understood by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Freire (1970, 1996a, 1996b) and Gutiérrez (1988). It also integrates elements of ‘mediation’ as expounded by Sonia Livingstone (2009). But it is also rooted in the participatory process of consciousness building, a fundamental building block of class formation. For Edward Palmer Thompson (1963), class is an active process of becoming and not necessarily a social category that exists out there. As used in this book, it refers to historical processes in which social groups are engaged in daily struggles to define and curate their place in the world. These groups could be oppressed or oppressors or somewhere in between, since there are moments when one is neither oppressed nor an oppressor.

Thus, as Thompson (1963) explains, class happens. This book likewise argues that class is not a static and frozen structure that exists out there. I consider class as a constant negotiation of individual and collective identities that enables people with similar interests and experiences to curate relationships and networks with people and institutions. In this book the discussion examines how class identities are formed in and through deliberative development interventions. In this case, Communicating Development with Communities refers to nodal points that are themselves the methodological and communicative spaces that empower non-persons (Gutiérrez’s and Freire’s oppressed people) to contest the formulation and implementation of development policies. These are spaces in which the catalysing educator, the field worker or the radical humanist educator, engages in communicative action with people, mediated by enablers and undermined by the constraints of logistical and financial resources, all the while aiming to generate evidence and theory, and manage socio-political expectations. In this sense then, deliberative development is a site of conflict that facilitates individuals to become a class within a social rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe how a wasp becomes a component in an orchid’s reproductive scheme that enables both of them to form a rhizome. This becomes more than a relationship of dependence, rather, it becomes a consciousness of the importance of the symbiotic roles various stakeholders have to play out in the course of development practice.

This book therefore explores the conceptions, values, attitudes and consciousness that so often govern the design and implementation of development interventions by people and institutions. Thus, in considering the speaking of development at the community level, the book examines the culture of development by oftentimes-antagonistic groups, as they negotiate and leverage power before and during the act of speaking interventions. My notion of speaking also includes elements of subjectivity and agency drawn from Bourdieu’s (1983) symbolic power and an element of reflexivity derived from Jay Ruby’s (2000) work in social anthropology. Speaking refers to a deliberate and fraternal process of building class consciousness in which subaltern groups are understood to become, thereby enabling these groups to collectively contest the production and exchange of power asymmetries.

What Communicating Development with Communities examines then are the five critical communicative spaces that can allow for the method-driven and theory-informed praxis of negotiated or deliberative development that has listening and experimentation at the centre of its practice. The successful design and execution of such interventions depends very much on understanding these five spaces, namely (a), the language of oppression (b) capturing subaltern voices, (c) living with the people, (d) encountering poverty, and (e) the pedagogy of listening. Yet to deconstruct these communicative spaces one needs to undertake a critical audit of development in practice, and that is what this book—especially the first two chapters—attempt to do. The discussion aims to emasculate the modernist ethos that characterizes much of development practice by exposing the spectacle of longstanding traditions, features, values and strategies that perpetuate, obscure and justify marginalization, dependence, and disempowerment.

In critical analytical traditions, the notion of spectacle is often used to describe problematic representations that employ stereotypes, are condescending, objectify the other, are vulgar and derogatory, and which undermine the identity and humanity of other people, history and cultures (Djebar 1992; Hall 1997). In this context, scholars such as Stuart Hall (1997), Ruby (2000), Tomaselli (2006) and others have undertaken semiotic analyses of popular art representations of marginalized social groups, demonstrating how symbolic power figures large in the construction of orientalist discursive repertoires. As borrowed and applied to development, the spectacle of development is framed here to describe various forms of deliberate and well-orchestrated class and capitalist disregard for fairness and the appropriate context in the design and implementation of policies by governments, corporations and other institutions. This strategic dishonesty and obfuscation of development narratives through the use of coopted methodologies, irrelevant theories and strategies, could constitute what the Princeton Professor Emeritus in Philosophy, Harry Frankfurt (1988), conceptualized as “bullshit.” The bullshit of development then comprises the fundamental building block of a colourful, theatrical and vain spectacle of development. Each of these components is vulgar and inconsequential for the lives of the majority of targeted beneficiaries.

Dominant scholarly work and narrative conceptualize development as an aspirational idea—problematic as it is—with its narrow, frequently economically deterministic and technology-driven conceptualizations within orthodox traditions (Lerner 1958; Mansell 1982; Rostow 1960; Schramm 1964). In this book, the exposition of the speaking of this development, that is, the undermining of its spectacle, will be achieved in two ways. Firstly, I critically converse with two of the leading thinkers in development today: Arturo Escobar (1995) and Robert Chambers (2005), both of whom have called for new and alternative ways of thinking about and doing development. Within post-development there is an attempt, as Escobar points out in a revised 2012 Preface to Encountering Development, to move away from centralizing development in our discursive imaginary, achieved by discarding the civilizational and globalization models of modernity. After all, as Aimé Césaire (1955) points out, western modernity and civilization are beyond repair and indefensible. Instead, it is argued that theory and practice should move towards relational and endogenous models of living that celebrate local ontologies, spirituality, environmental sustainability, economies of solidarity and community-ness. In this way, all students of society might begin to contribute to the various ontological struggles that are striving for a different way of imagining life (Escobar 1995).

In the context of this intellectual positioning, the discussion refers to Frankfurt’s (1988) philosophical theory of bullshit that comprises the deliberate and sometimes, careless disregard and indifference for the truth and reality. Frankfurt argues that bullshitters are neither concerned with the truth nor falsehood, but they are interested in achieving certain objectives that are of concern to them only. As conceptualized in this book and in this chapter specifically, such bullshit is similar to the dominant paradigm of development that never passed away. As elucidated by Mansell (1982), the dominant paradigm referred to modernist development, its ideologies, pra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• PART I Deconstruction
• 1 Spectacle of development
• 2 “We came, we saw, he died”: Language of oppression
• PART II Reconstruction and recovery
• 3 Capturing subaltern voices
• 4 Living with people
• 5 Encountering poverty in the Heart of Darkness
• 6 Pedagogy of listening
• Index