The Development Dictionary @25

Post-Development and its consequences

Aram Ziai, Aram Ziai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429836534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Few books in the history of Development Studies have had an impact like The Development Dictionary – A Guide to Knowledge as Power, which was edited by Wolfgang Sachs and published by Zed Books in 1992. The Development Dictionary was crucial in establishing what has become known as the Post-Development (PD) school. This volume is devoted to the legacy of The Development Dictionary and to discussing Post-Development.

This book originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Post-Development @ 25: on ‘being stuck’ and moving forward, sideways, backward and otherwise

Gustavo Esteva and Arturo Escobar

ABSTRACT

Escobar and Esteva engage in a retrospective conversation on Post-Development, reassessing the critiques and discussing openly the meaning of ‘living beyond development’ today. Some of the topics covered include: how the development discourse has shaped mentalities and practices; the tensions and contradictions in the institutional world, trapped in their compulsion for development in the face of the multiple crisis plaguing the world; the new manifestations of the resistance to development; and the relevant experiences that anticipate the new worlds beyond development and patriarchal capitalist modernity and towards the pluriverse.

Arturo

It’s been almost 30 years since that memorable week of September 1988, when we sat around the convivial table at Ivan Illich’s house on Foster Avenue in University Park (where Penn State University is located), summoned by Wolfgang Sachs and Ivan. Out of the intense and enjoyable discussions of those days there emerged the task of writing our respective chapters for what a few years later would emerge as The Development Dictionary. The book made a ‘splash’ of sorts when it made its debut in print. For some, the splash has been enduring and one of the most essential elements behind what came to be known as the Post-Development school. Other, less generous, retrospective analyses of the Dictionary (and Post-Development) argue that it was interesting but ineffective and that, in any way, it is superseded by now since development has certainly not died, as the Dictionary appeared to prognosticate. Many mainstream scholars and development practitioners, harsher in their appraisal, consider it to have been a terribly misguided endeavour and a disservice to the poor.

Aram Ziai’s invitation comes at an auspicious time to take stock of what has gone ‘under the bridge’ of the Dictionary and Post-Development waters in the intervening years, and to renew our understanding and critique. You were not only one of the pioneers of the critique but your position regarding development has, if anything, become even more radical than in 1992 – at least that’s how I read your most recent texts on the subject.¹ To remain for now on a historical register, I would like to ask you, to start this conversation: How do you see now the intellectual-political ferment of those early days, when the radical problematisation of development was first launched, as compared with the conditions that exist today for radical critiques? Is there something you think that our group could have done differently? Where do you hear echoes from those conversations in current debates?

Gustavo

‘Development’ is no longer an unquestionable category. At the grassroots, I have seen in recent years open resistance and opposition to development itself, not only to certain forms of development – and some have a long history. Such opposition is now fully incorporated in people’s discourses, something they did not dare to do before. In my contribution to the Dictionary, I celebrated the emergence of new commons, which I saw as an alternative to development. The Ecologist described such emergence that very year. And the commons movement is today in full swing, everywhere, in what we can legitimately call a post-economic society, not only beyond development.

Salvatore Babones’ classification of the current development panorama is very effective. He associates it with three Sachses.²

The ‘Goldman Sachs’ approach expresses a pretty general consensus that dominates in governments and international institutions. It defines development through their commodities trading desks, their infrastructure projects and their exploration units. It means an oil platform located 10 km offshore, safe from harassment by local indigenous militants.

The ‘Jeffrey Sachs’ approach blindly believes in development and capitalism but is concerned with massive hunger and misery, which they see not as consequences but as insufficiencies of both. Well-meaning people like Sachs, Gates and major US and European NGOs focus on the alleviation of obvious suffering – they stand for a chicken in every pot, a mosquito net over every bed and a condom on every penis.

The ‘Wolfgang Sachs’ approach circulates in critical development studies circles and departments and among indigenous leaders, independent intellectuals and a motley group of people basically ignored by academia and the 1%. In my view, this approach corresponds today to the awareness and experience, not necessarily the discourse, of millions, perhaps billions, of ordinary men and women around the world who are increasingly ‘beyond’ development.

The adventure of the Dictionary started for me a few months before that meeting in Foster Avenue. Ivan invited us to his house in Ocotepec, Cuernavaca, Mexico, to talk about ‘After development, what?’ Majid Rahnema, Jean Robert and Wolfgang were there. One of the things that I remember very well of that meeting was that we abandoned the expression ‘after development’, with an implicit periodisation that Wolfgang retained. We knew that the developers were still around and would continue their devastating enterprise. We wanted to explore how to be beyond development.

As you know, I am not a scholar. I read a lot, but my ideas, my words, my vocabulary, my inspiration, come from my experience at the grassroots, in my world of campesinos, indios and urban marginals. Ivan knew that. At one point in the conversation, he asked me: ‘Gustavo, if you had only one word to express what is to be beyond development, which is the word you will use?’ My immediate answer was ‘hospitality’. Development is radically inhospitable: it imposes a universal definition of the good life and excludes all others. We need to hospitably embrace the thousand different ways of thinking, being, living and experiencing the world that characterise reality.

This was not an occurrence: it came from my experience. In the early 1980s those classified as ‘underdeveloped’ were frustrated and enraged with always being at the end of the line. We knew by then that ‘development’ as the universalisation of the American Way of Life was impossible; that we would not catch-up with the developed, as Truman promised; that we would be permanently left behind. For many of us such awareness became a revelation; we still had our own notions of what is to live well and they were feasible. Instead of continuing the foolish race to nowhere, we should reorient our effort. In my experience, it was not dissident vanguards attempting development ‘alternatives’ or alternatives to development, but many grassroots groups reaffirming themselves in their own path, in many cases for sheer survival in the dramatic 1980s, what was later called ‘the lost decade’ in Latin America. For me, they were already beyond development.

I bought into underdevelopment when I was 13 years old. That implied that I fully assumed my ‘lacks’: I wanted development for me, for my family and for my country, in order to satisfy all the ‘needs’ suddenly created. Let me clarify this. When I was a child the word ‘need’ had only one practical application: shitting. It was used when my mother told us: ‘Once you arrive at your uncle’s house, ask him where you can make your needs’. We made the ‘needs’; we did not have them. This way of talking applied to everything: our ‘needs’ were defined by our own capacity, our tools and the way we used them, and were strictly personal, imponderable and incommensurable. It was in the course of my lifetime that all current ‘needs’ were created and we were transmogrified into needy, measured and controlled people. Professionals defined the needs and we were classified according to them.

When I was a child, people were talking to me. Words were symbols, not representations or categories, and only one of every 10 of them addressed me as an undifferentiated member of a crowd. As I grew, words became categories and I was addressed as a member of a class of people: children, skinny, underdeveloped … according to our ‘needs’: education, nutrition, development.

As you know very well, in the early 1970s, the recognition that the development enterprise was causing hunger and misery everywhere produced the Basic Needs Approach. The goal became to satisfy a package of ‘basic needs’. There was no consensus about the definition of those needs, but such orientation still characterises most development efforts … and shaped the UN Millennium Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) today.

In 1976, I was in the immediate danger of becoming a minister in the new administration of the Mexican government, after my success as a high officer for more than 10 years in conceiving and implementing great development programmes. I quit. I started to work autonomously with people at the grassroots. By then I knew that instead of ‘development’ the people looked for autonomy, as expressed in the name of an independent organisation I created with some friends (utonomía, Descentralismo y Gestión . I also knew that the ‘State’ was a mechanism for control and domination, useless for emancipation. After observing the damages done by professionals, as the transmission belts for the creation of ‘needs’ and dependence, I began the complex process of deprofessionalising myself.

In the early 1980s, there was increasing awareness of the failures of the development enterprise and the foolishness of adopting a universal definition of the good life. The idea of Post-Development started to circulate: people were reclaiming their own, feasible, ways of living well. In the 1985 conference of the Society for International Development in Rome, invited by Wolfgang to discuss the future of development studies, I suggested it lay in archaeology: only an archaeological eye could explore the ruins left by development. I was seeing development in my past, not in my present and even less in my future. I was exploring those ruins in my own world and already looking for hospitality for our ways of being … the ways captured in the expression buen vivir now coming from your area of the world.

A few years ago, when Salvatore Babones approached me with a proposal to write a book about development, he observed that ‘we’ in the Post-Development School don’t use statistics. He was right; we hate them. Salvatore is a quantitative sociologist, well acquainted with development statistics. He wanted to incorporate them to our analysis. He also observed that people studying development are often concerned with the real problems of the world, interested in making a difference. But we closed the door on them by proclaiming a firm ‘No’ to development. Can we open a decent door to them? He was right. And he appeared at a time when I was adopting, with many others, the position of ‘One No and Many Yeses’, following the Zapatista suggestion to create a world in which many worlds can be embraced. Yes, I agreed, we can share a common ‘No’ to development but be open to a thousand ‘Yeses’: the many paths people are following around the world beyond development; people studying development can accompany and support them. That is why we wrote and published The Future of Development: A Radical Manifesto.

Arturo

There are so many interesting dimensions to your answer, Gustavo. I would like to explore a few, and perhaps provide a counterpoint on some of them (as in the musical counterpoint, where a theme is developed in various directions). But first there is something I remembered as I read your comment on ‘needs’, something I heard Ivan saying once, I am not sure whether it was at Penn State or perhaps at Berkeley in the early 1980s when he came to do his, then, controversial lectures on Gender. Homo faber, he said, had given way to homo miserabilis (the ‘man of needs’) which eventually gave rise to homo oeconomicus. The history of needs was one of Ivan’s long-term interests, and it still has to be worked on, for instance, in today’s digital age and given the expansion of middle classes in many world regions, for whom ‘needs’ have seemingly skyrocketed. How do we treat needs ‘postdevelopmentally’?

Here I arrive at my first substantive question. It is a question often asked of me, so I thought we ought to give it our best answer. I think it is a significant obstacle in getting many people to embrace the thinking of Post-Development. And it is: You speak about the grassroots as the space par excellence to explore how to be beyond development. In doing so, are we not romanticising the grassroots (in your case) or ethnic communities and social movements (in mine)? Are they not also, now and increasingly, the subject of needs and desires, including those that ‘development’ and capitalist modernity promise and eventually delivers (though in limited ways; cheap cell phones, more consumer goods, second-rate overcrowded schools and health services)? Let me give you my answer to this issue, and then I would like to hear yours. The first part of my answer is a simple reversal: faced with the social and ecological devastation brought about by patriarchal capitalist modernity, coupled with the fact that things are not getting better (skyrocketing inequality, climate change), isn’t it more romantic to think that ‘more of the same’, in whatever guise (new World Bank recipes, green economy, SDGs or the new ‘Green Revolution for Africa’ advocated by J. Sachs), is going to lead to lasting improvement? In this context, more genuinely realist and less romantic are the alternatives emerging at the grassroots and with social movements. I would rather bet on them than on the world bankers and mainstream NGOs.

This links up with the historical dimension of my reply to the ‘romanticism’ charge. I was remembering Walter Benjamin’s injunction: ‘To articulate the past historically … means to seize it as it flashes up at a moment of danger’. He associates this moment with ‘the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress’.³ Are we not going through one of these moments again, with technology promising humans anything they wish, from unlimited information and immediate communication to eternal life, a ‘life ...