Contesting Development

Critical Struggles for Social Change

Philip McMichael

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781138216235
• eBook ISBN: 9781135172701
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

At a time when the development promise is increasingly in question, with dwindling social gains, the vision of modernity is losing its legitimacy and coherence. This moment is observable through the lens of critical struggles of those who experience disempowerment, displacement and development contradictions.

In this book, case studies serve as an effective means of teaching key concepts and theories in the sociology of development. This collection of cases, all original, never previously published and with framing essays by Phillip McMichael, has been written with this purpose in mind.

An important additional feature is that the book as a whole reveals the limiting assumptions of development and suggests alternate conditions of possibility for social existence in the world today. In that sense, the book pushes the boundaries of "thinking about development" and makes an important theoretical contribution to the literature.

1.
CHANGING THE SUBJECT OF DEVELOPMENT*

Philip McMichael

At a time when the development promise is increasingly in question, with dwindling social gains, the vision of modernity is losing its certitude. This moment is observable through the lens of critical struggles of those who experience disempowerment, displacement, and development contradictions. Our project is twofold: to illuminate the silences in the development narrative registered in social struggles in distinct but related spaces of the global political economy; and to propose a different “social movement analytic,” where we focus on the epistemic content of these struggles—how they particularize the meaning of social change through place-based engagements. Through the lens of these critical struggles we learn about the underbelly of the system, how its disempowered subordinates self-organize, and how they reveal the limiting assumptions of development and alternative conditions of possibility, through their struggles to become historical subjects.

Introduction

At a time when the promise of development is increasingly in question, with dwindling social gains, the vision of modernity is losing its certainty. Financial meltdown, arctic thaw, imploding states, diminishing resources, global migrations of economic and environmental refugees, and the resurgence of slavery are a few of the dramatic changes that are now part of the social and natural landscape. By and large, these represent particularly visible and broad reversals in the narrative of progress. What about the everyday and smaller-scale casualties of progress? This is the subject of this volume.

The casualties of progress include those whose class, gender, racial/ethnic, sexual, or disability identities have served as axes of exploitation, as well as those regarded as redundant and at odds with the values and history of capitalist modernity. Both are seen to be different, occupying a place, or history, outside of progress. To classify them as outsiders, laggards, or residuals reaffirms the narrative of progress.¹ The most obvious category is “traditional,” coined as the opposite of “modernity,” and designating cultures at odds with (or as a baseline for) the process of development, and its particular calculus of value. Popularized by W.W. Rostow in The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), the representation of human history as a linear journey through developmental stages (from traditional society to the consumer state), etched forest-dwellers, artisanal fisher-folk, nomad-pastoralists, and peasants deeply into the modern consciousness as hangovers from a world left behind.

From here it has been a simple matter to project the modern concept of poverty onto that world, lending Rostow’s progressive stages the status of an historical truth: namely, that these cultural forms we call traditional are also poor and destined to disappear, whether they or we like it or not, in the wake of progress. It is this “truth,” for example, that informs the baseline assumption underlying Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty, where he claims:

The move from universal poverty to varying degrees of prosperity has happened rapidly in the span of human history. Two hundred years ago the idea that we could potentially achieve the end of extreme poverty would have been unimaginable. Just about everybody was poor, with the exception of a very small minority of rulers and large landowners (2005, p. 26).

Without romanticizing Napoleonic era life, in and outside of Europe, it is well to remember that humanity was a good deal more complex, resourceful, and diverse than simply being poor, by our standard. And that is perhaps the real casualty of progress, the extent to which those who do not conform, or measure up, to a single standard of modern development are misrepresented and discounted in the process of normalizing a dominant vision of progress.

That standard is generally represented monetarily. It is institutionalized in the United Nations System of National Accounts, by which all member governments must maintain uniform measures of national output (Gross National Product; GNP). Because such measures are monetized, other forms of social and ecological wealth (e.g., homemaking, community work, livelihood networks, biodiversity) are formally discounted in measures of progress. This means development is governed by a “market calculus,” focused on a singular metric of output—which devalues non-monetized contributions to social life and disregards discrimination and environmental degradation. Because the latter outcomes do not command a price in the market, they do not register on the balance sheet of development (Waring, 1988). Through these devices development is normalized in market terms.

What are the consequences of understanding and prescribing the market as the site and vehicle of development? For one thing, it reinforces the belief that well-being depends on increasing GNP—a correlation questioned by recent studies.² The UN Development Program’s Human Poverty Index ranks the United States last among 17 industrial (OECD) countries with respect to indicators of poverty, illiteracy, longevity, and social inclusion (Gardner, Assadourian, and Sarin, 2004, p. 18). For another thing, it reinforces the association of nonmonetized subsistence activity (“tradition”) with poverty. If what is productive, and therefore key to development, is only that which can be measured in monetary terms, then women’s unpaid labor cannot be counted, nor can the myriad activities through which people share common resources and construct livelihood networks. Smallholders customarily experiment with seed-sharing and crop rotations as risk-averse activity in variable environments to sustain communities and ecologies—activities not valued in monetary terms. Within the development narrative, then, these practices are targets for displacement or commercialization.

The market calculus, as the subject of development, pervades contemporary neoliberal policies.³ Emphasizing deregulation of trade and finance and privatization of public and environmental goods, such policies purportedly expand the “free market” (the “invisible hand”) and development opportunity. Under the neo-liberal development project, social services (such as education, health, water provision) are converted into forms of private consumption. Yet markets remain unequal in their structure (subsidies to already powerful firms), and outcome (access to income and resources)— resulting in an ever-receding goal of overcoming poverty and discrimination across the world.⁴ It is this material casualty that underlies and informs the social struggles represented in this collection.

A second order casualty is the inability or unwillingness to imagine alternatives to development as we know it. The categorical violence⁵ directed toward development “misfits” ultimately inhibits social imagination by marginalizing, or silencing, values and knowledges (social, cultural, ecological) critical to sustaining human communities, rights and perhaps humanity itself. A singular market calculus applied across a heterogeneous world gives the appearance of equality as it denies diversity.

These struggles, then, challenge the “epistemic privilege” of the market calculus—where the market has become the dominant lens through which development is viewed. An episteme is an approach to knowledge about the world, based on a core set of assumptions that seem like common sense. Thus the market, and its “invisible hand” assumptions (neutrality, efficiency, rationality) has come to represent the central episteme in the modern enterprise of development. Since these assumptions have commonsense appeal, they normalize the market calculus in the discourse and pursuit of development. As a consequence, other such epistemes (views of the world) are rendered unviable, invisible, or unthinkable. The well-known neo-liberal axiom of “bad state/good market” reminds us that the market episteme depends on discounting alternative sets of ideas or knowledges. Accordingly, in contesting the epistemic privilege of the market calculus, these critical struggles do not simply alter the world, they transform the way we can think about the world and possibilities for social change.

This collection of essays gives voice to those who struggle with various material and epistemic exclusions of development. Critical struggles articulate alternative values and knowledges—not as intrinsically different from those associated with modern development, but as counterparts to, or commentaries on, the process by which development redefines human possibility via the singular calculus of the market.⁶ Of course the efficacy of this calculus depends on institutional force, which channels development successes and failures together. The expansion of slums, for example, is related to private property, whose superior institutional force depends on the relative power of markets to override public goods and protections. In Gayatri Menon’s chapter 10, pavement-dweller struggles to claim a right to the city find ways to work the balance of power between private and public resources. They expose the link between private property and liberal notions of those rights that would afford the protections they need but which are denied, because in lacking property they lack the capacity for political recognition. Politicizing the market in this way, and tempering development’s claims to progress, this struggle opens space for new understandings and practices of citizenship.

Through the device of a set of critical struggles, this book examines the shortcomings of development in both material and epistemic terms. Materially, it considers such fundamental issues as the link between education and employment, corruption of electoral institutions, forms of dispossession and displacement, military and neo-colonial occupation, conservation and food security, and citizenship struggles. Epistemically, these struggles reveal perspectives made invisible through disempowerment of the people concerned. With their survival and self-representation at stake, we identify processes and values through which the protagonists address, subvert, and reframe the assumptions of a market-based project of global development.⁷

By politicizing market culture, and its material consequences, these struggles reformulate the meaning and content of social change. Those deemed casualties of progress become agents or vehicles of critique of the normalizing claims of development. Their critique is not so much in development’s terms (success or failure), but in terms that are infused with the particular values and meanings through which they engage in struggle for rights, access, and representation.

Parameters of Social Change

While the critical struggles depicted here revalue what development devalues, they are not always agents of enduring, or large-scale social change as such. Nevertheless, they are all significant: first, in their own sites, since they address immediate issues of survival and justice; and second, in problematizing the dominant (and to them, exclusionary) vision of social progress under capitalist modernity. By injecting their counter-claims these struggles claim relevance and underscore that those excluded by development can and do self-organize and construct alternatives. They embody solutions to problems generated by development practices that are incapable of self-correction.⁸

These struggles subvert both the terms of development and the terms by which social movements are normally analyzed, in two ways. First, we do not claim for them the conventional status of “social movements,” avoiding the burden of “social change” proof—as noted in the Handbook of Political Sociology:

Social movement researchers need to confront the issue of demonstrating social movement change. This requires going beyond the study of social movement outcomes to look at the broader societal context within which these outcomes occur. If movement scholars fail to respond to this call, they risk being accused of trivial pursuits…. [p]ursuing this research program risks conclusions that most social movements are marginal to social change, in the sense of actually “moving society” (Jenkins and Form, 2005, p. 349).

Our own view is that declaring what may be “marginal to soc...

Table of contents

• ROUTLEDGE TITLES OF RELATED INTEREST
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• 1. CHANGING THE SUBJECT OF DEVELOPMENT*
• PART I DEVELOPMENT FOR WHAT, AND FOR WHOM?
• PART II GLOBAL MARKETS, LOCAL JUSTICE
• PART III OVERCOMING EXCLUSION, RECLAIMING DEVELOPMENT
• CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX