Part One: Development and today’s reality
Part Two: The actors and the future of development – The era of empowerment
Epilogue
Biographical note
Published as “Beyond Maldevelopment Praxis in Africa”, Monograph Series 1/1998, CODESRIA, Senegal.
CLAUDIO SCHUFTAN
schuftan@gmail.com
Part One: Development and today’s reality
Abstract
Introduction
Section I. Western development: Past and present
Section II. Myth and reality in development ideology, paradigms and models
Epilogue
Abstract
Western development, as the transnational, prevalent Third World model of development has been in crisis.
In the form of a review of viewpoints, this article, in two parts, presents arguments that illustrate the author’s nemesis (righteous indignation) towards Western development’s theories and praxis.
In this Part One, Western development’s past and present is critiqued as being too slow to change the major assumptions of outdated development theories.
Third World development as seen by the North oversells the technological approach. These countries are seen as in need of a technical fix; this leads to a foreign aid that merely provides the elements of such a fix.
Part One goes on to untangle myths from reality in development ideology, paradigms and models focusing on the present irrelevance of both old and so called “modern” development theories. In the same light, it is argued that current Western development studies have become irrelevant, perpetuating a biased pretension of objectivity and apoliticism that clearly overlooks and disregards the real constraints to development, primarily the issues of social and political power.
Resume
Le Développement Occidental, comme modèle transnational dominant de développement, a été en crise.
Sous la forme d’une révision d’opinions, cet article, en deux parties, invoque des arguments qu’illustre la nemesis (indignation justifiée) de l’auteur contre les théories et l’exercise du Développement Occidental.
Dans la première partie, le passe et le présent du Développement Occidental sont accuses d’être trop lents a changer les hypothèses les plus importantes des théories démodées du développement.
Les pays du Nord, dans sa perception du développement du Tiers Monde, exagère le rôle de la technologie comme solution. Selon eux, les pays sousdéveloppes ont besoin des “réparations techniques” ce qui conduit a une aide extérieure qui fournit surtout des outils pour une telle “réparation”.
Cette première partie aussi essaye de démêler les mythes de la réalité en ce qui concerne l’idéologie, les paradigmes et les modelés relatifs au développement et questionne la pertinence de ses théories qu’elles soient désuètes ou “modernes”.
D’ailleurs, on prétend que les études actuelles sur le Développement Occidental sont devenues périmées; elles perpétuent une prétention tendencieuse d’objectivité et d’apoliticisme qui ferme les yeux sur les facteurs qui vraiment entravent le développement, spécialement les questions relatives au pouvoir social et au pouvoir politique.
Introduction:
Titles should never be more intriguing than revealing. That is why the choice of this title requires an upfront clarification. Development nemesis should be understood as righteous indignation or justified resentment with the current trends and quality of the development process in the Third World. (Oxford Dictionary, 1979, p.1912).
As a witness of our times, and judging what I see happening in Third World development -its ideology, its paradigm(s) and “new” theories, and its models- I feel compelled to add my own “j’accuse” to the growing literature in this field. But pointing fingers is the easy part; suggesting new approaches to escape the fate of maldevelopment is what I will also attempt despite the formidable rivals I am aware we have to face. Nothing short of a check-mate to some of Western development’s (1) pernicious presumptions and misleading prescriptions will do. The story has to be told as it is, not as it has been romanticized.
What follows, then, is a collected assortment of viewpoints about today’s development -old and new; they flash together without being tightly bound; they are here presented to open up new vistas, not to prove any particular preconceived point. (Lehman, 1987, p.7).
As a presenter of viewpoints, I am an indefatigable sifter, sorter and compiler of the writings and ideas of others. I have sorted through the literature in the field of development, have selected topics that are related to this theme and woven them into arguments that illustrate my nemesis (righteous indignation) with Western development theory and praxis. I present them in a way that I hope is easily understood. My efforts have been to bring out what Gregory Bateson called “meta-patterns” -the patterns that connect other patterns, but which we often fail to see in our uncritical daily lives. (Childers, 1989).
I have organized the text into five sections in two parts as follows:
Section I. Western development: Past and present, where I analyze some of its too-slow-to-change major assumptions;
Section II. Myth and reality in development ideology, paradigms and models, where I explore the doom and irrelevance of dominant old and “modern” (rehashed?) development theories;
Section III. The actors in today’s development drama (or rather farce?), where I take a shot at our liberal development Establishment;
Section IV. The non-actors in today’s development process, where I provide some new insights into the issues of popular (bottom- up) participation and empowerment; and
Section V. Development: The future, where -from a more radical perspective- I go over what I think is needed to overcome and escape maldevelopment’s trends.
Part One covers sections I and II and is presented immediately here below. Part Two covers sections III, IV and V.
Section I. Western development: Past and present
1.1. A critique of outdated development theories and praxis
1.2. Third World development as seen by the North
1.3. The oversold technological approach in Western development
Western development, as a separate/discrete/identifiable entity, has fuzzy boundaries and is difficult to define in precise terms; its main characteristics will definitively become clearer to the reader as we zero-in on its critique.
1.1. A critique of outdated development theories and praxis
Despite official hope expressed on all sides, no trend identifiable today, and alarmingly few current programs or policies, offer any real hope of narrowing the growing gap between rich and poor nations and people. (Timberlake, 1987, p.2). On the contrary, everything points to a widening of the gap.
I basically see Western development operating at odds with its original purposes and supposedly generally well-meaning ideals. (Henderson, 1990, p.72). In short: noble (..or not so noble?) purposes, grand designs, flawed executions, poor results. (Fields, 1990, p.144). Precisely because of that, and because Western development has been so non- egalitarian and biasedly selective, the 1980s became a decade more of adjustment than of development. Development is about widening people’s options. But Western development has perpetuated poverty precisely by restricting people’s choices and options. Instead of leading to their integration, Western development in the 80s resulted in a further marginalization of the poor. (Pronk, 1990).
I have to admit that Western development is easy to criticize. It is also worth criticizing, I think. Romanticizing it, can be fatal. It cannot be ignored, though, that some exceptional individuals and groups have been at work in Western development theorizing and practice. It is not these exceptions that are to be criticized, but the lack of quality of the collective effort.
The real tragedy of so much that passes for altruistic activity in Western development is precisely that it seeks a common good by methods which are objectively neither common nor good.
On a more facetious note, Western development is merely the post-colonial form of economic exploitation now carried out at the request and with the support of the exploited.
For others, Western development has perhaps best succeeded in making social photography. Until now, the rural milieu in the Third World has been looked upon with somewhat of a tourist’s optic often focusing on its soothing folklore in dressed-up images so as to show the most sellable part of underdevelopment. (Azocar and Mertinez, 1988, p.80).
Plainly speaking, intellectualized old assumptions and theories are simply not working. Western development has produced new and more oppressive constraints, as well as instruments of violence by soft-selling peripheral-dependent- capitalism. The state in Third World countries has too often become an instrument of control and repression in favor of internal and external vested interests. We are living in a new economic and political conjuncture of high capitalism, high technology and high militarism. (Kothari, 1988).
In such a context, Third World governments are particularly uncomfortable with the language of social responsibility. Their ideas habitually move in channels dug by the dominant individualistic values of their respective societies. (Posner, 1987).
Against this already difficult background, Third World social scientists face an additional major difficulty: The dominant theories of development advanced in the developed world often further disguise or justify, and therefore perpetuate, the gross social, political and economic inequalities in the Third World. On the other hand, a scientific strategy designed to redress the real causes of these inequalities may be greeted with suspicion and overt hostility by Third World governments and by their ruling elites. The absence of a vocal critical social science in certain countries explains why multidisciplinary research has often tended to be toothless in its recommendations, often calling for “more research being needed…” and seldom clashing with the interests of the powers-that-be. (Ricketts, 1987, p.10).
The masses of the Third World, of course, actually end up being the victims of this international form of development which with its many glaring contradictions has placed the world in a path of foreseeable violence. The question is where this violence, born from desperation, is most likely to break out. Perhaps it will come from existing organized citizen’s movements, or straight from unorganized oppressed groups in the developing countries… [Ricketts, 1987, p.10].
Western development simply cannot continue to foster societies that make these masses feel ashamed of their poverty. As a result of subordinating ethics to profit, the breakdown of communities is more a product of the workings of the capitalist marketplace than conservatives have been willing to admit. In its sloganeering, Western development creates a mythology of a society in which there is equal opportunity for all. (…”Mink coats do not trickle down!”). The underlying assumption is that the economic marketplace will reward merit and endeavour and those who succeed will be those who deserve to succeed; the only task for the implementers is to remove external constraints to equal opportunity. (Lerner, 1987).
But empty anti-poverty slogans are likely to go down the drain with their many predecessors unless real rather than cosmetic changes are implemented. Western development has led to consistently adopting soft solutions when faced with hard choices, the latter reflected in social indicators that march relentlessly to assume menacing proportions.
Western development is skewed and has become an arrogant discipline which not only primarily disregards the plight of the poor, but also does not take account of the quality and stocks of natural resources; it has also perpetuated debt and environmental destruction. It has even led us to the absurd in which the debt crisis has now re-defined “development” as economic growth geared not to the needs of people or to safeguarding the environment, but to debt repayment! [Development Forum b), 1989, p.20].
Western development is based on the humanist idea of development: to give an opportunity to “grow”, and to feed, educate, heal and house everyone. The supporters of a humanist development in the 60’s were idealists, social scientists and politicians that in great numbers were proposing or promissing conventional fraternal and egalitarian ways to develop national economies and solve social problems. (Beaud, 1987, p.151). But tradition and continuity are not the flours from which the social loaf is baked. We simply cannot standardize people, their goals, their ideas and aspirations as much as one cannot exalt economic growth and national development above human growth and local development.
As of late, Western development workers are, in a sense, reinventing the wheel. They are involved in a leap of intuition that serendipitously leapfrogs ahead using the old (ineffectual) ways. (Brennan, 1989, p.4). It is as if their mono records are revolving on turntables engineered for stereophonic sound. (England, 1989, p.29).
The problem is that the Western development “system”, of whatever complexity, is actually primarily concerned with treating the symptoms of underdevelopment. Development, on the other hand, is a political issue and only political action geared to deal with deeper causes underlying mere symptoms can bring about and sustain genuine development-preserving/promoting environments. (Jonsson, 1988).
The techno-pragmatic response to the resolution of development problems advocated by Western development is very different from an appropriate economic and social response purposefully applied with an equity mentality leading to a less unequal access and utilization of the fruits of development interventions. In that sense, Western development has stressed action over values or at least has failed to clarify the values implicit in the action(s) promoted. (Gilson, 1988). Or, as Octavio Paz put it, it knows more of prices and of costs than of values, even committing the aberration of looking for the philosophical foundations of development in science.
Equity -defined as equal access for equal need- deals with social justice and with distributional fairness. The policy goal of efficiency, as persued by Western development, is concerned with matters of allocation rather than with matters of distribution (and at that, deals with market-based allocation which leads to more inequality…). As a result of such an efficiency focus, “selective” development strategies make impact their primary goal, not equity. (Consider, for instance, the GOBI approach of UNICEF at the center of their Child Survival Revolution).
What is needed thus is to strike a fair balance between efficiency and equity. Efficiency criteria lead to a market-based allocation of development resources. Cost-efficiency (is it worth doing?) is thus not synonymous with cost-minimization; neither is it with cost-effectiveness (does it work?) nor with improved technological efficacy (can it work?), as is often mistakenly assumed. Moreover, cost-effective does not mean cheap (e.g. Primary Health Care is cost-effective but not cheap). (Gilson, 1988). What we need is more (participatory) social and less economic cost-benefit analyses to guide the final decisions of our leaders. (Padron, 1990).
To take this idea a step further, consider the following additional facts: In an equity sense, public expenditure on the poor is more important than taxation in the redistribution of income. At the very minimum, the distribution of development expenditures should be less unequal than the prevailing distribution of income. But, as shown by current patterns of expenditure, the needs of the poor most often rank very low in the actual priorities of capitalist-dependent Third World governments. (Gilson, 1988). Moreover, and coming as no surprise, there is a clear correlation between bad (regressive) taxation policies enacted by elite-run governments and bad development investment decisions. The explanation does not lie in shortcomings in the analysis by decision-makers, but in the workings of deeper political forces and biases guiding decisions in which the poor are notoriously non-actors. (Berry, 1989; Ray, 1989).
The basic rules for assessing equity are not supposed to change with the level of resources available in a society; limited resources do not justify greater levels of inequity in their disbursement. (Gilson, 1988).
In sum on this issue, Western development’s choice of the changes assumed needed follows an only very partial consideration of inequity, and thus leans towards policy options that fall short of solving the deeply rooted problems of underdevelopment. Efficiency being stressed over equity, the latter gets lesser, if any, attention. The efficiency approach thus ends up limiting the governments’ role in embarking on a fairer distribution of societal resources.
In the same vein, one can criticize that Western development focuses too much on the supply of goods and services and too little on the access to and utilization of these services. Goods and services must be acceptable, available-to and used-by the community they are intended for. (Gilson, 1988).
To bring about equity, governments would be required to intervene in the inequitable workings of the free market; and this may, at present, be a utopia in most capitalist-dependent Third World countries, more so when under pressure from Western donors and especially creditors.
Perhaps the central fallacy of Western development theorizing and praxis stems from considering the LDCs (the underdeveloped members of the world-capitalist-system) as being just “less developed”. They simply are not “children” who will grow up to maturity if given the same “medicine” Northeners took to grow out of their underdevelopment earlier this century! (Anshen, 1989, p.11).
Euphemisms aside, the interactions that Western development has established with the LDCs are ultimately with a view to extracting benefits from them once their growth (even if unequal) enhances markets for the industrialized countries. The North/South relationship has powerful underlying features in which the bottom line is that the ideological actors from the countries in the North exert the strongest power (and thus impact) on these matters, because it is their full commitment and continuous pressure which dictates this one-sided and ultimately exploitative relationship.
As guided by Western pre-conceptions and conditions, development projects in the periphery more often serve the formal/private sector better than they serve the informal/communal sector. Such conditions seldom allow the distributional impact that these projects purport to have: Western development makes no efforts in distribution-relevant ways. Its funds go to governments that have not spent money on poverty-redressal-measures themselves and surely have not done so because of “difficulties in applying development theory…”. Official expenditure decisions are the outcome of bargaining between vested interest groups (even the public bureaucracy itself is an interest group) and decision-makers; the latter can neither act in a politically neutral manner nor do they receive unbiased advice. The poor are conspicuously absent in this bargaining process!
As a result, Western development has, more often than not, fostered an immiserizing growth: the prices of goods and labor supplied by the poor to the rich have invariably fallen. Western development has thus, at best, made only minor, exceptional dents in the widespread prevalence of poverty. (Berry, 1989; Ray, 1989).
As such, Western development has become one more weapon in the arsenal of world politics promoting status-quo. Precisely because it is useful to various Western interests as a tool of control, it will not be abolished without a fight.
Western development reflects all the inadequacies of the capitalist system and of the principles on which it rests. It is fair to say that it has made a bad system even worse. It has promoted naive illusions; and illusions are dangerous given their capacity to lead to cynicism. When false expectations and false hopes are not fulfilled, hypocrisy follows and disappointment becomes an excuse for inaction. Hypocrisy, also promotes false consciousness and may lead both hyppocrits and their accolytes to be fooled as to what really is taking place. If we are not fooled, we will not have false expectations. We will not think, for example, that present Western development theory can be improved by “reforms” designed to strengthen it. Any “improvement” will most likely make it a more lethal weapon. In other words, any change short of a drastic change in its very basic approach will merely serve to advance the interests of one group over those of another, rather than promoting needed equity.
1.2. Third World development as seen by the North
As long as development continues to be treated as a problem “over there”, no real progress will be made. (Anand, 1988).
We have to face the painful fact that Western development institutions (most of them in the First world) have become decreasingly relevant to any satisfactory resolution of the problems of underdevelopment. They have not succeeded in effectively managing global development and, even in the eyes of the North, they have been a disappointment.
Realistically speaking, some donor agencies are plainly ill-suited to pursue equity objectives – period. Although multilateral donor agencies may be less characterized by inertia than bilateral agencies, they are perhaps more influenced by fashion and faddism in development trends; the spectrum is wide. (Berry, 1989).
In this context, and because so many donor agencies involved in Western development have had to bend to the interests of the elites, many milder critics have been saying that foreign aid is, to put it mildly, “fatigued”. (Khadka, 1988).
Is it the fact that the countries of the North are essentially only interested in preserving the status-quo that inevitably defeats all development-aid efforts? What we see when these efforts fail is that proponents and practitioners of Western development tend to blame others (before blaming themselves) or begin to use some meaningless word-juggling so typical of the international mindset in an effort to justify failure. Eventually, such analytical justifications get published in our scientific journals giving the (false) arguments an aura of immutable truths and authority. (Butorin, 1987, p.7)
It is precisely the economic order that the Western development approach openly supports which creates and sustains the process that undermines the lives of the poor. Inequalities of wealth and power have always been justified on the grounds of a supposedly meritocratic economic marketplace which allocates rewards according to ability and effort. This line of thinking is obviously not self-evidently true. (Lerner, 1987). Take for example elections: Elections in so many Third (and First!) World countries -so staunchly supported by the West- are, for the most part, merely referenda on the status-quo, wealth and power taking precedence over ability and effort. And in periods of status-quo with low incentives for more radical change, I feel, development practitioners fall prey to the trap Nietzsche termed the most common form of human stupidity: forgetting what one is (ultimately) trying to do (or achieve).
Despite the fact that some of the unmet needs of the poor have become so obvious and palpable, the majority of our responses have remained too complicated; others have been of dubious efficacy in the given context they are applied and still others have been purely demagogic so as to collide with the evidence of history. Moreover, the high-level-experts Western development has been providing are simply not the appropriate personnel for the low level organizational and technological needs in the early stages of development. (Khadka, 1988.).
Western development has actually led to the formation of a club of development specialists controlled by older and established members of the development community -the oligarchs of the development guild. The goals dictated by perhaps well-meaning Western-development-oligarchs clash with the prevailing realities in most underdeveloped countries. These development goals raise expectations which governments cannot fulfill -and they have only themselves to blame. Development goals for Third World countries somehow call for the sacrifice of their national economies to an international economy that, in turn, does neither protect nor consider them. (Anand, 1988).
Development models based on different, Northern modes of thinking have shaped the strategy of Western development as applied in the world today. And these models have consistently suffered from an ethnographic ignorance or shortsightedness (if not bias) about the systems they want to reform. (Anand, 1988). In order to handle barbarian affairs, you have to know barbarian sentiments: In order to know barbarian sentiments, you have to know barbarian conditions. (Wei Yuan, official of the Imperial Manchu court). We should thus do our homework better -getting first-hand, local inputs and advice- before meddling in other people’s affairs. So many of the troubles around the globe in the last four decades have been due to the deplorable misconceptions of misguided Northern policies towards the Third World.
Hence, by responding to Western expectations, it is actually external forces that impose “standards” on the South. These external forces are exerted in either a subtle, tacit way or in a vociferous, explicit way. Either way, they always somehow end-up serving the interests of the haves, and this, at the expense of the interests of the poor. (World Health Statistical Quarterly, 1984). In other words, as these forces maximize wealth, redressing concomitant poverty is left to chance. (Hatfield, 1987, p.6).
Ergo, in spite of wishful thinking, we get more of the same since years have come and gone and the very same external pressures have prevailed, only that now they have found internal allies in local Third World bourgeoisies.
The costly consequence of these imposed mistaken attitudes and practices has been that they have diverted reformist energies to redress this situation onto the wrong track(s). These reformist strategies are still today doomed to failure, because they are mostly founded on a superficial, non-dialectical analysis of the nature of the problems and pressures at hand that lead to patch solutions which only scratch the surface of the real underlying causes of maldevelopment.
In sum, Western development, as seen from the North, can be accused of at least two sins: to have misidentified the real problem(s) of underdevelopment and to have used the language of “community”, but its own ethics to impose its private agenda on the societies it has tried to help “develop”. (Lerner, 1987).
1.3. The oversold technological approach in Western development
Men of action have often given the advice: Don’t just talk; get out there and do something. Perhaps the best advice for the short term is: Don’t just do something; get out there and talk things over with those you are trying to help. (Harman, 1987, p.11).
Despite the above advice, interaction between most implementing bureaucrats and people in Western development schemes has at best been based on a mixture of clientelism and some kind of a supposedly mutual, temporary convenience or benefit. (Montgomery, 1988).
These development managers in charge are expected to show administrator skills, as well as entrepreneurial skills. In the Western model, these development brokers give crisp, precise instructions as to who is to do what and when. But what is needed is a softer leadership model in which the shepherd follows his flock watchfully as it meanders along the natural contours of the land. He/she carries the weak and collects the strays, for they all have a contribution to make. This style may be inefficient, but it is effective. The whole flock reaches its destination at more or less the same time. (Hurst, 1984).
Ethical behavior somehow seems to be absent from many aspects of Western development management, not because the managers have no ethics (or have the wrong one), but because their whole strategic approach does not emphasize ethics as being valuable for achievement. Their hard approach deals in objectives and anyone in the team who raises value issues in that context will often not survive long. Development workers need to feel free to talk about the values and the ethics of what they do if there is any trust to be built in their work with communities. (Hurst, 1984).
Third World countries have thus become victims of an industrialized approach to development that manifests itself in the application of alien technologies, is managed like a business or is in line with its interests. (N. Shigeru). In that sense, Western development highights and epitomizes the discrepancy between Northern concepts and Southern realities. (Jarvis, 1989).
Because it is based on a global paradigm of integration and exclusion, Western development strives to integrate systems and sectors at the expense of excluding peoples and cultures. (Kothari, 1989, p.3). As a consequence, too often do real people in the real world suffer from the “demonstration effects” of Western development models. It is even more, ignoring the social dimensions of underdevelopment seems indispensable to the peace of mind of Western development practitioners!
Technology is inextricably linked to the society in which it is created and used, and will be as socially just or unjust as its milieu. (Dag Hammarskjold Seminar Declaration, 1988, p.5).
The bottom line remains that development is a directional concept defined by the social relations finally adopted. With its pose of neutrality and its armamentarium of surgical-precision- tools, Western development ideology and Western aid have actually obscured the structural dynamics of the development process. (Kanth, 1988) We will proceed to explore just that.
Section II. Myth and reality in development ideology, paradigms and models
2.1. Ideology and development models
2.2. Paradigms and new theories
2.3. The irrelevance of current development studies
2.4. The myth of objectivity and of apoliticism
2.5. The issue of social power
2.1. Ideology and development models
Only by articulating a social vision into an ideology can people understand how the problems they face in their daily life are actually the reflection of a larger social problem. (Lerner, 1987).
Political ideologies and theories concerned with how societies and geopolitics function, contribute to our understanding of social realities and relationships at any given moment. As these theories obsolesce, their weaknesses emerge; they come to be seen as the product of a particular time and circumstance. Other ideas take their place and those who lived by the old ideology are left behind. [Schuftan b), 1982). Political ideology, as Hannah Arendt said, is but a temporary manifestation of a still-hidden good.
The notion that there is no escape from politics, no way to represent the social world free of ideology, is not meant simply to correct some intellectual mistake that academics have made in the process of interpreting the world. Rather, it is to oppose the authority of official knowledge, precisely because it chooses to leave out the political dimension. It also is to denounce that the justification for certain people being marginalized and excluded from social power is the result of viewing the world through biased eyes, or it is to accept that the so-called learned, rational and civilized often see a distorted social reality. In that sense, capitalist ideology works to cover its tracks, to ignore the biased nature of the categories it constructs. Categories for interpreting the social world can be applied apolitically, but believing these claims to truth has played a powerful political role in the construction of the world’s social relations -in the ways that those in power have justified their power and those out of power have been made to feel that their powerlessness is their own fault and inadequacy.
Myths built around such claims to truth are no fiction. Myths are acted-out in our own psyches repetitively and ongoingly and -for better or for worse- they do end-up shaping our future.
What I am saying is that class-bound bourgeois ideology, with its rather modest objectives for development, puts us in a position from which we need to escape even if it requires heroic efforts.
This prevailing class-bound bourgeois ideology makes it difficult for us to look at fundamental issues without prejudice. Having a technological or technocratic logic displaces philosophical discourse and political expediency. (Harman, 1987, p.11). Western development pursues bourgeois ideals rather than a more concrete bourgeois ideology and relies more on eliciting attitudes and gestures than on fostering a specific philosophy. As was already pointed out, it is extremely difficult for a society in a Third World nation to pursue a development path different from the path dictated by the mainstream (capitalist) world economic system. And past forms of development in the North are simply not leading to a viable future in the South. As a response, perceived threats to the continued viability of Western- development-trends are likely to lead to non-constructive actions by donors such as irrationally further strengthening the faith in the new technologies. (Harman, 1987, p.11).
It is true that pragmatism more than idealism makes change possible. But such pragmatism has to be rooted in a solid development theory that starts by defining the social problems of maldevelopment. We thus need new ways of defining problems before we try to solve them. (Ran, 1987, p.4).
It is one thing to argue persuasively that current development policies have led to the neglect of the poor; it is another to provide a substitute model. In fact, one can safely predict that it will be counterproductive to attempt to replace the current development model(s) with (an)other if power and equity issues continue to be neglected.
The use of Western models carries the danger of inhibiting original thinking leading to the search for solutions to social problems. The central ideological conflict, however, does emanate from the definition of those social problems in development and, hence, the choice of the policy instrument that will be applied as relevant to solve them in the context of the model. Relevance is dependent upon the political environment and upon the social assumptions within which the model is being applied. (Mengistu, 1988). In short, at the macro level, how phenomena appear ultimately depends on one’s perspective and biases. (Hurst, 1984).
Only similarities or consensus stated in political terms -expliciting social assumptions- will lead to similarities or consensus in the adoption of strategies of development. (However, not even this type of consensus necessarily suggests similar outcomes under all conditions…). (Mengistu, 1988). There simply are no neat algorhythms of development that will fit every country. (Henderson, 1990, p.72).
W.H. Auden used to say he could never be friends with anyone who liked his steak well-done. There is something refreshing about that -a straightforward prejudice presented straightforwardly, not all dolled-up as a philosophical principle. Conversely, in Western development circles, we keep finding fresh excuses for not focusing on important public issues straightforwardly. Posturing about peripheral matters (peripheral, that is, to structural, macro questions) brings-on a clouding of the sense of direction.
There seems to be at work a law of inverse proportionality: The anger invested in disputes over the future of today’s development is inversely related to the real differences between the disputants. There is an unwillingness to allow the (sometimes) slight differences -between the proponents of different development approaches- to seem slight. Such mock debate we so often see in Western development can be called “the narcissism of small differences”, the exaggeration of small differences to give a little dispute the appearance of moral gravity.
On another note, it is imperative to point out that economics, as used in development modeling, is a fundamentally political social discipline. Ideology is always implicit in economics, framing a certain social reality that is too often taken for granted. Western development economics can thus be accused of being blind in one eye: Most of its practitioners completely ignore certain social factors that have tremendous influence on economic outcomes. We must, therefore, take economics as a belief system that is not only inherently ideological, but also inbued with prejudiced beliefs as to human nature. Be wary of the rhetorical deception of economists, particularly those applying econometrics to development modeling! (Heilbroner, 1987).
Furthermore, the Western development paradigm is also guilty of the bias of believing that political discourse is conflictual while the economic discourse is mostly cooperative. By naively trying to avoid political conflict, the Western development model is overwhelmingly conceived as economic development only. Models of development do not often enough take into consideration existing conflict and tensions, and not tackling the conflicts at hand is a sure way to not achieving set development goals. (Kanth, 1988).
Viewing societies as “economies” (in the narrow sense), and reducing the reactions of human beings to “feedback loops” in a systems model, betrays reality badly. I contend that systems theory cannot overrule an intelligent, sensitive, moral and political vision. A political vision is a systems vision par-excellence, and as Rene Dumont used to say, those who refuse to include morality in the economic system… are leading us to death. “Successful economies” have, indeed, already been responsible for the death of tens of millions of people around the globe; these deaths are the “facts” from which we should be seeking truth. (Buchanan, 1989, p.58).
Another fact becoming more and more an accepted truth is that the dominant development models that follow Euro-centric prescriptions are not open to modifications of the actual development paradigm; they lead to an undesirable mimetic development based on a misleading and faulty pan-economic ideology.
Along these same lines, the aid-for-development model discussed earlier actually fosters a process that E.F. Schumacher characterized as “collecting money from the poor people in the rich countries to give to the rich people in the poor countries”. (Harman, 1989, p.21).
It just happens that most so-called anti-poverty programs are like a bus: They offer a ride to both poor and non-poor. One can safely guess the outcome: The poor will soon be elbowed out of the program; in the name of the poor, the non-poor will reap the benefits. (Yunus, 1989, p.4).
In that sense, too many so-called development efforts have thus ironically become anti-developmental, primarily because macroeconomic policies have ignored or forgetten their inseparable counterpart: Macro-social policies. (Williams, 1989).
In summary, established models of analysis are no match for the complexity of reality itself; they often lead to false optimism about the future. More often than not, it is the areas of action contained in the “forbidden agenda” of those analyses that contain our best hopes. (Mc Dermott, 1989).
The models that we choose to guide the development of Third World societies play an important role in these societies’ evolution. When the models are flawed, however, progress is distorted and often stunted. This is doubly true when models are imposed from the outside. For the most part, LDCs have been given the Western model of development -and the system has not worked well. For instance, a mad consumerism beyond the reach of the poor is quite a standard outcome of the Western model of development. If the country develops the means of production designed primarily to produce consumer goods, goes the logic, it does accumulate wealth. But this wealth is usually not available to benefit all society. The consumer model also rarely corresponds to the population’s fundamental needs in mass-consumer-goods thus following distorted (Western) social priorities. (Kaci, 1990, p.4).
Since outdated and oversimplified models of the world lead to inappropriate policies, it is important that policy-making be guided by appropriate theory. To be relevant, such theory will have to include the dynamics of exploitation within and between nations. Therefore, a development theory which fails to come to grips with all aspects of national and international politics will have little chance of success, to say the least.
2.2. Paradigms and new theories
Danger comes when our science and our technology outpace our political imagination and when the ruling paradigm assumes that it does already encapsulate all relevant knowledge within its discipline of origin and that that gives it licence to arrive at conclusions valid beyond its boundaries.(Daly, 1990).
The extent to which a paradigm pervades our minds is a tribute to the efficiency of its propagation. Each compartment of universal knowledge has a ruling paradigm.
Therefore, modern science and technology, as applied to Western development, already bring with them a preconceived basic methodology, an ensemble of working theories, an accumulated body of knowledge and a range of what are considered effective techniques for applying that knowledge. (Shearer, 1987, p.11). To make things worse, these modern tools are applied in a top-down manner that ignores the most basic principles of the scientific method as applied to society and to the political discourse.
The world’s experience is not the reality they taught us in science class. In fact, each generation of scholars changes academic truths, although mostly staying within the sanctioned paradigm. (Emmanuel, 1972). Reality is, therefore, our own -dated- conscious awareness of that world experience as seen through the filter of the ruling paradigm that imposes on us customary rules of judgement and practice representing an invisible hand. (Hatfield, 1987, p.6). Unfortunately, paradigms actually care more about what one should not believe-in than about what one should believe-in.
As a matter of fact, current global and societal problems are of a sort that raise doubts as to their solvability within the ruling development paradigm altogether. And, to make things more complicated, although most of today’s social scientists and development practitioners working within the ruling paradigm declare themselves neutral, they are…more neutral toward some social groups than toward other.
Western social scientists too often fashion their work not only in relation to their peer scholarly community, but also in relation to the prevailing politics serving the aims of their employers. [Schuftan a), 1982]. As somebody said in a somehow derogatory tone, these scientists’ training has retained a Jesuitic flavor: You have to be bright enough to understand it, but dumb enough to believe it and go along with it. (Pezzey, 1987, p.5). A possible reason for their myopia as professionals is that their professional training is focused on acquiring power through control of a magic circle of scientific knowledge. But that magic circle not only defines the profession’s knowledge base, it also acts as a lens through which they both look-at and define problems. The result is that many of the most pressing problems of society are not addressed, because they do not fit into the predetermined magic circle. This is, of course, a problem given that this modus-operandus has evidently reduced the historic role of these professionals’ potential activism for bringing about meaningful changes. (Buttel, 1987).
The scholarly subject of development, as a distinct discipline, is only 40-45 years old. For most of these years, it has been posited, progress has been pushing through the sand dunes of the often naive assumptions of the ruling paradigm about the nature of the process itself. [Development Forum a), 1989, p.24].
While an eagerness to establish more political general theories of development that would accommodate the vacuum here exposed is understandable, I must repeat the caveat that another false general theory may be worse than no new theory in development work. (Vivekananda an Mou, 1988, p.104). Quite a few pseudo-marxist scholars have ventured into this field and have proposed still flawed novel approaches. Our criticism of them has been hesitantly there, but has largely been ineffectual and slow to ignite appropriate reactions and corrective responses.
Arriving at a more definite new theory of development, applicable to our present world, is particularly difficult, because the issue is so ideologically charged. However, once it is arrived at -dialectically- it will have to be made not only a tool, but a weapon, because principles without action are as bad as action without principles. The challenge is to bring principles and action together.
Regrettably, most of our colleagues seem to take a “MEGO” attitude (“my eyes gloss over and my brain shuts off”) as they go over these, to them distasteful, issues of paradigms and general theories that force them to dig deep into where it might hurt. They rather prefer to talk directly and lightly in terms of modernization, the need for capitalization, the development of industrial infrastructure or, occasionally, the need for a strong state apparatus, all issues more in-line with conducting business as usual. (Jarvis, 1989).
2.3. The irrelevance of current development studies
The chilling injustice of what is really happening in the world of the poor seems to be escaping many of our development scholars’ attention, passing by their windows on the smooth flow of economic analysis, disguising itself in the respectable clothing of the financial vocabulary. (UNICEF, 1990).
Development studies cannot continue to simply be a descriptive discipline that seeks merely to explain how underdevelopment has come about. Description offers no remedy. Development must also be prescriptive, actively seeking change through political action. In today’s world, this action cannot be confined to the national arena only. We need to embark more on studies of poverty and inequality between nations, looking for appropriate avenues of direct political action at this international level as well.
Development studies is to become the social science with commitment to do what other social sciences only preach. Therefore, development teachers should take-up a more political role commensurate with this mandate. (Jarvis, 1989).
In the prevailing (mostly functionalist) development paradigm, the problem has not so much been how to promote innovation as such, but how to prevent the emergence of unwanted innovation from below. Western development has constantly attempted to channel and at the same time control the inevitable flow of innovations by protecting and fostering those ones which coincide with the (mainly political) interests and orientations of the ruling social forces in the North and of the local elites that emulate them and benefit from them.
Poverty rather than any microbe, parasite or worm is the more relevant key vector of ill-health and, malnutrition and it is no coincidence that the poor are the ones who suffer from these deprivations (or rather privations, since they never had good health or nutrition in the first place…).
The countless packaged development schemes implemented around the world have actually worsened the status of blue-collar workers and peasants. By overlooking the macro constraints, development studies’ specialists keep dreaming they can revert maldevelopment -“if only we are left to do our technical work better and more efficiently”. One often wonders if things would have turned out any worse without all those packaged interventions. With them, what we have witnessed and what we continue to witness is rather the unfolding of a process of modernization of poverty in which a number of new variables have been introduced that have mostly confounded the problem(s). We have also seen the rise (and fall) of pseudo-macro intervention approaches. These are attempts at acting in the macro context, but departing from a flawed analysis of reality thus leading to failure. What seems to ultimately matter more is that development studies scholars and development practitioners “wash their brains in the same ideological tub” each day.
The time has come for new frameworks to break old thinking on development. (Jonsson, 1988).
2.4. The myth of objectivity and of apoliticism
The allegedly “objective” evaluator at best only makes a virtue out of the objectivity vice. (Baldwin, 1987, p.3).
Truly objective evaluators of progress in development would be those professionals, even those with the highest integrity, whose own agendas, conscious or unconscious, do not affect to some extent the validity and the conclusions of their evaluation. (Baldwin, 1987, p.3).
While the goal of science applied to development issues is to produce an objective and tested body of knowledge, many aspects of that knowledge are colored by the cultural and social perspectives of the scientist. In examining allegedly scientific work, it requires a conscious effort to separate the “background color” -the cultural and sociopolitical biases- from the essential scientific elements of the contribution. In short, analysis is contingent upon the politics of the analyst. (Kanth, 1988). (Have you ever thought of how your evaluation report on project X in contry Y will be different from one I may have written if I had been hired as the consultant -despite the fact that we both have been looking at the same project?).
Objectivity in a given context is actually merely the effect of a particular form of existing social power that presents itself as beyond mere interpretation, as truth itself. The content of reason is simply an effect of a particular group being in power through a certain twist of politics. Evaluation is neither neutral nor passive. The active participation of the interpreter is, therefore, part of the construction of meaning. One has to distinguish the truth from ideology, fact from opinion and representation from interpretation. The claim by those in our midst that “a rational approach” is able to purify itself of ideology and social conventionality does not fit the evidence. The traditional view of knowledge and truth is ideologically biased. The rational depends on an association between reason and particular cultural and political visions of social life.
Therefore, priorities in development are selected for an array of political, social, economic and other reasons. It is a myth to think that priorities can be based only on valid social- scientific evidence and that there are right and wrong decisions. Moreover, as already argued above, good information does not necessarily mean good policy. The priorities chosen only denote some kind of consensus, be it imposed or democratically arrived at. (WHO, 1988, p.30).
Let’s not forget, then, that meaning is always constructed, and always subject to being constructed differently. The attribution of meaning to events, especially in development, is a political process that cannot be determined by the authority of reason. It depends on the particular ideology of the meaning-giver (and meaning-taker!). Always remember: There is just no way to flee from the politics of interpretation of “reality” to the purity of reason. Social research is thus always, and by logical necessity, based on moral and political values and the latter are not part of the science, but of the ideology of the enquirer.
What the above all boils down to is to the fact that development often passes for universal, but is -more often than not- “North Atlantic”.
Consequently, our current political space in development work -a space in which the poor, the women and the generally marginalized are not yet sufficiently found beyond lip service- needs to be changed. What development workers need to do is to make the experience of the generally excluded a more explicit and integral part of the common political space in the battle to overcome maldevelopment. [Langley a), 1989 ]. By extension, they need to get more involved in participatory research showing social and political commitment to the cause of an empowering development (even if conventional research methodology risks becoming less pristine in the process). (Gunnar Myrdal)
In the new development order, therefore, heretofore marginalized individuals will have to acquire a status and a stature which transform them from an object of international compassion into a subject of right.
2.5. The issue of social power
Let’s face it, if change were measured by a shift in power relationships in society, then fundamental change is not taking place -the losers are staying losers. (Williams, 1987).
Social relations in any given society are ruled by a particular discourse of power that, as a rule, seeks to legitimize the existing social hierarchy. The most successful form of social power is the one that presents itself not as power, but as reason, truth and objectivity, claiming to have escaped politics. There is no grand organizing theory which can justify the choices made by the socially powerful as neutral and apolitical, as the products of reason and truth rather than of the dominant ideology. Progress depends on denouncing these choices, disproportionately benefitting the haves and made in the name of truth. As concerned development workers, we have to warn people about the distortions in the ruling paradigm. But, on the other hand, I am afraid that if there is anything most apologists of Westen development -including some of our development colleagues- are, it is Establishment. So, how can we break this dead-lock when some of the fifth-columnists are within?
We need to understand that worldwide systems, like health and food systems, educational systems, defence systems or legal systems generally serve power more than they serve need. Thus health status, for instance, is not determined primarily by health systems, but by wealth and power. Widespread malnutrition and disease are due to poverty, but even more fundamentally to powerlessness. [Schuftan, 1988; Schuftan a), 1985 ].
Most people have too little bargaining power. When they increase their productivity, most of the benefits of the increase are drawn away from them. The poor are endlessly marginalized. Malnutrition is thus a problem of the social order and excessive child mortality has its roots in powerlessness as well. [Kent, 1988, p.11; Schuftan b), 1985].
Long-term remedies to malnutrition and child mortality must lie in a political and economic empowerment. This calls for coalescing and networking, for consolidating power at the base. [Schuftan b),1985]. An example of such an empowering is the acceptance of the economic policies that make access to credit, especially by women, a basic human need or right.
In the 1980s, the concept of empowerment was borrowed (stolen?) from the political literature, particularly from Marxist writings and has since been grossly trivialized. I have denounced this misuse of the concept of empowerment in the field of health and nutrition elsewhere. (Schuftan, 1989).
There are economic and non-economic factors that rule the distribution of forces in society. Hence, to correct the existing maldistribution of power, the pointer should be directed toward the crucial elements propping-up those forces that have excess power in the system. Among other, the following social, political and economic factors have, directly or indirectly, entrenched power maladjustments in Third World societies:
– The social factors in the equation comprise all existing social rigidities; the weakness of social participation; social injustice and the weakness of education to induce structural transformations. (Keep in mind, for instance, that except for rare cases, genuinely critical social thought has had no place in the education of Northamerican development professionals).
– The political factors are embodied in the ubiquitous existence of authoritarian regimes that restrict democratic freedoms of citizens and forestall any political participation in making decisions concerning society.
– From an economic point of view, the vast majority of governments of LDCs have no explicit and forceful economic policies to reduce inequalities of wealth and income distribution, to destroy absent land ownership and to push for a democratic agrarian reform. (Mouhammed, 1989).
(Although these assertions about power are generally true, it is not acceptable to generalize them for different individual countries with different levels of development and distinct social and economic conditions). (Biswas, 1988, p.14).
Conflict or alliance between power, knowledge and truth are inevitable. Knowledge is not only not neutral, as we said earlier, but too often serves the interests of power. (Even language is not an impartial medium through which truth can be represented; language is a socially constructed medium with middle and upper-class overtones). Skepticism should thus be exerted toward “truth and knowledge”, particularly when disguised as scientific. One has to keep asking oneself whose power they further or serve.
There is, therefore, no such thing as a benign deployment of science and technology, much less in the realm of development. In the words of Rajni Kothari, we have to cease making knowledge the instrument of established power and begin creating alternative bases of authority to validate all knowledge being applied in the name of development. [Langley a), 1989].
The caveat emptor that flows from all the above is that, in circumstances of omnipresent power plays, it is a sham to assert that simple adherence to principles or belief in ideals has much to do with the real outcomes of current development projects in the Third World.
Epilogue:
As a contemporary development worker, you cannot allow yourself to be marginalized or intimidated into silence. You cannot afford the luxury of this kind of political irresponsibility. You must help unseat the sophisticated charlatans in development from their positions of influence and replace them with people who can serve the real interests of the poor. You must do so -not with a sense of moral superiority- but rather with respect for the many who have suffered from policies that cannot and should never receive our respect or support.
As a tactical step, start by becoming an advocate for a new development with ideas that involve minimum ideological antipathy or overtones, that is:
– the first task is to explode the myth that things are fine; the second is to do some educating about the major underlying problems, e.g., unemployment, infant mortality and malnutrtion trends, budget deficits, trade imbalances, world debt as seen from a macroeconomic and structural perspective;
– then, you have to -once and for all- debunk a second myth: you have to make it absolutely clear that, although there are independent causes, all causes of underdevelopment are connected to and by the persisting structural problems in the world economy dominated by the North. A hallmark of Western development has been its refusal to see any of these as interrelated problems. This has been called the “shish-kebab mentality”, a mentality that focuses on the chunks of meat without considering the skewer that holds them together; (T. Vittachi).
– from demonstrating that current development praxis has problems, it is necessary to move to specific economic constraints which are understandable and convincing to th people in a way that makes it clear to them how these constraints are affecting them in their daily lives.
At this stage of your advocacy, you are still talking about old values, but applying them in sensible ways to new -or newly recognized- problems. Only then can you start breaking down the long list of other stereotypes and unreasonable expectations of current trends in development praxis.
Whether the time is now right for a large-scale mobilization of international efforts remains to be seen. But you must face the hard questions that have so far gone unanswered. Not to ask them now might cause you to succumb to amnesia missing the opportunity for needed critical thinking that could lead to finding new possibilities for effective action on behalf of a people-centered development. (Anzalone, 1990, p.4).
I will leave things here with an appeal for us to see things whole, to be consistent in the application of principles and to show equal concern for all injustice wherever it may occur. The standard is not easily met, I am aware. I will elaborate on the actors and on the future of development in Part Two of Development Nemesis which follows.
(References available upon request at email address above)
Footnote:
(1): Transnational, prevalent Third World model of development derived/adopted from the past development process followed by Western capitalist countries.
Part Two: The actors and the future of development – The era of empowerment
Abstract
Introduction
Section III : The actors in today’s development drama (Or rather farce?)
Section IV: The non-actors in today’s development
Section V: Development: The future
Abstract
Western development, as the transnational, prevalent Third World model of development has been in crisis.
In the form of a review of viewpoints, this article, in two parts, presents arguments that illustrate the author’s nemesis (righteous indignation) with Western development’s theories and praxis.
In this Part Two, the actors in today’s development drama dominated by the Liberal Establishment are exposed.
A typology of what liberals stand for follows: their beliefs, their morals, their politics, their stands towards development. This is contrasted with what the author thinks they ought to do.
The elements of a genuine, liberating and empowering participation from-the-bottom-up are given due recognition and the plight of the “non-actors” in current development is taken as a point of departure. What it takes and how to organize participation more meaningfully in the future is explored in depth.
Progress towards any future strategy of development -that stays away from past irrelevance- will mean coming up with suggestions on what is needed to overcome and escape stale policies and present maldevelopment trends.
Relevant alternative prescriptions are explored, coming from a more critical and visionary attitude towards development.
Nothing short of a paradigmatic breakthrough is needed, together with a more committed activism that reconceptualizes the approach to Third World development making it definitely more political than technical in nature.
Resume
Le Développement Occidental, comme modèle transnational dominant de développement, a été en crise.
Sous la forme d’une révision d’opinions, cet article, en deux parties, invoque des arguments qu’illustre la nemesis (indignation justifiée) de l’auteur contre les théories et l’exercise du Développement Occidental.
Dans la deuxième partie de l’article, les acteurs du drame du développement contemporain -dominé par le “liberal Establishment”- sont démasques.
Une typologie est donnée de ce qui caractérise les libéraux: leur croyances, leur morale, leur politique, leur position vis a vis du développement. Cette typologie contraste avec ce que l’auteur pense du rôle que les libéraux devrait jouer.
L’article donne une position centrale aux questions de la participation authentique et libératrice des gens. Cet engagement des “non-acteurs” dans le développement actuel est considère comme indispensable. Ce qui est nécessaire pour organiser une telle participation populaire future efficace et significative est discute en profondeur.
Il-y-aura seulement un progrès dans des stratégies de développement futures si on évite les erreurs du passe. Cela signifie qu’il faudra surmonter et fuir les stratégies rances et les tendances actuelles du “maldeveloppement”.
Finalement, l’article explore des recommendations considérées plus pertinentes au développement. Ces recommendations sont issues d’une attitude plus critique et visionnaire.
Une rupture du paradigme du Développement Occidental régnant est nécessaire. D’autre part, il faut que les acteurs s’engagent de manière plus militante aux taches du développement et ca commence avec une reconceptualization de l’approche au développement du Tiers Monde en le faisant définitivement plus politique que technique.
Introduction
Each of us, active in Western development practice (2), carries around a complex story that purports to explain how we made mistakes along the way, did bad things or were in some way “not OK” -and it is in light of that story that we justify to ourselves unfulfilling work or frustrating and disappointing results. This litany of self-blame is usually quite painful and is often buried, but it is reinforced daily by the meritocratic ideology of society at large: “you get what you deserve to get”. Self-blaming is crippling and has historically contributed little to politicizing the core issues of development as is so badly needed.
It is clear to me that for the future of development, the handwriting is on the wall and is straightforward: Political we must become! The myth of apoliticism in development work is, therefore herebelow, dispelled.
I am here launching a search and a campaign for the doom of Western development as a viable (winning) approach. A nemesis (justified resentment, righteous indignation) arises when looking at the past performance of Western development. (1).
The poor in the South are tired of their poverty and their dependence and will fight back when they become more militantly aware of the real issues. Elite-controlled-so-called- democracies of the South, in tacit collusion with the North, are not fostering viable people-beneficial/gender-neutral development and will thus be challenged in the years to come.
What follows, then, is a collected assortment of viewpoints -old and new- about the actors and the future of development; they flash together without being tightly bound; they are here presented to open up new vistas, not to prove any particular preconceived point. (Lehman, 1987, p.7).
Throughout the text, I profusely use the personal pronoun we, mostly in normative contexts (“we should” or “we need to”). By it, I really mean “each of us”, and “us” is intended to mean, mostly, people genuinely interested to mobilize for social change. Whether the choice of such a style gives the discourse hereunder a moralizing tone, I leave the reader to judge. But I do not deny that my message in this article is normative.
I will not here contribute to an unproductive frame of mind by holding up unrealistic standards for the development process. I will merely politicize the issues bringing them to the level I think they justifiably need to get-to in order to bring about any desirable lasting change.
Section III : The actors in today’s development drama (Or rather farce?)
3.1. From liberals to progressives: a typology of modern-day secular missionaries in development work.
3.2. What liberals need to – the normative dimension
3.1. From liberals to progressives: a typology of modern-day secular missionaries in development work.
3.1.A. Liberal beliefs
Western liberals like to speak of themselves as hammering steadily at problems; breaking big rocks into little ones that are easier to handle. But by coming with little to offer to the development arena, they have been breaking hammers, not rocks. (Hoagland, 1988, p.4). They are basically devoid of a utopia that can shake or stir some ardent passion in society.
According to their different styles and ethos of work, Johan Galtung classifies development workers into either politically progressive or politically non-progressive, and into intellectually flexible or intellectually rigid.
Although there is quite a bit of wisdom in this typology, it may be perhaps too simplistic. Here, I will attempt to add a few more nuances to the typology and will take the liberty to critique the more non-progressive and rigid amongst us. (Schuftan, 1982).
Liberalism, in a traditional sense, still sees itself as an ideology promoting change and argues that: a) the circumstances of social life are the result of explicable causes; and, b) those causes are graspable by reason and strongly suggest needed changes. Liberalism thus believes in the possibility of rationality in collective life, but only if the individual enjoys personal liberty. It, therefore, imposes limits on the powers governments should retain and exert. Moreover, by focusing primarily on the individual, liberalism and the liberal outlook have become almost inseparable from capitalism. In short, Western liberalism promises unlimited possibilities if individual liberty is respected and if the free exercise of the “rational” faculties is allowed. [Langley a), 1989 ]. (Note that such a stance reveals a sense of self-righteousness to which large sectors of at least the American liberals are easily prone). (Woodward, 1989).
Liberals have liberally adopted an eclectic array of Marxist jargon -but not thought- which they have tossed around for lack of clearer ideas. They seem to know better what they don’t like, but not what they want to put in its place. They keep musing, although answers have not yet emerged to “what it is really all about” and where they want development to point towards. (This is not to say that liberals inclined to more utopian thinking do not continue to dream and to plan for a “different” approach to achieve a just world order). (Woodward, 1989).
There has been great technological and economic change in the last 20 years, but it has somehow not been philosophically or socially digested by liberalism. A new liberal thesis and inspiration for social change has not yet surfaced. What there is, is an air of mustiness about this aged liberalism. The question is how to move-on and accommodate changes that are inevitably coming. This requires fundamentally new habits of thought. Just mouthing the old messages, either in rejection or in affirmation, will not do. (Lewis,F., 1988, p.8).
For all these reasons, sharing beliefs with those in the mainstream poses a challenge to real progressive ideology. Liberals have a blind faith in the power of knowledge and the efficacy of good will, not being aware (?) of the antidemocratic consequences of such a paternalistic benevolence, particularly when they are used to pursue the interests of the Establishment.
Sadly, liberal tradition does not stray far beyond rather simplistic theoretical discourse: It tends to superimpose new vocabularies on established knowledge, embracing particular policy postures on behalf of particular constituencies within the existing structure. Most liberals are thus politically conservative (excuse this apparent contradiction…): Virtually all would defend the prerogatives of private property and capital to the end. (Buttel, 1987).
Liberals engage in trade-offs between awareness and security in their everyday life. Granted, a certain amount of self-deception is necessary, inevitable and normal in all of us… (Without some of the lies we construct to defend our egos, we would be unable to function…). But how much self-deception is tolerable? And for how long? Ignoring bitter realities may once have been bliss, but has no survival value in development work today, especially because it allows us to blot out the realities of our past and present failures.
That is why somebody concluded that, in the near past, Western development workers seem to have been on an unacceptable, unprecedented plateau of consciousness about the real underlying causes of underdevelopment. (Anshen, 1989, p.11).
3.1.B. Liberals and development
Are we part of a generation of compromise that has made us passionless? Has society made us that way? (Church, 1989, p.18).
Often, old-time development workers think of themselves as near saints with a mission. Their justification is that since development is for the good of people what they do must be good. The newer generation, though, does not think quite that way anymore; they made development their professional career. But despite their professionalism, they still lack the needed deeper understanding of the real underlying constraints to development and may have sometimes become just mercenaries to their salaries.
The new generation also likes to use fancy words to dress-up subversive thoughts. They sometimes presume to give advice to humanity on how to conduct its affairs although they are no wiser as mentors or worthier as examples than were the missionaries of old.
Liberals classically respond to development queries by demanding more details and by passing the resolution of problems -on to institutions ill-equipped to cope with them. (Timberlake, 1987, p.2). In the process, they have largely shown to be unable to recognize and much less to denounce the coercive use of these development institutions by the ruling elites. (Lerner, 1987).
The political economy of development is indeed not easy to unravel, but many liberal colleagues see it as a topic on which to do even more quantitative research and model building (neither being of much consequence to the feeding of hungry people…). (Buttel, 1987)
Liberals are indeed good at compressing this quantitative information often gathered from secondary sources, into tidy paragraphs using little analytical skepticism and showing a minimum of sensitivity. They sometimes pursue abstract ideas at the expense of people. And the power of ideas can and does hurt. They are too anxious to promote a redeeming and trascending Truth the establishment of which they see as their mission on behalf of humanity. They do not have much patience with the mundane, everyday truths represented by objective facts which get in the way of their arguments. These awkward minor truths get brushed aside, doctored, reversed or are even deliberately suppressed. These various pecadillos, of course, undermine the liberals’ credibility.
Perhaps (or not perhaps?) because of the above, liberals have become champions of the international NGOs scene. These NGOs are of three types (or mixtures thereof):
– Thinkers: they do studies and investigations. They purportedly are in the business of advancing the quality of analytical frameworks and tools.
– Informers: They disseminate information and do advocacy giving visibilty to the problems usually ignored by traditional corporate and state-run media.
– Doers: They directly provide social services and initiate projects at grassroots level. (Hunt, 1987, p.10). NGOs of this third type be much more flexible, so that they better adapt themselves to change, varying situations, new political regimes or different financial conditions, those changes are a common feature in Third World societies. (Padron, 1990).
Liberals feel particularly at home in NGOs of the first two types.
Another cause championed by liberals is the multidisciplinary approach to development problem-solving. A multidisciplinary team is a community in which each member is paradigmatically ruled by his/her discipline of origin. Nevertheless, team members mostly share a good many solid intellectual and ideological compromises woven around the very same prevailing development paradigm that already is dominant. Although a multidisciplinary team has the capacity to perceive a whole variety of situations from different angles, its members perceive these situations as similar to previously perceived ones. They thus adopt a certain way to look at things that has been sanctioned by time and by each of their own closest peer group. In this process, symbolic generalizations, beliefs, values and models are used in a way that determines what is acceptable by peers as explanations and solutions to the problems at hand.
Multidisciplinary teams purposely try to avoid being “contaminated” by values, and that is, of course, naif. Their members appoint themselves as categorical experts. In their closet, they work and rework their old assumptions, endlessly embellishing the thought structures that explain and interpret the problem(s) in acceptable ways. (Thomas, 1987, p.23).
Multidisciplinary development teams manned by liberals are thus actually particularly good at “choreographing” the operations they recommend -to impress outsiders (and themselves). (Walsh, 1987, p.2).
Hence, we need to reject the implicit assumption, all too often made, that multidisciplinary teams are omniscient, more efficient and impartial. This, not necessarily due to political considerations, but rather due to sheer logic and pragmatism. A healthy dose of scepticism is required to judge their members’ intentions, particularly if they play into the hands of status-quo and the elites. Ultimately -with or without the involvement of multidisciplinary development teams- political power will be abused to promote the particular purpose of its holders. [Schuftan b), 1988].
3.1.C. Liberals and ethics
Western development promotes the interests of the North through a calculated use of moral rhetoric and moral posturing. (Woodward, 1989).
It seems that all the more-critical-liberals succeed in doing is to simply denounce some of the more outdated underlying values of Western development. But keep in mind that they do this from within the intellectual and moral framework of concepts and methods otherwise ruling Western ideology.
Liberals are less often at odds with their own group’s moral sensibilities and end up adopting a self-centered ethic that in its collective form has dominated Western approaches to development. And this is what leads to the deeply-ingrained- self-deceptions one finds in the liberals’ ultimate motives. [Tikkun Editorial a), 1987]. Actually, the same self-centered ethics that has dominated Western societies leading to self-interest-above-all is actually the ideological underpinning of capitalism. (Van Dyk, 1987).
Given their privileged position in capitalist societies, liberals do have the political power to implement their ideas, only that the latter do not often enough speak to the basic level of collective human needs. They too often get stuck with a commitment to an abstract concept of individual rights and get deluded and blinded by this individualistic ideology. For too long, they have been subjected to an intense psychological and ideological conditioning pointing in that direction.
On the other hand, societies are deeply rooted in very concrete social, historical, ergo political contexts. Hence, in today’s world, commitment to change coming from ethical imperatives alone does not fuel great social movements anymore. (Lerner, 1987).
Moreover, Western development has succeeded in defining a deceivingly moral framework in which concessions made by the assumed beneficiaries of development appear not as an ultimate surrendering, but as “sacrifices in the name of a common good” that is neither common nor good. (Gomez, 1988).
Consequently, it is not enough to encourage the articulation of a shared moral vision, because it leaves us unable to consolidate this vision into moral outrage and that outrage into political power. A point in case is that of Western voluntarism and charity: neither ever succeeded in really helping the chronically distressed solve their problems in the long-run.
There is a social need for commitment beyond ethics, and individuals with insight recognize this need and pursue such an endeavour.
The beginnings of a new world-view and of a global ethics more closely linked to a political perspective will not come from destroying the old morals, but rather from building on what is most universal and genuinely democratic in the old creed. However, if such a doctrine -to which too many amongst us are all too ready to pay lip service only- is to become a reality, it will require a veritable mental renaissance among our peers. (U Thant).
The job facing us for achieving a just world order is thus primarily both educational and political, with the ethical dimension serving as an underlying shared frame of reference. (Laursen, 1989, p.35; Schuftan, 1987).
3.1.D. Liberals and politics
The ideology of the “extreme center” is what ordinary, decent liberals operate- on most of the time, displaying a disquieting homogeneity of perspective. In development work, they pay obedience mostly to expediency, because they do not feel comfortable participating in the social struggle; they thus close ranks with the forces of conservatism. (Woodward, 1989; Henriquez Neudel, 1988; Gomez, 1988).
As we have already discussed, many development workers have put some distance between politics and their pursuit of individual self-realization. We know they have not abandoned their moral quest for a better society, but they have missed changing themselves in their political outlook. And those who have never been challenged to understand the structural changes needed to achieve development in capitalist-dependent societies end-up framing their own politics in narrow external terms. They often remain unwilling to act on their correct intuitive belief that something must be done to at least restrain the power of dependency-perpetuating capitalism to shape economic life in a more promising direction. (Lerner, 1987).
What I see missing is the courage of liberals to stand-up and fight for their own sparks of enlightened vision. This unwillingness to fight for a vision stems from the lack of an ideological commitment to the needed drastic changes to bring about genuine, poverty-redressing development. [Tikkun Editorial b), 1987, p.11].
Sometimes, liberals do get involved in perfectly “reasonable” activities in no conflict with a life of commitment to equity principles. But, on the other hand, quick disillusionment too often leads them not into more limited-scope or manageable, still committed activities, but instead into a professional life devoid of any active political engagement. The liberal paradigm easily falls into an inarticulate strategic vision of the future. It too often leads to opting for symbolic acts of resistance to injustice devoid of any plan for how that injustice might ultimately be remedied for good.
Let’s face it, in liberalism, prestige of the intellectual depends on laying claim to being rational and apolitical. Therefore, liberals move away from politics and towards “reason”. But the “catch-22” is that, what one calls “reason” is a political question; reason rests on a particular ideology. (Peller, 1987).
Apoliticism fosters laissez-faire in crucial areas of development while concentrating sometimes on minutiae… And laissez-faire is no base for generating any kind of public philosophy.
It would seem that deliberate efforts are made by the liberal community to prevent debate on macro and political issues relating to the ultimate aims of society. This is achieved by purposely focusing the debate primarily on narrow operational sub-problems found in the implementation of development projects.
There is no consistency in the way in which liberals relate to political ideals in general. They seem to mostly pursue a politics of status instead of pursuing a politics of socialization. For liberals, the pursuance of particular purposes and objectives depends on how questions of status are resolved (including their own…). (Woodward, 1989).
It has been said that it is actually easier to change consciousness by changing behavior than to change behavior by changing consciousness. Accommodative changes of consciousness -those adopted just to keep-up with the times- invariably lead liberals not to wipe out the hypocrisy in their behavior and praxis, but just to improve the quality of it. (Henriquez Neudel, 1988).
Recent world history, as framed by the predominant Western ideology, has played a major role in creating some of the fragmentation in liberalism which we have been addressing.
It is liberals who have taken the politics away from ideology and placed it more in the realms of economics; they have thus made economic matters the central issue of politics! (Friedrich Durrenmatt).
The bottom line is that liberals who have shaped their outlook on development on a framework of no ideology or an ideology that strips events of their political meaning/underpinning, become disoriented and even uprooted when they discover that framework to be false, not to work or not to explain their past failures. [Langley b), 1989].
3.2. What liberals need to – the normative dimension
Hope alone leads to good-hearted, but unrealistic advocacy and to outcomes way short of expectations. (Harland Cleveland)
Instead of feeling guilty for problems they did not really create, liberals in development work need to adopt a new, more political paradigm. Instead of feeling angry at themselves and at the situation, they should gather the energy needed to change. (Lerner, 1987). Facetiousness aside, I ask myself, if so far liberals have not really fought for an equitable distribution of wealth and justice, should they not at least fight for an equitable distribution of the existing poverty and injustice? (Gomez, 1988).
Step one, is for intellectuals in development work to move themselves out of isolation and to identify with the victims of history. Writing about an issue is not nearly as significant as a de-facto personal commitment to the process of transformation. [Langley a), 1989]. (Beware of those colleagues of ours who prove their liberalism by writing nicely about development in places they would not live-in for a month).
Ethically, liberals need to leave behind their ethics of principles and adopt an ethics of global responsibility. (Gomez, 1988). Ideologically, liberals need to overcome the disjunctions or contradictions they encounter (or create) between what they feel and think and what they seem to do. The persistence of that unresolved fragmentation explains the ideological confusion and oversimplification in their scholarship which has caused them to cognitively ignore the ethico-political connection in the areas of knowledge crucial to their work in development. [Langley b), 1989]. We call on them to become scholar-activists beyond mere neo-populist politics and demagoguery. (Buttel, 1987).
Section IV: The non-actors in today’s development
4.1. Issues on participation:
4.2. Participation: the future
4.1. Issues on participation:
There is no progressive politics without the masses. But not every policy intended to promote the wellbeing of the masses is progressive. (Gomez, 1988).
4.1.A. Genuine participation: what it is and what it isn’
Without genuine participation, development is like a Christmas toy: Batteries not included. (Walker, 1986, p.27).
In Third World development projects, popular participation has so far mostly been used to reinforce the patronage of the existing political apparatus. Typically, it appears first as an effort to set up a poor people’s circuit in response to the aspirations raised by a populist system. It has much less been a springboard for collective mobilization of communities set up to help them master their own development.
Patronage and clientelism have been used as models of veiled political control. An example of this can be seen in the tendency of family planning workers to accept and apply crude neo-Malthusian assumptions and to preach and harangue rather than enter into dialogue with potential users.
Participation-in-the-way-the-authorities-want-it is controlled participation. It is a kind of “for them, but without them”. In that sense, “public opinion” is nothing but an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community to elevate it to the dignity of a physical force.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the income distribution issue is largely ignored in participation schemes in Western development projects. Consequently, the poor never attain the power necessary to demand the share of national resources that would be compatible with guaranteeing them minimum incomes commensurate with decent standards of living, health and nutrition.
Empowerment means something more than people following instructions or being able to answer narrow questions. Empowerment is development (or vice-versa): To be empowered is to increase one’s capacity to define, analyze and act on one’s own problems. Empowerment is cognitive and unashamedly value-laden. It entails arriving at an understanding of the situation in which one decides for oneself that changing one’s behavior is in one’s own interest. Development programs, therefore, need to go beyond the technical and help empower people to overcome the structural violence they are subjected-to day-in, day-out. Why do we go-on designing programs directed at people based on the assumption that they have needs but do not have any resources, competence or views? (Kent, 1988, p.11).
In Western development, participation has actually been more an exercise of integration than of incorporation of people. Incorporation tries to make people partners in the system making them benefit from the venture(s) undertaken. This has mostly not been the case so far. The issue has rather been finding ways of integrating people into a preconceived development process. People are where they are today, not because they have been genuinely incorporated into the process as such, but because they have been integrated into the existing social formation in the country. This process has largely preserved the underlying system that appropriates and expropriates surplus value from commodity producers and workers by controlling both the supply and demand sides of the market in capitalist-dependent societies in the periphery. (Bashir, 1988).
A distinction should be made here between a reformist view and a more liberatory view of social movements. The reformist view looks at the actual conditions of an oppressed people and asks: How can we improve the conditions or lessen the oppression? A more liberatory view says: There is something about the transformation of the conditions affecting a given oppressed group that the achievement of its liberation leads to the liberation of all.
Participation as “meeting with people here and there”, somebody said, is not unlike a ritual for invoking rain -and it may prove less effective… Genuine participation gives people a transformative rather than a fatalistic outlook toward the world. [Langley a), 1989]. The process of genuine participation thus calls for translating change into acceptance. (Gomez, 1988). It is about creating new community fora and meeting grounds where grievances motivate and spark effective, powerful action.
Grassroots organization, therefore, means people + leadership + ideas + a plan + taking collective initiatives + following self-deliberation + self-managing the tasks initiated; it means exercising the right to choose.
Ergo, genuine participation of beneficiaries is not to be a goal to be achieved with a project; it has to exist from the beginning, or there simply is no project! (Padron, 1990).
4.1.B. A liberating participation: why needed?
People have the right to define by themselves the kind of lives they want to live and under what conditions. (Lerner, 1987).
Felt needs should not have to wait for an opportunity. They are to create new opportunities. In other words, rights have to be taken. They are not given.
It is the poor who have suffered most in bad economic times just as it is them who have benefited least in good economic times. Therefore, why should the kind of Western development the people have been getting deserve their support? It is time to strip away the niceties of Western economic parlance and say that what has happened and is happening is simply an outrage against a large section of humanity. (Development Forum, 1989, p.15).
Historically, whenever abuses of political power have been corrected in the East and in the West, it has been through a popular movement from below. Throughout the struggles of people, these changes were made when enough people decided that the burdens of history required risks and that the demands for change could not be met by acting as if normal politics could do the job. (Falk, 1988, p.17).
Simply put, without participation, people are unable to consolidate moral outrage into political power which is the key to the type of change needed.
Constructive changes in society are almost always the product of social movements (Boyte and Evans, 1987) and only a changed society can adopt better, sustainable development strategies; Western development tends to do it the other way around… (Hatfield, 1987, p.6).
Without some modicum of political power and the ability to use it in an organized fashion, participation remains mere window-dressing. Because of this, confrontation remains a cornerstone of genuine participation. When confrontation softens and compromises begin to occur in key areas, the power base of the people tends to erode. The upholders of the status-quo play their game around these compromises.
Unfortunately, grassroot popular leadership is too often regulated, controlled and manipulated by the central political level thus, by definition, leading to a weak organizational base. What is needed for a liberating participation to flourish is a political process through which an independent local leadership can be built. There still prevail powerful dependent-dominant relationships in organized rural grassroots groups. In most places, the same dominant group controls the political and economic powers from the national to the village level. There is thus no real polarization of power between the rural poor and the elites, i.e. the power-deprived and the power-users. Such a polarization needs to be fostered through the process of participation, mainly because the silence of powerlessness keeps the needs and desires of the poor (especially rural) from being part of national political agendas. (Khadka, 1988; Daly, 1990).
On social issues, national governments do not move until they are pushed by a substantial grassroots movement. (Langley b), 1989]. Only then do they feel compelled to pay more attention to the claims of the numerically strong but economically weak. (Woodward, 1989).
Voting and other traditional social participation patterns are weak and misleading expressions of popular control in capitalist-dependent Western-type democracies. Only with a stronger de-facto control by the people comes hope.
Political participation in traditional forms of Western democracy is limited; it mostly allows to express a citizen’s preference for one (or various) candidates. New forms of people’s participation are thus being tried by grassroots organizations (e.g., slum dwellers associations), they all practice a much more adapted, responsive and accountable form of democracy. (Padron, 1990).
Hence, the development process’s role is to help create the necessary support systems among participants for a genuine, liberating participation to emerge and for it to nurture the spontaneous local sparks of awareness into concrete actions. It is both the consciousness-raising and the actual mobilization of people that ultimately help create these necessary support systems anchored in a strong sense of identity with each other and with an emancipatory cause.
Since Third World governments/elites manifest a distressing tendency to imitate their more powerful allies, change will have to come from non-governmental sources, from those willing and able to break the spell and penetrate the mystifications that the governing class has purposefully created and perpetuated everywhere. (Woodward, 1989).
Any NGO-organized participation has to achieve what grassroots groups want, i.e. the type of actions that bring about the desired changes. The act of organizing has an instructional role per-se. Knowledge by itself does not transform reality; it is essential that it be linked to organized activity. The dialectical unity of knowledge and action must be an essential aspect of the development process.(Gianotten and de Wit, 1983).
For this to happen, the goals of development must arise from within a society and cannot be imposed by external forces. Only then does participation help the individual to understand his/her own society, turning him/her into an active agent of social change by providing him/her with a way to analyze society from within and thus with better ways to tackle its problems. (Kaci, 1990, p.4).
It is becoming more and more evident that the hope for dealing with the global development crisis rests not with the development industry, but with the great social movements of contemporary society; it rests with people who are driven by a strong social commitment rather than by the budgetary imperatives of huge global bureaucracies. (Korten, 1990).
Because only a liberating participation promotes social change and organizes the oppressed into an economic/political force, development professionals should be compelled to reject, and not just be indifferent about, projects with a passive role for people. (Gianotten and de Wit, 1983).
In summary, people have to be present at the historical processes shaping their future as thinking activists and not be maneuvered by the Establishment thinking for them. The latter only leads to the all-too-well-known pattern of resentful participation. (Paulo Freire)
Furthermore, fundamental change is not possible without conflicts with the powers-that-be. The timing for this inevitable conflict with the vested interests can often be chosen: Either the organization decides to precipitate a crisis or it faces it when times of crisis come along.
4.1.C. Participation: what it takes
To succeed, participation needs to paint a picture of the world that has inner cohesion in the eyes of the participants; it needs to offer a roadmap for purposeful and consistent action. But above all, genuine participation needs to and does legitimize outcomes. [Langley b),1989; Laursen, 1989, p.35].
I am aware that true democratic social change cannot be based solely on the mobilization of the people for their immediate concerns and anxieties and on their present, often faulty, interpretation of the world. It also requires resources and management skills! Self-reliance cannot do without resources (material, financial and organizational). It also requires a commitment to social-philosophical principles and to the effort that is needed to link political activity to those same principles. A working coalition of people has to amass independent power and bring together organization, leadership, ideas and a plan. (Posner, 1987). Participation, therefore, takes learning, agenda setting, bargaining and fostering a strong sense of collective identity. (Schuftan, 1983). Achieving this, surely requires a concerted struggle and, in today’s world, it is almost a redundancy to say that the existence of established “democratic” institutions does not by itself guarantee that the poor and the disposessed are able to fight for their basic economic and social rights. (Kothari, 1988).
But the choice of social policies cannot be grounded in the values of liberal individualism only, as vital as these values may be. The emphasis must be on policies that express values of social responsibility rather than some vague commitment to community. The task is to create a broad movement or coalition based on important social values. (Posner, 1987). Only thus can development retain its deep roots in the community. Otherwise, it loses its energy and spirit. Ultimately, organized individuals have to strive for visibility in their political universe based on relevant issues, sometimes at considerable risk (e.g., a strike or a mass demonstration are acts of defiance). (Boyte, 1987).
The problem with most Western development schemes at present is that the limited participation they allow is atomized into isolated efforts effectively preventing groups with common interests and common enemies to coalesce. The need to provide rallying points for popular mobilization and for the consolidation of coalitions -e.g. linking single-issue constituencies together- should become more a part of our colleagues’ agenda so as to induce them to act more decisively in this direction.
The various components of the popular movement (trade unions, small farmers’ associations or cooperatives, neighborhood groups and other urban and rural organizations) find themselves too often isolated from each other: fragmented, distrustful of each other, seeing no further than their own noses… The fabric must be rewoven; social networks must be set-up to take advantage of collective past experiences. All needs to start with an assessment of what has been done so far in order to identify positive and negative experiences and salvaging what can be reproduced (the good seed) and rejecting the rotten. It is no easy task, nor will it come about tomorrow, but it must be undertaken; the sooner the better.
Participation has to foster activism within the system (“see-judge-act”) and all-across the popular movement. It has to overrule the technocratic perspectives of creating a stable world by insisting on th primacy of the political process and of social mobilization over technology to achieve meaningful, lasting transformations. (Kothari, 1989, p.3). (Mind that the technocratic perspective tends to forget that people are more important than technologies, as well as being more complicated). (Lewis, C., 1988, p.6).
In sum, to be relevant, participation has to start from the people’s viewpoint, from their accumulated experience and their specific present economy. (Gianotten and de Wit, 1983). To achieve this relevance, movements must also be linked to the everyday problems of people; key experiences can and should serve as a compass. (Montes, 1989).
These days, as a matter of pressure, we need popular demands to be accompanied by concrete proposals (“the problem must be solved in the following way:…”). Popular movements and actors are the ones called-upon to present positive proposals to solve the problems they know best. They should not exert pressure for the sake of pressure or in the name of empty slogans (e.g., a multi-party system). They have to challenge the context of existing policies and influence key actors and institutions at all needed levels. (Montes, 1989). From a tactical point of view, priority has to be ultimately given to the conflict most affecting the decision-makers, the one that puts most pressure on them. But this pressure has to be organized in a way that a healthy face-to-face confrontation to resolve the conflict is actually precipitated. In it, the people, effectively organized, do not only place vague demands, but offer and fight for concrete, viable alternatives.
4.1.D. Internal organization for participation
Development depends on a central source of constant renewal. The fountain of renewal spouts in a desert of sand soaking up the ground with new information as it runs from the center. Close in, the knowledge pools are constantly refilled. Further out, the new information sinks in the sand. Digging trenches to extend the flow helps little. (Brennan, 1989, p.4).
The organization of grassroots groups as pressure groups has to go through an incremental development process -developing trust, building a shared vision and, finally, establishing a strategy. By the time the strategy is arrived at, the group has such zeal and sense of mission that they are ready to take the issue to larger groups, using the same process. When organizers talk to people at all levels, people at all levels start talking to each other and problems tend to begin getting addressed before it is too late.
It is necessary for development professionals to create an excuse (or a crisis) to seek working with these groups, to listen to them, to share “secrets”, build trust, share a vision and capture them in it: call this a soft revolution. In organizing movements, each of us has to use graphic vocabulary, share confidential information, share hopes and fears to create a common vision and promote trust. We have to seize every opportunity to make a point, emphsize a value, disseminate information, share an experience, express interest and show we care. Performance and contribution of as many people as possible has to be publicly recognized: ceremonies present great opportunities to do so. Use incentive programs whose main objective is not compensation, but recognition. Create the group’s own culture, with its own language, symbols, norms and customs. An acculturation process begins when people get together in groups and trust and care about each other. Such a new culture is much more conducive-to and supportive-of consensus decision-making. (Hurst, 1984).
We all need to actively encourage and foster these new community fora and meeting grounds where grievances are no longer sources of defeat, but motivate effective, power-backed action, where people can learn the practices of work in common. (Boyte and Evans, 1987).
Since times have changed, we should once-and-for-all understand that participation has to be broad and has to allow participants to choose for themselves what the legitimate and important problems are that they need to be tackling.
Genuine participation has to make people feel affirmed; it has to help them deal with their real pains and with the absence of a coherent way to understand how the outside world sets limits to their possibilities. By definition, a process of participation has to provide respect and autonomy to community members. (Lerner, 1987). But care has to be taken that the organizing efforts of those seeking change do not actually mimic the views or play into the hands of the prevailing, dominant and ineffectual politics. (Moore Lappe, 1990).
Genuine (liberating) participation has to pass through a period of consciousness-raising, motivation-for-involvement and the generation of a sense-of-community and mutual-aid-support. Ergo, people have to be invited to participate in direct actions and thus practice grassroots democracy. Organizing should start as a local effort to be followed by the decision to form regional and then a national organization. [Langley a), 1989].
Practical politics, in this context, means control and empowerment for undertaking self-help actions, for lobbying and for placing concrete demands in front of authorities, even against the odds of repression. As a non-violent political duty, an organized group needs to position itself to exert active resistance to social evil. (A right exists only with a concomitant duty). [Langley a), 1989].
4.2. Participation: the future
The battle against underdevelopment will be won by many little people doing many little things in many little places. (Lankaster, 1988).
At the root of strong, genuine participatory democracy is the need to set up legal entities that define people’s rights more bindingly so as to transform millions of inhabitants into millions of equally sharing citizens. (Hardoy, 1987, p.14).
The future of this citizen’s participation in development lies in the hands of ordinary wo/men, in their level of political consciousness, in their comprehension of the multidimensional and interrelated nature of the development problem(s), in their courage, their capacity to overcome fear and insecurity, their willingness to come out of their various closets and to collectively create the conditions and the compulsion necessary to change their surrounding reality.
Development professionals need to help catalize this mobilization to achieve the changes people feel are needed to bring new hope to their future. (Kothari, 1988).
Ultimate success will be measured by the degree to which one has sparked a social movement, one has raised the level of political discourse at grassroots level and one has precipitated public debate about social values, even if the latter are unpopular.
Only when these new groupings defending their own interests have a more decisive weight, will there be a significant chance for change in global political processes. Every issue brought to a vote locally at the base has the potential to generate pressures for new demands. (Woodward, 1989).
In sum, people will have to explore and try various new institutional arrangements through which their collective social needs can be achieved before choosing the most suited to them.
Only when the all-pervasive culture of silence and apathy is overcome, can popular education really start to blossom and bring about the kind of organization needed for a truly liberating development.
Section V: Development: The future
5.1. What is needed to overcome stale third world development policies: A fresh (or not so fresh…) set of prescriptions.
Many Third World countries are moving away from authoritarian regimes, but are being sold US-style democracy: Procedural, formal democracy without substance. Formal democracy alone will merely ensure continued inequality, poverty and hunger. The challenge is to go beyond formal democracy (elite- controlled democracies) to genuine participatory democracy. (Bello, 1990).
5.1. What is needed to overcome stale third world development policies: A fresh (or not so fresh…) set of prescriptions.
To lead development anywhere meaningful, we in the North have to first stop living in societies of trends rather than ideas (Brown, 1989, p.18). And in the South, we need real change and transformation; not just adjustment. We need economic justice; not just growth. We need democracy and accountability; not just despotism, authoritarianism and kleptocracy. (Adebayo Adedeji).
Modern Westerners make a virtue of speculating far into the next century in the realms of technology. The question is: Why not also in the realm of the social sciences?
It is in response to this question that I here present a hopefully constructive discussion of alternatives which still receive far too little consideration in development circles.
The changes deemed necessary will not come overnight nor will old forms disappear fast, but rather centers of concern need to begin shifting as soon as possible. It is a whole new generation of thinking that is needed to cope with the present development problems and riddles. A new general framework is thus actually needed to force us to get more involved in concrete and more meaningful actions that foster Third World production systems based on local initiatives whose fruits are ploughed right back into community development. (Jonsson, 1988).
5.1.A. The need for a more critical and visionary attitude
He who knows what he is looking for, better understands what he finds. (Gregorio Maranon.)
Historically, Western development first saw the arrival of infrastructure builders who attempted to set up the backbone of Third World economies. Then, in the 70s, came basic human needs backers to “(re)connect people and development”. Now, we have the Greens reminding us of the environment and development. BUT we always left out the political dimension, not tackling it as the principal stumbling block to genuine development. (Berg, 1989, p.2).
That is why the first task facing us now is to unlock the many paradoxes and contradictions of the present maldevelopment syndrome and decisively handle its inherent ambiguities. (Hurst, 1984).
And because we are in a race with time, we must overcome the problems of maldevelopment before they overcome us. It is as simple and as deadly as that. (Dhital, 1989, p.6).
In this task, it is an error to equate being more radical with how totally opposed one is to the given order. Commitment to lines of analysis and action that have a better chance of changing things is more to the point. If we are serious about change, as social critics we have to be able to see not only what is wrong, but what there is to build-on. This includes being able to recognize every possible factor maintaining the status-quo that might be subject to our intervention. The constructive critic should constantly point out the contradictions and hypocrisies between theory and the actual praxis he/she encounters. (Boyte, 1987).
The picture of causality to emerge from a new line of analysis of underdevelopment in the 90s is not one of simple cause and effect. The process is to be dynamic. We just have to get away from the circularity in the analysis found in current Western development thinking. [Tikkun b), 1987; Schuftan a), 1988].
But on the other hand, when looking at the more obvious major and minor contradictions in the process of maldevelopment, the fact that our basic dialectics are failing us cannot but be emphasized enough. And here is why: Economic and social policies to achieve a people-beneficial development are determined by the prevailing political discourse. When analyzing those major contradictions, the question of power is at the center and to understand its determinants one has at least to look at the actors, the problem(s) or obstacle(s) and the process ahead.
The actors: Amongst the main actors in the development paradigm, a dichotomy can be found between those who have excess-power (or a power surplus) and those who are powerless: the excess-power lies with those who are making the decisions (and some of us act as their advisors…) and the powerlessness is found among the sufferers of those development policies that ignore them. The same dichotomy is also at the center of the dialectical relationships between the modern and the traditional sectors in national economies and between North and South in the international context.
The problem: The problem is precisely the powerlessness of the intended beneficiaries of development policies who are suffering, on a daily basis, from the prevalent conditions of social injustice and from a complete lack of equity in the development policies applied.
The process ahead: The challenge here is to escape the social and political mechanisms of ongoing disempowerment. Empowerment -as opposed to how the term has been misused and vilified for example in UNICEF’s jargon which equals empowerment of mothers to giving them more control over their own and their children’s wellbeing and ill-health through the mastering of a few basic techniques- was always meant to mean economic and political empowerment, precisely the one people have been consistently denied and the one UNICEF does not necessarily mean or explicitly enough address and tackle. Therefore, whenever one invokes empowerment as a must, one must first mean and then be prepared to bring it about by implementing strong measures that increase the political power, the economic power, the financial power, the decision-making power of the poorest. We are talking about measures that mobilize human and economic resources towards new ends, different from the traditional ones. (Henderson, 1990, p.72).
It is only the sequential process of Participation, Consciousness-raising, Social mobilization (or practical politics), Consolidation of movements, Networking and Solidarity that has a chance of achieving real empowerment of people. The process is not without risk due to all existing forms of overt or covert repression in the Third World.
Working hard and with dedication for development is not enough! We need not only do the things right, but do the right things, and tackling the power determinants at the roots of underdevelopment is one of those right things we have not done enough of. In development work, dreaming is OK, but being naif is not!
5.1.B. Paradigms and science: the needed breakthroughs
Understanding the new logic of an ongoing process plays a positive part in further shaping the process itself (Hegel) and this requires that we first get the “big picture” right. [Van Dyk, 1987; Schuftan a), 1988].
Applied to development, science has not been a critical science; in that sense, science has not been at the service of peoples’ development; it has rather been applied as an industrialized science and at that, managed more as a business. A revolution in the system of values which development science has served is badly needed. We need a science more responsive to the needs of humankind. One that gives a fuller scenario. There is an incompleteness in our present normal development science. Something important is being left out. We have thus to think in terms of belatedly incorporating a complementary body of knowledge. Complementing science in its present form is a second kind of knowledge-seeking: being concerned with sociopolitical values that give science ultimate social purpose and meaning. [Schuftan b), 1988].
The language of development we use is itself a stiff box that reflects our cultural heritage and emphsizes some features of reality at the expense of others. We thus need to unlearn many scientific concepts and develop (or accept) even a new vocabulary and new phrases and words. Thought and language are keys to changing perceptions. (In a way, it is a radical act to look at a familiar sight in a new way…).
We need to change the present context to one in which development problems are more widely discussed and acted-upon. The purpose is not to explain only, but to explain and to test assumptions, and not bend to foregone conclusions as too often has been the case. (Hurst, 1984).
The conversations that transform an era are those conversations out of which we see things in a new way, conversations in which what we consider to be possible is altered and in which possibilities are transformed into actual opportunities, conversations that empower and enable people showing new openings for action, conversations in which new real commitments are made, in which priorities are reorganized and resources are reallocated, no matter how drastic the change. (Shift in the Wind, Hunger Project).
We, therefore, need to subject the conventional Western development paradigm that rules our present behavior to the critique of present Third World realities so as to lay down the groundwork for the emergence of a new paradigm that will bring human beings, their development and welfare, back into the center of the scientific development endeavour. [Ricketts b), 1987, p.10].
The bottom line is that we desperately need a critique of our existing agendas, an examination of how we decide to worry about a given issue. This does not assume that the current substantive problems some of our colleagues have decided to worry about are unworthy of concern, but rather raises questions about the unexamined assumptions we make. We do not need to try harder as much as we need to learn how to think differently about development. In our present development paradigm, we are confronted with a forbidden agenda that discourages such a free, “unconventional” analysis. (McDermott, 1989). (Keep in mind that based on the security of the established paradigm the elites protect their positions of power). (Morehouse, 1988, p.15).
As is true for any paradigm, the Western development paradigm offers a wide if not contradictory variety of disciplined and undisciplined speculations on the possible, the probable and the preferable. The society to be attained (or avoided) is not something that will merely happen independently of our efforts. It is something we can and must shape, and a change of paradigm is needed for that. Genuine despair is preferable to apathy in this endeavour and may actually lead to the needed replacement of the present development paradigm. Urgency forces us to postpone and to suppress our doubts and quibbles. An effort is called for to peer deeper into these various issues in order to understand, in a fresh manner, precisely what it is we think we are trying to accomplish, what means are currently at our disposal and what kinds of problems and issues will persist after we have engaged ourselves as best we can. Let’s move towards considering what we think is best to do when we cannot do what we wanted to do in the first place. [McDermott, 1989; Schuftan b), 1988].
5.1.C. Politics, ideology and new global values: the keys to unlock underdevelopment
It is not enough to be opposed to mere reformism; we have to actively oppose any form of development that imposes and/or promotes it. [Langley a), 1989].
In today’s world, viable solutions to our most prevalent development problems have to be acceptable, accessible, affordable and arrived at with and not for the people. In working out these solutions it is by now also indispensable that we invert the M of men to a W of women beyond mere rhetoric. It thus behoves us to differentiate between people’s needs and demands and our own wants. (Williams, 1987).
Arriving at the same solutions requires that we restore the right balance between technical competence and a moral and political vision.
As a matter of fact, technical/political approaches are not to be considered an either/or proposition. We have to integrate both. Both are needed. But this unmistakably means that, as development workers, we need to enter the political arena more decisively, because it is in the latter arena where the failed Western approach to development is weakest (or “wickedest”…?).
Progressive community organizers have begun to think more in terms of ideology and larger political frameworks. They have been willing to come into conflict with those aspects of the prevailing value system which uphold the existing structure of society -i.e., racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, tribalism, national chauvinism and the deep-rooted belief that making it is evidence of one’s personal or group superiority. From now on, even short-term success will have to be defined and measured by the degree to which we have helped spark such a social movement and have helped raise the level of political discourse among people at the grassroots.
Nobody knows what brings a social movement into being, but what is needed, for sure, is the politization of the process, as well as of the wo/men of learning, of scientists, of development intellectuals and field workers so that they can portray reality more militantly and transform their anguish into anger and a search for being ultimately relevant. (Posner, 1987).
Progressive development workers’ voices have been fragmented and isolated, microscopic and varied in space and context. We need to search for alternatives to create our own movement and draw closer, to forge coalitions across regions and continents and even across ideological schools in order to develop a minimum consensus package and hopefully a sense of common cause. (Kothari, 1988). In short, building on new global values will mean rejecting moral ambiguities. Together, we have to be able to consolidate and translate moral outrage into an effective political platform. [Tikkun a), 1987, p.7].
As Northeners, we should -in any way we can- contribute to the ideological debate and harbor and help legitimate the national (very often dissident) intelligentsia fighting for a non-dependent development. (Padron, 1990).
As development organizers acting as political activists we have to be willing to come into conflict with the ideology of the ruling minority as well, so as to precipitate widespread public discussion about the most inequitable prevailing social values. In a society saturated with the ethics of individualism, it is only through conflict that new, still “unpopular ideas” become thinkable. (Posner, 1987).
We thus need to politicize the boundaries that separate knowledge from superstition, truth from myth, reason from passion, fact from opinion. Rather than continue the quest to find a place that is outside politics and independent of social struggle, it is high time that we look at all the ways in which social power manifests itself across the board in shaping social events. There is a call here to demystify the ideology of power-taken-as-being-neutral in the Western development model. Rather than compulsively searching for a vantage point of neutrality, we should recognize as acts of political power the exclusion of those who are kept marginalized from all meaningful decision-making. The deconstruction of the dominant forms of knowledge (paradigms) is only the first step of a committed critical development practice. We are thus faced with the task of taking a stand. The task of politics itself is to give social meaning to what we do (or do not do). (Peller, 1987).
The problem is not whether a solution is political or not, as the conservative sectors fear. What is important is that the solution, whether political or technical, be the result of a collective analysis that raises the level of peoples’ awareness about the existing structural constraints to development. In a way, we are talking about the piecing together of an ideology -in this case of an ideology leading to structural changes. (Paredes, 1987, p.5).
Here, we are not talking about an adolescent reaction to change in which politics only consists of feelings, indignation, morals, rebellion, idealism, dreams, generosity and even mysticism, but we are talking about practical politics without second intentions or a prefabricated rhetoric. Practical politics embraces a struggle to win and it unfortunately has to do so more by defeat than by convincing (from the Spanish “vencimiento/convencimiento”). (Gomez, 1988).
The explicit treatment of development as a non-political phenomenon deliberately attempts to eliminate class structure and class struggle from it and to redirect the focus mostly toward the provision of the mass consumption goods thought to be required.
What is actually needed is for all development workers to become more and more comfortable with the notion that, to succeed in the long-term, most of the following measures are thought to be indispensable:
– A fundamental restructuring of relevant institutions leading to a different ordering of the productive forces and the relations of production primarily, but not only, in the rural areas. (In this context of economic restructuring, note that there is a confusion in Western development between privatization and the selling-off of state assets (e.g. parastatals). Privatization may (and can) mean incorporation of market forces and private management in publicly owned institutions and not necessarily the liquidation or handing over of the enterprise to private hands. Moreover, there is little point in privatizing enterprises if there is no entrepreneurial class in the country concerned. At any rate, the private sector does have an important role to play in development, but as one more piece in the chess-board and not as a hegemonic force dictating all the rules of the game.
– Social changes to take precedence over or get equal attention as economic growth.
– Mass mobilization to be treated as essential in the implementation of solutions to the problems of maldevelopment.
– A strengthening of the rural economic bases supported by a popular land reform, especially in Latinamerica and Asia, but also in Africa.
– An economic policy which stresses agricultural development as a basis for industrialization. (Ruralize the urban and urbanize the rural!)
– An integration of all occupational groups with the least discrimination possible.
– Year-round, two-way transport networks for mass consumer goods.
– Short of the commodities indexation asked for by the New International Economic Order, international North-South and South-South trade to include bartering to minimize the effects of foreign exchange constraints.
– An explicit avoidance of generating imbalances between urban and rural areas, between rich and poor, between one region and another.
– Motivation of people at the work site with the introduction of tangible social and economic trade-offs. This motivation needs to be reinforced with education, consciousness raising, technical training, and the placing of social value on work completed.
– A sharp departure from the Western model of development since in the Third World the objective conditions are radically different from the West and hence the development models appropriate to the West do not fit or work poorly.
All these measures require an a-priori acceptance that development is neither value free nor a technocratic task isolated from contingent politics and from ideology. (Mengistu, 1988).
Epilogue:
I started these two articles on Development Nemesis before the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe. We all have since read exaggerated accounts of the demise of the socialist/egalitarian approach to development and the supreme reign of capitalism and “free market economies” (going largely undefined) for the remainder of the century and into the twenty-first. I have carefully re-read and re-worked the contents of these papers and I am positive that the postulates I have advanced are no less valid today than what they were before this new world mood seems to have crept into the commoner’s outlook (or mythology..?). What I have presented does not point towards any particular kind of regime as such (“leftist”, socialist or other); it points towards egalitarian/empowering policies that need to be adopted by any regime if development in the Third World is to go anywhere in our lifetime.
Also, I am aware that writing about all these things will not change the situation dramatically and much less overnight.
Therefore, do not succumb to the illusion that everything is now going to be different in the environment where you work. Do not think that from one day to the next, conservative elements will turn into reformers, passive elements into active ones or opponents into supporters. But if you manage to persuade at least 20% of those taking part in the initial organization to make a lasting and visible change in their behavior during the ensuing year, you may consider your efforts to have been a success. This will not be the case if all you do is record how many participants expressed satisfaction during the initial phase (even if the figure was 100%). Do not let the seed you have planted with so much effort wither away. Continue to stimulate your peers in responsible positions in your community and elsewhere to see that they are “rewarded” in some way. If this is imposible, do something about it yourself: congratulate them; it will always be appreciated.
Do not think your effort will change nothing. Do not believe it will change everything! But the gap between rhetoric and realistic action has to be bridged. (James Grant).
A political climate is something that one creates, not something that is found out there, as if it were a fact of nature. You have thus to stand up for this different vision, precisely now when it is not yet popular; the challenge is to create the times rather than to be “in step” with the present.
You have to combat the pervasive attitude that underlies much of the defeatism people bring to politics:…”Sure, I’d like to change things in the larger society, but who am I to expect that I can make things so much better when I can barely get my own personal life together?”…
You have to combat this surplus powerlessness that teaches us that nothing can or should be changed, that other people can’t be trusted or counted-upon to join with us in changing anything and that -human nature being what it is- we would be better off leaving things well enough alone and tending our own personal gardens. This is a new way of thinking about politics. It leads to new tasks: to create a politics and to share a set of experiences that help build committed action-networks based on mutual trust. [Tikkun Editorial b), 1987, p.11].
You need to build consensus, ultimately on political issues. You need to undermine the division in people’s minds between politics and their professional endeavour. For this to happen, our colleagues have to go through a politico-ideological transformation of no less profound proportions than that which gave birth to the nation-state system. [Langley b), 1989].
To achieve changes in political will, people you work with (and not for) have to be politicized so they can apply the needed pressures to change the attitude of key decision-makers; as a development worker you can never dream to achieve this by yourself. (Brennan, 1989, p.4).
We simply do not need any more compromising after 30 years of an unsuccessful development game. We need confrontation: constructive confrontation, but confrontation nonetheless. You need to challenge. Who? Whoever is indecisive towards reversing the maldevelopment that many amongst us have even helped foster (or have been condescending with). This includes confronting governments, members of learned societies, international agencies, members of Northern and Southern NGOs and indivduals freelancing advice on development. For this to happen, you need an incitement. And this is precisely what these two papers have tried to achieve. The sense of urgency that can be felt from the (non)beneficiaries of development schemes cannot be betrayed any longer. As we enter the 1990s, who or what can still sensibly separate development from contingent politics? The times demand more activism from its development intelligentsia; development has to and will get ahead: with you or despite you.
Biographical note
Dr Schuftan was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1945. After highschool there, he entered medical school in the University of Chile where he graduated from in 1970. Immediately thereafter, he pursued a combined residency in pediatrics and nutrition in the same university. In 1971 he spent three months in the US with a fellowship on nutrition education. In 1973 he entered academic medicine as an instructor in his alma mater. Due to the coup, he left his native Chile in January 1974 and became assistant professor in the Dept. of Community Medicine at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN. In 1975 he started working extensively in Africa in food and nutrition planning from his base at Meharry. In 1978 he moved to the Tulane School of Public Health in New Orleans. His continued work in Africa led to a year’s stay in Cameroon in 1981. He has worked in over 25 countries in Africa and over 25 elsewhere. He lived in Kenya from January 1988 to June 1995 on secondment from Tulane working first in the local ministry of health in planning, health information and health care financing issues. He then worked two years as an independent consultant based in Nairobi. In June 1995, he moved to Vietnam where he worked as a long term adviser to the ministry of health under a SIDA project until December 1997. He currently again is an independent consultant in Saigon. Dr Schuftan is the author of over 50 academic papers and chapters of books.
(References available upon request to the email above)
Footnote
(2): Transnational, prevalent Third World model of development derived/adopted from the past development process followed by Western capitalist countries.
Acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge the invaluable critique of the final draft of this paper that I got from Dr Vicente Sanchez in Nairobi.
Claudio Schuftan
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.