Unplanned Development

Tracking Change in South-East Asia

Jonathan Rigg

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781848139893
• eBook ISBN: 9781848139916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Unplanned Development offers a fascinating and fresh view into the realities of development planning. While to the outsider most development projects present themselves as thoroughly planned endeavours informed by structure, direction and intent, Jonathan Rigg exposes the truth of development experience that chance, serendipity, turbulence and the unexpected define development around the world. Based on rich empirical sources from South-East Asia, Unplanned Development sustains a unique general argument in making the case for chance and turbulence in development. Identifying chance as a leading factor in all development planning, the book contributes to a better way of dealing with the unexpected and asks vital questions on the underlying paradoxes of development practice.

1 | The hidden geometries of development

Economic theorists, more than other social scientists, have long been disposed to arrive at general propositions and then postulate them as valid for every time, place, and culture. There is a tendency in contemporary economic theory to follow this path to the extreme. (Myrdal 1968: 16)

Economists (and other experts) seem to have very little useful to say about why some countries grow and others do not. Basket cases, such as Bangladesh or Cambodia, turn into small miracles. Poster children, such as Côte D’Ivoire, fall into the ‘bottom billion’. In retrospect, it is always possible to construct a rationale for what happened in each place. But the truth is, we are largely incapable of predicting where growth will happen, and we don’t understand very well why things fire up. (Banerjee and Duflo 2011: 267)

Introduction: outlining the hidden geometries of development

Why is it that economic crises – not to mention economic miracles – come out of the blue? Why does the Prince of Serendip seem to reign supreme in the ways of women and men? Why do humans so often act in ways that do not accord with the rules of Homo economicus? Why does history’s arrow follow a trajectory different from the one that geometry might suggest? Why do the most carefully constructed plans go awry? Why do the empirics of change rub uncomfortably up against theory? Why do accepted orthodoxies fail to resonate in any convincing manner with country experiences? It is these questions which this book aims to illuminate – and does so with reference to the South-East Asian region.

In shedding light on these questions, the book covers a good deal of disciplinary ground. I am interested in the trajectories of history; the failures and successes of governments; the art and science of plans and planning; the assumptions of academics and policy-makers; the behaviour of individuals and the functioning of households and families; the norms of society and the rules of economy; and the role of culture. At the heart of the book, and at the most general level, is a twin puzzle. Why is it that things so rarely turn out the way we expect? And why are our explanations for the patterns of the world so often partial, incomplete and far from universal in their application? Looking across the development experience of Asia over the last half-century, it is tempting to see a pattern of change and a set of developmental paths that can be ‘explained’ by reference to unifying conceptual models and frameworks. This desire to impose explanatory order is, this book will suggest, problematic on a number of grounds, and not least because the experiences that reveal themselves are more different than they are alike.

Making the claim, however, that ‘context matters’, though undoubtedly true, does not greatly help in bringing greater traction to understanding why the experience of development demands explanatory frameworks that open up and normalize heterodoxy. This book aims to elaborate on just this question, and does so by focusing on four axes of contingency. These comprise, first, the country conditions that comprise the development milieu within which change is embedded. Development does not occur in a governance vacuum; it is not a technocratic and managerial exercise that can be unproblematically implemented and exported from one country to another. The failure of so many expert missions arises because of a tendency to adopt a cookie-cutter approach to the ‘problems’ identified, expecting that countries will somehow conform to generalized models. Secondly, development always needs to be seen as partially governed by the prevailing (time-sensitive) national and international historical contexts that exist at any given time, and our understanding needs to be attuned to such historical conditions and historical moments. These two axes provide the high-level explanatory script that should caution against reductionist interpretations. At a finer level, and thirdly, development is often strongly influenced by idiosyncratic local sets of personal circumstances that shape the choices, decisions and development experiences of communities, households and individuals. Finally, and fourthly, we also need to be attuned to the human character(istics) of the people whose choices we are seeking to understand. There are sufficient examples of people acting counter-intuitively to warn against attempts to second-guess behaviours. The nature of these axes and the ways in which they operate to shape the development present and development futures are returned to and developed in the final chapter.

As we seek to weave an explanatory fabric to make sense of the world, the point that the black boxes labelled ‘unknown’, ‘unexpected’ and ‘unintended’ are larger than expected may be regarded as frustrating. Personally, however, I find it ultimately satisfying and liberating that people do not act according to the script of economics, the designs of governments, the assumptions of multilateral organizations, or the conceptual frames and theoretical models of academics, accreted over decades of dedicated study.

The breadth of subject matter in this book has meant that the supporting literature also crosses a broad swathe of the social sciences, encompassing geography, anthropology, history, area studies, sociology and cultural studies, economics, development studies and development economics, and political economy. Also included here is reference to a good deal of applied and policy-related literature. My own interests are in the development challenges of South-East Asia, and so I have chosen to situate much of the argument in that region. I would like to imagine, however, that the themes I introduce have relevance beyond South-East Asia and therefore that the book will be of value and interest to scholars and practitioners working in and on other places.

The title of the book – Unplanned Development – directs attention to the unplanned, unseen and unexpected and, therefore, to the gaps between planning designs and planning experiences, between what is seen and measured and what ultimately proves to be important, and between expectations and outcomes. These things are not usually ‘hidden’ in the literal sense. They are overlooked because of the way that the world (society, economy) is framed; because people act in ways that do not accord with the script of development or the rules of governance; because states either cannot or will not implement their own policies; and because the passage of history is hard to second-guess.¹

From the big picture to the minutiae

Across the board, from the grand, overarching explanations of Asia’s growth to the micro-level explanations for the progress of an individual village or a particular household, it seems that we lack the wherewithal to make convincing interpretations of why things are as they are and, therefore, to map out likely trajectories of future change. Looking across fifty years of growth and stagnation across the world, Rodrik concludes:

… reality has been unkind to our [development economists’] expectations. If Latin America were booming today and China and India were stagnating, we would have an easier time fitting the world to our policy framework. Instead, we are straining to explain why unorthodox, two-track, gradualist reform paths have done so much better than sure-fire adoption of the standard package. (Rodrik 2007: 55)

It has become usual for scholars of South-East Asian development to reflect that shortly after the end of the Second World War the countries of the region which appeared to be best placed to modernize were Burma (Myanmar) and the Philippines. As it has turned out, their development experiences have – to date – been among the most disappointing in the region. From the performance of countries to the progress of households, a similar theme emerges. In Caroline Moser’s compelling Ordinary Families, Extraordinary Lives, which charts the progress of families in the urban slum of Indio Guayas on the outskirts of Guayaquil, Ecuador, between 1978 and 2004, she observes that only a longitudinal study, rather than a time-bound one, can bring explanatory clarity to the fact that ‘while men were … considered “hopeless shits” (pendejos), overall it was still considered better to have any man than no man at all’ (Moser 2009: 180). When poverty is aggregated and generalized, when livelihoods are decontextualized, and when experiences are detemporalized, we lose the ability to explain what is happening and why. This has a further important implication: governments (thank goodness) do not have the ability to control and shape economy and society in anywhere close to a deterministic manner. There is a good deal of hubris when it comes to state planning initiatives. The state is ‘all fingers and no thumbs’.²

A core reason for this state of affairs is that lives are messy and social science is not in a position to arrive at simple explanations for processes and patterns that are, at core, not fully coherent or knowable. ‘Events and processes’, John Law writes in his book After Method: Mess in social science research, ‘are not simply complex in the sense that they are technically difficult to grasp. Rather, they are also complex because they necessarily exceed our capacity to know them’ (2004: 6, emphasis in original). The development industry is particularly prone to an auditing culture and enthused by templates, recipes and models because it seems so important to arrive at clear policy prescriptions. Governments and policy-makers do not find it helpful to be told, ‘it’s complicated’. This book questions how we undertake this process of distillation and reduction, whether the resulting models provide an accurate and therefore truthful insight into the ‘realities’ they seek to explain, and whether the prescriptions that are then extracted are useful in policy terms.

The limits to agency and government This book emerges from the twin empirical puzzles outlined above and these, in turn, arise from my personal experiences in the field. In most years over the last three decades I have engaged in fieldwork, whether with farmers in rural settlements in Laos or Thailand, among migrants in urban Vietnam, or with factory workers and tea estate employees in Sri Lanka. More often than not, what people do defies my attempts at neat explanation; and when it comes to accounting for change, I find myself playing explanatory catch-up. Each time I return to the field I find that my ideas have to be recalibrated and my understanding reassessed. Why this might be the case is another question that threads its way through the book.

Personally and temperamentally, I am enamoured of the power of individual agency. I cherish the notion that the mostly poor and generally powerless people I have interviewed over the years have more of a hold over their lives than their depiction as marginalized and socially excluded, and beholden to rich classes and powerful states, permits. I am not, however, too much of a romantic not to appreciate that there are limits to agency, and I recognize that ‘power’s matrices’ (Li 2007: 288) to a degree capture and shape what people are able to do. But, and this is a second theme in the book, power’s matrices are not as hard and fast as the term ‘structure’ implies. They are less scaffolds of control than networks of possibility. States may, as the later chapters will illustrate, try to ‘plan’ development interventions, control fertility, guide migration and stage-manage land-use decisions, but these often have less purchase than the rhetoric of planning and intervention implies.

In light of this, while the structure/agency binary is valuable as a didactic device, it fails adequately to capture the ways in which causal processes are tied up with structural factors that lie outside a locality, social processes are embedded internally, behavioural traits are individualized, and historical trends are lumpy rather than smooth. Taken together, these serve to create the complex causal relationships which this book tries to elucidate and which make development processes and experiences particularly difficult to ‘know’ and therefore to explain.³

Beyond the problem of agency, a third theme that this book addresses is the contrast between people’s respect for the state and their belief in its power (see Jeffrey 2010), reflected in the way in which state officials continue – generally speaking – to be admired and esteemed, and the liminal but equally widespread recognition that government and the agents of government rarely deliver. The same is true of development professionals, who often seem to have all the answers. Jeffrey Sachs in The End of Poverty writes that ‘Our generation can choose to end … extreme poverty by the year 2025’ (2005: 1) and then proceeds to ‘show the way toward the path of peace and prosperity, based on a detailed understanding of how the world economy has gotten to where it is today, and how our generation can mobilize our capacities in the coming twenty years to eliminate the extreme poverty that remains’ (ibid.: 3–4). This book counsels against such simplifying tendencies and universal answers.

Although the book seeks to challenge mainstream views of development and its interpretation and achievement, this is not, inherently, a radical book. The politics of development makes an entrance, but this is largely with a lower-case ‘p’. If there is an ideological tenor it might be termed critical localism. By this I mean that while the local most certainly does not provide an adequate or sufficient answer to the challenges of development, taking a local perspective does provide an insight into why state-led initiatives so often fail, or succeed but in unexpected ways.

The structure of the book and the argument

The book contains five core chapters which set out the case for the arguments rehearsed above. In summary they focus on the following themes:

• Plans and planning
• States and markets
• Histories and turning points
• Events and processes
• Behaviours and outcomes.

Each chapter provides a different but complementary insight into the hidden geometries of South-East Asian development but, taken together, they contribute to the wider case. This wider case is more than the claim that ‘context matters’ (which is certainly an element in the argument).

The following chapter, Chapter 2, looks at the science, art and experience of comprehensive development planning. The failures and disappointments of planning have been remarked on since the 1970s and yet the act of planning continues to be a central feature of development in almost all poor countries. This, in itself, is something of a puzzle. Every five years or so, governments feel the need to set out, often to a remarkable degree of detail, what they seek to achieve, and how. These plans are characteristically out of step with what governments are able to do in terms of their capacities and capabilities, what domestic political realities permit them to do and, moreover, what ensuing events allow them to achieve. The result is either that plans fail or that they never even get to the point where they might succeed or fail. The failure of planning, however, should not be extrapolated to imply a failure of development. Putting aside the cautionary caveats, the experience of the South-East Asian region is one of developmental success. Planning failure, in other words, has been accompanied, in many instances, by considerable development achievements.

This discussion of planning leads to a wider discussion, in Ch...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables, figures, illustrations, boxes
• Abbreviations and glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Dedication
• 1 The hidden geometries of development
• 2 From development plans to development planning
• 3 State and market perfections and imperfections
• 4 The teleology of development: history and technology
• 5 The power of ordinary events in shaping development
• 6 Fertility decline and its consequences in Asia
• 7 Contingent development
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index